Tony Leviero, the New York Times White House correspondent, was already sniffing around the story. When he spoke with George Elsey, a senior White House aide, about the Wake meeting, Elsey immediately went to Truman. Leviero was considered straight and reasonably friendly by the White House.

If there was to be a leak, Elsey suggested, then here was the right man with the right paper for the job. "Okay—you can give it to Tony," the president said, and with that Leviero and the Times got the full transcript. The paper published it on April 21, and the next year Leviero won the Pulitzer Prize. The MacArthur people were furious; it was a smear, General Courtney Whitney said. If it was not nearly enough to cripple the growing assault on the White House, then anyone knowledgeable about how things like this played in Washington now had reason to wonder just how well the general and his record would fare in Senate hearings scheduled to begin on the Hill.

The showdown finally came in the Senate hearings.

The Republican right was sure the momentum was going its way. Its leaders in the Senate had no doubt that MacArthur, forceful and charismatic as ever, had all the answers (which were their answers) and spoke for real Americans. What was it MacArthur had said at San Francisco's City Hall in front of half a million adoring citizens? "I have just been asked if I intended to enter politics. My reply was 'No.' I have no political aspirations whatever. I do not intend to run for any political office. I hope my name will never be used in a political way. The only politics I have is contained in a simple phrase known to all of you—'God Bless America.'" That, as Joseph Goulden noted, was the general's own coy way of signaling that he might indeed be available for a political run, for one last try.

Given the power of the emotions now in play, none of the top Democrats was eager to lead the hearings and get in the way of so powerful a force. So it fell to Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat and senior senator on the Armed Services Committee—a truly conservative man in the old-fashioned sense of the word, with unparalleled respect among his peers in the Senate and, because of the nature of the one-party* South, completely immune to the political pressures of the moment—to head the committee. He was a towering figure of the Senate, probably closer personally and ideologically to conservative Republican senators than to liberal Democratic ones, though he could never run successfully for national office because of the issue of race; he was an all-out segregationist. In other circumstances, a figure holding such a gavel in such crucial hearings, as Robert Caro noted in his book Master of the Senate, might have had a chance to become an instant national figure and a household name. But to take the gavel now was a dubious honor. It was not a role Russell sought, but it was a role, however odious, he felt obliged to accept. The MacArthur committee would be a joint one, combining the Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. The Democrats would technically have an advantage because they were the majority party and because some of the Republicans, like Leverett Saltonstall and Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, were Eastern internationalists, but the emotions of the moment, to which all senators were finely attuned, greatly favored MacArthur.

WHAT THE REPUBLICANS hoped for was a great national platform for the general. He would be the great patriot who had been wronged and betrayed by wimpy politicians, and here in the national spotlight he could slay his—and, more important, their—opponents with that great voice and that all-encompassing knowledge of the world. He would dismantle on their behalf not just Truman, Acheson, and Marshall, but their policies over the previous decade. What the Republican right wanted was nothing less than for these Senate hearings to launch the 1952 presidential election campaign. There was, however, a serious problem for MacArthur. The passions his return had triggered had not actually represented an endorsement of his policies, most especially not of a wider war in Asia. Instead, the emotional welcome for him and support for his policies were two very different things—especially as those policies were placed under increasingly serious scrutiny, and the consequences of following them became clearer.

What then do you do in a democracy when passions outpace the realities of the moment? Richard Russell pondered that question, and eventually decided that slowing the process down to focus on substance might limit the passions. He wanted, to the degree that he was able, to marginalize the headline-hunting. So it was that the most critical thing Russell did was to disarm the emotions of the hearings. The hearings, he decided, would be full; they would be as thoughtful and judicious as he could make them and they would not be covered live—they would be covered instead almost live. Reporters would not be allowed in the hearing room, nor would the cameras of that new media form, television, be allowed in—even though, with its audience beginning to grow, as many as 30 million Americans might have watched every day. There would be a record, and it would be given out to reporters almost as soon as someone had testified. But they were going to be talking about issues of national security even as the war went on, and Russell was in no rush to have a discussion of the most secret aspects of American foreign policy made available to the country's enemies. Thus, the stenographic record of the hearings would be edited immediately by censors from the Defense and State departments.

Four votes on whether or not the hearings should be closed were brought by the Republicans, and four times Russell won, albeit narrowly. So on May 3, 1951, the hearings began, and as they did, so did the demythologizing of Douglas MacArthur. He could not, as he had so often done at the Dai Ichi in Tokyo, dominate this political situation and deliver his carefully rehearsed monologues without challenge. The Dai Ichi was not a democratic setting; this was. During the Senate hearings, he did indeed use phrases like "history teaches us" and "history shows," as if there were just one simple lesson to be passed on and he was history's designated voice. For the first time, though, great hero or not, he had to bow to democratic procedures, facing tough questions from men every bit as partisan and egocentric as he.

As the first witness, he answered questions for three days, and it was in no way a virtuoso performance. He was forced to deal with a rather more complicated record than he might have wanted. These men felt they could challenge his thoughts and his facts. Nor were his answers necessarily what the Republican right wanted. Each day his case seemed a bit weaker, he himself a bit smaller, and his opponents, indeed his punching bags, like Acheson and Marshall, a bit more thoughtful and better grounded in the issues.

One of the great problems with Douglas MacArthur, something that had bedeviled those who had dealt with him for years, was that he did not always tell the truth. He used the truth when it suited him and his cause, and readily departed from it when it got in his way. The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, he was mortal like everyone else, and was often wrong, on occasion very wrong. Because he was surrounded by so many sycophants and no one ever challenged him, his own distortions eventually became crystallized as truths. Challenges to his version quickly became seen as the distortions of sworn enemies. When he had spoken before the Congress upon his return, he had lied shamelessly about one critical point. He had claimed that the Joint Chiefs supported his positions. Perhaps he had convinced himself that they did; for there had been a brief moment after the Chinese came in and before Ridgway was just arriving that some of them had pondered some of his proposals. But when Ridgway turned the war around, he had lost them again. Perhaps, in his own mind, he who had gloried in mocking and belittling them now truly believed that they had indeed supported him. Perhaps he believed that the old codes were more powerful than the truth, that, in the end, if it came down to a collision between the military and civilian politicians, then like it or not, all military men would be bound by a kind of institutional loyalty to back him up. Though he had not necessarily been loyal to them in the past, they, men of less grandeur, would nonetheless be loyal to him now.

Almost no one in the Pentagon agreed professionally with that judgment. These troops were in fact regarded as a disaster waiting for another place to happen. A thirty-seven-man mission sent to Taiwan by the Pentagon at virtually the same time, which had spent a good deal of time on the ground, Marshall testified, had found that the "condition of training and equipment...was so low that they could not be depended upon to defend" the island, let alone invade the mainland. Instead of preventing them from recapturing their homeland, we were protecting them from being overrun in their island redoubt.

As for giving them more equipment, their record for losing their equipment during the civil war was unparalleled and made the Joint Chiefs reluctant to give them any more. Bradley was particularly blunt. He said the Nationalist troops might defect to the Communists at the first opportunity. Moreover, he added, if a Communist force was actually able to land on Formosa, it might win the island over thanks to defections. Joe Collins added: "We were highly skeptical that we could get anything more out of these Chinese than we were getting out of the South Koreans, because these were the same people that were run off China in the first place." The testimony about the Chinese Nationalist troops reflected what most military men felt in private. It just was not the sort of thing one said publicly about the soldiers of an ally. But because it was censored, the myth of Chiang's troops, that extraordinary army of more than half a million men—America getting something for nothing—was allowed to continue.

The hearings represented a great education for Americans about the complexity of the world they now inhabited. Many who had thought Washington did not have a larger policy for dealing with the Communist world began to understand the containment policy that had been put in place. None of this painful process of education was what the Republicans who had pushed for the hearings, smelling blood in the waters, wanted.

After six days of Omar Bradley's testimony, with the other Joint Chiefs still to follow, Senator Bourke Hickenlooper, the conservative Iowa Republican, suggested to Russell that the hearings were taking too much time and that there was really no need to hear the other three chiefs testify. That was a sign that the great Republican hope—that they could use the hearings to reveal a vast gap between the Truman people and the uniformed military—was dying. Hickenlooper's proposal was rejected fourteen to eleven. The hearings were going to run their course, and every day they lasted, MacArthur shrank further on the political landscape.

FOR THE TRUMAN administration the MacArthur hearings were a significant victory. The historical record—if not the political center of the country—had been reclaimed. A longtime adversary had been partially defanged, albeit a little late. Given the political damage already done by the fall of China, by the entrance of Chinese forces into the war, and the firing of MacArthur, Truman might be the winner in the long run but not in the short term, given the emotions triggered by the conflict. He might have title to the Constitution, and that would help him one day with historians, but the Republicans still had title to the flag, and that was more important in the political equation.

EVEN THE SHREWDEST of men do not always know when their most dramatic moment is over and it is time to leave the stage; for the self-absorbed that is far more likely to be true. So it was for Douglas MacArthur. "If he had retired the day after Inchon, every town in America would have had a school named after him," said Bill McCaffrey, then a mid-level officer on the Tokyo staff, "but the longer he stayed, and the more he said, the more he damaged himself." In the end, he simply did not grasp the politics of it all—what the cheering had been about (and perhaps more important, what it had not been about) when he first returned home. He thought it had all been about him, not understanding that he was merely a trigger device for something larger. For a time he still chased his dream, giving speeches all over the country. The crowds dwindled, and as they did, his voice inevitably became more strident. Many of his most passionate followers drifted elsewhere in search of another candidate. The game plan for the conservative right had never really centered around him. His real job had been to damage their enemies. If the lightning struck, they would have gone with him, but their real candidate had always been Bob Taft, whose father had taken down MacArthur's father some fifty years earlier in the Philippines, and with whom MacArthur had the most uneasy of political alliances.

That was still true as 1952 approached. Taft, infinitely more isolationist than MacArthur, was the candidate of the conservative Republicans. At their convention that year, MacArthur gave the keynote speech, but the handsome and charismatic old soldier, the man who had stood so confidently before the Congress a little more than a year earlier, had disappeared. In his place was a civilian—indeed a politician—who seemed not only more partisan, but much older, appearing in what was one of the most alien and uncomfortable roles of his life, that is, speaking on behalf of another man. He was not, it became clear early on in his speech, very comfortable with his own words. The delegates in the arena soon became restless and began to abandon their seats. Millions of other Americans, sitting in their homes, watched as he emptied the floor. He knew that he had somehow failed, and the next day did not take calls.

CHIPYONGNI HAD SIGNALED the beginning of a new stage in the war, one that lasted two more years without granting either side any turn-of-the-tide victory. The commanders of both armies were largely without illusions—though some illusions might still remain among the political figures above them. But from then on it became a grinding war. I want you, Ridgway told a group of Marine officers about that time, "to bleed Red China white." It became a war of cruel, costly battles, of few breakthroughs, and of strategies designed to inflict maximum punishment on the other side without essentially changing the battle lines. In the end, there would be no great victory for anyone, only some kind of mutually unsatisfactory compromise.

Each side had managed to neutralize the forces of the other, but both seemed somehow powerless to stop the war itself. The Chinese launched a major offensive in the spring of 1951, costly to them, and of only marginal success. They threw some three hundred thousand men into the line. Some of the most intense fighting of the war ensued, with insignificant benefits at the cost of horrific Chinese casualties. For the Western command, however, it was a reminder of just how good the Chinese troops really were and how many of them there were, which dampened any great desire to plan offenses to punch north of the thirty-eighth again and head for the Yalu. The commanders in the field did not always agree—the Eighth Army commander Jim Van Fleet was for a time very restless with the limits placed on him and thought, once he had stopped the Chinese offensive in May 1951, that it was his turn to drive north. But Washington had been through all that once before, and the results had been horrendous, and it had no intention of investing more American and other lives in trying it a second time.

But no one knew how to end it. The war had settled into unbearable, unwinnable battles; it had reached the point where there were no more victories, only death. Both sides wanted to get out, but neither seemed to have the political skills to do so, and the figure of Joseph Stalin, not unhappy to see two potential rivals caught in so unhappy a war, slowed down any chance of getting out easily. Both the United States and China were also slowed by their policy of nonrecognition—the only place they recognized each other was on the battlefield, at gunpoint. Nonetheless peace talks, or at least armistice talks, began in mid-July 1951 at Kaesong, the ancient Korean capital just below the thirty-eighth parallel, and went forward at a speed somewhat slower than a snail's pace. Eventually moved to Panmunjom in the no-man's-land of the thirty-eighth parallel, the talks were slowed by great ideological hostility and distrust, and by the fact that neither of the ancillary powers, the two Koreas, wanted to admit the existence of the other. What also turned out to be a major deterrent to progress was the issue of repatriation. There were a large number of Chinese prisoners who did not want to go back to the mainland. One estimate suggested that there were some twenty thousand Chinese soldiers being held prisoner, and only about six thousand wanted to be repatriated. That made a difficult process even harder.

BEFORE THERE COULD be peace in Korea, the American political process had to come to terms with the idea of a stalemate in a limited war. The Democrats, unhappily cast as the war's architects, were badly limited in their ability to do that. But a Republican president, especially a centrist Republican one, might be able to bring home the kind of imperfect settlement that a Democrat could not. Thus the great political battle of 1952 was not waged in the general election, but rather at the Republican Party's convention in Chicago, between the moderates and the conservatives. The anger there was visceral; it was as if all the long-simmering bitterness over foreign policy—and the parallel powerlessness among the right-wing members—surfaced at that convention. Everyone there believed that thanks to the war, they were now going to have the best chance to win in more than two decades—an even better chance than in 1948. And in the view of the right-wing isolationists there was Dwight Eisenhower, previously not even a declared Republican, arriving at their convention ready to steal their nomination. Who even knew if Eisenhower, who had worked so easily with Roosevelt and Truman, was really a Republican? "I Like Ike," said the Eisenhower buttons. "But What Does Ike Like?" countered the Taft buttons. The tensions on the convention floor and on the Chicago streets were far more bitter than normal. John Wayne, the actor, who had been, at thirty-four, an acceptable age to fight in World War II (Jimmy Stewart, a year older, had an exceptional war record) but had decided to do the war in celluloid because his career was just beginning to take off, was a particularly vocal Taft delegate. The star of many war films, Wayne at one point jumped out of his cab and yelled at an old mess sergeant who was running an Eisenhower sound truck, "Why don't you get a red flag?"

Taft himself seemed to think he could use the Korean War and the firing of MacArthur as central issues. Just before the convention, he announced that if elected he would name MacArthur "deputy commander in chief of the armed forces," whatever that actually meant. Senator Everett Dirksen was Taft's man, the key floor leader for the Midwestern wing, ready to fight to the last to stop the Eisenhower intruders. The leader of the Eisenhower forces was the twice-defeated Tom Dewey. At one point Dirksen stood at the podium and pointed down at Dewey, the archenemy of his own people, now the leader of the Eisenhower surge, and said, "Reexamine your hearts before you take this action. We followed you before and you took us down the road to defeat." Then, his finger still pointed at Dewey as if it were a weapon, Dirksen added, "And don't take us down that road again." It was the highest drama of the convention.

But to many ordinary delegates at the convention, hungering for a presidential victory, the promise of Eisenhower with his immense charm was more seductive than that of Taft's greater ideological purity. And Eisenhower it would be, both at the convention and in the general election. There was even a chemical formula for his campaign, worn on pins by his supporters, K1C2, or, translated into politics: the Korean War, corruption in government, and Communists in government. During tire campaign he had uttered one single sentence that had virtually guaranteed his election. "I will go to Korea," he had said. Translated from the codes of politics to the public at large, that meant, "I will end the war." He won the election handily, by 6.6 million votes. He went to Korea, met with both General Mark Clark, who had the old MacArthur job, and Jim Van Fleet, who had the Walton Walker job, both of them more hawkish than Eisenhower and both irritated by the limits imposed on them—they were not allowed major offensives and were to focus on minimizing casualties. They were both filled with plans on how* to intensify the pressure on the Chinese. Eisenhower barely listened. He wanted out.

Eisenhower was probably the perfect centrist candidate for that moment as America went through the torturous, grudging process of becoming an international power. He was thoughtful, careful, and experienced, the least jingoistic of military men. He was what the country wanted and probably needed just then, a tempered and tempering figure in an edgy and surely dangerous time. His sense of internationalism was impeccable and hard-won. He had led the largest invasion force in the history of mankind. He was, in personal terms, the anti-MacArthur, generous with subordinates, quick to give them credit, brilliant at suppressing his own ego, and capable of fending off the considerable ego of others.

His election also spelled the end for a certain kind of overt McCarthyism and, finally, for the senator himself. McCarthy had never quite understood the boundaries and limitations under which he operated, that he was useful when he attacked a Democratic president, not a Republican one. He did not understand that his role changed once Eisenhower had been elected, and so he continued on, reckless as ever, until in 1954 the Republican center began to move against him, resulting in his eventual censure. If McCarthy himself was censured in 1954, that did not mean that McCarthyism itself was dead—the willingness of prominent politicians in one party to attack their political opponents, not because of a valid disagreement over policy but on grounds of loyalty, accusing those they opposed of treason, and of aiding and abetting the Communists, continued; and some of the issues that had burdened Truman and Acheson still smoldered just under the surface. Much to his surprise, Eisenhower, new at the political game, quickly found that on some key issues he had more support and greater sympathy from the Democrats in Congress than from his own party. "Republican Senators," Eisenhower wrote in his diary a few weeks after becoming president, "are having a hard time getting through their heads that they now belong to a team that includes rather than opposes the White House."

WHAT THE ELECTION of Eisenhower also did was ease the way for a future settlement in Korea. Then in March 1953, both the United States and China caught a break. Joseph Stalin, the man covertly pushing the Chinese to be more obstinate, died, opening the way to finding a solution. Both sides were now freer to get a settlement than they might have been only a few months earlier, the Americans because Eisenhower could bring home the same kind of disappointing settlement that Truman might have been pilloried for, and the Chinese because Mao no longer had Stalin looking over his shoulder.

A routine letter to the Chinese from Mark Clark, the United Nations commander, suggesting an exchange of sick and wounded prisoners, drew an immediate and positive response. In late April 1953, the exchange, known to the Americans as Operation Little Switch, took place. The way was now open for further progress. But it was still a difficult task. Syngman Pdiee, furious about the inconclusive nature of the potential solution, the fact that he would, like Kim II Sung, after all that bloodshed and sacrifice, once again rule only half a country, tried to undermine the talks. First he announced in May that he would not be a party to any settlement and that the South would fight on alone—a threat that was palpably embarrassing to the Americans but also palpably empty. What he got in return was an offer of a bilateral security from the United States. Then, in mid-June, as both sides seemed to be moving ever more quickly toward a settlement, Rhee moved again to undermine the talks. He pulled his guards from the prison camps in the South, allowing some twenty-seven thousand North Koreans, who might have been forced into repatriation, to escape and slip back into South Korean society, thereby enraging Pyongyang. But even that did not stop the process. The two larger powers wanted out.

The war went on grimly and meanly as the peace talks continued; the battles became an especially cruel way for each side to show* to the other that if it was not exactly winning, then nevertheless it could stay there forever. By mid-1952, the war had begun to resemble more than anything else the worst of the First World War: trench warfare, days and nights of living under constant artillery barrages, men caught in the wrong place at the wrong time with almost all meaning subtracted from the fighting and dying. By then both sides had created seemingly unassailable extensive defensive lines. It was as if the Chinese, who had been so cavalier with their manpower in the earlier months of the war, had morphed their troops into a different kind of Army in the previous two years, skilled at this different kind of warfare. Given UN air and artillery supremacy, they had gradually adjusted their style of fighting. They had created quite exceptional tunnels, triumphs of raw, primitive engineering (and eventually to be copied and perhaps exceeded by the North Vietnamese, first in their assault on the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and then in time in their war with the Americans). In Korea these tunnels went from Chinese positions relatively removed from the point of assault to the very mouth of an attack point. They allow*ed the Chinese relative immunity from UN firepower until the very last moment of an attack. In addition, the Chinese had their artillery pieces, usually ones captured during their civil war, hidden aw^ray, virtually invisible to detection even from the air. They were positioned on the back side of the mountains, often in caves laboriously carved out of the mountains themselves. A given artillery piece would be slipped out periodically, would fire about twenty rounds of frighteningly accurate fire at the American positions, and then be wheeled back into the cave. "By the time our counterfire guys could fix its location, their gun was safe and its crew was safely back in the cave too, sucking down their rice," said Hal Moore, who had commanded a rifle company in those days. Their defensive positions were exceptional, "very tough to crack—they were hard-core, heavy duty, professional diggers," Moore said. "Their lines were built around deep caves, catacombs with large underground rooms sometimes twelve or fifteen miles behind the front lines. Because of that our artillery, bombers, and close air support had little or no effect on them."

Their troops were much admired by the American commanders in the field for their discipline and tenacity. The Americans were rotating their frontline people more and more quickly because it was such an unpopular war, but the Chinese wore more often than not keeping the same units and the same troops engaged on the line for extended periods, and the American commanders in the field marveled at how well they seemed to be able to move at night without exposing themselves. As the war had continued, it had obviously become a kind of two-track struggle: the peace talks at Panmunjom, slow and agonizingly difficult, and the fighting itself, just enough input to let the other side know that neither side, Western nor Eastern, was going to lose military face.

So it was with the battle of Pork Chop Hill in the spring of 1953. Pork Chop Hill, or Hill 255, was almost a symbol of the sheer emptiness of the last stages of the war, so much to be invested for so little gain. It was a bitter and bloody battle that took place in several stages, and it involved a small number of American infantry units, positioned at the extreme outer point of the un lines, struggling for one of the most distant outposts on the un exterior line. It had no great strategic benefit, and it was only of value because it had been deemed of value and because whichever side held it, the other side wanted it. The battle was more accurately a series of battles, for Pork Chop Hill had been going on for more than a year, culminating in the final battles of the Korean War in July 1953. The closer the people talking at Panmunjom came to some kind of a settlement, the more the value of Pork Chop seemed to go up, and the bloodier the fighting for it became. In late March of 1953, the Chinese attacked the hill and were driven off, but in the process took a neighboring outpost on a higher hill, Old Baldy, making Pork Chop that much more exposed. Major General Art Trudeau, the commander of the Seventh Division, wanted to take Old Baldy back, but Lieutenant General Maxwell Taylor, the new commander of the Eighth Army, refused permission for fear of additional prohibitive casualties. Taylor himself was under orders to clear any assault larger than two battalions with his superiors in Washington. That order in itself reflected Washington's desire for less not more war at this point.

In mid-April 1953, just as they were moving ahead on Little Switch and Panmunjom, the Chinese struck again, some twenty-three hundred of them, attacking the tiny garrison at Pork Chop. What ensued was a furious artillery battle. Slam Marshall, who wrote of that battle as he did of the fighting up near Kunuri, said that during the first day of the artillery barrage, the nine artillery battalions of the Second and Seventh divisions fired 37,655 rounds, and on the second day alone an additional 77,349 rounds. "Never at Verdun were guns worked at any rate such as this. The battle of Kwajalein, our most intense shoot during World War II, Was still a lesser thing when measured in terms of artillery expenditure per hour, weight of metal against yards of earth and the grand output of the guns," he wrote. "For this at least the operation deserves a place in history. It set the all time mark for artillery effort."

The American troops managed to hold. In July 1953, the Chinese tried once again. The battle went on ferociously for two days, with both sides in a virtual stalemate on the crest of the hill. King Company, commanded by Lieutenant Joe Clemons, took the hardest hit. Clemons had gone up there with 135 men in his command and came back with 14. The fighting went back and forth over five days, from July 6 to July il. On the morning of July 11, Maxwell Taylor drove up to Trudeau's headquarters and told him that Pork Chop was not worth the investment of any more American lives, that the battle was over. The remaining American forces slipped off the hill, unbeknownst to the Chinese. When someone asked Major General Mike West, the commander of the British Commonwealth Division, what he would have done to get Pork Chop back, he answered, "Nothing. It was only an outpost." Sixteen days later, on July 27, a truce began in Korea.

A difficult, draining, cruel war had ended under terms that no one was very happy with.

PERHAPS ALL WARS are in some way or another the product of miscalculations. But Korea was a place where almost every key decision on both sides turned on a miscalculation. First, the Americans took Korea off their defensive perimeter, which in turn encouraged the varying Communist participants to act. Then, the Soviets gave a green light to Kim II Sung to invade the South, convinced the Americans would not come in. When the Americans entered the war, they greatly underestimated the skills of the North Korean troops they were going to face, and vastly overestimated how well prepared the first American troops to go into battle were. Later, the Americans decided to drive north of the thirty-eighth parallel, paying no attention to Chinese warnings.

After that, in the single greatest American miscalculation of the war, MacArthur decided to go all the way to the Yalu because he was sure the Chinese would not come in, and so made his troops infinitely more vulnerable. Finally, Mao believed that the political purity and revolutionary spirit of his men greatly outweighed America's superior weaponry (and its corrupt capitalist soul) and so, after an initial great triumph in the far North, had pushed his troops too far south, taking horrendous losses in the process. For a time it seemed like the only person who got what he wanted was Stalin, who, fearing Titoism on Mao's part, and a possible Chinese connection to the Americans, was not unhappy when the Chinese decided to fight the Americans. But even he, so cold-blooded and calculating, miscalculated several times. He originally thought that the Americans would not enter the war, and then they did. If he was not at first unhappy with the idea of them fighting the Chinese (with the Russians sitting on the sidelines), then the long-range consequence for the Soviets would prove complicated indeed. The Chinese would remain bitter about what he did nor do for them in those vital early months, and those feelings of resentment contributed to the Sino-Soviet split a few years later. But perhaps even more important, the Chinese entrance into the war had a profound and long-lasting effect on how Americans looked on the issue of national security. It gave the ultimate push forward to the vision embodied in NSC 68. It greatly increased the Pentagon's influence and helped convert the country toward far more of a national security state than it had previously been, so increasing the forces driving that dynamic that in ten years Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech as president, would warn of a "military-industrial complex." It would help define the Communist world, in American eyes, for years—and quite incorrectly—as a monolith, and so diminish the political influence of men like George Kennan, who placed greater emphasis on nationalism and age-old historical imperatives. It would poison American politics, where the great fear would become—for domestic political reasons rather than for geopolitical ones—losing a country'to the Communists. Because of that, American policy toward Asia became deeply flawed, and this would profoundly affect American policy toward a country barely on the American radar screen at the time, Vietnam.

Certainly Kim II Sung miscalculated, not just that the Americans would not send their troops to defend South Korea but the myth of his own popularity and that of his revolution, convinced as he was that two hundred thousand Southern peasants would rise up as one when his troops moved south. He not only failed to make his country whole but encouraged the Americans to upgrade the importance of South Korea, not only defending it militarily but financing its growth in the postwar era into an infinitely more viable society than his North. Fifty years after the end of the war, there were still American troops garrisoned there, and the South had become something of an economic beacon to underdeveloped nations, its economy infinitely more vital than that of the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s. Comparably the North remained a sad, grim backwater, as xenophobic as it was totalitarian and economically destitute.

FOR MANY AMERICANS, except perhaps a high percentage of those who had actually fought there, Korea became something of a black hole in terms of history. In the year following the cease-fire, it became a w^rar they wanted to know less rather than more about. In China the reverse was true. For the Chinese it was a proud and successful undertaking, a rich part of an old nation's new history. To them it represented not just a victory, but more important, a kind of emancipation for the new China from the old China, which had so long been subjugated by powerful Western nations. The new China had barely been born, and yet it had stalemated not merely America, the most powerful nation in the world, the recent conquerors of both Japan and Germany, but the entire UN as well, or by their more ideological scorekeeping, all the imperialist nations of the world and their lackeys and running dogs. In that sense it had been a victory of almost immeasurable proportions, and it had been, in their minds, theirs and theirs virtually alone. The Russians had committed some hardware, but had held back at the critical moment on manpower, men who had talked big and then had cheered from the sidelines. The North Koreans had been boastful, far too confident of their own abilities, and then had failed miserably at crucial moments, and it was the Chinese who had saved them. It was not out of character and hardly a surprise in the eyes of the Chinese that the North Koreans, in their historic accounts of the war, largely withheld credit from the Chinese. They were not, the feeling went, very good about being saved. If the Chinese at that moment had lacked the military hardware to chase the Americans off Taiwan, then they had instead used their abundant manpower, their ingenuity, and the courage of their ordinary soldiers to stalemate the Westerners on land. Afterward, the rest of the world had been forced to treat China as a rising world power.

More than that of anyone else it was Mao's personal victory. He had pushed to go ahead when almost everyone else had wavered and had feared that their brand-new China, already financially and militarily exhausted by the sheer struggle of taking power after the civil war, might fail. Mao was the one who had seen the political benefits, both international and domestic, of making a stand in Korea. If the consequences had turned out to be far bloodier than he had imagined, if the Americans with their superior weaponry had eventually fought better than he had expected and inflicted greater damage on his armies, then he could accept that; he had a tolerance for gore as part of the price of revolution, and he headed a nation that might not be rich in material things, but was very rich in manpower, in the numbers of men it could sacrifice on the battlefield on its way to greatness. That was something he had always believed in when most of the others around him hesitated. It was not that he knew the demographics better than the others in the leadership group; it was that he was willing to make the calculations more cold-bloodedly than they did.

What had been at stake in the Korean War, and it was to hang over subsequent wars in Asia, was the ability to bear a cost in human life, the ability of an Asian nation to match the technological superiority of the West with the ability to pay the cost in manpower. During Korea and soon enough in Vietnam, American military commanders and theorists alike would talk about the fact that life in Asia was cheaper than it was in the West, and they would see their job as one in which they used vastly superior military technology to attain a more favorable battlefield balance, even as their Asian adversaries were determined to prove to them that in the end that was not doable, that there would always be a price and it would always be too high for an American undertaking so distant, and so geopolitically peripheral.

Because the Chinese viewed Korea as a great success, Mao became more than ever the dominant figure in Chinese politics. He had shrewdly understood the domestic political benefits of having his country at war with the Americans. As he had predicted, the war had been a denning moment between the old China and the new one, and it had helped isolate those supporters of the old China—those Chinese who had been connected to Westerners—and turned them into enemies of the state. Many were destroyed—either murdered or ruined economically—in the purges that accompanied and then followed the war. From then on there was no alternative political force to check Mao; he had been the great, all-powerful Mao before the war began, and now, more than ever, his greatness was assured in the eyes of his peers on the Central Committee, who were no longer, of course, his peers. Before the war he had been the dominant figure of the Central Committee, a man without equals; afterward he was the equivalent of a new kind of Chinese leader, a people's emperor. He stood alone. No one had more houses, more privileges, more young women thrown at him, eager to pay him homage, more people to taste his food lest he be poisoned at one of his different residences. No one could have been contradicted less frequently. The cult of personality, which he had once been so critical of, soon came to please him, and in China his cult matched that of Stalin.

There was in all this a scenario not just for political miscalculation but for something darker, for potential madness with so much power vested in one man, a man to whom so much damage had been done earlier in his life. That was always a critical element of what happened next: Mao as a young man, not unlike Stalin, had been hunted too long and too relentlessly, as it were, by so many enemies; the deepest, most unwavering kind of paranoia grew out of that past and was the most natural part of his emotional and political makeup. At the same time he had become the principal architect of an entirely new political economic-social system. He existed and operated in a nation without any personal limits on him and yet where everyone could be an enemy. Both his power and his paranoia were without limits. He who had been for so long the ultimate outsider now lived a life of imperial grandiosity. He no longer needed to listen to others; if the others differed from him on issues, it was because they did not hold China's welfare as close to their hearts as he did, and were perhaps enemies of his and of China as well—the two he judged to be the same.

He was sure that he was right on all issues—his words as they escaped his mouth were worthy of being codified as laws. China, he had decided, his China, was ready to rush into modernity—the Great Leap Forward, it was called, and the burden of turning a poor agricultural society into a modern industrial state virtually overnight fell on the peasants. If he had once been uniquely sensitive to their needs, more tuned to them as a political force than anyone else in the leadership, he now seemed prepared to put the entire burden of modernization, brutal though it would be, on them for his larger purpose. His new China would, if need be, be built on their backs. It was their job to make his dreams, no matter how unlikely, come true. The Great Leap Forward was probably the first example of a turn toward madness: as it went on, the peasants suffered more and more, under growing pressure to produce more agriculturally than ever before, even as there were conflicting pressures for them to convert to a kind of primitive industrial base, as if there were to be a small foundry in every Chinese backyard. The Great Leap Forward was always more vision than reality. Figures on agricultural production were severely doctored to make the program look like a success. Almost everyone in the bureaucracy knew that it was largely a failure—the phrase that the distinguished Yale historian Jonathan Spence used was "catastrophic hardship"—but for a long time no one dared challenge Mao. The genuine independence of the rest of the Central Committee seemed in decline; the power and authority of Mao in a constant ascent. His will had become the national will; his truths were everyone's truths. He was never wrong. If he said that night was day, then night had become day.

25. the korean peninsula after the cease-fire, july 27.1q53

Because his hold over the government was so complete, because his need to dominate every decision was so total, he forced anyone who was a potential critic or dissenter, no matter how essentially loyal, into the most dangerous role. Those who challenged him were not merely wrong, they could become, if the issue were serious enough, enemies of the people. Those who thought they wore his friends and peers and old colleagues wore, it turned out, badly mistaken; they wore his friends and allies only as long as they agreed with him on all issues all the time. No one suffered more than one of his oldest allies, Marshal Peng. He was a simple man who had always known his limits and thus his place, a true Communist, a man who always deferred to Mao on politics. But Peng was also a proud man, every bit as confident of his sense of the peasants' wolfare. Peng became a dissenter almost involuntarily—almost, it seemed, as if Mao wanted a break with him, wanted to turn on him and make him an enemy. By 1959, the early results of the Great Leap Forward wore in and China was in the midst of a terrible famine. Yet ever higher agricultural vields were being reported. Almost every senior official understood this—that the chairman's Great Leap was buttressed by lies and falsified statistics, but no one dared take him on.

Finally Peng did. He was by then the minister of defense; as the Sino-Soviet split had become more serious, it was believed that he felt that it had gone too far. That in itself might have been a problem. But there had been no break with Mao. Peng's very simplicity, his lack of political instincts, his hard-won old-soldier truths were what involuntarily turned him into a rebel. In 1959, he returned to his boyhood region around Hunan and spoke with the local peasants, who were quite candid with him about their plight, and he discovered that there was a vast Potemkin Village arising in China, that the truth as envisioned by the country's highest officials and reported to them, and the truth as borne on the shoulders of its ordinary people, were completely different. Then, in the summer of 1959, six years after the end of the war, thinking he was a good member of the Party, almost surely not understanding the full consequences of what he was doing, thinking he would have some political allies because he had such powerful truths on his side, Peng went to a conference of the Party leadership at Lushan and there wrote a cautionary private letter to Mao about what he felt were some of the problems. The letter Was filled with the obligatory references to all the successes they had gained, but it did contain a surprising number of cautionary warnings. Mao immediately reprinted it and made it available to everyone at the conference, changing the nature of the letter, and thereby casting Peng as an enemy of the government. With that, Peng had apparently played into Mao's hands—he asked for his letter back, but did not get it. Mao turned the letter into a frontal political challenge. Though almost everyone at the meeting agreed with him and knew the larger truth of what he had written, no one supported him publicly. As Jonathan Spence noted, "Mao...[treated]...Peng's well intentioned and confidential comments as tantamount to treason, but then when Mao circulated copies of the letter to the other senior members of the Communist Party, none of them came to Peng's support, even though most of them knew that the Marshal's analysis was correct. It was the ultimate act of political corruption. It meant that the Central Committee by then reflected the whims of Mao, no matter how mad, more than it did the needs and realities of China. Historians," Spence added, "now see this period as a turning point in the collapse of moral courage at the heart of the Party apparatus." In the next seven years, Spence noted, "more than 20 million Chinese died of famine." The madness had been not just legitimized, but institutionalized.

With that, the chairman called on Marshal Lin Biao, a longtime rival of Peng's, and asked him to appear at the conference and attack Peng. It was over for Peng—he was no longer defense minister; he was soon under house arrest; and as the Cultural Revolution eventually took place, starting in 1966, he became a familiar target, placed on stages in show-and-abuse theaters, where he was repeatedly attacked physically and verbally, humiliated as part of a vast national theater where he was supposed to confess his crimes. He was eventually beaten to death, a bitter payback for so many years of bravery and loyalty*. One of the principal charges against him made by the Red Guards was that he had "opposed Chairman Mao all his life." When the Red Guards attacked and beat him, crushing his ribs and his lungs, often knocking him unconscious, he never bent. "I fear nothing," he would shout at his investigators. "You can shoot me. Your days are numbered. The more you interrogate, the firmer I'll become." By the time he died from his beatings, he had been interrogated 130 times. As Mao destroyed Peng, he destroyed much of what had been the best and most idealistic part of the Chinese revolution, turning his government in the process into one where only his own monomania could flourish.

BY THE BEGINNING of the twenty-first century, no society seemed more different from the South than North Korea. To the degree that there were successes in North Korea, they had been the very early ones, because it was from the start a completely totalitarian structure, imposed always from the top down, all done with a ruthless efficiency, enforced by a brutal security system imported from Moscow. That was a specialty of the Russians in those years: they might not do agriculture and housing or industrial development well, but they did state security extremely well; they were masters at creating authoritarian societies. Thus in the years immediately after World War II, while the Americans and the government in the South had struggled, often ineptly, displaying incompetence and inefficiency rather than skill and mastery—the Americans being new at the old game of having client states—the Russians in the North had seemed singularly efficient: it was what they did best. What to do in Korea after the war was something Washington had thought very little about, and the government they had installed in the South was corrupt and often inept. By contrast, despite a lack of deeply rooted legitimacy or any great popularity, the North Koreans displayed from the start a sense of purpose and an ability to control their population that was unnervingly efficient. If the Russians had begun the process, then Kim II Sung continued it; others might mock him, but to the surprise of some of his early handlers, he turned out in time to be a shrewd student of modern totalitarianism, expert in the suppression of other men and their ideas and thoughts.

He was also an almost perfect reflection of a certain kind of Korean paranoia, of what the past, the war, and his country's colonial status had done to his generation and his country, made all the worse by his adaptation of the Soviet system. It was as if all possibilities for his people—political, economic, and social—were frozen by it. That paranoia would play as important a role in his own stewardship of the nation as any ideology—perhaps it was his true ideology, even though he would become one of Communism's sole surviving true believers. That he was so deft a survivor and player in the international Communist world surprised others: as tensions mounted between the Russians and the Chinese in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kim seemed able to promise his hand and his favors alternately to both sides, playing them off against each other while limiting their hold on him (and his own dependence on either).

But those early successes were the rare ones, and they were always imposed downward from the top; the North was a land without debate and discussion, or finally, choice. It was a place where you learned how to salute and to obey; a world without any mechanism for change. As a society, North Korea was like a living organism that simply could not breathe and was always on a respirator; as it could not breathe, it could not grow. For societies to grow, they have to be able to develop both in the right way and sometimes in the wrong way, for there is no perfect journey—you learn as much from your mistakes as from your successes. But in the North there was no criticism, no wrong step; every step, because it had been taken by Kim II Sung, was always the right one. As such the North soon became a model for a new kind of highly personalized, airless, Asian totalitarianism, a land without oxygen, even more totalitarian than Mao's China because China was so large that it was harder to control. In time, North Korea became one of the most xenophobic places in the world. As South Korea often seemed to bumble—veering back and forth from totalitarianism to what sometimes seemed like tiny increments of democracy, North Korea never stumbled—and that was its great sin. It remained frozen in a terrible monomania, a land with only one man whose thoughts could be acted on.

No political rivals were allowed to develop. Kim was the equal of Stalin in the art of purging his rivals. The only word that mattered was that of Kim II Sung, and he was always right, which meant any alternative view of politics, economics, and agriculture was wrong. In the 1980s and 1990s, as both Russia and China began in different ways and in different degrees to adjust to moderating forces, Pyongyang grew ever more distant from them, unable to change and unable to adjust—because any change might mean a fall from power for Kim. As other Communist societies, once exceedingly fraternal to North Korea, began to change and were ventilated by new forces, North Korea if anything became more didactic and more rigid, more a prisoner of one-man rule than ever; the more other Communist nations changed, the more distrusting and self-isolating the North became, and the more convinced its leader was that he was alone and could trust no one.

It was as if he alone had fought every battle, won every victory in the struggle for North Korea's independence. The Chinese were furious when they visited the museum dedicated to the Korean War in Pyongyang and found what a tiny role they had played in saving their sister state; they were barely worthy of mention. At the same time, as a means of proving to his own population (and quite possibly himself ) that his way was right and that the citizens of North Korea, despite famine and constant police procedures and an abysmal standard of living, were blessed in their good fortune, the cult of personality grew more profound, leading him past his former tutors, Stalin and Mao. A giant sixty-six-foot bronze statue of him stood in the center of the ninety-two-room Museum of the Revolution. The city also had an Arch of Triumph, even grander than the one in Paris; it celebrated Kim's return from Japan in 1945. It was a city—and a country—literally never absented by a likeness of him.

He was always referred to as the Great Leader. He had five great palaces, which no one else dared live in or use. All traffic stopped when he drove down one of Pyongyang's thoroughfares. His photo, and, in time, lest there be any mistake about the succession, that of his son, hung everywhere. Ordinary people somehow managed in their everyday dress to carry a photo of him on their jackets or tunics or dresses. By the later 1980s, according to Don Oberdorfer, who wrote about the two Koreas, there were at least thirty-four thousand monuments to Kim II Sung in the North, not including park benches where he had once however briefly sat and which were thereafter covered with glass. Once asked by a Soviet official about what appeared to be the cult of personality in his nation, he had answered that it was simply part of the history of the land: "You don't know our country. Our country is used to paying respect to elders—like China and Japan, we live by Confucian culture."

His people starved, and the production from his factories was considered pathetic. He was from the start something of an international outlaw, trying to arrange the assassination of rivals in Seoul and kidnapping people from the South he felt could be helpful to his state. He seemed, as he aged, to have two main dreams, first to develop an atomic weapon of his own, and second, to name his son, Kim Jong II, as his successor. Nothing reflected the growing change between his country and that of the South more than the ability to look at photos taken from above the two Koreas at night by satellite—the land below the thirty-eighth parallel alive with lights and commerce of all kinds, the land above the parallel blacked out, a land of self-inflicted wasteland.

Kim had in the end created a nation in his own image, one without vitality and hope, taking an existing totalitarian system and, by dint of adding his skills and fears, strangling it. North Korea became more isolated all the time, outside the reach of even its former allies like China and Russia, and still hoping to create an atomic weapon so that then at least it could be a viable outlaw state.

OF THE SUCCESSES that America was responsible for in the post—World War II/Cold War era, what happened in South Korea was probably the most impressive and dramatic—ranking even above the success of the Marshall Plan, which had delivered financial aid, materiel, and technical assistance to European societies that had in the past been fully developed powerful societies but had been badly damaged physically by the war. Korea, by contrast, had little in the way of a democratic past and little in the way of a middle-class life or an industrial base. What was created there after the war was politically, economically, and in many ways socially strikingly new. Powerful, more advanced neighbors had systematically colonized and exploited Korea's people. Their talents had long been dormant. Certainly there had been foreign witnesses in the past, most of them missionaries, who had understood the vast potential of the Korean people, their hunger for a better life, their innate talents, their surpassing work ethic—right up there with that of the Japanese—their Confucian respect for education, and the way they had maximized what limited opportunities were available to them. But the peninsula's history—that is, its geography—had too often been bleak. There had always been a more powerful regional player, a nation on a power ascent of its own, eager to dominate Korea and to suppress its people. In the period immediately after World War II, the South had appeared to be headed for more of the same, with the Americans now a player, poorly prepared for an old colonial game, bumbling and fumbling, curiously ignorant of modern Korean history, quick to get many things wrong and to underestimate the possibilities of the future for Korea. The Americans hardly seemed an improvement on great powers who had been there in the past, other than that they seemed to know* less about Korea's history than so many of their predecessors and existed at a far greater geographical distance, which might have been a plus. They helped impose on the South Syngman Pdiee, a genuine patriot, but a man whose idea of a democratic society was one where he and his closest allies could do what they wanted, and everyone else should be watched.

But whatever else, the Americans were willing (because of their broad anti-Communism) to have their sons die on Korean soil, and they were not there as conquerors or, in the classic sense, imperialists. In time, as the Cold War became less intense, they were willing to adjust to some of the more democratic impulses taking place in the society, impulses often imported back from the United States by Koreans who had gone to America to study and had been affected by the freedoms they discovered there; many who had gone to study engineering had learned about both engineering and democracy.

So it was under the American aegis in the midst of the Cold War, which had so immediately followed a hot war, that South Korea was allowed to modernize, first militarily and then technologically and industrially, but not politically; that was not part of the original package. But then, in some thirty' years, in retrospect an amazingly quick turnaround, there was a startling democratization of the society, a surprising by-product of the other aspects of modernization. What happened in South Korea was an odd mix of revolution with evolution, all taking place at an unusual rate of speed. It had begun with the need, self-evident during the Korean War, for a better South Korean Army, and that had to begin with better, more professional Korean officers. Too many of the existing ones at the start of the war were hacks who held their positions out of loyalty and willingness to play their part in the massive national corruption. In 1952, under pressure from the Americans, a new military academy was inaugurated, based to an uncommon degree on West Point. Many of the early faculty members were American officers. The curriculum, like the one at West Point, was tilted heavily toward engineering. Many of the country's most talented young students were sent there—and it became an instant source of meritocratic talent, a place where a generation of talented young Koreans could get a badly needed education and prove their worth, and break through some of the social restraints of the past.

It was an early harbinger of a new, potentially more modern society. It was probably the first step in creating what became in effect a new class in Korea, that of modern, purposeful, increasingly well-educated young men who wanted to bring a new definition of modernity to their country. The consequences of the military school and its then critical role in the nation were greater than any of its founders realized they might be: in effect the more the Army—and the country—modernized technologically and economically, the more the old ways were going to be seen as archaic and corrupt, and the less control that Rhee and the men who eventually replaced him had over the country. And in some ways the association of these students with their American teachers was fateful. The American officers represented something new. Their body movement and language reflected two quite contradictor*.' things—respect for the military hierarchy and yet a high degree of personal freedom within that same hierarchy.

It was the first critical step in the modernization of an educational, social, and then economic, and finally political, order. As the military system was modernized, so too were other colleges and universities; as the nation gained in stature and talent and confidence, it began to want to be a player economically on the international scene, and that same engineering talent was put at play there, a kind of state-guided, state-propelled capitalism. In some ways it was not unlike a smaller Japan, although the victories in Korea were far greater, because there had been an earlier precedent for some of Japan's economic successes, but little for those of Korea.

What happened in South Korea in the 1960s and 1970s was a fascinating human and societal story, a great lesson in the uses of adversity. The people who ran the country, Rhee and the men around him, did so for some thirty years in a narrow and dictatorial manner, but even as they did and as they suppressed a series of student protests, the currents within the country for a better life were becoming more powerful. Economic success gradually begat an increasing social optimism and confidence, and in time a growing restlessness on the part of the population, manifest first among its students. That change was taking place in home after home, even as Rhee and the government thought they could do business as usual and that all the power in the society existed at the top. It was a case of a nation, surely not the first and surely not the last, changing in its expectations and aspirations without the hierarchy at the top understanding the new forces. When Rhee finally fell from power in April i960, the chief of staff of the ROK Army said, "Personally, I respect Dr. Rhee. But history has turned him down, has scorned him and lost its trust in him. I, who saw the march of events, am sick inside about it."

In the background to all of this there was the leavening influence of the United States; in those early years the American government at the highest level, still deeply engaged in the Cold War, might have constantly tilted toward an authoritarian definition of Korean leadership, but there were other influences of America as well; many of the young Koreans had studied in the United States and discovered that you could be a loyal citizen and a free person at the same time, that loyalty to the state often had a built-in complexity to it that allowed you to disagree with the government's actions while still loving your country. So it was that South Korea, in small steps that few people understood at the time, and that no one planned or expected, stumbling toward a freer society, began the process in the late 1970s of serious democratization. More young Koreans were feeling more confident about their own abilities and lives and wanted greater increments of freedom to go with the greater increments of prosperity. The kind of talent and ambition that some of the early missionaries had spotted in another century—the capacity for hard work, the immense discipline, the desire for more education—were manifesting themselves on a national scale, and this had its own dynamic. Once the people of the South sensed the possibility of a better life, it was hard to slow them down.

The government tried for a time to suppress those forces, but it was overtaken by the very successes it had authored—the more successful the economy, the more confident ordinary Korean citizens felt about themselves, and the more they wanted to share, both economically and politically, in the fruits of their success. The government faced a crisis that it never really understood—in a sense a vast nationwide protest driven by rising expectations. At first the pressure for political liberalization came primarily from the universities and the students, but in time the labor unions joined up and ordinary citizens of the middle class followed them. "Korea by 1987 had irrevocably changed," said Gaston Sigur, Who was assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific in the late 1980s. "The middle class had become a power. And it could no longer be disregarded. The government wasn't dealing with a handful of left-wing students. They may have been out in front, but it was plain that you had strong middle class support for the demonstrations." In a stunningly short time, South Korea had morphed itself into a dynamic, highly productive, extremely successful democracy. "I cannot think of another country, at least in recent history, that went so swiftly from an authoritarian system to a democracy on its own," a member of the party of Roh Tae Woo, a truly democratically elected president of Korea, once told Frank Gibney. In the South the great success had come because the top of the political hierarchy had been forced, no matter how reluctantly, to pay attention to the needs and aspirations of the bottom and middle of the society.

FOR THE AMERICANS and others who had fought there, who had more often than not felt the lack of recognition in their own country, and who had not particularly liked the country when they were there, the success of South Korea as a nation brought a sense of belated validation to their sacrifice, and the sacrifice of others who had not come home, and granted them a legitimacy and honor that they had not always felt.

So many of them had for so long kept it inside themselves. No one wanted to hear about the war when they had first come home, and so they never talked about it, not to their families or to their oldest friends. Or when they did, no one understood—or, worse, wanted to understand. Their children more often than not would grow^r up knowing only that their fathers had served in the war, but almost nothing else—which units they had been with and what battles they had fought in. They would complain about their fathers, that they were never willing to talk about the war.

It was all bottled up. What they had done and why they had done it were still important to them—they were proud of having gone, and proud also of how* well they had done under dreadful conditions. They mourned those who had not come back, but they shared it only with one another. More than half a century later, this was still the defining experience in so many of their lives, and a number of them had become, in their own way, amateur historians. Late in life they wrote their own memoirs, sometimes privately published or simply Xeroxed and stapled together, done often somewhat belatedly at the urging of their children and grandchildren. A surprising number of them had, in effect, their own history rooms, with small libraries devoted to the Korean War, and with large maps of the country* showing selected battle areas pinned to the walls. But the rooms, like so many of the experiences and the memories, were effectively closed off to outsiders. No one, save the others who had gone, had offered the proper respect for what they had done and why they did it back when it had mattered. It was as if a critical part of the experience, the validity of it as judged and valued by others, had been stolen from them.

They shared, then, this one great bond—that they could talk to one another and that those who had been there would always understand. They kept in touch by phone and letter, and then late in life by the magic of the Internet, a wonderful means as well of locating old buddies who had been lost in the shuffle of time. Their alumni associations were important, and they took their division and regimental newsletters seriously, as well as their annual conventions. Friendships were sustained, and sometimes new ones flowered between men who had been in adjoining units but had not known each other in Korea itself. At the reunions they gathered in small groups, often men who had been at a particular battle, summoning their pasts through the haze of half a century of memories. In the words of Dick Raybould, an artillery forward observer in the Ninth Regiment of the Second Division, "You go to the reunions and you find yourself trying to remember what you've spent the last fifty years trying to forget."

Epilogue An IMMENSE AMOUNT of damage had been done to the Democratic Party by those years. There was a legacy from all this, a price still to be paid, and it was paid, first by the Democratic Party, and then in time by the country. There were many forces that had worked against the Truman administration at the end. It wasn't just the Korean War and the fall of China, it was something larger that was in the air, a mounting sense of fatigue with the Democrats, an exhaustion from a very difficult, grinding era, both international and domestic, with which they had tangled for too long. The Democrats by 1952 had, whatever their successes both economic and political, served for seven very hard postwar years, years in which both the administration and the nation were forced into a new kind of war that produced anxieties rather than victories. The Communists appeared likely to stand as an enemy in perpetuity. Americans, not surprisingly, wanted a change by 1952. But the lessons of that era were nonetheless haunting, and it was like a virus that got into the bloodstream of the Democratic Party, placing it perpetually on the defensive. For the Republicans had found their issue—they were in their rhetoric always tougher on the Communists. They sold their party as the one that would more eagerly stand up to Khrushchev or his successors. National security had changed: there was a genuine Communist threat out there, but measuring it accurately became more difficult because it was now so deeply entwined with domestic American politics. The Democrats were, in the decades that followed the 1950s, haunted by China as an issue, seemingly unable to answer the charges against them as they were put forth in the raw crucible of the political arena, unable to explain the complexity of what had happened so far away. China became their Achilles' heel. The larger question that arose from those years after the Korean War was soon ignored: whether or not America could separate serious and genuine national security concerns from the increasing power of simplistic anti-Communist rhetoric expressed in domestic political campaigns. Was the country wise enough to identify what was a real national security threat and what was not? And that quandary, because of the vulnerability of the Democratic Party, helped lead America into Vietnam. The successes of the Democrats in stabilizing Europe after World War II were largely ignored; they had, after all, seemingly failed on China.

In the years that followed the 1952 campaign, the Cold War deepened exponentially as a political issue, even as the outer limits in terms of real power alignments were largely settled. More, it was no longer just a struggle with the Soviets over Europe, a theater where the Russians were clearly the imperial power, imposing their will by force and inflicting their cruel little police states on unhappy satellite nations and where the United States was often identified with indigenous nationalism, a deep national longing for some form of Christian, democratic capitalism. Now the battlefield was perceived as spreading to the Third World. There indigenous forces were in the process of rising up against what had often been Western colonial or neocolonial regimes, often turning to the Communists for aid and weapons. The countries where these challenges were taking place were rarely in pure geopolitical terms terribly important or powerful, nothing that could shift the global balance; they were the kind of countries whose overall value George Kennan would have scoffed at in terms of realpolitik, and where he would have been sure there would be an inevitable conflict between Moscow and some local Communist government. The British, and in time the French, were learning that there was no upside to trying to sustain colonial relationships in this new era, and were pulling back, but now, somewhat to the surprise of its allies, America began to step in under the banner of anti-Communism.

Gradually even the Democratic Party made its adjustments to the changing political dynamic. By i960 most of the contradictions of the era were reflected almost perfectly in Jack Kennedy, probably the party's most attractive young candidate. Kennedy was an intellectually superior, quite skeptical, uncommonly modern political figure. There was a certain iciness at his political core that suited him well in this new political age, framed as it was by nuclear weapons, and therefore one that demanded ice instead of fire in a leader. He seemed to embody little in the way of genuine political passion—other than to be a rational man, as if being a rational man would always be enough. This meant that Kennedy, more than any other Democrat of that era, came to represent the conflicting forces of the New Deal Democratic Parly as it evolved into the era of the Cold War Democratic Party, a young man who at least on the surface took a harder line than the candidate who had preceded him, Adlai Stevenson. No longer would a Democratic candidate dare be accused of being soft on Communism. "Isn't he marvelous!" the ever hawkish columnist Joseph Alsop once said about Kennedy during the i960 campaign, "a Stevenson with balls." In the i960 election Kennedy and the Democrats, if anything, took a harder line on the subject of Fidel Castro, who had come to power in Cuba during the Eisenhower years, than did Kennedy's opponent, Richard Nixon. For Cuba by then had become the litmus test for a presidential macho index. (In the i960 campaign Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, had gone through the American South telling people at each stop that he would know how to deal with Castro: "First I'd wash him. Then I'd shave him. And then I'd spank him.") In that same campaign, Kennedy also accused the Republicans of creating a missile gap with the Soviets—thus showing that perhaps it was the Republicans who were soft on Communism, and at the same time, however involuntarily, feeding the nation's nuclear anxieties. His charge turned out to be true; there was a missile gap—the United States had two thousand and the Russians had only sixty-seven—but it kept the Republicans just a bit more on the defensive, and Khrushchev, delighted to look more powerful than he was, never corrected Kennedy.

Kennedy might have thought privately that our China policy, our insistence that Taiwan was China, was a quaint kind of irrationality', a sentiment he was willing to express with some of his more liberal aides, but he was not about to take any political risk to change it, at least not in his first term. He could be stunningly candid about these things in private, for personal candor was part of his charm and added considerably to his reputation as a realist. But Kennedy's candor was always a private, rather than a public thing. Because of that, those exposed to his private side liked him even more, and saw him not as being timid, but instead as being realistic. After the election, he told those liberal advisers to whom he had earlier seemed to promise a new policy on China that he could not talk about China for the present. Perhaps in the second term...So much, it was clear, was going to have to wait for the second term.

Instead his administration was embattled—indeed on the defensive—from the start. The margin of victory over Nixon was paper thin, barely a hundred thousand votes. Then the administration, hoisted on its own petard, went along with a bizarre CIA plan to support Cuban rebels who wanted to take the country back from Castro by landing them on Cuban beaches. The Bay of Pigs plan, run by the CIA not the military, with Kennedy cutting back some of the air cover, failed miserably and predictably. In political terms, Kennedy was seriously wounded by its failure, more on the defensive now than before. At a meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna two months later, the Soviet leader, mistaking the Bay of Pigs escapade for a sign of Kennedy's larger weaknesses, decided to bully him. The only place where the West and the Communists were fighting with real bullets was Vietnam, and as a means of showing Khrushchev that he was made of sterner stuff, Kennedy decided to up the ante there.

There was, however, a great unanswered issue about Vietnam—if the Democrats could not deal with China, which their parly had been accused of losing, how' could they avoid the same pitfalls in Vietnam? The question went unanswered because it went unasked. In the administration no one even discussed China. That Vietnam might now become their China and they would be blamed for losing it to the Communists was a far more immediate question for them. So a line Was to be drawn there. Their policy on China was one of essential silence. Yet China and Vietnam were two parts of the same issue. Of the two countries, China was the done deal—a policy that was deceased—the other, Vietnam, was a work in progress, or perhaps more properly, a tragedy in the making. They were tied to each other by the same political forces: one could not deal with the real challenge of the Communist-nationalist forces in Vietnam, because one could not deal with the issue of why those same forces had won in China. The people who did not want the Americans to lose Vietnam, another Asian country that had never been theirs, were largely the same people who had already frozen U.S. China policy. The new administration, so filled with confidence about changing what it considered outmoded Dulles policies, decided to lay off the most outmoded one of all and continue the fight to keep Communist China out of the UN. On China, Kennedy was, said the prominent China expert Allen Whiting, who served in that administration, "a profile in caution."

Typically, at his home in Hyannis Port in the summer of 1961, Kennedy met with Adlai Stevenson, by then his UN ambassador; Harlan Cleveland, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations; and Arthur Schlesinger, his aide and historian. When they got to the subject of China, and the president's desire to keep Mao's China out of the UN for the foreseeable future, Kennedy, sensing the moment had arrived to strengthen everyone's resolve just a bit, immediately called out to his wife, "Jackie, we need the Bloody Marys now." He wanted, he told a dubious Stevenson, to buy at least one more year before dealing with China. That year soon stretched on.

At a meeting a few weeks later, with Stevenson, Schlesinger, McGeorge Bundy, his chief national security aide, and Ted Sorensen, his top domestic adviser and principal speechwriter, the subject of China came up again. Stevenson, Kennedy said, was in a terrible position, one of keeping the real China out of the UN. "You have the hardest thing in the world to sell. It really doesn't make any sense—the idea that Taiwan represents China. But, if we lose this fight, if Red China comes into the UN our first year in town, your first year and mine, they'll run us both out. We have to lick them this year. We'll take our chances next year. It will be an election year; but we can delay the admission of Red China until after the election. So far as this year is concerned you have to do everything you can to keep them out. Whatever is required is okay by me." Stevenson asked if the blockage was to be for one year or more permanently. At least for a year, Kennedy answered. He himself was going to make clear to Chiang Kai-shek that he could not make the issue of China at the UN a domestic political issue. And then he offered a curiously innocent description of how he was going to get a group of China Firsters—Harry Luce, Walter Judd, and Roy Howard—and bring them around on the issue. Anyone listening to him at that point, knowing how passionate these other men were on the subject of Chiang, and how* little connection they felt to Kennedy's own election, might have wondered if his normally cool, realistic appraisal of political forces had completely deserted him. Changing their position on Chiang was not something those men were likely to do because of a friendly presidential phone call. John Kennedy at that point was the most rational of men, carrying on the most irrational of policies.

In the late fall of 1961, Kennedy decided to up the ante in the ongoing but still relatively low-key guerrilla war in Vietnam. At the time there were only six hundred American advisers in South Vietnam. His was the most dangerous of moves geopolitically even if at first it was a limited commitment of advisory and support troops, totaling perhaps some seventeen thousand additional Americans by early 1963. The Kennedy escalation meant that even if the commitment was in the beginning relatively small, nonetheless the flag had been planted ever more deeply and planted in a country and a war where the United States did not by itself control the dynamic and where the forces gathering against the American proxy were driven by a deep historic dynamic. It was America, because it was great and mighty and rich, believing it was in control of events but following a path over which it would have less and less control; in effect it was following the French path. "The Americans are walking in the same footsteps as the French," said the journalist-historian Bernard Fall, who was eventually killed there, "but dreaming different dreams."

The Kennedy commitment in Vietnam was more than anything else driven by domestic politics. As he could not deal with China in his first term, he could not afford to lose another country'—one where there was an actual shooting war taking place. Saving South Vietnam from Communism, though it became the rallying banner for an ever increased American presence, was always peripheral. It was much more about a Democratic administration not wanting to be driven out of Washington. Nothing reflected the change caused in American domestic politics by the Cold War more than the increasing escalation of the Vietnam War. The wartime America that had been against any colonial presence was frailer, that vision replaced by the new anti-Communism. Dean Acheson, now a Democratic foreign policy elder statesman, a traditionalist and a man of Europe anyway, and now badly wounded in the struggle over the fall of China, had become in this new era, on this derivative issue, one of the leading hard-liners. Some of his old colleagues from the Truman days were shocked by his hawkishness. George Elsey, one of Truman's top White House aides, would say years later, "The one thing I can't forgive about Dean is how he switched sides on Vietnam—he who should have known so much why it wouldn't work became all too much like the right wingers who had criticized him all those years." Acheson became ever more hostile to what he considered the soft-liners in the administration, men like Stevenson, Chester Bowles, and Kennan. It was almost as if he made a practice of taunting his old colleague Kennan in that period, as the political distance between them seemed to widen. When Kennan was named ambassador to Yugoslavia by Kennedy, Acheson told friends in an uncommonly cruel remark, "Tito is going to have a field day playing with poor George's marshmallow mind."

In addition, the Kennedy administration had done something extremely dangerous when it increased the larger mission to Vietnam; it corrupted the truth to suit its political needs for short-term political profit—in effect buying time to get through to the 1964 election. Because in the process it planted the flag ever more deeply, it needed ever greater results, for appearances were everything, and it needed them faster. But those results were not forthcoming, because the policy never worked. Never. Therefore, to compensate for the failure to produce the desired results in the field, the Kennedy administration soon created something quite extraordinary—a giant lying machine, one based in Washington, with its major affiliate in Saigon, a machine that not only systematically rejected all pessimistic reports from the field, and punished those who tried to tell the truth, but created its own illusion of victories and successes, victories and successes that never existed. It was a great exercise in self-deception: what the great King machine did in that period was delay the arrival of the truth in Washington by some three years, and of course it also began the process of diminishing the credibility of the government of the United States. What was lost in those three years was the ability to make wiser judgments about whether the commitment worked. In November 1963 John Kennedy was assassinated.

There would be no second term during which he could think about crossing the fail-safe point of sending combat troops. As his predecessors had left him with an immense burden in the existing policy on China, now he left his successor a policy that was an immense trap in Vietnam. Kennedy had always retained his mordant sense of humor. One day when he came out of an NSC meeting in which they had discussed some disastrous problem handed down to them by previous administrations, he said, "Oh well, think of what we'll pass on to the poor fellow who comes after me."

The poor fellow who followed, whom no one had ever thought of as a poor fellow, most especially those who had been run over by him in the past, or at the very least had their shoulders massaged and ended up voting on the side of an issue that they had not intended to vote on, was Lyndon Johnson, and the gift the Kennedy administration passed on was Vietnam, where by the fall of 1963 the Viet Cong had virtually won the war. The United States had spent three years making Vietnam seem more important in terms of geopolitics than the Washington authorities privately believed it was. By the time Johnson arrived, part of the rationale for the Americans doing what they were doing there was that they were already doing it, and not to continue to do it, in the cancerous way that these tilings feed on themselves, would weaken the United States elsewhere. Each cynical speech by some American official over the previous three years about how well the Americans were doing and how important Vietnam was became the rationale for the investment of more American bodies in a war that could not be won.

LYNDON JOHNSON WAS, by contrast, a very different president from Kennedy, and whereas Kennedy had (privately) made distinctions between hard Communism in Europe and Communist-nationalism in the Third World, Johnson made few comparable distinctions in the Communist world, and he left less room for serious doubt among the men surrounding him. The rest of the world was for him a much more distant place than it had been to Kennedy. If Johnson came out of the 1964 election with a landslide, he intended to use his accumulated power as quickly as he could on domestic issues, not, as Kennedy would have, on foreign ones. Foreign policy had never interested him greatly unless it impinged directly on domestic policy. As Philip Geyelin, one of the best of the Washington foreign policy analysts, wrote prophetically in 1965, as he measured the approaching collision of Johnson and the world, "The point is that Lyndon Johnson never was really interested [in the world] except as a practical need to be arose."

Lyndon Johnson knew nothing of the subtle strength of this small but fierce country, still fourth-rate to him, how it had managed to hold off mighty China in the past and defeat mighty France so recently. Yet in Vietnam history was fate. The men and women on the other side were the same people who had driven the French out, the heroes of the revolution, a revolution the United States chose not to see as a revolution; comparably, most of the top people in the South Vietnamese Army, fighting as it were on the pro-Western side, had also fought alongside the French during a revolutionary war. The other side's leaders were skilled, brave, and had their form of political-military tactics, very similar to those of Mao and his compatriots, down pat. No one who had fought them would ever underestimate either their ability or their patience—only powerful men in Washington who had no experience in this new⁷ kind of war would mock them for their lack of traditional battlefield organization. In the early war games that the top Americans had played back in Washington—a group on one side playing for Hanoi, their rivals playing for America, each making countermoves against the other—it always turned out that Hanoi had more options than the United States did, and could keep coming without paying an exorbitant price. In time they stopped playing the war games because they always ended so badly.

In 1964, as Johnson edged closer to the final decision on the war, there were three factors that tended to make him hawkish. The first was the nature of the man himself, his own image of himself, the need to stand tall, not to back off when he was challenged, and to personalize all confrontations and to see them as a test of manhood. Pierre Salinger's job, Johnson told the principal Kennedy press officer when he first became president, was to sell Johnson as a big Texan who was both tall and tough in the saddle. Of a rebel leader in the Dominican Republic Johnson had told McGeorge Bundy, "Tell that son of a bitch that unlike the young man who came before me I am not afraid to use what's on my hip."

The second factor was an innate, almost unconscious American racism, the kind that had bedeviled so many officers in the field at the beginning of the Korean War, the notion that because Asians were smaller and from a lesser part of the world with lesser industrial and technological accomplishments, they were a lesser people and could not stand up to American technology^- and American troops. Certainly miscalculations of that kind had been costly in Korea, at the very beginning of the war, when everyone had underestimated the ability of the North Korean troops, and even more later on, when MacArthur had miscalculated what the Chinese would do and how well they would fight. Vietnam, when Johnson spoke about it at NSC meetings, was often "a raggedy ass little fourth rate country." On occasion, like Ned Almond, he used the word "laundrymen" to describe the combatants.

Sometimes too, as he came close to the final decision on whether to send combat troops to Vietnam, Johnson's racism showed in the way he spoke of the Vietnamese as being like Mexicans, the kind of lesser people you had to show some strength to before they got the message and gave you the respect you deserved. The Vietnamese, he would say, were not going to push Lyndon Johnson around, because he knew something about people like this, because back home he had dealt with people just like them, the Mexicans. Now, Mexicans were all right if you let them know who was boss, but "if you didn't watch they'll come right into your yard and take it over if you let them. And the next day they'll be right there on your porch, barefoot and weighing one hundred and thirty pounds, and they'll take that too. But if you say to 'em right at the start, 'Hold on, just wait a minute,' they'll know they're dealing with someone who'll stand up. And after that you can get along fine."

And finally, and probably most important of all, there was the politics of it, because he was always a political man. That was what mattered most, and this time he got the politics wrong—he went to the politics of the past, not the future as it might have been if he had kept us out. Beneficiary of a landslide victory over a seemingly much harder line candidate, Barry Goldwater (in part because he had said he would not send American boys to do what Asian boys should do for themselves), Johnson misread the politics of his own victory. His sense of the war's politics and the price of losing Saigon led him back to the fall of China and to the ferocious political forces that had been unleashed domestically. Johnson was immensely sensitive to those forces, because they had been unusually important in the two places he knew best: Washington, where he had seen senators who opposed Joe McCarthy destroyed, and Texas, where the local McCarthyism had been unusually virulent and very well financed by oil interests. It was in Texas, where, as Johnson made the mutation from liberal New Deal congressman to U.S. senator, he had gradually become politically closer and quite dependent upon some of the same powerful right-wing figures, the men of oil who had backed McCarthy.

China weighed heavily on him as he made his ultimate Vietnam decisions. He talked about it all the time. In private he would often go on about how China had destroyed the Democratic Party back in the early 1950s, and how the country might be engulfed in a resurgence of McCarthyism if Vietnam went under. Truman and Acheson had lost China, he would say, and it was like a mantra, and when they lost China they lost the Congress, because the Republicans in the Congress had finally found their issue. When he was alone in private moments with close friends and assistants like Bill Movers and George Reedy, it would all pour out, his fear of losing what he prized most, the Great Society, which would be his signature accomplishment as president, losing it because he had been weak on Vietnam.

He had been there the last time it happened, he would say. Hell, he would add, Truman and Acheson had even been accused of appeasement, could you believe that? "You boys are young," he told Movers and some of the other young men, "and you don't understand the connection of the Congress to Asia. They won't give me the Great Society and Civil Rights if Ho is running through the streets of Saigon." The Congress, he said, did not care about that kind of legislation. "They'll push Vietnam up my ass all the time. Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam. Right up my ass."

He was, Movers thought, far more than Kennedy, caught in the recent past. He did not see the country as changing, especially as Kennedy had in the final few weeks of his life, which gave Kennedy a sense that peace might now be an issue. Oddly enough Johnson did not think the American people wanted the war, but he did not know how to get around the political system in Washington, which he thought did. He did not see the possibility that easing tensions in the Cold War at that moment might have new political benefits, or that the country might be changing, and a new generation, less a prisoner of the worst of the Cold War tensions, emerging.

What he did not see and could not see, in no small part because in the end there was a large part of him that was a bully, was that on the eve of battle with the forces of North Vietnam in 1965, America's military and political strengths were on the surface, in some ways self-evidently awesome, while its weaknesses for a war like this were hidden awav. Those weaknesses were basic; America's inability to adjust to a distant war that was more political than military, its innate impatience, and the inability of its troops to become Vietnamese were far greater than any policy maker realized. Comparably the Vietnamese weaknesses were on the surface, and were self-evidently considerable— their lack of a great deal of modern military hardware—but their strengths were formidable, just beneath the surface. Those strengths were in their own way for this kind of war far greater than America's, because in the end it was their country.

SERGEANT PAUL MCGEE got out of the Army in June 1952, a little more than a year after he had held off the Chinese at McGee Hill on the south side of Chipyongni. McGee had wanted to stay in, because he liked the Army, and felt that he was a good and perhaps even a skillful soldier, but he was forced to take a hardship discharge to help out his family back in North Carolina. His father had started a small machine shop where he repaired parts for the machines used in the cotton mills, but then his father's health had slipped badly, and Paul was needed at home. When he had fought in Korea he had never had any doubts that he was doing the right thing. He had volunteered for it, and even during the worst of the battle of Chipyongni he did not doubt the decisions that had brought him there. The ensuing half century did not change his mind. It had not been a popular war, he thought, and most of the country seemed to have forgotten about it long ago. But it mattered to him and some of his friends who had also fought there, and he thought that they had done the right thing, and it had been worth it for all the hardship and the loss of life. He thought the fact that the Communists had not tried anything like Korea again showed that America had been right in fighting there. He had missed being in the Army when he came back to Belmont, and on occasion in those years after Korea, the Army seemed to miss him; sometimes it sent recruiters down to see how he was getting along, and to see if he had any second thoughts about coming back in. When they were trying to start the Special Forces at nearby Fort Bragg in the late 1950s, someone had looked at his records and decided he would make an ideal Green Beret, and they had put a good deal of pressure on him, but his family obligations outweighed his personal feelings that it was exactly the right kind of job for him. If he had gone back in he might have gotten a third war, he thought, the one in Vietnam, and he wondered if he would have made it back from Vietnam.

He did not know anyone who had gone to Korea who felt differently about that war. He was on occasion filled with sadness when he thought of the men he had known there who had not made it back. Sergeant Bill Kluttz, his buddy from that battle, had died recently, and they had stayed close to the end. McGee did not go to many of the veterans reunions anymore because the men were all getting older and fewer, and fewer of them were able to attend, and it made him sadder when he showed up and the ranks had thinned. He was still in touch with Cletis Inmon, who had been his runner up on McGee Hill, and they talked about once a month. They were able to communicate in those phone calls without actually saying things—he knew what Inmon was thinking when they were on the phone together, without many words passing between them—they had been there, had shared those dangers, and that set them apart from almost everyone else for the rest of their lives. They did not need words to bind them together; their deeds were the requisite bond. All in all, he thought, he was glad he had gone and fought there. It was a job to do, nothing more, nothing less, and when you thought about it, there had not been a lot of choice.

Author's Note In A WAY, the roots of this book go back to a series of long conversations I had in 1963 with Lieutenant Colonel Fred Ladd. He was the senior adviser to the ARVN (or South Vietnamese) Ninth Division, based in Bac Lieu, in the middle of the Mekong Delta, and was one of my favorite officers. We stayed friends until his untimely death in 1987 at the age of 67. Fred Ladd was a general's son, a West Point graduate, a thoughtful, brave man of great honor. Once when his Vietnamese counterpart, the division commander, had given a very rosy-eyed portrait of how well the division was doing to a group of senior American officers, Fred had taken the American commander in Vietnam, General Paul Harkins, aside to tell him that things were not going nearly that well. For that bit of honesty he was sharply rebuked by Harkins for casting aspersions on a fine Vietnamese officer's words. In a way, Vietnam became a great roadblock in Fred's career, and he could never reconcile himself to reporting optimistically about a war that was being lost.

Vietnam was, of course, the obsessive subject matter at hand, but as we got to know each other we talked more and more about the Korean War, where he had also served, with gathering interest on my part. It was only thirteen years since the Chinese had entered that war, and Fred spoke often of the tragic quality of a war, almost over, that had suddenly become infinitely larger and more violent as they came across the Yalu and caught most of the American units by surprise. He had been a general's aide at the time, ironically to Major General Ned Almond, who is a prominent figure in this book. He spoke cautiously about Almond in those sessions, a discretion that was a compromise, I suspect, between high personal loyalty and considerable professional reservations. What I do remember from our talks was the terrible ordeal of the troops, some of the men only a year or two older than I was (I was sixteen when the Korean War started), caught in that freezing cold by this massive attack, surely the largest ambush in American military history. During those sessions in Bac Lieu and when Fred stayed with me at my house in Saigon, we went over the subject of those days again and again. What I did not realize at the time was that he was the teacher and I was the student, and the subject was not just Vietnam; it now included Korea as well.

The images of that moment, when the Chinese struck, stayed with me. As when I had returned from Vietnam and I had needed to find out what had happened there and why, and thereupon had written The Best and the Brightest, I remained haunted by the images I had created in my own mind of those weeks in November and December 1950, and I was determined to write about it one day. Now, forty-four years after I first heard Fred Ladd's stories, here is the book.

A book like this does not have a simple, preordained linear life. A writer begins with a certainty that the subject is important, but the book has an orbital drive of its own—it takes you on its own journey, and you learn along the way. It became not just the story of the Chinese entering the war and what happened in those critical weeks. On the way there was a great deal of political history to be learned, all of which formed the background on both sides. And there were other battles to be studied—people kept telling me about the brutal fighting in the early Pusan Perimeter days, and so I had to learn about that. And then one day someone mentioned the Battle of Chipyongni to me—the battle where the American commanders first learned how to fight the Chinese.

When I began The Best and the Brightest in 1969 it was a much easier book for me. Vietnam had been a central, dominating part of my life for seven years by that time. Thus I knew to an uncommon degree the overall map of it, the players, and the essential chronology^-. That was not true for me with Korea. So I spent much of the first two years not merely reading the existing bibliography and interviewing people but getting a feel for what had happened. I had very good teachers—most of them combat infantrymen who had survived it all. I am grateful for the kindnesses and courtesies extended to me by so many men and so many families in the homes I visited. To those whom I visited and interviewed, but whose stories did not make the book, I offer my regrets but my thanks, because all the interviews helped shape my sense of the war. I found many of the senior officials in the Korean Veterans' groups, especially those of the Second Infantry Division, to be exceptionally helpful in guiding me toward veterans of those battles in which I was especially interested, or which they felt I had to master.

One of the great pleasures of what I do comes from the constant sense of surprise of the reporting—how many people turn out during the interview's to give more than you expected and thus enhance the entire experience. That forms something I particularly prize in what has been a fifty-two-year journalistic career: a respect for the nobility of ordinary people.

One story will suffice along this line. When I was working on the book a number of people had suggested that I interview a man named Paul McGee who lived on the outskirts of Charlotte, North Carolina. I called him. The first call, the introductory one, was not a great success. He did not seem very enthusiastic about seeing me. But we made a date to get together on a Saturday, which was to be my getaway day after a week on the road. That had been a particularly hard week—five interviews in five days in five different North Carolina towns. On the morning of my scheduled visit with McGee it snowed heavily in Charlotte—a truly miserable day. My plane back to New York was scheduled for 3 P.M. I was staving at an airport motel. The temptation to bag the McGee interview and take an earlier flight was overwhelming; then I thought again, why not see him? I had come all this way and this was what I get paid to do. So I went out and found his home and for four hours it all poured out, what had happened in those three days at Chipyongni when he was a young platoon leader. It was if he had been waiting for me to come by for fifty-five years, and he remembered everything as if it had been yesterday. He was modest, thoughtful, and had total recall. The story of how his platoon had held out for so long came out in exceptional detail, along with the names and phone numbers of a few men who had made it out with him and who could confirm all the details. It was a thrilling morning for me, nothing less than a reminder of why I do what I do.

Acknowledgments BECAUSE OF THE nature of this book, events that took place more than fifty years ago, my interviewing was different this time than for most of my books: fewer total interview's, but a great deal more time spent trying to decide which battles mattered and only then finding the varying surviving veterans. That meant I spent more time trying to figure out which veterans to interview; and when I did find what I thought were the right people, going back repeatedly to them. Here is the list of interviewees (I am not using military rank because in many cases the rank kept changing): George Allen, Jack Baird, Lucius Battle, Lee Beahler, Bin Yu, Martin Blumenson, Ben Boyd, Alan Brinkley, Josiah Bunting III, John Carley, Herschel Chapman, Chen Jian, Joe Christopher, Joe Clemons, J. D. Coleman, John Cook, Bruce Cumings, Bob Curtis, Rusty Davidson, James Ditton, Erwin Ehler, John S. D. Eisenhower, George Elsey, Hank Emerson, Larry Farnum, Maurice Fenderson, Leonard Ferrell, Al Fern, Thomas Fergusson, Bill Fiedler, Richard Fockler, Barbara Thompson Foltz, Dorothy Bartholdi Frank, Lynn Freeman, Joe Fromm, Les Gelb, Alex Gibney, Frank Gibney, Andy Goodpaster, Joe Goulden, Steve Gray, Lu Gregg, Dick Gruenther, David Hackworth, Alexander Haig, Dr. Robert Hall, Ken Hamburger, Butch Hammel, John Hart, Jesse Haskins, Charles Hayward, Charley Heath, Virginia Heath, Ken Hechler, Wilson Heefner, Jim Hinton, Carolyn Hockley, Ralph Hockley, Cletis Inmon, Raymond Jennings, George Johnson, Alan Jones, Arthur Junot, Robert Kies, Walter Killilae, Bob Kingston, Bill Latham, Jim Lawrence, John Lewis, James Lilley, Malcolm MacDonald, Sam Mace, Charley Main, Al Makkay, Joe Marez, Brad Martin, John Martin, Filmore McAbee, Bill McCaffrey, David McCullough, Terry McDaniel, Paul McGee, Glenn McGuyer, Anne Sewell Freeman McLeod, Roy McLeod, Tom Mellen, Herbert Miller, Allan Millett, Jack Murphy, Bob Myers, Bob Nehrling, Clemmons Nelson, Paul O'Dowd, Phil Peterson, Gino Piazza, Sherman Pratt, Hewlett Rainier, Dick Raybould, Andrew Reyna, Berry Rhoden, Bill Richardson, Bruce Ritter, Arden Rowley, Ed Rowny, George Russell, Walter Russell, Perry Sager, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Bob Shaffer, Edwin Simmons, Jack Singlaub, Bill Steinberg, Joe Stryker, Carleton Swift, Gene Takahashi, Billie Tinkle, Bill Train, Layton (Joe) Tyner, Lester Urban, Sam Walker, Kathryn Weathersby, Bill West, Vaughn West, Allen Whiting, Laron Wilson, Frank Wisner, Jr., Harris Wofford, Hawk Wood, John Yates, and Alarich Zacherle.

In addition, there are a number of interviews I did for earlier books, which connect directly in this one, including the aforementioned long talks with Fred Ladd, and interviews and talks with Homer Bigart, the legendary Herald Tribune and New York Times reporter, a close friend and my predecessor in Vietnam, Walton Butterworth, Averell Harriman, Townsend Hoopes, Murray Kempton (another close friend), Bill Movers, George Reedy, James Reston (my original sponsor at the New York Times), Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., John Carter Vincent, and Theodore White, another good friend. In addition, when I wrote 77ie Best and the Brightest, I became friendly with General Matthew Ridgway. He quite liked the book (in no small part because he was one of its rare heroes) and we stayed in touch. Late in his life, around, I think, 1988, we had a series of telephone calls, and during one of them he began talking about doing another book about the Korean War. He was clearly dissatisfied with parts of his earlier book, perhaps goaded by Dean Acheson, who had in a somewhat friendly way in a letter suggested that Ridgway had pulled his punches in describing his view of MacArthur's behavior in those days. I think he was also stung by MacArthur's own subsequent criticism of Ridgway's conduct of the war. At this point his voice changed somewhat, and he became edgier and sharper of tone. He also started free-associating over the phone about the reasons he believed MacArthur had gone so far north, and in particular, why he had split the command—to diminish, Ridgway said, the influence and independence of General Walker and particularly the Joint Chiefs, to make Walker compete with Almond, who was completely under MacArthur's control. It was really aimed at the Joint Chiefs, he said; and as his forces moved north it shifted ultimate power and control of the mission to Tokyo from Washington and Korea itself. He was also very critical—almost bitter in tone, I thought—about how completely removed the Tokyo command was from the reality of the battlefield, and the failure of Tokyo to understand what it was subjecting American soldiers to. As he continued to talk I took rough if imperfect notes and later consolidated them. There was the suggestion in that conversation that perhaps he would do another book and might want to do it with me. When a few weeks later I called back to see where his thinking was, he had pulled back from the idea of a book. He was, he said, in his early nineties (he was born in 1895), and it was more work than he wanted. But some of that conversation is reflected in this book.

I AM INDEBTED to a great many people for their help with this book, starting with the men of the Second Infantry Division, especially the officers of their Korean War alumni association, and particularly Chuck Hayward, Charley Heath, and Ralph Hockley. From the First Cav, Joe Christopher was exceptionally helpful in connecting me with men who fought and survived Unsan. Edwin Simmons went out of his way to assist me with access to the First Marines and helping me find men like Jim Lawrence, who were unusually knowledgeable about O. P. Smith.

I want to thank others who helped me: Tom Engelhart, who edited the book, which given its complexity was never an easy process; Ben Skinner, a talented young writer in his own right, who did additional research for me on the American decision to cross the thirty-eighth parallel and head north; and my neighbor Linda Drogin, who volunteered on this book as in the past to do some vital checking for me. I would also like to thank my friend Joe Goulden, who not only wrote one of the best and most penetrating books on the Korean War but was a source of constant assistance and encouragement to me. I want to mention the scholars of the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, and in particular Kathryn Weathersby, for their help in this book—the Center is a remarkable source of new information on areas long closed off to Westerners.

I was welcomed and treated with uncommon kindness at a number of libraries. From the U.S. Army Military History Institute at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Dr. Richard Sommers, chief of patron services, as well as Michael Monahan, Richard Baker, Randy Hackenburg, and Pamela Cheney; from the Marines, known properly as the History Division of the Marine Corps University, Dr. Fred Allison, Danny Crawford, and Richard Camp; at the Douglas MacArthur Archives in Norfolk, Virginia, James Zobel was exceptionally helpful; at the Harry Truman Library, Michael Devine, the director, Liz Safly, Amy Williams, and Randy Sowell; at the Lyndon Johnson Library, Betty Sue Flowers; from the Franklin Roosevelt Library, Alycia Vivona, Robert Clark, the supervisory archivist, Karen Anson, Matt Hanson, Virginia Lewick, and Mark Renovitch; and from the New York Public Library, Wayne Furman, David Smith, and my friend Jean Strouse. At the Council on Foreign Relations, Lee Gusts was generous and helpful. As ever, the entire staff of the New York Society Library was helpful and helped create what is an oasis for me and other writers in the city.

At Hyperion Bob Miller and Will Schwalbe had faith in this book and its value from the start and stayed with me, even though, like most books, it came in somewhat behind schedule. Others at Hyperion for whose support I am grateful are Ellen Archer, Jane Comins, Claire McKean, Fritz Metsch, Emily Gould, Brendan Duffy, Beth Gebhard, Katie Wainwright, Charlie Davidson, Vincent Stanley, Rick Willett, Chisomo Kalinga, Sarah Rucker, Maha Khalil, and Jill Sansone, and from HarperCollins, my old friend of more than thirty years, Jane Becker Friedman. I am grateful for the help of my friends and lawyer-agents, Marty Garbus and Bob Solomon. My friend Carolyn Parqueth once again transcribed most of the interview's. Charles Roos is my computer expert and he saved me from crisis after crisis—on those terrible days when my manuscript seemed to have departed my computer.

No one who sets off to do a book like this is ever the first; someone has always been there before, and we in this business are always aware of those who went before us and our debt to them, especially when the events took place more than fifty^- years ago. So it should be noted that among the books listed in the Bibliography, certain books were truly essential, most notably Clay Blair's encyclopedic The Forgotten War, the most important primer for anyone dealing with Korea; William Manchester's American Caesar; the books of Roy Appleman; S. L. A. Marshall's The River and the Gauntlet; Joe Goulden's Korea; Max Hastings' The Korean War; and Martin Russ's Breakout. Uncertain Partners, the book by John Lewis, Sergei Goncharov, and Xue Litai about the relationship between Stalin, Mao, and Kim, is a groundbreaking work, its value greatly enhanced by my own long conversation with Professor Lewis. My friend Les Gelb, until recently the head of the Council on Foreign Relations, was as ever a wise consultant and a thoughtful ally.

My two friends Lieutenant General Hal Moore (who commanded a company in Korea) and Joe Galloway, who together wrote what I consider the best book on combat in Vietnam, We Were Soldiers Once...and Young, were not only constantly supportive but gave me valuable guidance. In addition my friend Scott Movers, who has been uncommonly helpful in my work for more than a decade, kept an eye on me and helped me out when I was struggling with the manuscript. I want to acknowledge my immense admiration for the esteemed photographer David Douglas Duncan, who came out of Chosin with the First Marines and is revered by them for that alone. With his remarkable photographs he has been able to remind us of what all those men went through in those days; I am proud that he was willing to let me use one of his photographs for the jacket of the book—it's a badge of honor.

Afterword by RUSSELL BAKER David 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 '4g, 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.