English

DTIC ADA427583: The 1951 Korean Armistice Conference: A Personal Memoir

Students of American history and students of international relations should be grateful to RAND for at last publishing Herbert Goldhamer's once Secret Memoir on the Korean War truce negotiations. Though the Memoir concerns only four months of negotiations that ran on for almost two years, it is a document illuminating not only the negotiations but the war as a whole. Perhaps more importantly, the manuscript provides insight into negotiation as a general process. Goldhamer's's lucid, clinical analysis of what he experienced and witnessed is reminiscent of Machiavelli or at least of Callieres. To recognize the value of the Goldhamer Memoir as a historical document, one needs some sense of common generalizations about the Korean War. Prior to the 1980s, most histories described Truman as having decided to intervene to defend collective security, not Korea. In a massive two-volume history of the origins of the Korean War, Professor Bruce Cumings has arrayed evidence showing that many of Truman's advisers thought South Korea important in its own right, partly as a shield for Japan, partly as a possible point of departure for rolling back Communism in Asia. In a comparably exhaustive gen

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