POP CULTURE
by Frank D.McConnell
At one point in Graham Greene's The Confidential Agent, the hero-a hunted spy-hides out in a movie theater. A nondescript Hollvwood romance is on the screen, but the hero discovers in it a significance deeper than any intended by its makers: "It was as if some code of faith or morality had been lost for centuries, and the world was trvins to reconstruct it from the unreliable
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evidence of folk memories and subconscious desires. . . ."
A splendid...
Books on "popular" or "mass" cul- ture are nearly as numerous as the formula novels, movies, TV shows, comic strips, popular songs, "pop" paintings, and other manifestations of 20th-century life with which they deal. Some are excellent studies. Others are themselves a kind of "pop" scholarship; these are written according to formula, aimed at the college campus. Sometimes they make good reading, but they often are no more nourishing than spun- sugar candy.
Moreover, f...
1982, while asking Congress for an initial $800 million in compensatory arms aid for Seoul; both proposals stir debate. Here four historians- Samuel Wells, John Wiltz, Robert Griffith, Alonzo Hamby-look back at the war and what it did to America. Retired diplomat Ralph Clough examines the two Koreas today.
Samuel F.
For most Americans over 40, the bitter conflict on the Ko- rean peninsula from 1950 to 1953 evokes memories and lessons that differ from those of other wars. The Korean War had spe-...
Twenty-five years ago this summer, the guns finally fell silent in Korea, ending a bitter 37-month "limited war" that cost 34,000 American lives and engendered fierce political controversy at home. America's Korea veterans are now well into middle age, their efforts against the Chinese and North Korean invaders sel- dom remembered. But they succeeded in repelling Communist aggression, and the shock of that aggression changed modern American attitudes toward national security. The war's...
the press, Congress, and most of the public, ignored the crucial differences between Vietnam and Korea. "Controlled escala- tion' theories so popular in universities could not be applied successfully in Southeast Asia, for the circumstances were strik- ingly divergent. The Vietnam War in 1961-65 was not a formal military confrontation launched by an invasion across a recog- nized border, confined to a peninsula, fought by organized ar- mies, and supported by coherent populations on two clearly...
KOREA
The Korean War had an important influence on American politics and culture-less as a force that produced radical de- partures than as a force that accelerated and heightened proc- esses already underway.
Both the New Deal and World War I1 unsettled traditional notions about the size and the character of American govern- ment. As a result, during the years following World War I1 American leaders were involved in negotiating a series of ar- rangements to reconcile competing claims to the...
The scientists known to the Ameri- can public today are not inventors like Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell, and the others who be- came famous in the 19th century for technological innovations. Nor are they discoverers of new principles, like the 20th century's Albert Ein- stein. They are not leaders of the sci- entific community who have served as spokesmen in high places-such as Nobel Prize-winning physicist Robert Millikan after World War I and electrical engineer Vannevar Bush after W...
KOREA
sent in Cold War America.*
Finally, and more generally, the war slowed-if it did not halt entirely-domestic reform on the part of the Truman ad- ministration, while further strengthening conservative forces. Truman was forced to abandon the remnants of the Fair Deal and to depend more and more on conservatives, both in Con- gress, where he was now forced to seek accommodation with the southern Democrats, and within his own administration. The emasculation of the Housing Act of 1949 and...
Nathan Reingold
In 1800, the score of professional scientists in the United States was scarcely distinguishable from the somewhat larger group of devoted amateurs-like the gentleman-scholar Thomas Jefferson and the multi-talented Benjamin Franklin. As befitted a nation of farmers, sailors, and craftsmen, most Americans pursued such sciences as zoology, botany, geology, and astron- omy-sciences rooted in the world around them. There was a constitutional mandate to "wromote" the useful...
by Ralph N.Clough
When the artillery finally stopped firing on July 27, 1953, Korea was a devastated land. The mountains and rice paddies were scarred by trenches and shell holes. Entire villages were erased. Seoul and Pyongyang were partly in ruins. And among the people, the trauma had been profound. The South Koreans had sustained 313,000 battle casualties; more than a million civilians had lost their lives; 2.5 million refugees had fled south from North Korea; and the economy was at a standstill....