Mutual Pact of Succession

Transcription

welcome to books of our time brought to you by the massachusetts school of law and seen nationwide today we shall discuss a book entitled the korean war the book discusses the historical origins of that war which to this day are unknown to most americans joining me today is its author bruce cumings the chairman of the department of history at the university of chicago and i am lawrence r velvel the dean of the massachusetts school of law thank you for coming up thank you for having me delighted i wish to say that having heard you uh... at lunch i feel that a lot of the questions i intended to ask are not necessarily geared to some of the things you said so i hope you will just use my questions not just as something to answer but also as springboards to other things that you might wish to talk about we have a pretty literate and educated faculty and i think the uh the amount of things the number of things you were talking about that were unknown even to a pretty accomplished group illustrates the need or the desirability of saying them on television if we if you remember to say them now i want to avoid misconceptions because i've read that you know reviews and so forth and to avoid misconceptions why don't you tell us you know briefly or at length whichever you wish with as much detail as you wish what's your concession your view all over the country when there were these guerrilla wars and so forth before it got divided at the thirty eighth parallel and and even afterwards massacres were the order of the day of hundreds of people of thousands of people at a time i think you mentioned digging pits it's like you see in the movies from eastern europe with the germans lining the people up to shooting well it's uh most of what i put into this book is based on research that i did twenty years ago or more 'cause I did a two volume study of the origins of the korean war based on mainly american and north korean archives the north korean archive came courtesy of douglas macarthur which by the way i should tell the audience that two volume study is mentioned in all reviews and it's regarded as you know the font of most knowledge about the whole thing these days but go ahead well thanks very much for that it taught me not to write long books uh... because people don't read them and so I say things in here that i said in those two books and people treat it as revelation but i i was also able to drop a lot of south korean research that has come out since they democratized in the nineteen nineties and in particular the truth and reconciliation commission in seoul that has done very painstaking research on massacres of civilians and the results are horrific uh... first of all our side the south koreans are running six to one ahead of the north koreans in terms of killing civilians most americans would think north koreans would just kill a civilian to look at him the the numbers are astonishing in toto somewhere between a hundred and two hundred thousand were killed in the early months of the war in political violence that adds up to about another hundred thousand that were killed in political violence from nineteen forty five to nineteen fifty and so i mentioned in the book that they had been studying in spain scholars had been studying franco's political massacres and the figures in about seventy five percent of the provinces or counties where they've been able to do this research come up to around two hundred thousand so we're talking franco spain or korea franco franco spain willoughby didn't write about that I presume no uh... korea's worse in other words and it happened in in often in full view of americans now the worst incident no review that i've seen as wanted to get into this but i called it our srbrenitza because somewhere between as many as seven thousand political prisoners were murdered in a period of days they were put into pits with our c_i_a_ people watching our military people watching the south korean police did this and then it was covered up blamed on the communists even our official history of the war by roy appleeman blames all this entire taejon massacre it happened at small city taejon blames it on the communists and then the joint chiefs of staff classify the photographs of it 'cause the photographs make it clear who's doing it and they don't let the photographs out till nineteen ninety nine when a korean finally got them declassified so in other words they knew what our south korean army and police were doing but how can you take a massacre of seven thousand people turn around and blame it on the communists rather than stopping it when it was going on and then the pentagon did a video uh... a little movie called crime of korea that's where you see the best shots of the pits they go on through like a football field pit after pit of dead people and then humphrey bogart is in a is in a voice-over saying someday the communists will pay for this someday we'll get the full totals and believe me we'll get the exact accurate totals of the people murdered here and we will make these war criminals pay and everywhere lay the murdered dead the scenery of destruction is monotonous atrocity stories keep repeating themselves what can i tell you what can i show you of the ten thousand human beings slaughtered in seoul perhaps it isn't exactly ten thousand perhaps the total figure right now is approximate if that makes any difference in time we'll get a careful tabulation we'll learn the exact number of the slaughtered down to the last corpse now this is a complete reversal of black and white done as a matter of policy and i was astonished when i didn't know about it I didn't know it reminds one frankly of the katyn forest yeah in reverse where the communists blamed the nazis and everybody believed them until we found out it was really the communists yeah i mean it it is a an aspect of a very deep american responsibility for the regime that we promoted more really more than any other in east asia it was our creation in the late forties why do you think that things seemed the media in particular seemed to have been so different almost from the beginning of the vietnam war well i think korea had a an impact it certainly did on president johnson and many of the generals they had developed this line after the korean war ended that we don't ever want to fight another land war in asia then lo and behold a few years later they get into another land war and for johnson he wanted to make sure the chinese weren't gonna come into the war and destroy his administration the way they had destroyed truman's that was that's very clear you know right at the top of his head in a deliberations from the oval office during johnson's years but i think it it uh... had a lot to do with a TV with the ability to photograph the battle scenes either as movies you know with uh... hand-held camera that would then be uh... shown in theaters in documentaries uh... i remember in nineteen sixty-five seeing a documentary on the war that was very shocking to me and then of course it it spilled out into a living room war as more and more television cameraman came to cover it and i i think if there had been television in in korea that the war would be much better remembered for one thing and it would be much more contested i want to say for your viewers that they can go look at gallup polls in nineteen fifty two and fifty three and see that the korean war had become just as unpopular as the vietnam war did by nineteen sixty nine or seventy and truman's popularity rating was down around twenty five twenty six percent even george w_ bush didn't hit that low until right at the end of his presidency and those are the two lowest ever so it wasn't a popular war but it was an unknown war because there was no lens to open up on it like vietnam and second by the early sixties mccarthyism head waned very considerably and you know when the house uh... un american activities committee would would try to get a vietnam war protester like like uh... what's his name rubin what's his first name jerry rubin jerry rubin blanked on that get jerry rubin up to testify he comes in in a revolutionary war uniform generally makes a you know bedlam and a big joke out of the whole thing but mccarthyism was very real and very uh... oppressive in the early fifties uh... even the new york times would write articles condemning protests against uh... the korean war paul robeson got a protest going in harlem in august in nineteen fifty and the times condemned it in no uncertain terms so that i mean the korean war began just after the rosenbergs were indicted and it ended just after they were executed and people are thinking my god you you could go up the river to sing sing and get executed for your political beliefs now this they were said to be spies and all of that but i mean people don't make those distinctions yeah you know isn't it kinda interesting it never occurred to me uh... before a few days ago but MASH was one of the most popular maybe the most popular t_v_ programs ever and they had various points to make about war and was supposed to be about vietnam though it was set in korea and the idiocy of it but i don't i don't claim to have watched every episode of MASH at some point or another but i don't ever remember anything about some of these what i'll call the bad stuff us participating in slaughters of civilians I don't remember anything about that no i don't think they did i mean i think when you look at the vietnam war that most americans think that lieutenant calley and a bunch of other bad hats carried out the my lai massacre and that's about the only one that happened in vietnam when in fact there were my lais all over vietnam uh... well you know another thing americans just put out of their minds don't know this didn't start in korea it started in the philippines actually started with the indians but it was big time in the philippines and everybody at the time knew it it was the subject of articles in newspapers and not denials but apologias in in the newspapers so this has been a constant in american history well it reminds me that two statements by roosevelt and achison teddy roosevelt teddy roosevelt when people were complaining about the philippines war he said everything you can say for aquinaldo you could have said for sitting bull and then i i found in atchison's papers at yale in a letter to a professor who had complained about the vietnam war and that ho chi minh was a real patriot atchison said everything you say about ho chi minh could have been said about kim il-sung you know that was true wasn't it uh... and uh... we knew nothing about the history we knew nothing about the nationalism we knew nothing about who had been helping our enemies and who had been helping our friends we just uh... reflect anti communism joe stalin fight a war against them well there's a new book on george bundy that has an astonishing passage in it i mean i not much astonishes me having you know written these books and taught courses on the korean and vietnam war my whole career but bundy is going on about why we lost the war is this goldstein's book yeah we had him here go ahead well he gets out of bundy that i was never interested in the vietnamese he says it i was never interested in them and he goes on to indicate that he never inquired much about them either he didn't know his enemy and he didn't care to know his enemy now he's a boston brahmin and all of that and he probably thinks the same thing about you and me if he were still alive you know not interested in people like that but for a guy to be prosecuting a war and he was one of the biggest warriors in terms of expanding the war he wanted to invade north vietnam it was a global chess game to these people yeah he tells reporters that he found political and religious factions in vietnam united in their beliefs that the vietcong is their common enemy we had an opportunity to talk frankly and freely uh... with them they again emphasized the overriding importance in south vietnam of the contest against the communists they emphasized the political leaders had done the importance in their own dedication too the importance of and their dedication to the task of forming a stable and effective political society under a stable and effective government in that country a view which of course uh... we share you talk about having no interest in people like the vietnamese or people like you and me and you have said at lunch and i think you might have once mentioned here that um... the c_i_a_ has its ideas and when you come they ask you to talk or you're at conferences and you interrelate with them they say cuming's again they turn around you know bacevich who's been here three times andrew bacevich has uh he's written a book which i read and I'm in the middle of rereading it to write about it called washington rules yeah i want to that's exactly what he's talking about they don't care about what people like you and bacevich say uh... i you put this in a context of washington at lunch you might expound about this it is the narrowest minded geographical area you have ever been exposed to you might expound about that a little bit if you don't mind well i i uh... i want to make clear to your viewers that i uh... i'll talk to anybody if the north koreans invite me to give a lecture i will and i i do lecture to c_i_a_ folks and state department people and i go to conferences but I never do anything that requires a security clearance and the reason is that if i ever get a security clearance I'm going to be part of the same mindset that they're part of what makes you think you could get a security clearance uh…that's another thing but uh... I did start going to washington frequently after the north korean nuclear crisis broke open around nineteen ninety two and there are uh... i i mean there are a range of think tanks there i had some very interesting conferences at the carnegie endowment on north korea nuclear proliferation all of that but the guy that organized them is selig harrison who is one of the most independent investigative journalists i've ever known he worked for the washington post his whole career he's retired now still very active so it is possible to get some light under the tent there in washington but what you get with with north korea starting in nineteen ninety two is beltway speak that north korea is going to collapse tomorrow morning and it becomes the c_i_a_'s mantra when they go before congress it's not a question of when north korea will collapse whether it'll collapse only when and i see this stuff and i think what do they know that i don't at first and then i realized it's just they talk to each other they're trying to get ahead in washington or get a job in an administration and if hilary clinton is running around saying north korea has a power struggle and might collapse who am I to say no she's full of it you are a failure and that's who should say it she came into office picked up the bush administration's line on north korea and just kept ongoing meanwhile here we are two years later north korea hasn't collapsed the succession seems to have gone smoothly to the younger son which is what i would have predicted so i mean there is maybe i should write a book like bacevich's where I try to figure out it's it's shocking to me it's just shocking to me to see perfectly intelligent people often with degrees from the very best universities who uh... are going around not just in public but in private saying things that are manifestly can't happen you know if i were to put it all in a word it's careerism a lot of it is careerism but it's a bipartisan careerism so you have certain guys who take a line that that will get them a job in the republican party certain guys who take a line that will give them a job in the democratic party but there's really not much distance between them even though their career tracks yeah i think what you said at lunch amounted to you saying there's about an inch between them that's about it well the the fellow that we have as our undersecretary of state for east asia kurt campbell uh... i've been to conferences with him including back in the nineties uh... i don't know why he's a democrat but somehow he hooked on with uh... the clinton administration so he probably got on the democratic trajectory his views are indistinguishable from a lot of right wing conservatives he's a bully and I don't particularly like him as you can tell but he is the last person to bring fresh thinking into our policies toward china if you don't want to deal with something like north korea how about china which is becoming a bigger and bigger problem and that's a obama administration is supposed to really do something new and it hillary clinton's turned around to the same old people that were any other democratic president would have hired well that's why much of the country is so ultra cynical about anything anything a politician says you know the old joke how do you know when a politician's lying his lips move ok you know one thing that's interesting about halberstam 'cause you said that if i remember correctly you said that in his book the coldest winter which i read cover to cover fascinating book I thought uh... there's not there's almost nothing expressed about the history beyond june twenty-fifth nineteen fifty and at the same time this is the guy who was one of the major media figures in blowing the whistle on what was going on in vietnam and why don't you find that a kind of a strange paradox well i wrote a few pages about that book and about david in in my new book he uh... called me up asked to talk about the war with me could i come to new york or see him next time I'm in new york i was amazed at when i called him back to you know he's listed in the manhattan phone book and he picks up which i always liked david a lot I thought he had a terrific career going back-and-forth between you know serious political subjects and sports and was terribly eh... sad when he died going to interview YA Tittle but i could tell after an hour or so that we didn't see eye to eye to eye about the korean war and that what the korean war meant for david was that he had lived through it as a young man probably a teenager or college student and it was something he wanted to avoid it was something that contrasted with the halcyon fifties when so many other things were going right and that he hadn't paid a lot of attention to it but one thing was going to happen in his book truman and atcheson were going to be the heroes no matter what any historian says from washington general of the army eisenhower sets out on a mission unprecedented in history to organize and command an international army to defend western europe against communist aggression mr president i devoutly pray the commission on which i'm leaving this morning will result in nothing but peace security and tranquility for our various nations secretaries marshall atcheson are present as he leaves to visit each of the twelve nations which through a treaty called the atlantic pact have banded together for mutual defense 0:22:07.740,0:22:08.270 for david i mean he's got douglas macarthur sending us into north korea even though we have about three books now that show that wasn't true that it was uh... truman and atchison in washington who made that basic decision to go to go to the yalu march in and try to knock knock over the north korean regime as part of the roll back communism idea exactly uh... and this is slightly off of the point of halberstam and this is another point that's not widely known right people think it was macarthur off on a frolic and detour and and essentially uh... that's what halberstam says he he actually allows atcheson to be quoted saying we sat in the rooms just like little babies while he just took the war and did what he wanted with it and that that's a complete complete yeah he says that everybody in washington was in such fear of the august god douglas macarthur that nobody dared to say a word one against his moving north yeah so i mean i think that both his book and philip roth's novel that i also discuss its not set in the korean war but he's going to uh... college and gets kicked out of the college and then gets sent to korea and dies there uh... that novel i'm blanking on the name of it was something like interrogation or something like that he has a similar attitude toward the korean war that that it was something he didn't really understand it kinda blindsided him when he got sent there uh... it blindsided the fifties it blindsided his generation but you know uh... ten years later a guy like david halberstam was trying to cut his spurs at the new york times and thinking that there was you know some problem uh... with what he was hearing in south vietnam and he becomes a big critic of the of the war and does excellent work but in the in his uh... book on the korean war i mean i gave him both of my big tomes and uh... a list of other good books on the war he doesn't mention them he doesn't mention the bombing of the north he mentions the three-year u_s_ occupation of south korea in one sentence without giving it any significance and mentions a total of two south koreans in a seven hundred page book syngman rhee and his old general paik sun yup who everybody all the western journalists are taken to paik sun yup so he can tell them how things really happened now to bring this back to our earlier discussion pain sun yup was born in pyongyang he was about ten years younger he he's younger than kim il-sung he was a lieutenant in the japanese army he fled to the south with his brother and they both became central people in the command of the south korean army when the war broke out so kim il-sung grew up just outside of pyongyang here's two two other guys took opposite sides during the colonial period and they're facing each other off on the thirtieth parallel on june twenty-fifth nineteen fifty uh... so it's uh... astonishing that anybody in in washington that knew anything about korea could have been surprised by this war stay with us we'll be right back president truman arrives at flushing meadow five years to the day after his historic proclamations which announced the beginning of work by the united nations mr. truman dramatically calls on the world assembly of nations to bring about real disarmament through control of atomic and all other weapons then the president says vast sums now being spent on rearmament could be used for world betterment in the reception that follows the president greets the delegates of the sixty united nations among them are russia's andrei bashinski and soviet security council delicate jacob malik america's warren austin and eleanor roosevelt the un anniversary is hailed around the world massachusetts school of law legal education that is practical accessible affordable and enjoyable offering flexible day and evening classes full or part-time studies candidates are assessed not on the LSAT but their academic and other accomplishments providing more professional skills training than any other law school in the new england massachusetts school of law visit us at mslaw.edu training students to become successful lawyers and advocates not just legal scholars the topic i will be discussing today is whether a person or a couple should make a will the short answer is yes before i discuss specific situations let me state a few things in the hope of clearing up some misconceptions first the law of wills is state-specific that is each state has its own set of laws governing who can make a will and the formalities one must comply with in order to make a valid will one that a court will enforce second generally a person who wants to make a will needs to be eighteen years old and of sound mind which means that the person has to know that they are making a will that they know the nature and extent of the assets they own and that they know the natural objects of their bounty in other words you have to know what you were doing and why a written and signed document is required in almost all but a few special cases and most states require that two other people also sign the will as witnesses some states do not require witnesses as long as the document is signed by the person making the will known as the testator and the material portions of the will are in the testator's handwriting the main reason to make a will is to make sure that upon your death your property goes to those persons you want your property to go to a will can accomplish that objective and do so in a legally accepted manner if you do not have a will then you die intestate and the law of the state you live in will step in and make the decision for you about how your property will be distributed and to whom again each state has its own rules and each person's family situation is different in another presentation i discussed the general rules of been intestacy so i will leave that issue for now there are other reasons to make a will and they are as varied as each families dynamics providing for children especially for minor children providing for partners providing for aged parents minimizing taxes selecting fiduciaries to handle your affairs selecting guardians to raise your minor children and making sure that there is an orderly process to reach a distribution goals are but a few of the many other reasons let me give you three typical scenarios first a young unmarried person just starting out in his or her career second a recently divorced parent of two young children and finally an older couple with grown children who have started their own families first the young unmarried person just starting out in your career you might feel that you do not have enough assets to bother with making a will that may be true but even if it is things could change quickly you could inherit money from a parent or a grandparent you could get injured and receive money either in a lawsuit or as a settlement regardless you have your own ideas about how your property whatever the value should be distributed upon your death everything to partner if you have one some to your parents some to your brothers or sisters or a favorite niece and nephew how about to a favorite charity and if you have pets who will take over their care without a will your preferred beneficiaries may or may not receive your property when you die and with a will you choose an executor or executrix someone you trust to make sure your testamentary plan is carried out let's consider another example the recently divorced parent of two young children in this situation your primary goal will probably be insuring that your children are taken care of if you pass away for you there are two major concerns first who will be the guardian of your children that is who would you want to raise your children if you pass away and your ex spouse is either passed away is unfit to raise the children or simply does not desire to do so an elderly parent a sister in a faraway state a successful sibling who is married and has children of his own or her own in a will you choose who will be the guardian of your children while your choice is not absolutely binding on the probate court it will be given great deference and it would be a good idea to select an alternate guardian in case your first choice of guardian is unable to take on the role of guardian second how will your property be distributed this situation also requires careful thought and planning and may involve providing money to the guardian to help pay for the cost of raising your children and even setting up trusts for things like their college education and finally the older couple with grown children who have children of their own will there be enough money to ensure that the surviving spouse can live comfortably what happens to the estate when the second spouse dies to whom should the property go the wealthy and successful daughter the son struggling to raise a family with a spouse siblings in need of financial support or specific grandchildren what about grandchildren yet to be born and what about planning for medicaid eligibility and long-term care finally what about estate taxes for those fortunate to have had financial success the list of issues to be addressed goes on and on whatever your current situation it is probably a very good idea to consider making a will at a minimum making a will gives you some peace of mind knowing that if anything should happen to you your wishes upon your death will be honored at the new american college of history and legal studies in salem new hampshire you can finish your bachelors degree affordably and get on the fast track to law school we teach american history and you will receive a rigorous education at a very low cost the small day and evening classes allow you to interact closely with a distinguished faculty at the american college of history and legal studies professors don't lecture through the discussion method of teaching you'll be engaged in the issues raised in class you'll learn to be a critical thinker a better writer and a polished public speaker and you'll be able to compete with anybody in today's competitive marketplace you can also get on the fast track to law school qualified students gain early admission into the massachusetts school of law the new american college of history and legal studies offers the junior and senior years of undergraduate education to finish your bachelors degree with the opportunity to start your law degree early call or visit today united nations troops once again hit the road towards korea's capital city of seoul on the way american infantrymen fight through towns like the rail center of an yang south of seoul this time the advance is different from previous allied attacks led by tanks diving deep into the chinese communist lines searching out the reds in the rice paddies the goal of the united nations command this time is not to capture towns but to track down the enemy and destroy him is this war of maneuver gains ground so much the better and gain ground we do u_n_ units hurling back chinese counterattacks reach the blasted bridges along the vital han river across from seoul for the fourth time since the war's start the city of seoul comes under attack the offensive is was backed up from bases in japan where flying boxcars of the combat cargo command take to the air to drop supplies just as though they were coming off a factory assembly line uh... welcome back why did mao mao come across to help the the north koreans well i think it's true that he was defending his own border and the industry's uh... japanese had also put a lot of industries into manchuria but not china didn't have much industry sort of an imperial fringe you know of shanghai along the coast that other the british and others had built factories and there was a distinct possibility that the u_s_ would would uh... bomb those factories that the u_s_ would put an american army on the yalu river which i think the chinese still would resist if korea were unified but I developed a lot of evidence mainly in chinese and koreans sources that it was also a matter of reciprocity for what koreans had done for them and that for a new revolutionary regime to let the north koreans hang out to dry when many of his officers had fought with uh... kim il-sung and other guys in the north korean military would be most unfortunate and then the third reason yeah I mean it took me forever to get any handle on what koreans had done in china with that revolution but it goes all the way back to nineteen twenty one or two when the defense minister of the north korean army in nineteen fifty had been at the whampoa military academy that's where chiang kai shek went many of mao's allies it's most famous military training facility all the way back to the early twenties there were koreans on the long march including one of the biggest generals in the north korean army in nineteen fifty may I ask a question why well because i mean it's it's it's partly that when westerners look at east asia they think well i better learn something about china better learn something about japan but i don't really need to learn much about korea I'm joking a little bit but i've seen that many times it's also the schisms that came into the postwar communist world where the chinese felt the koreans didn't give them enough credit koreans felt the chinese didn't give them enough credit you know things like that so that these stories get distorted but why did so many koreans fight with mao you know in the long march and in the fighting chiang kai-shek and all that i think that uh... japanese colonialism was so oppressive to young men in particular there's a great book called song of ariran ariran is a famous korean song written by kim san who was uh... korean revolutionary who died in uh... the late thirties edgar snow's wife took his biography but he said and he said specifically about syngman rhee in nineteen nineteen he went to versailles to try and get the powers to give korea independence and this this kim san said how how can syngman rhee think that because he can speak english he's going to go to versailles and somehow those great powers are going to force japan to give up korea it's just naivete on an unbelievable scale says words to that effect but then he says why he joins the chinese revolution is because somebody's finally fighting the japanese cause i mean the borders between korea and china almost didn't exist the the japanese were in uh... all of northeast asia by nineteen o five at one point or another and then they controlled the northeast provinces of china for fifteen years so it was natural i think that you get a generation of revolutionaries who think the only thing the japanese understand is bullets well now we've got about fifteen minutes left and i'd like to discuss perhaps three or four major topics number one we discuss the japanese here a lot and i think you feel that uh... I don't think I've ever heard anybody take a different position that the japanese and the north koreans have never reconciled and very interestingly and I had not heard this because i think of my own ignorance frankly that you feel that the people who have been high in the japanese government and who to this day are high in the japanese government are related by blood to the people who were the fascists in the japanese nation in the nineteen late nineteen twenties and thirties and who brought on world war two and that the north koreans are well aware of this i don't think there's any question of that one of the people who was in manchuria kishi nobusuke who became postwar prime minister in japan great favorite of the americans even though he was really a right winger kishi was running the munitions operation in manchuria in the mid-nineteen thirties as a young man i go into these various lineages in my book uh... but uh... two uh... of the most recent prime ministers are direct descendants of people that go back to that period but the other thing I mean two things japan has the most hereditary democratic parliamentary system on the face of the earth they have kept districts where the son the grandson and you know the great-grandson are going to hold that seat in the diet or the parliament that's more true of the liberal democratic party which is temporarily out of power but was in power through most of the post-war period they have very deep roots in the countryside they have very deep hereditary roots it's not to say it isn't a democracy but it uh... it would be like taking the kennedys and several of our you know rockefeller's and other families I was going to say the kennedys and just blast you know plastering them all over the country and then the other thing is koreans were always known hundred and fifty years ago they were known for keeping genealogies and that had to do with if you had an aristocrat in the last four generations of your genealogy of your family history you could sit for the civil service exams which was a way to get upward and onward and if you didn't you couldn't so hereditary systems are very strong in korea including slavery but if you could trace you know your your family back to some distinguished person you u you could do much better in korean society so koreans are just widely known they're great students of genealogy most families have extensive family trees and so the first thing the north koreans do since they think the japanese are unreconstructed and every wipstitch some l_d_p_ politicians shows that they're unreconstructed by saying you know we really developed korea we didn't hurt korea stuff happens all the time they all look at the guys genealogy you know there have been some famous episodes recently that indicate this although we americans don't know the background that you just presented uh you know the claim there was no such thing as comfort women and you know when the when the chinese government says to them you really should apologize for thus and such like uh... the rape of nanking oh no no we had nothing to do with that you know well i uh... i think it's a very serious problem because they're wonderful japanese historians that have pointed all this stuff out three hundred thousand people died at nanking comfort women were hundred and fifty thousand so you know there are very good historians people that i consider very good friends who have total contempt for their own government but the politicians are constantly saying things that are that seem to be purposely designed to put salt into the wounds and what amazed me though is that the head of the air force in japan a year and a half ago got up and he gave a speech where basically he said japan's been right in every international conflict it's gotten themselves into since eighteen ninety-five when they scuttered the chinese and blamed uh... world war two on pearl harbor and roosevelt listening to too many communists i mean it was just a really wackey thing but in the middle of it he says there was a great korean officer named kim suk won oh he killed so many chinese you know he was terrific we really liked him well that was the guy in the nineteen thirties who headed the unit to track down and kill kim il-sung and kim suk won was the commander of the thirty eighth parallel all through the summer of nineteen forty nine when the south was making these skirmishes and attacks and i mean you didn't need anybody else there to provoke a war i mean this guy is a quizling traitor a benedict arnold and you know we're standing there next to him with our officers while he he he he literally said when i attack the north I'll have breakfast in pyongyang and uh... lunch in some place and dinner on the border chin wi she he said this to people all the time but i think your average american you get instead of an expert with forty years of experience you get forty guys with one year of experience and then they're going off to their next post they don't know anything about this guy's background yeah yeah there are some real questions for a different day but there are some real questions about the way in which our state department and for that matter one might even say the military operates in the ability a year or two years there are certain real benefits to that but there certain downsides that don't often get discussed uh why don't you talk about tell us about the one thing probably most known to americans whether we understand the whole story i don't know but that's the print those are the prisoner of war issues when when the war was finally the armistice was finally signed well uh... the uh... there a lot of things to say about the p_o_w_ issue it held up the signing of the armistice primarily because we wanted some mechanism whereby anticommunist soldiers would not be sent back to north korea or china they would be rewarded as it were well if they were anticommunist they should go to south korea or taiwan but not go back to a communist country but that was based on the treatment that the russians gave to germans who had surrendered to them and so it was a perfectly reasonable position but it ignored what was going on in the p_o_w_ camps which was a virtual political war sometimes open war warfare where the communists on the north korean side would would get everybody together and organize their camp and then fight with the anti communists on the south korean side except the north koreans are much better organized south koreans tended to have youth group leaders the south koreans were the anti communist p_o_w_s they were the ones who wouldn't join with the communists even though they had been communist or they have been in the north korean army they had been captured in the north korean army or as guerrillas yeah okay or they got into the camps and figured the u_s_ was going to win this war sooner or later and they would go to south korea and there was a lot of anticommunist indoctrination among those north and south koreans a lot of south koreans were captured fighting on the north korean side and and so syngman rhee also in addition to these fights that were going on he decided to sabotage the armistice couple months before it was signed by letting twenty five thousand prisoners go free these were anticommunist ones or probably anybody that realized they were going to go free on tuesday morning if uh... syngman rhee let them and that infuriated the uh... american command which was running everything i mean the u_n_ had almost no role in korea and so uh... that managed to delay the armistice for several months but to me what most americans remember i think is the americans in north korean and chinese p_o_w_ camps because of the uh... the shocking things that came out when they came home the most shocking being that twenty-one of the p_o_w_s stayed behind and i've actually met two of them they all eventually made their way back to the united states they went from north korea to china some of them stayed there decades others came back fairly quickly but they were just confused young men in one case a black guy who said he had no future in the united states and the chinese promised him a job in in education which is entirely plausible he's now runs a chop suey restaurant in memphis he's a very funny guy and he got his education his wife and his job in china but he told us in an interview that he wanted to come back to the united states because there's no ceiling on your ambition where as there is in china it was just a fascinating interview very uh... interesting person so twenty one stayed behind and they were supposed to have been brainwashed when in fact the political indoctrination was fairly light compared to what most people believe uh... i've read a book by a black guy who was a p_o_w_ and he said they would come to him and talk to him about imperialism and he'd say it's a bunch of hogwash and they'd come back and try and do it and the worst thing ever did was make him stand on the ice in his bare feet for an hour or so teach him a lesson so i i i a lot of it was overdrawn but it fed into this idea we couldn't win the korean war we were stalemated what happened to the world war two generation when men were men and you see then in the mid fifties all of this talk about the decline of american manhood and rebel without a cause james dean's most well-known movie you know his father's going around in an apron he tells his father why don't you slug mom in the mouth for christ's sake instead of letting her push you around i mean it you see it in hollywood you see it in stories and scenes on t_v_ and so the uh... that particular p_o_w_ episode and it went beyond that because a lot of americans died in captivity and one thought well it's the brutality of the north koreans and the chinese but there were a lot of british p_o_w_'s hardly any of them died and so when studies came out and there there are some excellent studies by sociologists on this including a book called mass battle and behavior in captivity that i think is the best book it turned out that the british knew how to keep their morale up much better than the americans and these guys would just give up commit suicide or just die like bridge on the river kwai in a way isn't yeah it is and i don't think it has anything to do with american manhood it has to do with young people who don't know where korea is that get six weeks of infantry training you know one of the things maybe this american manhood thing is a perpetually cycling idea because as you will remember this was something that tremendously bothered theodore roosevelt and other people who were the sons of the civil war generation and who had never proven themselves you know in his famous comment i want a war any war but we need a war right yeah actually one of the fascinating things about korea is how well officered the american military was almost all the officers who fought in world war two fought in korea ridgeway macarthur clark you you can't uh... hardly name anybody who didn't fight there and that and that made be losing that war or not winning it all the harder to take a couple of last questions that seem to be related i think talk if you would about the growth of democracy in korea after in south korea after this vile dictatorship until about nineteen sixty under syngman rhee whom we brought back there and the fact that today the south koreans seem to understand far better than we do that the korean war was fundamentally a civil war among koreans the same thing that is said about the vietnamese later on well syngman rhee had a dictatorship masquerading as a parliamentary democracy for twelve years from nineteen forty eight to nineteen sixty when he was overthrown in a popular rebellion uh... and at that time people in the countryside in particular settled scores with policemen and military people who had killed their family members in political violence during and before the war and for about a year you had a situation moving toward a a genuine democracy and then in may nineteen sixty one park chung he mounted a coupe and uh... took over the country and uh... kennedy didn't like it made him run for election in nineteen sixty three but all during the park period for the next uh... twenty years koreans would tell me if he ever lost an election he'd just put the tanks in the street again so most of the elections were for show but in nineteen seventy one uh he ran against kim dae jung who was uh... a much younger politician and very charismatic and somehow kim got forty six percent of the vote and nearly got killed for that and so park declared himself president for life put in a new constitution a year later a kind of pressure cooker was built up in korea in the seventies and eighties where the civil society and the educational level of the people and all that was way beyond living in a military dictatorship modeled on what the japanese had done in the thirties so when park was assassinated in nineteen seventy nine you had another year when it looked like uh…a democracy would develop and then one of his proteges took over chun doo hwan in nineteen eighty and prolonged the dictatorship until a major rebellion throughout kind of like what's going on in tunisia today every major city had tens of thousands of people in the streets overthrew chun doo hwan and you had the first direct election of a president and then in in the nineteen nineties i think korea really fully democratized and in many ways it's a more democratic country than our own i think in that it's is it's as stable a democracy as we have but its spectrum is much wider the political spectrum they have a left-wing newspaper that's one of the most popular newspapers and I don't mean left-wing like the new york times but it it it's uh... yeah it's not a liberal spoken like a true right winger well sarah palin might think it's a left-wing newspaper but and a full spectrum of debate and a very lively civil society and in that context all kinds of questions that people had been tormented about but couldn't talk about for decades started to come out like the no gun village massacre which was an american massacre of women and children and that got made a lot of news here but of course koreans are more interested in the massacres that their people did and so pretty soon you had the truth and reconciliation commission uh... and and a number of other similar projects so that and then this went along with uh... as you said a different evaluation of the nature of the war for a young person in nineteen eighty to hear that kim il sung was actually a gorilla fighting the japanese rather than a stooge of the russians which is what had always been put out and that the top officers in the south korean army were all at the time of the war were all people who served in the japanese army in world war two this is like somebody telling us i don't know what i mean that john kennedy was a secret communist or something like that that it's just had a shattering effect on young people in particular and so the whole postwar consensus that the conservatives have tried to curdle up over the decades collapsed and they'd like to put it back together again but they can't they're too old uh... anybody who fought in the korean war now is going to be about eighty and so the to me as a historian it's one of the best examples of what democracy can do for you because when people are actually allowed to inquire into those things that move them deeply they do very good work well I must be a real democrat because for the last ten years i have come to think that robert taft was a great man and you know back in the nineteen fifties people thought he was the incarnation of right wing ogrism and he was so right about what was happening in the executive branch of the united states government well I uh grew up among a bunch of ohio cousins who thought robert taft walked on water and i still remember one of my cousins pounding his fists into the sand we have I used to my parents owned a cottage with a bunch of other cousins who had their own cottages coming down from a nineteenth-century farm that my great grandfather owned i went through every summer for twenty one years and i remember one of my cousins pounding his fists into the sand listening to the radio so angry and i said to my father I said what's wrong he says eisenhower's getting the nomination not taft well you know taft maybe some maybe he was sort of right wingish on domestic policies but boy when it came to foreign affairs and the ability of the executive to do whatever it wants and congress being a mere cypher oh my god was he right on took a lot of years to realize he was uh my cousins were at that time mostly small businessmen or salesmen for some buick dealer or whatever and he was a champion of small business low taxes but he was principaled low military budgets too uh... and i wrote about him not in this book but in another book of mine that came out a year uh... or so ago where he says what truman is embarking on with this military budget and these basis is just a disaster sooner or later it's going to get us into wars and it's going to bankrupt us and it's been doing that now for sixty years yeah and now we we really have to wrap this up but i will add that now there is talk in congress and elsewhere that what is happening on the international fund front militarily does threaten the country with bankruptcy you're you're exactly right i mean you see it coming slowly in in the morning paper more and more congressmen more and more pundits talking it and conservative that's the thing that interests me so much yeah conservatives who are hard-line hard line when it comes to the military and when it comes to our role in the world and they are say it's going to bankrupt us I very much have grown to like secretary of defense gates because he's the first secretary of defense since eisenhower left you know the presidency to talk about reducing the military budget in serious ways well sir thank you thank you very much it's been a good discussion boy i think i think that uh... you were terrific so thank you very much thank you thanks for the good questions and you're welcome and to the audience be with us again next time or the next issue the next uh... episode installment I guess that would be the best word of books of our time thank you