Dead White Author

Months ago, I had set aside this Thanksgiving holiday to take a big slice out of some literary pie, one by David Halberstam. His newest and last book, "The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War," rested heavily on a reading table in our living room. I was eager to get to it.

As a cold front moved over the graying skies of the plains and the promise of flurries followed strange November days of summery Missouri weather, curling up with a good book near the crackling fireplace seemed like a good idea.

I had only to start the ritual cooking and set the kitchen timers before settling down to read what one of America's greatest journalists had written about the war some called "the black hole of modern American history."

And though I did not know it at the time, the scheduled reading was prescient. Thanksgiving week, the California driver of the car in which Halberstam rode was convicted of vehicular manslaughter. Sentencing for University of California-Berkley grad student Kevin Lloyd Jones is set for next February.

We lost a brilliant communicator in one wrong left turn last April that resulted in a fatal collision on a California thoroughfare. A guy such as Halberstam should die of old age at his desk with stacks of papers in front of him and a library of dog-eared books at his back.

Instead, Halberstam, 73, died of massive internal injuries and was trapped in a 1989 Camry. He was on his way to conduct an interview for another project he was working on.

An accidental historian and best-selling author, Halberstam's brilliance first shone through in his reports of the Vietnam conflict. For their coverage of the war, Halberstam and his New York Times colleagues won a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. It was well-deserved.

Long before Robert McNamara published his tardy mea culpa memoir about the misjudgments, mischief and misdirection by our government in the Southeast Asian war, Halberstam's dispatches exposed the military's deception and told stories of the boys sent to accomplish an impossible mission.

His newspaper accounts and other published work provided a voice for voiceless troops whose jobs were to follow orders, not question them.

He made the American people, some witness to our first televised war, understand this conflict was unwinnable because of South Vietnamese corruption and hardheadedness in Washington about the war's progress.

In the Vietnam conflict, our troops were dying and some were committing unthinkable atrocities and all for no good reason. Sound familiar? Just read today's headlines from Iraq.

In his "The Best and the Brightest," published in 1972 after leaving the Times, Halberstam continued to inform and influence with accounts of the ways of the Vietnam War, the ways of the men who wage such wars and why.

This Thanksgiving, I was set to read about a divided Korea, the Chinese surprise near the Yalu River, Kim Ill Sung, Douglas MacArthur, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower. I had hoped to become better acquainted with Dean Acheson by reading "The Coldest War." I wanted to know how and why our Korean War vets slipped off the radar as though there were no conflicts between World War II and Vietnam. As he often did, Halberstam acknowledged the bravery and sacrifices of U.S. troops. In this book, he debunks the myth of MacArthur magnificence. He concludes that the battle of Unsan and the general's decision led to what many consider the "greatest military disaster since Little Bighorn."

Truman didn't think he needed congressional approval before going in and neither does our current president about engaging Iran. Deep in this book are poignant but powerful lessons from a dead man who no longer can give us more.

The thought leaves me cold and numb by the crackling fire with an open book.

Rhonda Chriss Lokeman (lokeman@kcstar.com) is a columnist for The Kansas City Star. To find out more about Rhonda Chriss Lokeman and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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