The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam Page A

8:45 A.M. Seoul time, one of the Marine guards, Sergeant Paul Dupras, asked him what was going on. “The North Koreans have crossed the border,” he answered. “That’s nothing—that’s a common occurrence,” Dupras said. “Yeah, but this time they’ve got tanks,” James answered. James kept getting more and more details, and at 9:50 A.M., he sent out his first bulletin. He had been moving around the city, and when he returned to the embassy and one of his friends in military intelligence said something about letting Washington know about it, he decided that if it was good enough for them to go with, then it was good enough for him as well. He was careful, he said later, not to hype it, because it was a question of war and there was no need to make more of it than there was, because surely there would be plenty of details in the hours and days that followed. Though UP was notoriously cheap, he took it on himself to send the bulletin at urgent rates. Because he moved so quickly, his story was the only one to arrive back in America and make the Sunday morning papers. It began in typical wire service fashion: “URGENT UNPRESS NEW YORK 25095 JAMES FRAGMENTARY REPORTS EXTHIRTY EIGHTH PARALLEL INDICATED NORTH KOREANS LAUNCHED SUNDAY MORNING ATTACKS GENERALLY ALONG ENTIRE BORDER PARA REPORTS AT ZERO NINETHIRTY LOCAL TIME INDICATED KAESONG FORTY MILES NORTHWEST SEOUL AND HEADQUARTERS OF KOREAN ARMY’S FIRST DIVISION FELL NINE AYEM STOP ENEMY FORCES REPORTED THREE TO FOUR KILOMETERS SOUTH OF BORDER ON ONJIN PENINSULA STOP TANKS SUPPOSED BROUGHT INTO USE CHUNCHON FIFTY MILES NORTHWEST SEOUL….”
    In Washington, there were more and more fragmentary reports coming infrom the embassy. But it was James’s United Press bulletins that alerted the city. As others in the United Press bureau, and soon other newspaper bureaus, began calling high public officials to get some kind of confirmation, the top people in government were alerted to the fact that a new and very unwanted war had begun on the Korean peninsula.
     
     
    WHEN THE NORTH KOREANS attacked, Douglas MacArthur was surprisingly slow to respond. He seemed almost indifferent to the early news of the invasion, so much so that he worried some of the men around him. Nor were these witnesses committed liberals, the kind of sworn enemies he believed were always out to undermine him for domestic political reasons; they included one of the most conservative men connected to the U.S. national security apparatus, John Foster Dulles, the shadow Republican secretary of state, then serving as an adviser to the State Department; and John Allison, one of the more hard-line members of the State Department, who was serving as Dulles’s aide on a trip to Seoul and Tokyo.
    By chance both Dulles and Allison had arrived in Tokyo to discuss a future peace treaty that would formally end the American occupation of Japan, when the North Koreans struck. Just a few days before the attack, both men had visited a South Korean bunker near the thirty-eighth parallel. There they were photographed huddled with ROK troops. Dulles, wearing his signature homburg, looked like he was on his way to a meeting of top Wall Street bankers. “Foster up in a bunker with a homburg on—it was a very amusing picture,” said Secretary of State Dean Acheson, who had no fondness for the man who wanted to take his job, and had been sure he was going to get it a mere eighteen months earlier, when Tom Dewey had run for the presidency. The next day Dulles, a man possessed of no small amount of grandiosity, blended as it was with a streak of great personal and religious righteousness, had spoken before the South Korean National Assembly. “You are not alone,” he told the assembly. “You will never be alone so long as you continue to play worthily your part in the great design of human freedom.” Those words had been specifically written for Dulles and that occasion back in Washington, by men who would in different