The Unknown War, The Forgotten War, Korea: The War Before Vietnam – these titles and subtitles of studies of the Korean conflict published in the mid- to late 1980s give some indication of the perceived status of that event, especially in comparison with what many have seen as its offspring, or close relative, the war in Vietnam. Roger Dingman once described the neglect of Korea as resulting from its being sandwiched between the “good war” and the “bad war”; and Joseph Goulden attributed that neglect to the conflict's uninspiring nature. It was an event that most Americans were “eager to permit to slip through the crevices of memory.”

The outcome has been that it has taken over thirty years for the moral and intellectual questions raised by these hostilities to be exposed and debated. For example, we have only recently discussed whether a domestic revolution with potentially regional repercussions was stopped on the peninsula in June 1950, whether the push into South Korea was a case of Southern entrapment, or of Soviet and/or North Korean aggression, whether U.S. threats to use atomic weapons were either effective or justified, and whether the costs suffered by all sides – but especially by the Koreans – in this enormously destructive war were commensurate with a negotiated settlement that plainly did not provide the basis for an eventual reunification of the peninsula.

For years, David Rees's book – an orthodox analysis that reflected and reinforced Washington's own interpretations of the war's origins and course – stood as the standard account of the war.