The Korean War: A History (35 page)

15.
Hendrik Hertzberg, “The Fifth War,”
New Yorker
(Nov. 30, 2009), 23.

16.
Martin (2004), 63.

17.
Ibid., 65; Lowe (1997), 59–60. I discuss all this over a full chapter in
Origins
, vol. II.

18.
Horwitz (1997), 31, 82, 119, 149, 156, 207, 230, 270, 272.

19.
Horwitz estimates that 6 million Americans served in the war (1).

20.
Gregory Henderson, “Korea, 1950,” in Cotton and Neary (1989), 175–76. See also Henderson (1968).

21.
Ha Jin (2004), 13, 35, 51, 57, 89, 159.
(General Dean’s Story
is one American account that does locate Ha Jin’s Korea in its vision.)

22.
Ibid., 150–52, 174–75, 186.

1.
Knightly (1975), 338. This is a superb account of Korean War reportage.

2.
See Knox (1985), 6, 67, 116, and passim.

3.
Dean (1954), 163.

4.
New York Times
, Sept. 1,3, 1950.

5.
New York Times
editorial, July 27, 1950;
New York Times
editorial, July 5, 1950. The CIA at this time also listed Kim as an imposter who stole the name of a heroic guerrilla who died in Manchuria about 1940.

6.
Thompson (1951), 39, 79.

7.
Knox (1985), 117–18, 157, 288, 295, 359.

8.
Knightly (1975), 344–54; Foot (1990), 67. For a full discussion of censorship, which began by fits and starts in December 1950 and became fully institutionalized later in 1951, see Casey (2008), 8–9, 170–71, and passim. “Stories that tend to discredit the ROK forces” were from then on forbidden.

9.
Knightly (1975), 347.

10.
See Princeton University, Allen Dulles Papers, box 57, Ascoli to Dulles, April 8, 1952. See also Jon Halliday and Bruce Cumings,
Korea: The Unknown War
(New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), 72. The quotation on the CIA as a liberal refuge is from Corson,
Armies of Ignorance
, 27. Although he could not in the end prove it, Stanley Bachrach was convinced that the CIA funded the “Committee of One Million,” another arm of the China Lobby. (See his
The Committee of One Million: “China Lobby” Politics
[New York: Columbia University Press, 1976], 55.)

11.
David Oshinski quotes the “sock full” line in
A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy
(New York: Free Press, 1983), 111; the Soviet comment from
Izvestia
is in
New York Times
, March 27, 1950; “Communists and queers” and “egg-sucking liberals,” ibid., April 21, 1950.

12.
Capehart is quoted in Hodgson (1976), 34 (emphasis added). In 1951 a constituent wrote to Senator Tom Connally, “The people of Texas are tired of this British Appeasement, that is being loaded on this country by the British, and the Britisher whose Title is Secretary of State [sic].” Elmer Adams to Connally, May 21, 1951, Tom Connally Papers, box 45.

13.
Or what one did not look like: Thomas F. Murphy, federal prosecutor in the Hiss case, said, “The Communist does not look like the popular conception of a Communist. He does not have uncropped hair, he does not wear horn-rimmed glasses nor carry the Daily Worker. He doesn’t have baggy trousers.” (New
York Times
, March 13, 1950.)

14.
The investigations of Grajdanzev and others are in MA, Willoughby Papers, box 18, “Leftist Infiltration into SCAP,” Jan. 15, 1947, and
thereafter; Willoughby supplied his 1947 studies to Benjamin Mandel of the McCarran Subcommittee after Mandel solicited them, and also stated that he had given them to McCarthy (box 23, Mandel to Willoughby, Feb. 19, 1954). See also Willoughby to W. E. Woods of HUAC, May 1, 1950, Willoughby Papers, box 10.

15.
New York Times
, March 14, 22, 27, and 31, 1950. For an excellent account of the Lattimore case see Stanley I. Kutler,
The American Inquisition: Justice and Injustice in the Cold War
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 183–214.

16.
New York Times
, April 4, 1950.

17.
New York Times
, May 16, 1950.

18.
“Transcript of Round Table Discussion on American Policy toward China,” State Department, Oct. 6–8, 1949, declassified in Carrolton Press, CRC 1977, item 316B. Someone, apparently a State Department official, placed a big question mark on the original transcript, next to Lattimore’s point about collaborators in the Rhee regime. The transcript quotes Taylor as saying “cold prosperity sphere,” obviously a transcriber’s error, which I corrected in the quotation. On Lattimore’s support for the U.S. role in the Korean War, see
New York Times
, Aug. 1, 1950.

19.
New York Times
editorials, April 5 and 19, 1950. Other responsible officials who held this “shocking view” were, for example, most of the high Army Department officials in 1948–49, who were ready to write off the ROK even if it meant a Communist takeover; Gen. Lawton Collins told the 1951 Senate MacArthur Hearings, in testimony deleted at the time, that Korea “has no particular military significance,” and if the Soviets were fully to occupy the peninsula, Japan would be in little greater jeopardy than it already was from Vladivostok and the Shantung Peninsula.

20.
McAuliffe (1978), 147.

21.
Hodgson (1976), 89, 97.

22.
Letter to the
New York Times
, July 10, 1950.

23.
Interview with a Korean American who still wishes to remain nameless. This person also alleges that at least one mildly liberal, anti-Rhee Korean professor on the west coast lost his position after an FBI investigation, narrowly avoided deportation to Korea, and was stateless and prevented from getting a passport for many years. Several of the deported Koreans were connected with the leftist Korean newspaper published in Los Angeles,
Korean Independence
.

24.
U.S. News
, Sept. 29, 1950.

25.
Oshinsky (1983), 180.

26.
On Hoover, Willoughby, Whitney, and Smith helping McCarthy, see
Thomas C. Reeves,
The Life and Times of Joe McCarthy
(New York: Stein and Day, 1982), 318, 502; for the 1953 episode, see Willoughby Papers, box 23, John W. Jackson letters, written on Justice Department stationery to Willoughby and to Ho Shih-lai, both dated Oct. 16, 1953. The faked files (on Lattimore, John Service, and others) are discussed in Robert Newman, “Clandestine Chinese Nationalist Efforts to Punish Their American Detractors,”
Diplomatic History
7:3 (Summer 1983) 205–22.

27.
Karl Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

28.
Leon Trotsky,
Stalin
(New York: Stein and Day, 2nd ed., 1967), 1–2, 358. See also Stephen Cohen,
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution
(New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 291, for Bukharin’s depiction of Stalin as “a Genghis Khan”; also Isaac Deutscher,
Stalin: A Political Biography
(London: Oxford University Press, 1949), 472: Stalin was “primitive, oriental, but unfailingly shrewd.”

29.
Poppe’s defection is discussed in more detail in Christopher Simpson,
Blowback
.

30.
Perry Anderson,
Lineages of the Absolutist State
(London: Verso, 1974), 462–549.

31.
See, for example, Chong-sik Lee, “Stalinism in the East: Communism in North Korea,” in Robert Scalapino, ed.,
The Communist Revolution in Asia
(Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1969).

32.
Kim Jong Il tries to get American attention “by appearing to be barmy—a gambit aided by the fact that he almost certainly is.” Coll, “No Nukes,”
New Yorker
(April 20, 2009), “Talk of the Town.”

33.
Daniel Sneider, “Let Them Eat Rockets,”
New York Times
Op-Ed, April 8, 2009.

34.
Martin (2004), 259.

35.
Jameson (1981), 295–96, 298; see also Kantorowicz (1957), 4–14. For an excellent analysis of the nature of the North Korean regime see Heonik Kwon, “North Korea’s Politics of Longing,”
Japan Focus
(April 2009).

36.
Quoted in Theodore Von Laue,
Why Lenin, Why Stalin, Why Gorbachev
(New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 182. See also 155.

1.
Akizuki Tatsuichiro,
Nagasaki 1945
, trans. Nagata Keiichi (New York: Quarter Books, 1981), 24–25, 31, 155.

2.
Central Intelligence Agency, “Korea,” SR-2, summer 1947, and “The Current Situation in Korea,” ORE 15–48, March 18, 1948.

3.
Sawyer (1962), 80–82.

4.
Lowe (1997), 44.

5.
The quotations and events in this section are drawn from military government reports from the time, cited in my
Origins of the Korean War
, vol. I (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 298–304.

6.
U.S. 6th Infantry Division Headquarters (Dec. 31, 1946), in XXIV Corps Historical File, NA.

7.
Cumings (1981), 364.

8.
Here I draw material from ch. 4, 161–86, in Soon Won Park,
Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard East Asian Monographs, 1999).

9.
Seong Nae Kim, “Lamentations of the Dead: The Historical Imagery of Violence on Cheju Island, South Korea,”
Journal of Ritual Studies
3:2 (Summer 1989), 253. See also John Merrill, “The Cheju-do Rebellion,”
Journal of Korean Studies
2 (1980), which gives a figure of 30,000 (194–95).

10.
NA, USFIK 11071 file, box 62/96, transcript of Hodge monologue to visiting congressmen, Oct. 4, 1947; RG332, XXIV Corps Historical file, box 20, “Report of Special Investigation—Cheju-Do Political Situation,” March 11, 1948, conducted by Lt. Col. Lawrence A. Nelson. Nelson was on Cheju from Nov. 12, 1947, to Feb. 28, 1948.

11.
USFIK, G-2 Weekly Summary no. 116, Nov. 23–30, 1947;
Seoul Times
, June 15 and 18, 1950. These issues reported the results of a survey by a team of journalists from Seoul.

12.
Seong Nae Kim, “The Cheju April Third Incident and Women: Trauma and Solidarity of Pain,” paper presented at the Jeju 4.3 Conference, Harvard University, April 24–26, 2003.

13.
Seoul Times
, June 18, Aug. 6, Aug. 11, 1948; USFIK G-2 Intelligence Summary no. 144, June 11–18, 1948; NA, Office of the Chief of Military History, “History of the U.S. Army Forces in Korea” (HUSAFIK), vol. II, part 2, “Police and National Events, 1947–48.” In a report to the National Assembly on the origins of the insurgency, Defense Minister Yi Pom-sok traced it to “the propaganda and plots of the so-called People’s Republic which sprang up right after Liberation,” which were “still in existence” on Cheju. (NA, 895.00 file, box 7127, Drumwright to State, enclosing Yi Pom-sok’s December 1948 report.) But the usual Rhee line was to blame it on the North Koreans.

14.
USFIK G-2 Intelligence Summaries nos.134–142, April 2–June 4, 1948;
Seoul Times
, April 7 and 8, 1948; HUSAFIK, “Police and National Events, 1947–48.”

15.
Carlisle Barracks, Rothwell Brown Papers, Brown to Hodge, “Report of Activities on Cheju-Do Island
[sic]
from 22 May 1948, to 30 June 1948.”

16.
Pyongyang,
Nodong Sinmun
(Worker’s Daily, NDSM), Feb. 11, 1950. Cheju leftists and Communists never had effective relations with the North Koreans, and even today the remnant survivors of the Cheju insurgents in Osaka remain independent of the North, publishing accounts of the rebellion without taking a pro–Kim Il Sung line.