Book Review: 'The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War'
(C) 2007 Hyperion Books The Korean War is, as the shopworn cliche describes it all too aptly, America's "forgotten war." Sandwiched between the last undisputable and clearcut victorious conflict - the Second World War - and the tragic quagmire that drove a stake through the nation's heart (Vietnam), Korea is only on the national consciousness due to a few factors: the long-running TV sitcom M*A*S*H, which was set in Korea but deep down was really about Vietnam; the long and eventually successful campaign by Korean War vets for a monument in Washington, D.C.; and more recently, President Donald Trump's bizarre attempt to take credit for the first tentative attempts toward detente between the Communist dictatorship that has ruled North Korea since 1945 and the democratic (and U.S.-allied) South. The three-year-long Korean conflict was, in retrospect, doomed to be forgotten except, sadly, by the brave men and women who served in a U.S.-led United Nations for...