Product Description

David Halberstam's magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book for the Vietnam War. More than three decades later, Halberstam used his unrivalled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another dark corner in our history: the Korean War. The Coldest Winter is a successor to The Best and the Brightest, even though in historical terms it precedes it.Halberstam considered The Coldest Winter the best book he ever wrote, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy.Up until now, the Korean War has been the black hole of modern American history.The Coldest Winter changes that. Halberstam gives us a masterful narrative of the political decisions and miscalculations on both sides. He charts the disastrous path that led to the massive entry of Chinese forces near the Yalu, and that caught Douglas MacArthur and his soldiers by surprise. He provides astonishingly vivid and nuanced portraits of all the major figures -- Eisenhower, Truman, Acheson, Kim, and Mao, and Generals MacArthur, Almond, and Ridgway. At the same time, Halberstam provides us with his trademark highly evocative narrative journalism, chronicling the crucial battles with reportage of the highest order.At the heart of the book are the individual stories of the soldiers on the front lines who were left to deal with the consequences of the dangerous misjudgments and competing agendas of powerful men. We meet them, follow them, and see some of the most dreadful battles in history through their eyes. As ever, Halberstam was concerned with the extraordinary courage and resolve of people asked to bear an extraordinary burden.The Coldest Winter is contemporary history in its most literary and luminescent form, and provides crucial perspective on the Vietnam War and the events of today. It was a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to write. It stands as a lasting testament to one of the greatest journalists and historians of our time, and to the fighting men whose heroism it chronicles.Includes an Afterword by Russell BakerTributes to David HalberstamDavid Halberstam died at the age of 73 in a car accident in California on April 23, 2007, just after completing The Coldest Winter. Legendary for his work ethic, his kindness to young writers, and his unbending moral spine, Halberstam had friends and admirers throughout journalism, many of whom spoke at his memorial service and at readings across the country for the release of The Coldest Winter. We have included testimonials given at his memorial service by two writers who made their reputations at the same newspaper where he won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War reporting, The New York Times: Anna Quindlen ...David occupied a lot of space on the planet. Perhaps he felt the price he must pay for that big voice, that big reach, that big reputation, was that his generosity had to be just as large. Most of us, when we take to the road and meet admiring strangers, vow afterward to answer the note pressed into our hands or to pass along the speech we promised to the person whose daughter couldn't be there to hear it. But with the best will in the world we arrive home to deadlines, bills, kids, friends, all the demands of a busy life. We mean to be our best selves, but often we forget. David did it. He always did it. The note, the call, the book, the advice. When I mentioned this once he dug his hands deep intothe pockets of his grey flannels, set his mouth at the corners, looked down and rumbled, "Well, but it's so easy." That's nonsense. It's not easy. But it is important, and why he has been remembered with enormous affection by ordinary readers all over this country, and why each of us who live some sort of public life would do well, with all due respect to Jesus, to ask ourselves about those small encounters: what would David do? ... Read her full tributeDexter Filkins .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4067 in Books
• Published on: 2007-09-25
• Released on: 2007-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 736 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Reviewed by James BradyAt the heart of David Halberstam's massive and powerful new history of the Korean War is a bloody, losing battle fought in November 1950 in the snow-covered mountains of North Korea by outnumbered American GIs and Marines against the Chinese Communist Army.Halberstam's villain is not North Korea's Kim Il Sung or China's Chairman Mao or even the Soviet Union's Josef Stalin, who pulled the strings. It's the legendary general Douglas MacArthur, the aging, arrogant, politically ambitious architect of what the author calls the single greatest American military miscalculation of the war, MacArthur's decision to go all the way to the Yalu [River] because he was sure the Chinese would not come in.Much of the story is familiar. What distinguishes this version by Halberstam (who died this year in a California auto crash) is his reportorial skill, honed in Vietnam in Pulitzer-winning dispatches to the New York Times. His pounding narrative, in which GIs and generals describe their coldest winter, whisks the reader along, even though we know the ending.Most Korean War scholars agree that MacArthur's sprint to the border of great China with a Siberian winter coming on resulted in a lethal nightmare. Though focused on that mountain battle, Halberstam's book covers the entire war, from the sudden dawn attack by Kim Il Sung's Soviet-backed North Koreans against the U.S.-trained South, on June 25, 1950, to its uneasy truce in 1953. It was a smallish war but a big Cold War story: Harry Truman, Stalin and Mao, Joe McCarthy and Eisenhower, George C. Marshall and Omar Bradley, among others, stride through it. A few quibbles: there were no B-17 bombers destroyed on Wake Island the day after Pearl Harbor, as Halberstam asserts, and Halberstam gives his minor characters too much attention.At first MacArthur did well, toughing out those early months when the first GIs sent in from cushy billets in occupied Japan were overwhelmed by Kim's rugged little peasant army. MacArthur's greatest gamble led to a marvelous turning point: the invasion at Inchon in September, when he outflanked the stunned Reds. After Inchon, the general headed north and his luck ran out. His sycophants, intelligence chief Willoughby and field commander Ned Almond, refused to believe battlefield evidence indicating the Chinese Communists had quietly infiltrated North Korea and were lying in wait. The Marines fought their way out as other units disintegrated. In the end, far too late, Truman sacked MacArthur.Alive with the voices of the men who fought, Halberstam's telling is a virtuoso work of history. (Sept.)James Brady, columnist at Parade and Forbes.com, is author of several books about Korea. His latest book is Why Marines Fight (St. Martin's, Nov.).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Stanley Weintraub

No "Mission Accomplished" banner has ever been flaunted about the Korean War. The conflict that David Halberstam calls a "black hole" in history (despite shelves of books about it) achieved its original objective. At great cost, military intervention reversed the communist thrust into South Korea, now a model of prosperity; North Korea remains an impoverished, Stalinist state. But in the 1950s, Americans did not perceive the Korean War as a success, and we have even more reason to view it with misgiving now, in light of our imbroglio in Iraq.

As Halberstam recounts with mounting indignation in The Coldest Winter, some of the worst decisions in Korea were based on skewed intelligence. To be sure, it was military officers who massaged the facts they reported to civilian leaders. In Vietnam and Iraq, the pattern reversed, with civilians cherry-picking the intelligence to manipulate the military and the public. But in Halberstam's view, the Korean War set a "most dangerous" precedent: "the American government had begun to make fateful decisions based on the most limited of truths and the most deeply flawed intelligence in order to do what it wanted to do for political reasons, whether it would work or not." Half a century later, we still have thousands of U.S. troops in Korea -- not a good omen for Iraq.

Halberstam was one of the great war journalists of our time. In April, five days after delivering final revisions to this book, he was killed in a car crash in Menlo Park, Calif. Among his 19 previous books is the iconic The Best and the Brightest (1972), probing how and why some of the most able Americans of their generation entangled the United States in an unwinnable war in Vietnam.

When communist North Korea invaded the South in June 1950, Halberstam was 16, too young to take much notice. He learned about the Korean quagmire from men in Vietnam who had endured the earlier misery. Vietnam dominated his life for seven years, after which he tackled other subjects, from sports to the automobile industry. It was only in the late 1990s that he returned to the Cold War's first hot war. Now, because of his untimely death, The Coldest Winter will stand with The Best and the Brightest as the big bookends of his career -- parallel accounts, 35 years apart, of wars characterized by a disconnect between reality and authority.

Some readers may find The Coldest Winter to be something of a quagmire itself. Halberstam acknowledges in an author's note that it does not have a "linear" structure. Rather, "it takes you on its own journey, and you learn along the way. It becomes not just the story of the Chinese entering the war and what happened in those critical weeks. On the way there is a great deal of political history to be learned, all of which forms the background on both sides. And there are other battles. People kept telling me about the brutal fighting in the earlier Pusan Perimeter days, and so I had to learn about that." In the process, we reach page 395 before the weather turns cold. By then, Douglas MacArthur, for five years unanswerable to anyone as occupation boss of Japan, was running the war by remote control -- never spending, as Halberstam acidly notes, "a night in the field in Korea." He was already 70, and his willfulness was unyielding, abetted by pseudo-intelligence subserviently packaged by staff toadies in Tokyo.

In a miscalculation of his opponent's character and a display of his own hubris, MacArthur claimed that Chairman Mao would be intimidated if the United States inserted an army by sea at Inchon, above Seoul. He believed it would be too late for the Red Chinese to intervene; the hapless North Korean aggressors would be cut off and crushed. Regardless of MacArthur's arrogant incaution, who in Washington, or even in Korea, could dispute his strategy after the Inchon landing's initial success? "MacArthur has thought it all through," the X Corps intelligence chief declared, "and it's not to their advantage to come in, so they won't come in."

Yet the very existence of X Corps was a problem. To evade Washington and allow him to run the war personally, MacArthur had set up X Corps as a parallel force to the Eighth Army, which was still struggling to push north toward Seoul. By splitting his troops (to Halberstam, "the unthinkable") to give his favorite courtier, Edward Almond, a combat command and eligibility for a third star, MacArthur stalled pursuit of the enemy for a month.

Halberstam vividly describes how, after Inchon that September, MacArthur visited the awed I Corps staff, to whom he was "walking history." Confidently, he boasted: "The war is over. The Chinese are not coming . . . The Third Division will be back in Fort Benning for Christmas dinner." Then he flew back to comfortable Tokyo. No one doubted him, a colonel recalled, because "it would have been questioning an announcement from God."

Yet the facts on the ground looked different. U.S. forces were divided into two widely separated fronts as an early and lethal winter set in. After concealing themselves in the snowy hills, the Chinese -- uncowed and opportunistic -- struck hard. While the dysfunctional Eighth Army retreated in chaos, Marines of the X Corps in the east, resourcefully led by Maj. Gen. Oliver Smith, withdrew from the icy Chosin Reservoir heights late in December to evacuate by sea. MacArthur's prematurely celebrated victory turned into what his troops ruefully called "die for a tie." Even that stalemate became possible only under the tough, tireless Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway once MacArthur, imperious and insubordinate to the end, was sacked by Harry Truman in April 1951.

Why had the ouster taken so long? Military necessity, Halberstam suggests, finally outweighed the domestic political consequences. As MacArthur continued to stretch his mandate and openly criticize a strategy intended to contain the war to Korea, the Pentagon worried that his megalomania could have horrific consequences now that Stalin had the Bomb. But the mystique of MacArthur, who had been cosseted timidly by Washington for a decade, paralyzed the process. When his lapses had helped lose the Philippines after Pearl Harbor, he was 9,000 miles away and untouchable. In the dark months when the nation needed a hero, Gen. George C. Marshall, the army chief of staff, overcame his scorn and drafted an unearned Medal of Honor citation for the self-styled hero of Bataan, where MacArthur had spent all of two hours. The gesture was fitting for someone Halberstam characterizes as believing "that the truth was whatever he said it was at that moment."

Domestic politics made MacArthur's overdue dismissal partisanly divisive. His favorite president, the elderly Herbert Hoover, hailed him, after his "Old Soldiers Never Die" valedictory to Congress, as "the reincarnation of St. Paul into the persona of a great General of the Army who had come out of the East." And veneration of MacArthur continued, in some quarters, for decades, although the congressional hearings upon which diehards insisted after his firing only further diminished him. Halberstam's narrative closes more than a year before a hard-won truce halted the fighting in Korea. But what his formidable indictment does end is the mythologizing of Douglas MacArthur.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Publicized as a bookend to The Best and the Brightest, The Coldest Winter is a fitting, if premature, conclusion to David Halberstam's illustrious career. (He died in a car accident last spring, shortly after completing the book.) Magisterial in scope, eminently readable, well researched, and even gripping at times, Coldest Winter is hailed as a book destined to become the subject's most popular history. Much of this success rests with the immediacy of Halberstam's storytelling, his gemlike portraits of the major players (particularly General MacArthur), and his close-up descriptions of the trenches. The Miami Herald accuses Halberstam of inappropriately lifting his framework from Best and Brightest to fit Coldest Winter; other reviewers note factual errors and an overly epic (and sometimes numbingly detailed) story. But in the end, Coldest Winter is not only a compelling history but a story that resounds loudly today.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Outstanding work.
This fine work on the Korean War sets the bar at a new level.

Simply Outstanding.

Not as good as I'd heard
I thought that this book would've earned 5 stars but I was disappointed. The research was outstanding, but little was done to help readers make their way through the text. Often times battles and territory were described without maps; other times, the maps seemed inadequate. The editor of this book should do better next time. Imagine your reader getting through the text for the first time....think, what might help him grasp this better? Also, there was no explanation of the difference between US troops and UN troops. Finally, photos would have enriched the text, but I would guess they were left out because of the bottom line.

A Good Solid Story of the Causes of the Korean war & Fall of MacArthur
While this is not a complete story about Americas Most Forgotten War- The Second Korean War. (We fought a brief Campaign in Korea during the Post Civil War Era of showing the Flag) It is however a brillantly written story of the fall of General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and one of our greatest military defeats of the Cold War. (Korea has a lot to teach us about the way the world works if we were to take heed of its lessons offered.)
While it has been previously & rightfully pointed out in the other reviews, some minor errors of details in this book. None the less the Author (who will be sorely missed by this reader) creates an excellent overview of the causes of the war & the tragic fall of a great but in no way perfect American Icon. Altogether this book is well worth the time and coin to get and read if one is interested in this period of American History.
As an added plus two forgotten but excellent - Generals Walker & Ridgeway are brought back into the light. Walker being the fellow who with an ill trained, equipped, supported and poorly led Army fought the Ruthless North Korean Army to a Standstill at the Pusan Perimeter.
Ridgeway who later on took over the 8th Army after the death of Walker in a jeep accident. Proceeded to make it into one of Americas Premier Fighting Armies and gave the Communist a severe whipping on the field. Ridgeway also later on helped delay Americas entry into Vietnam for almost 10 years.