<i>Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953</i> (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews195 nature of status, mobility, and land tenure in traditional Korea, social historians may be skeptical of anthropological analyses based on some necessarily tentative assumptions. One would hope that they might yet be as attentive to theJanellis' work as theJanellis were to social history, perhaps with similarly intriguing results. Laurel Kendall American Museum ofNatural History Child of Conflict: The Korean-American Relationship, 1943-1953. Edited by Bruce Cumings. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1983, 335 pp. A rapid reassessment of the foreign policy of the Truman administration is being furthered through the opening of additional American and British archives. The greatest challenge faced by Truman and his colleagues lay in the protracted struggle in Korea between 1950 and 1953. Truman showed decisiveness in handling key issues: notably, the commitment of American resources to oppose North Korea in late June 1950; the crossing of the thirty-eighth parallel and the curious encounter with General MacArthur at Wake Island in October 1950; the determination to survive the days of despair in December 1950January 1951; the dismissal of MacArthur in April 1951; and the resolute refusal to return prisoners of war to North Korea or China contrary to their wishes. However, Truman was only one and not necessarily the most important of those concerned with the formulation ofAmerican policy. Many aspects ofthe Korean conflict have been controversial or obscure. Why was American policy towards the Korean peninsula erratic and at times contradictory between 1945 and 1950? How interested in Korea were the various parts of the bureaucracy in Washington? What were the intentions of the governing elites in Seoul and P'yongyang? Who provoked whom, or were both sides responsible ? What was the relationship between North Korea and the Soviet Union? Did Stalin encourage Kim Ilsong in an adventurist policy or not? Where did Peking figures in events before large-scale Chinese intervention? To what extent were Taiwan and Korea linked before Truman's formal statement at the start of the war? Why did it take so long to end the conflict and was this due to malevolence or incompetence ? These questions and many others are examined in this important new volume of essays edited by Bruce Cumings. It is in some 196Book Reviews respects complementary to the valuable work edited by Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs, Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations , 1947-1950 (New York, 1980). Cumings and his associates cover a longer period but address themselves to some analogous problems . Most of the contributors have relied principally on a wide range of American sources, including the extensive holdings of the National Archives, the numerous papers in the Truman and Eisenhower libraries, and other relevant collections, such as the Dulles and MacArthur archives. Some Korean material has been used but a great deal remains to be utilized, including the voluminous North Korean records seized by the Americans in October 1950. The most difficult areas concern the policies of the Soviet Union and China; as the editor remarks, it will be a long time before these are fully clarified (if ever). Each contributor writes with force and distinction and the volume assumes a more cohesive character than is usual in such collections. The volume is the result of two conferences held in Seattle in 1978 and 1980 and essentially represents the work ofyoung scholars, who have labored in depth over the past decade to ascertain why the Korean war occurred and why it took the form it did. Bruce Cumings provides a succinct preface and then a lengthy, most stimulating introduction that sets the revisionist tone. He asserts that traditional interpretations of the outbreak of the con flict are erroneous because they depict the administration reacting to events and implementing a strategy of containment. Cumings maintains that in reality Truman and his colleagues were more adventurous and attempted a rollback policy in which communism would be driven into retreat through, in this case, the unification of the Korean peninsula under United Nations auspices. This development is placed in the framework of the coalition within the American establishment advocating the consolidation of the Truman doctrine through dynamic American world leadership: in party terms this connoted most of the Democrats and the liberal Republicans...