We are all familiar with the work of American correspondents and journalists in the Vietnam War, and how their vivid reports of the fighting and the human suffering that came as a consequence played some part in influencing the crucial attitudes of public opinion toward that most divisive of wars. By contrast, the whole subject of the reporting of the Korean War, and of fluctuating public attitudes to that equally bloody and, during its course, contentious conflict, has escaped detailed historical scrutiny. It is on this largely blank canvass that Steven Casey has drawn a masterly analysis of what is certain to become the standard work on its subject.

Casey's basic concern is to show how the Truman administration attempted to sell to the American public the merits of a limited war, an especially difficult task when battlefield fortunes oscillated so wildly in its first year and then settled into a debilitating and bloody stalemate, and also to illuminate the relations between officials and the politicians and media they were attempting to influence. In doing this, and based on prodigious research in multiple archival sources, Casey offers a wholly new perspective on the war and revisits with great profit many of the orthodoxies accepted by historians.

One example here is the appraisal of the fallout from the MacArthur hearings in the summer of 1951, which, rather than further driving away Republican congressional critics of the administration's foreign policy, is seen as serving to swing key internationalist senators such as Leverett Saltonstall back toward bipartisanship. Another is the treatment of the 1952 presidential election campaign, where Casey downplays public disillusionment with the war, even showing that Truman's stand over prisoner-of-war repatriation helped to bolster support for the administration's cause in Korea. Instead, there was little to choose between Eisenhower and Stevenson over alternative approaches to concluding the war, and the former made relatively few attempts to attack existing policy.

By deftly shifting his focus between the high policymaking levels of the Truman administration, congressional debates, the Far East Command in Tokyo, and the work of reporters in Korea itself (and the censorship issues they sometimes faced), we are offered a multilayered view of the war that is far more convincing than many other monochrome efforts. The whole study is, moreover, conveyed with real verve and at a cracking pace, no more so than when Casey follows his intrepid reporters, such as the indomitable Marguerite Higgins and Homer Bigart, as they struggled through the harrowing retreats of 1950–51, and attempted to file their all-important copy back to the United States. In sum, this is an exceptionally good book which does full justice to the complexity of the domestic politics of the Korean War and the role of the media, official institutions, and politicians in shaping public opinion.