Beijing and the Korean Crisis, June 1950-June 1951

Our understanding of the Korean War and especially the crisisfilled first year of that war has undergone some dramatic changes. Through the 1980s, approaching the fortieth anniversary of the outbreak of the war, some twenty books appeared dealing with the war's politics, diplomacy, and strategy.' late Gregory Henderson, writing in an elegiac vein, acknowledged this new era in scholarship. The men who lived the Korean War now pass. A new generation, eyes deep in mountains of documents declassified up to 1954, claims the old fields. headiness of those years for us who lived them ebbs. We come, cooly sic enmeshed in footnotes, to the scribes' time.2 scribes have been busiest rewriting American policy and Anglo-American relations during the war. Perhaps as much as anything, the appearance between 1976 and 1984 of the relevant volumes in the U.S. foreign relations series and the clock-like opening of pertinent materials in the British Public Records Office stimulated this fresh research. New accounts have also brought the role of Ko-