{"id":1066,"date":"2011-07-21T19:14:02","date_gmt":"2011-07-22T01:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1066"},"modified":"2015-05-31T14:36:52","modified_gmt":"2015-05-31T20:36:52","slug":"the-coldest-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/?p=1066","title":{"rendered":"The Coldest Winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

by David Halberstam, 2007, Hyperion, New York<\/p>\n

Excellent book, although a bit tedious at times.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t know much about the Korean War.\u00c2\u00a0 A friend of ours read this book and thought it was worthwhile so my wife gave it to me for Christmas.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, it is July now and I finally got through it!<\/p>\n

Halberstam gives a scathing account of Douglas MacArthur and his actions (and non-actions) in Korea (I had read a book previously that gave the same opinion of MacArthur in the Philippines).\u00c2\u00a0 I now rate MacArthur about zero: minus 10 for his defense of the Philippines, plus 10 for his\u00c2\u00a0island hopping strategy in the Pacific leading up to the fall of\u00c2\u00a0Japan, minus\u00c2\u00a010 for his actions in Korea, plus\u00c2\u00a010 for the Inchon landing (he was lucky), and plus\u00c2\u00a010 for his administration of\u00c2\u00a0Japan post-war, and minus 10 for his insubordination\u00c2\u00a0to the President.\u00c2\u00a0 When he did things well, he did them very well; when he did things badly, they led to disasters.<\/p>\n

The other thing I took away from the book was how nasty the right-wing Republicans were in those days, putting their ideology and world view above the good of the country.\u00c2\u00a0 (I guess not much has changed as we approach\u00c2\u00a0our debt-ceiling crisis in August of 2011, some sixty years later.)\u00c2\u00a0 I am also amazed at how we managed to get ourselves into the mess in Vietnam after we should have learned from the lessons of Korea.\u00c2\u00a0 This book gave me the urge to read Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest<\/em> which tells that story.<\/p>\n

At times I felt that Halberstam beat a good horse to death with the amount of detail he used to back up his argument and it, at times, felt repetitive.\u00c2\u00a0 On the other hand, it was easy to read and follow.\u00c2\u00a0 It is sad that the author was killed in an automobile accident only a few weeks after he finished this, his last book.\u00c2\u00a0\"4<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by David Halberstam, 2007, Hyperion, New York Excellent book, although a bit tedious at times.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t know much about the Korean War.\u00c2\u00a0 A friend of ours read this book and thought it was worthwhile so my wife gave it …<\/span> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,14],"tags":[20,38],"class_list":["post-1066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-four-star","tag-history","tag-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1066"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1798,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1066\/revisions\/1798"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wilsonld.com\/weblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}