No Cakewalk in KoreaWhy Halberstam lets the establishment off the hook.

It will be the rare reader of David Halberstam's history of the Korean War who picks it up not knowing that long ago, the author wrote about another war in Asia that went badly for the United States. His new book gently reminds us that we're in such a war again, and the inevitable question—why do these things keep happening?—hovers over the entire story. Back in 1972, in The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam had a clear answer: The military and moral disaster of Vietnam was no accident, but the product of the geopolitical groupthink that had shaped U.S foreign policy throughout the Cold War. John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Robert McNamara didn't get us into Vietnam on their own. Dean Acheson and Harry Truman were also to blame.

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The reader who remembers Halberstam's earlier polemic might expect The Coldest Winter to be a renewed attack on the American establishment, an account of how big ideas like "containment" got us into pointless losing wars almost from the start. It isn't. This time, Halberstam (who died in a car crash last spring) has a more exciting story to tell than one about mere national security groupthink. His protagonist is a real-live villain—one of the most bizarre and colorful figures in recent American history, the general whom Harry Truman once peevishly referred to as "Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur."

Anyone who doubts that great events pivot on quirks of personality has only to compare Douglas MacArthur with the cast of The Best and the Brightest. He was more of a martinet than McNamara, more of a bully than Johnson, a more mesmerizing speaker than Kennedy. He considered Washington and Lincoln his intimate personal advisers and surrounded himself with flunkies who called him "the greatest man in history." (Others called him, for his foppish scarves, "the fighting dude.") Most important, MacArthur was the general in a million who could turn the war in Korea around with one victorious stroke—the super-risky landing at Inchon—only to overreach, suffering a stunning and totally unnecessary defeat at the hands of the Chinese less than three months later.

Yet, by personalizing the march to disaster, The Coldest Winter does what The Best and the Brightest was too angry to do: It lets everyone else off the hook. A big defeat happens—does this sound familiar?—when a few unscrupulous policy-makers seize the reins from the more level-headed many. Halberstam has the occasional cutting comment about Acheson (too much of an elitist for the age of nationalism), but all in all, his version of the Korean War is one that the Truman administration would have no trouble accepting.

As he tells it, MacArthur blindly ordered his men into the Chinese meat grinder to indulge his dreams of late-career glory, while the president and his advisers looked helplessly on. "Paralyzed rabbits," Acheson called them, regretfully including himself. Halberstam further spices up the account for contemporary readers by describing how MacArthur's minions discarded intelligence that undercut their own preferences. And to give the entire story a wistful, greatest-generation glow, he recounts in detail the heroism of ordinary American foot soldiers, who paid heavily on the battlefield for the mindlessness at headquarters.

What Halberstam is not so good at is explaining why the rest of the U.S. government was overwhelmed by the great man's madness. Explanations flit through the book, but they don't tell the whole story. Yes, MacArthur could charm any audience, large or small. (If he had gone on the stage, said a colleague, "you would never have heard of John Barrymore.") And the growing McCarthyism of politics back home did make it dangerous to seem insufficiently anti-Communist. MacArthur was also a master at keeping Washington higher-ups from knowing exactly what he was doing. And once he became "the sorcerer of Inchon" (another Acheson phrase), it was all but impossible to second-guess him.

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