The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (97 page)

D
avid Halberstam had put the finishing touches on
The Coldest Winter
in the spring of 2007, just five days before his death in a car accident in California. He had essentially finished the book months earlier, but with a book there is finishing, and then a little more finishing, and then a final finishing, and after months of revising, checking and rechecking, slashing, inserting, and wrestling with endless pages of manuscript and printed proofs, he stopped by his publisher’s office on an April Wednesday and dropped off his final corrections. This was the book as he wanted it to be, and he was happy with it. It is the book now at hand.

He had worked at it off and on for ten years—his first formal proposal for what came to be called “the Korea book” was drawn up in 1997—but the idea sprang from a 1962 conversation in Vietnam with an American soldier who had fought in Korea. In a sense
The Coldest Winter
is a companion book to
The Best and the Brightest
, which dealt with America’s failure in Vietnam. The Korean War had ended in stalemate while he was still in high school. He was in his twenties when he started covering Vietnam for the
New York Times
, and by that time the Korean War did not mean much to him, or to many other Americans except the soldiers who had fought it. Americans neither celebrate nor long remember their stalemates. Halberstam sensed that this forgetting masked some turning point in the history of America’s political development after World War II. How had we gotten from Korean stalemate to Vietnamese disaster? He set out to understand, then re-create, a time of extraordinary political bitterness that Americans had put out of mind.

Finally, on a Wednesday in April, he finished this monumental task and by the following Monday, not being a man to relax after completing a big job, he was in California to do some work on his next book. This one was to be about professional football. It would be the twenty-second book he had written over nearly fifty years. His first, published in 1961, was
The Noblest Roman
, a novel about small-town corruption in the Deep South. His only other novel,
One Very Hot Day,
had a Vietnam setting, but he was a man prone to a kind of
moral outrage not readily accommodated in fiction. As a reporter in Vietnam he had discovered that the plain, astonishing, outrageous, absolute implausibility of the real world made it far more fascinating than whatever world any but the greatest fiction writer could possibly imagine. He spent the rest of his life trying to be the best of all possible journalists.

Halberstam thought journalism a high, sometimes even a noble calling, and was sometimes cruelly dismissive of those who belittled it and especially of those who betrayed it. One of his earliest books,
The Making of a Quagmire
, dealing with the Vietnam War, put an antique word back into common use while introducing the country to the then astounding possibility of American fallibility.

With
The Best and the Brightest
, his sixth book, he returned to the subject of Vietnam and established himself as a singular force in what was being called “the new journalism.” This involved the use of fictional techniques to interest readers in complex matters that many might otherwise find forbiddingly tedious. The aim was to create the sense of a storyteller weaving a tale. The writer was expected to remain faithful to the facts but not to encumber the story with constant explanations of how the facts were obtained.
The Best and the Brightest
was a masterful illustration of the technique and, though traditionalists once fumed about its unorthodox journalistic method, it is now regarded as an essential classic of Vietnam War literature.

After that the books came in profusion: big books like
The Powers That Be
,
The Reckoning, The Fifties, War in a Time of Peace
; books about the world of sports like
The Amateurs, Summer of ’49, Playing for Keeps
, and
The Teammates
; books both short and long, written simply because he thought they ought to be written:
The Children
, for example, celebrating a group of young Southern blacks who had been in the vanguard of the civil rights struggle in the 1960s; and
Firehouse,
a tribute to his neighborhood fire fighters. (On September 11, thirteen of them left the firehouse for the World Trade Center; twelve did not return.)

This next book, the football book that had brought him to California, demanded a great deal of interviewing. There was nothing unusual about that. Interviewing was the bedrock of his work. His books were filled with the sound of people talking, and getting the sound right required endless interviewing and patient listening.
The Coldest Winter
, for example, opens with the voices of American soldiers happily discussing their apparent triumph over the North Korean Army while several hundred thousand Chinese soldiers are silently closing the trap that will annihilate them.

The Teammates
begins with Dominic DiMaggio’s wife, Emily, objecting to her husband’s plan to visit his dying teammate, Ted Williams: “I just don’t
want you driving to Florida alone,” she says in the book’s third sentence. In
Ho
, his character study of Ho Chi Minh, a French army officer on page one starts talking in a Vietnamese bar about the defeat at Dienbienphu: “It was all for nothing…I let my men die for nothing.”

Halberstam once said that after finishing Harvard he deliberately sought work on small-town Southern newspapers so he could learn how to talk to ordinary people, a skill not much cherished in the Ivy League, but indispensable to success in journalism. Getting people to talk was vital to his distinctive way of writing history, because he believed in the individual human as history’s agent. It is doubtful that he was ever much interested in a Tolstoyan view of man at the mercy of history’s tides, and for good reason. Take that road and journalism becomes absurd; Halberstam was a journalist, heart and soul.

He needed to understand the connection between the human and the event. He was constantly trying to understand why a nation with such high aspirations, led by the most excellent people, so often ended up in one quagmire or another. His work assumed a vital human agency behind historical developments. Belief in the importance of these human forces led naturally to the study of people, and they appear in astonishing variety in his books: powerful men like the Kennedys, Douglas MacArthur, Ho Chi Minh, Lyndon Johnson; great athletes like Michael Jordan and Ted Williams; important policy shapers like Robert McNamara, Brent Scowcroft, and Madeleine Albright; but also a young man rowing a single scull in hopes of making an Olympic team that almost no one else cares about, and a bunch of black kids risking their lives for the right to vote and eat an ice-cream sundae sitting down, and those thirteen firemen headed for the World Trade Center.

To bring them to life on the page he had to hear people talking. So he interviewed and interviewed. For his twenty-second book, the one about football, he was on his way to interview a Hall of Fame football player named Y. A. Tittle. The crash occurred on his way to the interview.

For further details about the sources listed in these notes, please refer to the Bibliography.

INTRODUCTION

“nastiest little war”
: Hastings, Max,
The Korean War
, p. 329.

“If the best minds”
: Goulden, Joseph,
Korea,
p. 3.

“sour war”
: Ibid., p. xv.

“a police action”
; Paige, Glenn,
The Korean Decision,
p. 243.

“[was] another mountain”
: author interview with George Russell.

put their losses at roughly 1.5 million
: Hastings, Max,
The Korean War,
p. 329.

CHAPTER
1

so raw it made you gag
: author interview with Phil Peterson.

“we did it, buddy”
: author interview with Bill Richardson.

“the
thirteenth
platoon leader”
: author interview with Ben Boyd.

“Kim Buck Tooth?”
: Breuer, William,
Shadow Warriors,
p. 106.

“they were going to be overrun”
: author interviews with Barbara Thompson Foltz, John S. D. Eisenhower.

“On to the Yalu”
: Paik, Sun Yup,
From Pusan to Panmunjom,
p. 85.

“No, I’m Chinese”
: Ibid., pp. 87–88.

“diplomatic blackmail”
: Spurr, Russell,
Enter the Dragon
, p. 161.

“We’re all going home and we’re going home soon”
: author interview with Ralph Hockley.

“damn near annihilated that very first night”
: author interview with Pappy Miller.

“He was the best”
: author interview with Lester Urban.

his advice had been ignored
: Blair, Clay,
The Forgotten War,
p. 381; Harold Johnson oral history, U.S. Army War College Library.

“To say it was careless”
: author interview with Hewlett (Reb) Rainer.

thought he was crazy at the time
: author interview with Bill Richardson.

particularly enticing target
: author interview with Fillmore McAbee.

little curiosity about either
: author interview with William West.

“than battle-tested officers”
: Ibid.

“strangest sight I have ever seen”
: Appleman, Roy,
South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu,
p. 690.

encircled on three sides
: Ibid., p. 691.

“twenty thousand laundrymen”
: author interview with Ben Boyd.

“Walsh is dead!”
: author interview with Bill Richardson.

“gooks all around us”
: author interview with Robert Kies.

“Well, He is, He is”
: author interview with Bill Richardson.

“We have to act on our own”
: author interview with Phil Peterson.

without knowing they were Chinese
: author interview with Ray Davis.

Do you ever forgive yourself for some of the things you do in life?
: author interview with Bill Richardson.

as an adviser in Vietnam
: author interview with Robert Kies.

“Custer at the Little Big Horn”
: Rovere, Richard, and Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr.,
The General and the President,
p. 136.

“something from the wreckage”
: Blair, Clay,
The Forgotten War,
p. 391.

“SOME OF WHICH WERE CHINESE”
: Ridgway, Matthew B.,
The Korean War,
p. 59.

The drive north would continue
: Ibid., p. 60.

“The most elementary caution”
: Acheson, Dean,
Present at the Creation,
p. 466.

CHAPTER
2

“with the point of a bayonet”
: Goncharov, Sergei, Lewis, John, and Xue Litai,
Uncertain Partners,
p. 138.

“strike the Southerners in the teeth”
: Ibid., p. 135.

“Dean really blew it on that one”
: author interview with Averell Harriman for
The Best and the Brightest
.

still much feared regionally
: Goncharov et al.,
Uncertain Partners,
pp. 136–137.

“from any direct involvement”
: Ibid., p. 140.

“I am ready to help in this matter”
: Weathersby, Kathryn, Cold War International History Project, Numbers 6–7, Winter 1995–96.

quietly taken out and executed
: Goncharov et al.,
Uncertain Partners,
p. 144.

met three times with Stalin
: Shen Zhihua, Cold War International History Project, Winter 2003, Spring 2004.

“You have to ask Mao for all the help”
: Goncharov et al.,
Uncertain Partners,
pp. 144–145.

he had answered “arrogantly”
: Chen, Jian,
China’s Road to the Korean War,
p. 112.

the Chinese would send troops
: Shen Zhihua, Cold War International History Project.

the north-south rail lines
: author interview with Jack Singlaub.

“out of the question”
: Kennan, George F.,
Memoirs 1925
–
1950,
p. 484.

“are hitting all along the front”
: Goulden, Joseph,
Korea,
p. 44.

“FIFTY MILES NORTHWEST SEOUL”
: Paige, Glenn D.,
The Korean Decision,
p. 88.

“it was a very amusing picture”
: Myers, Robert,
Korea in the Cross Currents,
p. 83.

“the great design of human freedom”
: Allison, John,
Ambassador from the Plains,
p. 130.

specifically written for Dulles
: Paige, Glenn D.,
The Korean Decision,
p. 74.

“one arm tied behind my back”
: Allison, John,
Ambassador from the Plains,
p. 129.

“I don’t know what G-2 in Tokyo”
: Ibid., p. 131.

“what was happening in his own backyard”
: Ibid., p. 135.

“such a dejected, completely forlorn”
: Ibid., pp. 136–137.

“symbolic sacrifice alongside his men”
: Hastings, Max,
The Korean War,
p. 65.

CHAPTER
3

the greater MacArthur’s role in the creation would be
: author interview with Alex Gibney.

“Let them help themselves”
: Leary, William (editor),
MacArthur and the American Century,
p. 255.

“as we would California”
: Cumings, Bruce,
The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II,
p. 233.

“looked like hell”
: Tuchman, Barbara,
Stilwell and the American Experience in China,
p. 522.

“swift betterment to their condition”
: Myers, Robert,
Korea in the Cross Currents,
p. 8.

“the same breed of cat as the Japanese”
: Blair, Clay,
The Forgotten War,
p. 38.

“crushed in the battle of the whales”
: Oliver, Robert T.,
Syngman Rhee: The Man Behind the Myth,
p. 9.

“either elucidation or explanation”
: Myers, Robert,
Korea in the Cross Currents,
p. 28.

“The Japs interest me and I like them”
: Zimmerman, Warren,
First Great Triumph,
p. 465.

“peoples of the civilized world”
: Ibid., p. 465.

“the Japanese imperial wolf
”: Myers, Robert,
Korea in the Cross Currents,
p. 27.

“utterly unable to do for themselves”
: Goulden, Joseph,
Korea,
p. 7.

“future redeemer of Korean independence”
: Oliver, Robert T.,
Syngman Rhee: The Man Behind the Myth,
p. 111.

Koreans held on to no such hopes
: Myers, Robert T.,
Korea in the Cross Currents,
pp. 36–37.

parts of the Japanese power structure
: Ibid., p. 37.

“who have suffered for their faith”
: Hoopes, Townsend,
The Devil and John Foster Dulles,
p. 78.

“much less comfortable with movements”
: Hastings, Max,
The Korean War
, p. 33.

“corrupt, and wildly unpredictable”
: Blair, Clay,
The Forgotten War,
p. 44.

CHAPTER
4

as he was then known in Pyongyang
: Spurr, Russell,
Enter the Dragon,
p. 132.

“worn the people out”
: Scalapino, Robert, and Chong-sik Lee,
Communism in Korea
, p. 314.

“more power and autonomy”
: Martin, Bradley K.,
Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader,
p. 49.

“the most among thirty million Koreans”
: Armstrong, Charles,
The North Korean Revolution,
p. 228.

“Great Sun of democratic new Korea”
: Ibid., p. 228.

CHAPTER
5

“kickbacks were commonplace”
: Blair, Clay,
The Forgotten War,
p. 51.

“the same disaster that befell China”
: Goulden, Joseph,
Korea,
p. 34.

“was simply inexplicable”
: Blair, Clay,
The Forgotten War,
p. 57.

CHAPTER
6

“most probably to world war”
: Allison, John,
Ambassador from the Plains,
p. 131.

“meet them on that basis”
: Truman’s writings, the Harry S. Truman Library.

“which is of great deterrent importance”
: Cumings, Bruce,
The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II,
p. 48 and p. 780.

“as near like Tom Pendergast”
: McCullough, David,
Truman,
p. 451.

“liked the little son of a bitch”
: Ferrell, Robert (editor),
Off the Record,
p. 349.

“an innocent idealist”
: Ibid., p. 452.

Truman was worthless
: Ibid., p. 452.

“if we don’t put up a fight now”
: papers of George Elsey, June 26, 1950, the Harry S. Truman Library.

“to let them have it!”
: Donovan, Robert,
The Tumultous Years,
p. 197.

“No one believed that the North Koreans were as strong as they turned out to be”
: Ibid., p. 199.

“I’ll handle the political affairs!”
Paige, Glenn D.,
The Korean Decision,
p. 141.

“Haven’t been so upset since”
: letter from Harry Truman to Bess Truman, June 26, 1950, the Harry S. Truman Library.

“profitless and discreditable”
: Isaacson, Walter, and Thomas, Evan,
The Wise Men,
p. 512.

arranged a dinner
: Wellington Koo oral history, Columbia University Library.

wanted to concentrate on Korea
: McFarland, Keith D., and Roll, David L.,
Louis Johnson and the Arming of America,
pp. 260, 279–280.

“block headed undertaker”
: Isaacson, Walter, and Thomas, Evan,
The Wise Men,
p. 494.