4.0
The Coldest Winter
ByPublisher Description
"In a grand gesture of reclamation and remembrance, Mr. Halberstam has brought the war back home."---The New York Times
David Halberstam's magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book about the Vietnam conflict. More than three decades later, Halberstam used his unrivaled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another pivotal moment in our history: the Korean War. Halberstam considered The Coldest Winter his most accomplished work, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy.
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 River 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. 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, providing crucial perspective on every war America has been involved in since. It is a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to complete. 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.
David Halberstam's magisterial and thrilling The Best and the Brightest was the defining book about the Vietnam conflict. More than three decades later, Halberstam used his unrivaled research and formidable journalistic skills to shed light on another pivotal moment in our history: the Korean War. Halberstam considered The Coldest Winter his most accomplished work, the culmination of forty-five years of writing about America's postwar foreign policy.
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 River 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. 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, providing crucial perspective on every war America has been involved in since. It is a book that Halberstam first decided to write more than thirty years ago and that took him nearly ten years to complete. 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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Coldest Winter Reviews
4.0
“Lots of thoughts about this book. First, as always Halberstam is an amazing writer. He can set the table with his narrative descriptions and create tension in ways that make you sit on the edge of your seat. This book is in the grand tradition of the best war stories in that it conveys the story of the first 1/3 of the war (more on that later) with gripping tension, narrative cohesion, and information without a cardboard cut-out story of Army units mechanically moving across a map.
Second, if you want to understand the real life meaning of why the movie/TV show MASH cast such withering criticisms onto the generals and other leaders executing decisions in the Korean War, this is the book for you. Halberstam is absolutely relentless (deservedly so) with his criticism of in particular Gens. Douglas MacArthur, Jim Almond, and Charles Willoughby. You will be shaking your head and, by the end likely be angry listening to the missteps and hubris in their decision-making. How they are not pilloried more as pariahs in American history is lost to me since they cost the lives of hundreds of thousands.
Third, the criticism of MacArthur deserves more discussion. He dedicates large sections of the book to developing the narrative around not only MacArthur’s failures but also the way he became more like a Far Eastern King who saw himself on similar levels as the president (his failure to salute the president when they met at Wake Island is the stuff of legends). This is both a high-point of the book and one of its weaknesses. At times Halberstam has a tendency to wax eloquent about what are really footnotes to his overall story. He does this a bit with Mao and Mao’s biography in this book, but with MacArthur, he gives a biography within the overall Korean War story that goes back his grandfather in the Civil War, MacArthur’s relationship with his mother, and his prior military experience. Is it relevant? Sure. But it is both too short to be a solid biography and too long for a historical book about the Korean War without losing the overall story.
Fourth, readers should not look to this book to be a solid summary of the entire war. Halberstam stuffs the final two years or so of the war into (barely) a small section at the end, which highlights how the war turned into a World War I’esque trench warfare quagmire. But he goes almost nowhere beyond that very, very brief description of the last half of the war. A better description and perhaps title of the book would be something like MacArthur and the Tragedy of the Korean War since almost the entire book is about the relationship between the general and how he and his staff’s blunders on the peninsula made the war what it was (even the incredible success of the Inchon landings depended on huge measures of luck and his staff ignored lots of contrary advice). Halberstam does dedicate lots of print to Gen. Ridgeway’s success in turning back the Chinese route from Chosin down the peninsula, but again, much of that discussion is in the context of how Ridgeway did things different from MacArthur and can only be understood in that context.
Finally, this book feels poignant for a couple of other reasons. Halberstam spent seven long years as a young reporter in Vietnam. He saw the nation go through the throes of what amounted to in many ways national suicide. From that experience, he wrote one of the seminal books on the Vietnam years, The Best and the Brightest. I got the feeling in The Coldest Winter that he internalized his experience in Vietnam, combined it with his 50+ years as a journalist, and used all that life experience to come out firing. This book is not a dispassionate treatment of the war or the leaders involved in the decision-making. It is a strongly worded—at times a white hot furious condemnation—work that calls out the tragedy of the entire war and how we allowed thousands of dead to pile up based on personal failings as basic as pride, ego, and willful silence.
Similarly, the poignancy of the book is underscored by Halberstam’s life around its writing. He first got the idea of writing it when he was a young reporter in Vietnam talking to various soldiers who had fought there. He knew there was a story about the ineptitude of various leaders, which continued to gnaw at him for decades until he finally sat down to write the book that had been gestating in his head during the preceding thirty years. And then, after spending about 10 years on the book and conducting endless interviews, he turned the manuscript into his publisher only to die in a car crash five days later. So in a very real sense, this book represents an opening and closing bookend to his writing and journalistic career. And understanding that fact makes the urgency and fury of his words toward the men who cost so many lives more understandable and moving.”
About David Halberstam
David Halberstam (1934-2007) was the author of twenty-two books, including fifteen bestsellers. Born in New York City, Halberstam spent much of the 1960s as a reporter for the New York Times, covering the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement. His Vietnam reporting earned him both a George C. Polk Award and a 1964 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Vanity Fair dubbed Halberstam "the Moses of American journalism," and the subjects of his books reflect his passion and range: war, foreign policy, history, and sports.
The Best and the Brightest (1962), his sixth book, a critique of the Kennedy administration's Vietnam policy, became a #1 bestseller. His next book, The Powers that Be, a study of four American media companies, was hailed by the New York Times as a "prodigy of research." Many of Halberstam's books explored themes in professional sports, including bestsellers The Teammates, a portrait of the friendship between baseball players Ted Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr, and The Education of a Coach, a profile of New England Patriots' Coach Bill Belichick.
The Best and the Brightest (1962), his sixth book, a critique of the Kennedy administration's Vietnam policy, became a #1 bestseller. His next book, The Powers that Be, a study of four American media companies, was hailed by the New York Times as a "prodigy of research." Many of Halberstam's books explored themes in professional sports, including bestsellers The Teammates, a portrait of the friendship between baseball players Ted Williams, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr, and The Education of a Coach, a profile of New England Patriots' Coach Bill Belichick.
Other books by David Halberstam
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