veterans, whom he clearly enjoyed interviewing about this “puzzling, gray, very distant conflict, a war that went on and on, seemingly without hope or resolution, about which most Americans … preferred to know as little as possible.” It was a war, he thought, “orphaned by history.” True in the 1950s perhaps, but a full shelf of books by historians in the United States and around the world reclaimed it decades ago. Had Halberstam read this work seriously, he could not have written
The Coldest Winter
. Had someone written a book like this about the Vietnam War, he would have been the first to criticize it. Rather, his book illustrates the war’s impact on a particular generation, those too young for World War II, in school while Korea raged, and professionally engaged by the time Vietnam became an issue. In the same way that no archival document couldever convince me of Richard Nixon’s essential goodness, no historian was going to tell David Halberstam that Dean Acheson and Harry Truman were not the good guys, and MacArthur not the author of the war’s essential failure. Halberstam ends Part I with this from Acheson: “We sat around like paralyzed rabbits while MacArthur carried out this nightmare.” Here we witness nothing more than the brilliance of Acheson’s ventriloquy and dissembling.
Melvin Horwitz was a bright young doctor assigned to a MASH unit near the front in 1951–52, and his loving letters to his wife reflect his complicated experience. His original image of the Far East, formed by Hollywood movies, was about places “where terrorists lurked in dark shadowed alleys.” Korea existed somewhere between an occupied Japan that he could enjoy and appreciate, and American stereotypes of Chinese laundrymen (“Boysan, boysan, makee with rubber,” he wrote about some sandals; the
san
honorific is, of course, Japanese). Like most other Americans in the last two years of the war, his contacts with Koreans were minimal—houseboys employed full-time for $2.25 a month, maids, wounded ROK soldiers muted by the language barrier. He rode through the countryside like a tourist, enjoying the beauty of the mountains and rice paddies, and the glint of red pepper drying on golden thatched roofs. The one city that escaped the war, Pusan, was for him a nightmare of refugees, gangs of ragged children and kids pimping (“Me pimpo … nice girl. Blow job.”). Like most of the soldiers he knew, he fought in a war “that no one really believes in,” especially the “pain and death” along a front that rarely moved more than a few miles. Syngman Rhee, the George Washington of Korea to American politicians, was “a tyrant and as fascistic as Chiang.” Korea was “yet one more war that shouldn’t have happened.” 18 Salter, Roth, Halberstam, and Horwitz are markers for a generation that will pass away (like the rest of us), and after that no American will again bury this distant war in the nostalgia of young men and their formative experiences.
Gregory Henderson was one of the very few among the millionsof Americans to have served in Korea both before and during the war (six million in the war years alone 19 ) to have been moved by the country, to learn the language and culture, to have made of it a second home—first as a diplomat, then as a scholar. His
Politics of the Vortex
remains one of the best books on twentieth-century Korea, and it is particularly acute on those years he himself experienced. Everyone knew everyone else in Seoul, a city so centralized that it was the core of his “vortex”; Henderson’s job was to get to know the elites even better, on behalf of his country. His eye fell on anomalies that others missed; for example, the Japanese military service of the high command of the ROK Army, the quiet pride they took in having fought for the emperor and remained loyal. (Park Chung Hee served a different emperor, P’u Yi, the titular leader of Manchukuo, from whom Park received a gold
The Coldest Winter
. Had someone written a book like this about the Vietnam War, he would have been the first to criticize it. Rather, his book illustrates the war’s impact on a particular generation, those too young for World War II, in school while Korea raged, and professionally engaged by the time Vietnam became an issue. In the same way that no archival document couldever convince me of Richard Nixon’s essential goodness, no historian was going to tell David Halberstam that Dean Acheson and Harry Truman were not the good guys, and MacArthur not the author of the war’s essential failure. Halberstam ends Part I with this from Acheson: “We sat around like paralyzed rabbits while MacArthur carried out this nightmare.” Here we witness nothing more than the brilliance of Acheson’s ventriloquy and dissembling.
Melvin Horwitz was a bright young doctor assigned to a MASH unit near the front in 1951–52, and his loving letters to his wife reflect his complicated experience. His original image of the Far East, formed by Hollywood movies, was about places “where terrorists lurked in dark shadowed alleys.” Korea existed somewhere between an occupied Japan that he could enjoy and appreciate, and American stereotypes of Chinese laundrymen (“Boysan, boysan, makee with rubber,” he wrote about some sandals; the
san
honorific is, of course, Japanese). Like most other Americans in the last two years of the war, his contacts with Koreans were minimal—houseboys employed full-time for $2.25 a month, maids, wounded ROK soldiers muted by the language barrier. He rode through the countryside like a tourist, enjoying the beauty of the mountains and rice paddies, and the glint of red pepper drying on golden thatched roofs. The one city that escaped the war, Pusan, was for him a nightmare of refugees, gangs of ragged children and kids pimping (“Me pimpo … nice girl. Blow job.”). Like most of the soldiers he knew, he fought in a war “that no one really believes in,” especially the “pain and death” along a front that rarely moved more than a few miles. Syngman Rhee, the George Washington of Korea to American politicians, was “a tyrant and as fascistic as Chiang.” Korea was “yet one more war that shouldn’t have happened.” 18 Salter, Roth, Halberstam, and Horwitz are markers for a generation that will pass away (like the rest of us), and after that no American will again bury this distant war in the nostalgia of young men and their formative experiences.
Gregory Henderson was one of the very few among the millionsof Americans to have served in Korea both before and during the war (six million in the war years alone 19 ) to have been moved by the country, to learn the language and culture, to have made of it a second home—first as a diplomat, then as a scholar. His
Politics of the Vortex
remains one of the best books on twentieth-century Korea, and it is particularly acute on those years he himself experienced. Everyone knew everyone else in Seoul, a city so centralized that it was the core of his “vortex”; Henderson’s job was to get to know the elites even better, on behalf of his country. His eye fell on anomalies that others missed; for example, the Japanese military service of the high command of the ROK Army, the quiet pride they took in having fought for the emperor and remained loyal. (Park Chung Hee served a different emperor, P’u Yi, the titular leader of Manchukuo, from whom Park received a gold
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