미국의 유명한 수사식 보도 전문기자 데이비드 핼버스탐이 쓴 'The Coldest Winter'(가장 추운 겨울)는 한국전을 다룬 大作이다. 핼버스탐은 뉴욕타임스의 사이공 특파원 시절 월남전을 수행하는 미국과 월남정부의 자세를 비판적으로 보도하여 퓰리처상도 받고 유명해졌다. 그가 쓴 'The Best and Brightest'는 케네디, 존슨 행정부의 엘리트들이 왜 월남전을 이끌면서 바보도 하지 않을 오판을 했는가를 추적한 걸작이다.

그는 작년 봄에 교통사고로 사망했다. 그 직전에 완성한 것이 'The Coldest Winter'였다. 미국의 월남전 개입을 비판적으로 다뤘던 그는 한국전에 대해선 미국과 한국의 역할을 호의적으로 평가했다.

그는 한국전에 참전했다가 돌아온 미군들이 좌절하고 실망하여 당당하게 자신의 과거를 밝히지 못했던 때가 있었다고 썼다. 전쟁이 미군의 승리가 아니라 무승부로 끝났기 때문이었다. 한국전 참전은 자랑스런 과거가 아니라 '부끄러운 과거'로 치부되기도 했었다. 그래서 한국전을 '잊혀진 전쟁'이라고 불렀다. 잊어버리고싶은 전쟁이었단 뜻이다.

이런 평가가 서서히 바뀌기 시작했다. 한국전 참전용사들도 자랑스럽게 생각하기 시작했다. 가장 큰 원인은 한국의 발전이었다. 한국전에 참전했던 미국 병사들은 한국을 좋아하지 않았다. 분뇨 냄새 나고, 춥고 더웠던 전선의 기억에다가 절망적인 나라 꼴이 한국을 뒤돌아보기 싫은 나라로 만들었다. 그 한국이 경제적으로 발전하고 민주화까지 되더니 서울올림픽을 성공적으로 치렀다. 반면 북한은 전쟁 때보다 더 못 살게 되었다. 미국의 참전용사들은 '우리가 피를 흘려 자유를 지켜준 덕분이다'고 생각하게 되었다. 한국의 발전을 자랑스럽게 생각하게 된 것이다.

노년의 참전용사들은 한국으로 관광을 왔다. 낙동강 戰線, 휴전선, 판문점을 둘러 보곤 감동의 눈물을 흘렸다. 그들이 만난 한국인들은 미군에 감사했다. 그들은 미국에서 받아보지 못한 환영을 한국에서 받았다. 이런 소문이 미국에 전해지자 더 많은 참전용사들이 한국을 찾고 있다.

쓰레기더미 같았던 부산과 서울이 세계적 대도시로 바뀌고 거지 같았던 한국인들이 미국인들보다 더 오래 사는 신사 숙녀로 바뀌었다. 미국의 참전용사들은 이런 한국의 성공에 자신들의 기여가 있었다고 자부하기 시작했다. 미군은 한국전에서 5만명의 전사자, 10만 명의 부상자를 냈다. 그 희생으로도 승리를 쟁취하지 못했다고 얼굴을 들고 다닐 수가 없었는데, 한국에 와 보고는 희생의 결과가 번영하는 자유의 나라임을 알게 된 것이다.

핼버스탐은 '가장 추운 겨울'에서 한국의 성공은, 유럽을 살린 마셜플랜을 능가하는 트루먼의 업적이었다고 칭송했다. 한국인의 성공 덕분에 미국의 한국전 참전용사들이 얼굴을 들고 살 수 있었다는 이야기를 읽으면서 한국의 反美운동 때문에 갖지 않을 수 없었던 미안한 생각이 다소 누그러졌다.


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David Halberstam
by George Packer
May 7, 2007 Text Size:
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Halberstam, David; Reporters; Writers; Obituaries; War Correspondents; Vietnam War; Journalists, Journalism In 1963, the notion that a newspaper reporter might challenge the official story of generals and ambassadors in the middle of a war, essentially accusing them of lying, was so improbable that it could have occurred only to someone still in his twenties. The Second World War and the unquestionable prestige that it conferred on men in uniform were only a generation old. David Halberstam, who died in a car accident on April 23rd, at the age of seventy-three, was a product of the Cold War, a self-described “square from the fifties” who went off to cover the obscure conflict in Southeast Asia believing that it was a necessary front in a global struggle. He was a liberal anti-Communist, like the leaders of the war. But Halberstam was also a Jewish kid from the Bronx, big and immodest, with oversized hands, clawing his way into the élite culture into which those leaders had been born; his colleague and friend Neil Sheehan later wrote, “His insecurity showed . . . in his compulsion to be recognized and in his need to test himself.”

When Halberstam applied his enormous energy to uncovering the failures of the South Vietnamese Army in the Mekong Delta and was met with denials and disdain from American officials, he responded with a personal, vengeful rage. At a Fourth of July party at the United States Ambassador’s residence in Saigon, he refused to shake hands with General Paul Harkins, the fatuously optimistic commander of the American advisory effort. Halberstam’s wartime work will last not just because of its quality and its importance but because it established a new mode of journalism, one with which Americans are now so familiar that it’s difficult to remember that someone had to invent it. The notion of the reporter as fearless truthteller has become a narcissistic cliché that fits fewer practitioners than would like to claim it. “David changed war reporting forever,” Richard Holbrooke, who had known him in Vietnam, said last week. “He made it not only possible but even romantic to write that your own side was misleading the public about how the war was going. But everything depended on David getting it right, and he did.”

Halberstam went on to write twenty books on almost as many subjects, but historical memory, more ruthless than any of his editors, will eventually cull from them one enduring achievement. “The Best and the Brightest,” which consumed Halberstam from 1969 to 1972, has the feverish atmosphere of an obsession, and if its prose shows the excesses that later subjected him to criticism and parody, in this instance the subject fully deserved his passionate treatment. “The basic question behind the book,” he later wrote, “was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.” When the book was published, Mary McCarthy wrote a scathing assessment in The New York Review of Books. It read like pulp historical fiction, she wrote, without a purpose: “I cannot think who will be benefited by ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ who corrected or instructed.” McCarthy, whose own work on Vietnam consisted of a sympathetic report after a brief visit to Hanoi, was seldom more spectacularly wrong. Halberstam had invented a new genre, the Washington book (now published annually by the dozen), in this case on a tragic historical scale, and with a purpose: to take the reader into the lives of the men around Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to show why their biographies and talents not only failed to prevent the mistakes of Vietnam but made them almost inevitable.

I read “The Best and the Brightest” in Iraq in the summer of 2004. By then, that war had gone badly, perhaps irretrievably, wrong, and Halberstam’s three-decade-old book seemed like front-page news. Halberstam was critical of some of the reporting on Iraq, especially during the prewar period and the invasion. It didn’t always meet his standard of unintimidated truthfulness. Perhaps an element of professional caution had settled over ambitious journalists, as it had over ambitious military officers and government officials. Halberstam’s reporting in Vietnam drew on sources, such as Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann, who risked and sometimes lost their careers. In Iraq, no high-ranking soldier or civilian has been audacious enough to get fired for telling the truth, and it’s almost impossible to imagine a young correspondent refusing to shake the hand of a commanding general in the Green Zone. But that summer, among reporters in Baghdad, “The Best and the Brightest” kept coming up in conversation, making it clear that any historical account that may be written about the origins of this new war will have only one model. ♦