The distant fire

The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
By David Halberstam
Hyperion, 719 pp., illustrated, $35

Journalists become historians for the same reasons historians become historians, and for some reasons of their own. David Halberstam, who died this April in an automobile accident at the age of 73, earned his reputation reporting the Vietnam War for The New York Times. In his second book, "The Making of a Quagmire," published in 1965, he stepped back slightly from real-time reporting, looking to the recent past for an explanation of the vexed present. "The Best and the Brightest," released in 1972 and acknowledged almost immediately as a classic, was still more historical, in that Halberstam was further from the events he probed and better able to distinguish the lasting from the ephemeral in the evolution of America's Vietnam policy.

Yet if Halberstam, increasingly like the historians, sought to explain the roots of current events and policies, he never lost the journalists' concern with the individuals upon whom events and policies fall. He once said he took jobs on Southern papers, just out of Harvard, so he could learn to hear the voices of ordinary people and capture their stories. In all his books, even the ones most concerned with the most powerful, plain folks figure centrally.

"The Coldest Winter" may be the best of Halberstam's 20-plus books; it may also be the best general history of the Korean War. He worked on it for a decade and thought about it even longer. He came of age with the war, and it formed - for him and every other American of his generation - the template for their country's limited wars of the post-1945 era. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson led the United States into Vietnam looking over their shoulders at Korea. They refused to invade North Vietnam because they remembered how Harry Truman's decision to invade North Korea had caused China to enter the Korean conflict. Johnson insisted on receiving congressional authorization for the war in Vietnam because he recalled the criticism of Truman for not doing the same in Korea. At first, Korea served chiefly as a cautionary illustration of what to avoid in Vietnam, but as the war in Vietnam dragged on, and as South Vietnam grew more and more unstable, a Korea-style solution looked better and better. At any time after about 1966, Johnson or Richard Nixon would have been thrilled to get out of Vietnam on Korea-like terms.

Halberstam approaches the story of the Korean War like a journalist, but he tells it like a historian. Historians typically start at the center and work outward. They rely on written documents - memos, transcripts of meetings, correspondence among the principals - in the belief that the contemporary, unfiltered record is the most certain method of determining what happened and why. Halberstam starts at the periphery and works inward. By his own testimony, he was drawn to the Korean story by conversations with war veterans. He heard them talk of their ordeal among the frozen mountains below the Yalu River, of how they fought short-handed, underarmed, and ill-provisioned against an enemy that knew the terrain, was prepared for the climate, and had inexhaustible reserves of manpower. Halberstam finds his way to the centers of decision-making, but he does so without setting obvious foot in any archives. He makes effective use of other authors, including historians, who have haunted the dusty corridors, and he reconstructs the thinking of the leaders of the various governments involved.

At the heart of the war were two fundamental miscalculations. Kim Il Sung, the leader of North Korea, reckoned that South Korea would collapse within days or weeks of an attack by his Communist troops and that the peninsula would be unified under his rule. Neither he nor Joseph Stalin, who approved the attack, expected the United States to intervene. Their failure of foresight was natural, given that American Secretary of State Dean Acheson had conspicuously omitted Korea from a list of countries the United States was prepared to defend.

The second miscalculation was less defensible and even more fateful. After intervening in the war among the Koreans, the Americans managed to drive the Communists back into North Korea. At this point the American leadership got greedy. Douglas MacArthur, the US commander, promised to win the war by Christmas of 1950, with Korea reunified under anti-Communist control. Truman, who was being hammered by the Republicans for having lost China to communism, couldn't resist. He and MacArthur ignored warnings from Beijing that an American approach to the Yalu would not be tolerated. They paid for their hubris when 300,000 Chinese troops slipped undetected across the border and sprang a terrifying trap on the Americans and South Koreans.

Halberstam succeeds better than any previous author in capturing the dual nature of the Korean War. His characterizations of Truman, Stalin, Kim, Mao Zedong, and other decision-makers, while largely dependent on secondary sources, are forceful and persuasive. His accounts of battles are harrowing and heroic, moving and mundane, in realistic proportions. Now and then the journalist in Halberstam gets the better - or worse, rather - of the historian. His interviews are necessarily decades distant from the events they describe; the reader wonders how the memories have shifted over that time. Some quotes are decorative without being explanatory. One veteran describes the Naktong River as being "about as wide as the Missouri," without telling which part of that variable waterway he has in mind. Occasional slips of other sorts - MacArthur's inexplicable blunder of Dec. 8, 1941, was to lose his air force on Luzon, not Wake Island - might well have been corrected had Halberstam not died before publication.

But the book, overall, is compelling and insightful - and timely. Halberstam lets readers draw their own parallels to the current war in Iraq, which began and continued with miscalculations like those that marked the Korean War. The Bush administration hopes Iraq turns out to be another Korea; increasingly it looks like Vietnam. Either way, future generations should count themselves lucky if someday there emerges a chronicler of the Iraq war as able as David Halberstam.

H. W. Brands is the Dickson Allen Anderson Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin. He is completing a biography of Franklin Roosevelt.