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82BOOK REVIEWS The Reluctant Crusade: American Foreign Policy in Korea, 19411950 , by James Irving Matray. Studies from the Center for Korean Studies No. 4. Honolulu: The University of Hawaii Press, 1985. Notes, bibliography, subject and name indexes. 351pp. $30.00. It seemed enigmatic once, the history of those confusing, turbulent years, even to those who lived through them. But now the record approaches completeness : undeniably voluminous. All those file boxes wait for us on Pennsylvania Avenue or in Suitland. Dr. Matray sifts the awesome leaves the Greeks called Sibylline and we archival. He collates: a thousand footnotes—"See not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost;/ Every hair is hair of the headnumbered ." We are assured now it was all quite normal, all those things we once thought hectic and irregular even when we were plunged in these events and penning some of these documents. And now that all that we once found exciting has been settled, normalized, taxonomized, we wonder how we found these events so engrossing as we did. Seoul and Washington, 1941-50, become almost as familiarly detailed as Boswell's London. The disjointed, fragmentary days have left us and suddenly we miss the old allure that inspirits the poems of Sappho and Silla; of events glimpsed vividly but separately, ambiguously. We have come to the time of the scribes. The Reluctant Crusade has a theme; barely. America tried to reconstruct Korea more or less in its developmental image but without resort to major means. Trusteeship and negotiation were trundled off and on the stage without working. Containment seemed better though it solidified division. There was consistent commitment but more economic and technical until invasion, seen as Soviet-inspired, magnified the military to politics' detriment, giving birth to major means at last. The success of an at first reluctant military intervention in Korea spread from its birthplace to a more generalized and rigid US policy of military intervention to contain communism and "preserve worldwide peace and stability." It sounds broad and grand. But the potential grandeur of the theme is as reluctant as Matray believes the crusade was. It is reduced to a few slightly forced paragraphs. His real labor and love lies in a complex, lapidary detailing whose Churrigueresque chipped surface, though chiselled in an earnest, sober spirit, almost overwhelms its theme, as Taxco's cathedral baroque overwhelms its Christian tidings. The intricate mosaics Matray excavates materially expand, though hardly revolutionize, our understanding of these two decades. Those like myself who bewailed American unpreparedness for and disregard of 1941-46 Korea will have to stand at least partially corrected. There was more consideration than we knew or divined. Cumings points this out, but Matray, chip by chip drives the point home. For the deeply interested, Matray is a useful foil to Cumings's first volume of Origins and will goad him to further refining efforts as he completes his second. In neither conviction, power, nor volume can Matray touch Cumings , by whose work all others on these years are likely to be measured. But for those many who feel that history often slinks by in uncertainty, probing, scant knowledge and communication, and inadvertence as much as—more than—by BOOK REVIEWS83 imperious design, Matray's criticism of Cumings, his sine ira et Studium view of the period, however cluttered, are likely to carry greater ultimate conviction. Moreover, Matray cites documentary evidence unused by anyone else, Cumings included. Both views are needed; each, perhaps, asks for the other. Both also carry a degree of truth. Matray does not deny that the TrumanAcheson perception of the 1950s invasion as the initiator of worldwide aggresion may have been misplaced and that Cumings's view that the Korean war was basically a civil war may be right. But this conviction, which sustains Cumings through a thousand (present and future) pages, Matray simply dismisses (not opposes) in a single clause (p. 258). What interests Matray is less the policy's truth or even its effectiveness than its development, course, consequence beyond Korea, and what, through thick and thin, he sees as its consistency. Cumings is out there tilling the same policy field but with plough cutting deeper...

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