Truman Legacy Series, v. 8. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2012. xiv, 362 pp. (Illus.) US$28.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-61248-014-5.
Edited books tend to come in two forms. Some volumes collect together ground-breaking work on new areas of research; others focus on the familiar in order to provide a synthesis of the existing historical consensus. The volume under review, which is part of a series on President Truman’s legacy sponsored by the Harry S. Truman Library, leans towards the latter approach. Drawing together scholars from the United States, China, South Korea and Britain, its aim is to provide an overview of the record of the Truman administration in regard to one of its most problematical areas of activity, its policy towards East Asia. This is an important topic, for, as James Matray notes in his introduction, this region during the period between 1945 and 1953 witnessed the end of the Pacific War, the Chinese Civil War and the start of the Korean War.
The book is divided into fourteen chapters, three each on various aspects of policy towards Japan, China and Korea, four on intelligence and the conflict in Korea, and lastly a historiographical review of the literature on the opening of the Korean War. The contributors are in the main established scholars who are experts in the field of American and Chinese international history. The essays are accordingly well-written and authoritative, but many of them are also rather predictable, for they are content to follow well-trodden paths. In particular, the decision to include four chapters on intelligence is curious, for their contents overlap too much – one good comprehensive overview would have been sufficient. The best of the essays is the most original, namely the fascinating chapter by Charles S. Young on the way in which prisoners-of-war from the People’s Republic of China and North Korea were forcibly tattooed with anti-communist slogans in order to deter them from seeking repatriation. This is genuinely innovative research, which raises important questions about the nature of the Korean conflict. In addition, the chapters by Gallicchio and Casey contain fresh material and as a result enliven old debates.
In part, the problem with the volume’s predictability is simply in the nature of the beast, but considering the fireworks that this area of research used to stimulate back in the 1970s and 1980s, one cannot help but think that it might have been possible for the organizers of the original conference to have taken a more daring approach. For example, it would have been interesting to hear how some of the survivors from the generation of “revisionist” Cold War historians, such as Walter LaFeber, John Dower, Bruce Cumings or Ronald McGlothlen, viewed Truman’s presidency in retrospect. As it is, despite the fact that the “revisionist” school raised interesting questions about the forces that helped to shape American policy, most notably by looking beyond the American concern with national security to investigate the role of commerce and finance, by reading this book one would, by and large, not know that any controversy had ever existed. One does not need to believe the “revisionist” version of history to find this disappointing, for surely a volume such as this could have allowed for different schools of thought to have been represented and for reflection on past debates in the light of both experience and new sources.
The only exception to the ignoring of the “revisionists” is the historiographical essay by Kim Hakjoon, which deals with the literature on the outbreak of the Korean War. It argues that some of the speculations that the revisionists postulated about the origins of the war have proved to be unsubstantiated and implicitly lean towards the orthodox line that the conflict arose out of the machinations of Kim Il-Sung and Stalin. That may well be the case, but, giving credit where credit is due, it is disappointing that this essay does not address the main contribution that Cumings made to the debate, which was that the Korean conflict began in the summer of 1948 and only escalated into a conventional war in 1950. One can infer from Kim’s chapter that possibly even that is too much for conservative Korean historians to admit, for it is clear from his essay that, while the conflict may be history to the outside world, it is still highly political within Korea.
In conclusion, this is an edited volume that, while containing a number of perfectly well-executed chapters, does not add greatly to the existing literature and, accordingly, leaves the impression of being something of a missed opportunity.
Antony Best
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, United Kingdom
pp. 341-342