In a conversation the day before he was killed in an auto accident last spring, David Halberstam told me that the book manuscript he had delivered to his publisher four days earlier was "the best work of my life."
Given the 20 books that preceded it, his claim struck me as touchingly audacious, even for a writer as preternaturally enthusiastic as David always was. Now, after spending hours enthralled with "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War," it's easy to see why he felt as he did. In his final book, Halberstam took a method of historical storytelling he virtually invented and brought it to a masterful level. In the process, he gave the whole category called "popular history" a new standard against which all who practice it now must measure themselves.
As perfected over half a century, Halberstam's method was to set the authentic voices of a great event's individual witnesses in tension with the kind of grand strategic overview beloved of synoptic historians. It was a technique that melded the best of traditional journalism's immediacy with the academy's reflective perspective. All that was required was a truly great reporter's skill at one-on-one interviews and the intellectual depth of a first-rate historian, bound together by profound seriousness, endless energy and insatiable curiosity -- and, most of all, an unquenchable love for a good story well told.
"The Coldest Winter" incorporates all of that and seems certain to become the standard one-volume history of the Korean War, superseding even Clay Blair's "The Forgotten War" and Stanley Weintraub's "MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero." What sets Halberstam's history apart is its stunning array of first-person interviews with Korean War veterans, its lucid evocation of battlefield maneuvers, its crystalline portraits of major figures such as Mao and Kim Il Sung and its description of how Douglas MacArthur's whole willful -- indeed, deceitful -- prosecution of the war proved so costly. (Was there ever an American hero of MacArthur's stature whose image has been so ravaged by history? His deliberate distortion of intelligence to justify his horrifically wrongheaded push to the Yalu River is bound to set contemporary readers' heads shaking.)
One of the most rewarding aspects of "The Coldest Winter" is the way in which the author integrates sharply drawn portraits not only of leading individuals but also of the histories and societies at play in the conduct. They're wonderfully incisive, fair-minded and utterly unsentimental. Consider this, for example, on the society the war created north of the 38th Parallel:
