The Korean War: A History
A review
If one were to read just one book about the fierce and very destructive war that took place on the Korean peninsula 1950-1953, this rather short (268 pages counting the endnotes) 2010 effort by Bruce Cumings, the retired chairman of the department of history at the University of Chicago, would not be the one that I would recommend. To the contrary, it would be just about the last book I would recommend if the reader were to go into the subject knowing very little. What it would be especially good for, though, would be reinforcing the leftist prejudices that the typical American college student takes away from his or her experience in higher education these days, particularly if they have attended one of the elite institutions.
If you already know quite a bit about Korea and the Korean War, and you’ve never heard it before from the perspective of the other side, not so much the Chinese or Soviet but the Communist North Korean side, the book might make worthwhile reading. I’m probably among the few Americans who knew about the bloody 1948-1949 Jeju uprising against the Syngman Rhee government that had been more or less imposed upon the Koreans in the South by the Americans, not to mention the better-known 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Jeolla Province against Chun Doo-hwan’s feckless authoritarian government. I knew, also, that that southwest corner of Korea had long been a hotbed of peasant rebellion and a communist breeding ground, but I had to learn from Cumings about the 1948 Yeosu-Suncheon rebellion in that same area.
All such tales of leftist agitation and revolt and savage repression at the hands of the authorities are right in Cumings’ sweet spot. His first experience with Korea and mine came at the same time, 1967-1968, when he was in Seoul teaching English for the Peace Corps and I was an ROTC-commissioned Army lieutenant stationed not far away at a U.S. Army post on the outskirts of Incheon, a quick and cheap train ride from Seoul. I met there once with a group of Peace Corps folks, and Cumings might well have been one of them. Joining the Peace Corps was one way, at the time, to avoid being drafted and possibly sent to fight in Vietnam. That’s one of the main reasons to this day why people from the Peace Corps generally fit the left-wing stereotype. Cumings, certainly, seems never to have grown out of it. And why should he? Pursuing a career in American academia, he has found a very good fit for his clear bias. It speaks volumes that the leftist William Leuchtenburg and the far-left Eric Foner are the only two people who have been the president of all three of the major national organizations of historians, the American Historical Association, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians.
Solid Man of the Establishment Left
As an establishment historian, Cumings has been throughout his career right in the heart of what I have dubbed the NOMA, the national opinion-molding apparatus. The key members of that apparatus are the GAME, government, academia, media, and entertainment. Coincidentally, my next encounter with a Peace Corps person, also of a well-known leftist bent, was during the first summer session of economics graduate school at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1968. Actually, he had yet to experience the Peace Corps at that time. He was on his way out of grad school after just one year, disillusioned with the theoretical nature of graduate economics and perhaps out of his depth intellectually, to serve the Peace Corps in Swaziland. His career would eventually touch prominently on all parts of the GAME. We’re talking about Chris Matthews, of MSNBC’S “Hardball with Chris Matthews” fame. He was the first economics grad student I met there, at a house party that my two housemates and I hosted in our apartment. I was taking only a course in Chinese history that first session because of the interest stimulated by my year in Korea. Matthews and I spent virtually the entire time at the party talking to one another, because I was interested in what I was getting into, and he was interested in my experience.
In his note on sources for his 2018 On Desperate Ground: The Marines at the Reservoir, the Korean War’s Greatest Battle, the popular writer Hampton Sides lumps Cumings’ book with I.F. Stone’s 1969 book, The Hidden History of the Korean War as “revisionist” histories of the war. That says quite a lot, because Stone hardly hid his pro-Communist orientation and his book was published by the fringe left-wing Monthly Review Press, while Cumings’ book, by contrast, was published by Random House, the largest book-publishing company in the world.
With the Random House blessing and its publicity machine behind it, the Cumings book is positioned to be almost as influential concerning American attitudes toward the Korean War as another book was in 1947 concerning the ongoing civil war in the world’s most populous country. That was the The Unfinished Revolution in China, a book by the Polish-born U.S. resident but longtime resident of China, Israel Epstein. It was completely on the side of Mao Zedong’s Communists. The New York Times gave the book a glowing review. Here is the review’s conclusion:
The incubators of this new generation were the liberated and guerrilla areas behind the Japanese lines, where men organized to defend their own homes and families. Out of that there has grown a movement of solid millions in vast blocks of territory. I doubt if the landlords will ever get the bridle on those peasants again; and it also looks as though they will reject the bite of doctrinaire Marxism. It all makes exciting reading.
Thus America’s “newspaper of record” made the eventual victory by the Reds sound not just understandable and inevitable, but even palatable to the American public, something to be welcomed, even celebrated. The chosen writer of that review was a very established member of the first three letters of the GAME at the time, Owen Lattimore.
Epstein defected to Communist China in 1951 where he became editor-in-chief of the English-language Communist Party propaganda organ China Reconstructs, later called China Today. He remained in that position until his retirement at age 70 in 1985, with a five-year interruption during the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1970s, when he was imprisoned on charges of plotting against Zhou Enlai. And we have this from Wikipedia: “In 1951 Communist defector Elizabeth Bentley testified to the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, ‘Israel Epstein had been a member of the Russian secret police for many years in China.’”
Lattimore, for his part, would write a column on July 17, 1949, in the leftist New York newspaper, The Daily Compass, entitled “Korea – Another China” that concludes like this:
Korea is another chapter in the same unhappy story. I have yet to meet an American who knows all the facts and believes that Syngman Rhee is either a popular or a competent President of South Korea. In spite of high-pressure elections, his Legislature is more badly split against him than China’s was against Chiang Kai-shek.
The thing to do, therefore, is to let South Korea fall—but not to let it look as though we pushed it. Hence the recommendation of a parting grant of $150,000,000.
Concerning Lattimore’s recommendation, Senator Joseph McCarthy wrote on pp. 127-128 of his 1952 book, The Fight for America:
In this connection, it should be noted that nearly a year before the Korean War started, Congress voted $10,300,000 military aid for South Korea. This was not done upon the recommendation of the State Department. The Congress was entitled to believe that this $10,300,000 was being spent rapidly for airplanes, tanks and guns for South Korea. However, whenever a member of Congress asked the State and Defense Departments how the $10,300,000 was being spent, the answer was, “We cannot tell you for security reasons.”
After the war in Korea began, Senator [William] Knowland [R. CA] put into the Congressional Record (August 16, 1950, p. 12600)the facts which showed that the State Department had succeeded in keeping the expenditures for the arming of South Korea down to $200, which was spent for loading some wire aboard a West Coast ship which never reached Korea.
Thus did the State Department plan to “let South Korea fall” into the Communist hands without letting the Congress or the American people know that “we pushed it.”
Cumings tells us on page 89 that the very next month after Lattimore wrote his article the very-much-connected man made precisely the recommendation to the U.S. State Department that he had made in the obscure leftist New York newspaper. Cumings spins the episode by making it look like something of a victory for Lattimore because he volunteered that revelation to the press, arguing that that recommendation of his was the sole reason for the allegations of Senator McCarthy that he was a Soviet agent.
As one might expect, the staunch anti-Communist McCarthy gets the standard liberal-establishment treatment from Cumings. In his index, there is no entry for his name, only for the “McCarthyism” slur. By contrast, Cumings treats Lattimore as something of a hero, a wise visionary, representative of a number of foreign policy “experts” who suffered at the hands of this dangerous demagogue. Interestingly, in a generally favorable article September 2000 article about Lattimore in Johns Hopkins Magazine, the university where he taught, Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson revealed that this persistently popular “McCarthyism,”
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