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books: Reading between the lines.

No Cakewalk in KoreaWhy Halberstam lets the establishment off the hook.

By Stephen Sestanovich
Posted Monday, Sept. 24, 2007, at 11:24 AM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Any foreign-policy disaster can be explained away by finger-pointing of this kind, but doing so usually leaves out something fundamental. In Korea, it's this: Even those who were most fearful of what MacArthur might do largely shared his goals, and they came to want a big victory just as much as he did. Halberstam believes that the anti-Communist hysteria of the war limited the administration's choices. Acheson saw it a little differently. For him, the North Korean attack had punctured national complacency—"inertia of thought," he called it—and that was good. It created an opportunity to push through long-blocked, but necessary, policies. The president, he told the rest of the Cabinet, needed new authority and new resources: "If it is a question of asking for too little or too much, he should ask for too much."

Moreover, the fateful decision to unite Korea was basically made before Inchon, and Acheson himself was one of the believers. Today, we would call this policy "regime change," and the justifications that State Department officials offered for wanting to overthrow the North Korean "puppet" state have a surprisingly contemporary ring. They saw the war as America's first real chance to "displace part of the Soviet orbit." Throughout Asia, others were expected to "take hope" from seeing a Communist dictator dethroned. As American troops prepared to cross the 38th parallel, Acheson crowed that the United States was about to demonstrate "what Western Democracy could do to help the underprivileged countries of the world." To this end, MacArthur was supposed to prepare for the occupation of the whole country and—because no one wanted to occupy Korea too long—for early elections.

One challenge that any great-man reading of history faces is to explain why other equally great men are pushed aside, and Halberstam does wonder why George Marshall wasn't able to restrain MacArthur. As secretary of defense, he had the authority; as national hero and military genius in his own right, he had the stature. The Coldest War's doleful answer: The old guy was simply past his prime. Yet this, too, is incomplete. Old or not, Marshall and his Pentagon colleagues wanted to win the war, and they were far more involved in overseeing it than Halberstam lets on. It was Marshall who privately cabled MacArthur as he prepared to cross the 38th parallel into North Korea, saying that the president wanted him to feel "largely unhampered" in the coming campaign.

A month later, with evidence mounting that American forces were vulnerable to a Chinese attack, Gen. Omar Bradley and the other service chiefs did exactly what they should have done: They conducted a round-the-clock review of MacArthur's plans and actually decided to order him to pull back from the border. But the next day, Bradley changed his mind, and his reason showed how strong the Truman administration consensus was. The United States had made the unity of Korea its goal, he thought, and should stick to it. Pulling back would be "an admission of failure," with "dire long-term consequences." No surprise, then, that a few weeks later Marshall, Acheson, and the chiefs met again, on the eve of MacArthur's "final offensive"—and unanimously agreed that he should proceed.

The Korean War that David Halberstam describes offers echo after echo of our contemporary predicament, or at least of one reading of it. His story is all about the hijacking of American policy, the fomenting of national hysteria, and the disaster that follows. But he would have written a truer—and, for that matter, a more useful—book if he had admitted how many people in high positions thought the policy was both necessary and right. For an understanding of the insidious workings of consensus, rather than of conspiracy, The Best and the Brightest would have been an excellent place to start.

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Stephen Sestanovich is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and professor of diplomacy at Columbia University.
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Remarks from the Fray:

I was in the Army there in '52-'53, and I don't see any important similarity at all to the usual US "regime" change wars, mainly because of the political realities, and the (Korean) publics' ideas about them. It's no accident that there was no significant guerilla war at all. MacArthur's Inchon landing, which he should get full credit for, was not surpassed by anything Napoleon ever did, as far as I know. The North Koreans were decisively and totally defeated. As for the Chinese, it was a stalemate (We shouldn't say defeat, because, after all "it's still going on"...Yes, the General was wrong, but what he did right still outweighs it all. (Japan in its present state)

.It simply is not like Vietnam at all.

--disigny

(To reply, click here.)

(9/27)

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