Oberdorfer's book illuminates 'Two Koreas'

By Edward Neilan

TOKYO (JP): A new book should become a best seller at least in Seoul's Blue House and in the Presidential bunker in Pyongyang.

South Korean President Kim Young-sam and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il, if they do read the book, would surely learn a thing or two about the way the rest of the world perceives them and their policies from a cohesive backstage perspective.

Never since the 1950 Korean War have the background intricacies of the troubled peninsula -- particularly from the United States policy viewpoint -- been as meticulously reported and analyzed as well as commented upon so authoritatively.

The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History, by Don Oberdorfer (Addison-Wesley, Reading, Maine, 458 pp.) published last week, fulfills another purpose besides illumination: Oberdorfer serves notice that journalists are back as astute chroniclers of events and authors of perspective.

Oberdorfer has been reporting and writing about Asia for The Washington Post since the days when foreign correspondents used typewriters instead of laptop computers to file their stories.

In the last decade, academics heavy with advanced study degrees have all but taken over newspaper op-ed pages and news analysis slots in magazines and televised "talking head" sound bytes. The reportage of knowledgeable journalists has been out of vogue and out of print.

Oberdorfer corrects that wrong-way syndrome with his book that will command the respect of statesmen, diplomats and other specialists in the way that journalists Walter Lippman, James Reston and Joe Alsop informed public opinion in another era.

Oberdorfer, as a fine journalist, fills out the abstraction of scholarship by means of immediate, sensory reporting and anecdotes. The strict academic approach -- "don't write anything unless you have a document to back it up" -- misses a lot of the flavor of events. Oberdorfer's kind of "documentation" -- over 450 interviews in South and North Korea and other countries -- gives a first-person familiarity with important events and players.

The other notable book on Korea published this year, Korea's Place In The Sun: A Modern History, by Bruce Cumings, (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 502 pp.) is an example of the difference. With all due respect, Northwestern University professor Cumings' work is a nice piece of scholarship, but in my opinion Oberdorfer's is the better all-around book.

Cumings, for one thing, can't shake his earlier gaffe: an insistence that South Korea started the Korean War instead of North Korea. The preponderance of evidence available now from Russian and Chinese sources means Cumings should own up to his mistake gracefully and move on. Instead he clings to a thesis which applied elsewhere would say World War II in the Pacific began with embargoes and Japanese dreams of power rather than with the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Koreans deserve the long-overdue attention they are getting from the likes of Oberdorfer and Cumings and there are more books coming soon: Robert J. Myers of Hoover Institution, Stanford University, will provide in his book the insight of having known most of the major actors in the Korean drama since the end of World War II and Tokyo-based journalist (Asian Wall Street Journal, Newsweek) Bradley Martin's manuscript will combine eyewitness accounts and scholarship on North Korea.

Push the "Korea" button in most world citizens' minds and up pops a card reading "Korean War, M*A*S*H, Asian Tiger, nuclear threat, North Korean famine" and perhaps one or two others. These new books help correct the "Korean gap" in contemporary East Asian non-fiction literature. English language lists in the genre tend to be dominated alternatively by Japan and China titles.

Because the United States was a party to the division of Korea in the first place, plus the Korean War experience, the peninsula is part of Washington's unfinished business in East Asia. Oberdorfer's fine book is a lucid reminder of that responsibility.