Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
First of all, what got you interested in studying the Korean War?
I went to the Peace Corps in Korea when I was trying to avoid the War Corps in Vietnam. The Peace Corps is not a substitute for military service but it does provide a deferment. I was quite stunned by the relationship Americans in Seoul had with Koreans in the late 60s when I was there. The Americans lived on compounds and there was very little interaction with the Koreans. So I got interested in the origins of the U.S.-Korean relationship. Then I went to graduate school and ended up doing a dissertation on the U.S. occupation in Korea right after World War II, before the Korean War. As I was doing that it occurred to me that I was learning about the origins of the Korean War. There is very little literature that you can find in the U.S., apart from what scholars have done, that will tell you what the long background to the Korean War was. It is usually seen as a thunderclap that came on a Sunday morning, like Pearl Harbor.
Your first choice is John Merrill’s Korea: The Peninsular Origins of the War.
Like several of the best books on the Korean War, this one is out of print. When David Halberstam was doing his book on the Korean War a few years ago he wrote that he went to a public library and he found 88 books on the Vietnam War and four on the Korean War, and I think that says a lot about the general lack of scholarship and interest in the Korean War in the U.S.
John Merrill’s book is one of the very best. It is based on a lot of archival research and it looks at the internal emergence of the Korean War in the late 1940s rather than this idea that it started only in June 1950, which is of course the official American position. He was the first American to write about a rebellion on Cheju Island off the southern coast where at least ten percent of the population was killed in a very brutal suppression campaign. It is a very fine book.
Next up is Steven Casey’s Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States.
Yes. This is a recent book, and it is very well researched. I think for lay people who try to understand what historians do, it really helps to know that you can’t really cover a subject without using archives and primary sources. He also looks at formerly classified secret documents. All this information gives us a window into what really happened (as opposed to what was supposed to have happened), and it’s also unimpeachable evidence. What the author found with all his research is that the U.S. government had a major campaign to massage public opinion about the Korean War, both in the United States and on a global scale.
What kind of things were they doing?
One set of files that I looked at in the State Department is very typical. You might find the Embassy in Guatemala trying to refute an article in the local press praising I F Stone’s book, The Hidden History of the Korean War. In South Africa they would counter a letter to the editor in the Johannesburg newspaper. It is just amazing how much money and personnel the U.S. had to push its interpretation of the Korean War.
Which was what?
Essentially, that both South Korea and the U.S. were utterly blameless and that North Korea, backed by the Soviet Union and China, launched an unprovoked invasion which was courageously resisted. This is actually what many influential people believed. Another thing the U.S. did was censor the battlefield. The first six months of the war were not censored, so you get really interesting books. If I had a sixth book to recommend to you, it would be Cry Korea by Reginald Thompson, a British reporter, which was written in 1952. He covered the war in the first six months and said it was a very different war from World War II. It was really like what we came to understand to be the nature of the Vietnam War. In particular, Thompson discovered an extraordinary number of atrocities by the South Korean government, and saw that the U.S. was turning a blind eye to the situation. And it was when British and Australian reports about this came out, at the end of 1950, that censorship descended onto the battlefield. For the next two years, what you learnt about the war was what you got out of General MacArthur’s headquarters or the State Department.
You talk about how America manipulated press coverage of the Korean War, but you do have some critics who say that you are a revisionist historian who is too quick to criticise the U.S.’s role, and too eager to overlook the misdemeanours of the North Koreans. How would you respond to them?
Well, the last thing you said is completely false, so I would tell them it is completely untrue that I overlook what the North Koreans were doing. What my critics have done is to ignore South Korean atrocities, which we now know ran at a ratio of six to one with North Korean atrocities. That has been proven by a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that laboured for years in South Korea.
Bruce Cumings' research and teaching focus on modern Korean history, 20th century international history, U.S.-East Asian relations, East Asian political economy and American foreign relations. His first book, The Origins of the Korean War, won the John King Fairbank Book Award of the American Historical Association, and the second volume of this study won the Quincy Wright Book Award of the International Studies Association. He is the editor of the modern volume of the Cambridge History of Korea (forthcoming), and is a frequent contributor to The London Review of Books, The Nation, Current History, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and Le Monde Diplomatique.
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