Author David Halberstam
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David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter" is not so much about the Korean War as it is about everything behind the war. Chiefly it is about the American who was behind it for its first nine months, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and the tale is not a pretty one.
Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of a score of books ("The Best and the Brightest,"The Fifties"), put the finishing touches on this one just five days before he was killed last April in a California car crash. Into its 700-plus pages he appears to have poured all he had learned about East-West politics and conflicts in nearly five decades of reporting, research and writing. It is possibly the best one-volume history of the conflict yet, easily the equal of Clay Blair's "The Forgotten War" and T.R. Fehrenbach's "This Kind of War."
Not that Halberstam is the first to make a case against MacArthur. Historian Stanley Weintraub did a tightly focused job of that seven years ago in "MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero."
And not that he ignores MacArthur's positive qualities and accomplishments, both before and after North Korea invaded South Korea June 25, 1950, most notably his decision to make an amphibious landing at Inchon three months into the war. Perceived by his military advisers as completely unworkable, it turned out to be a masterstroke.
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