I.F. Stone, author of The Hidden History of the Korean War, became a professional journalist at the age of fourteen, and has worked for a number of prestigious periodicals. He is a "man of the independent Left" (xiv), and has been often critical of the government, which suggests that his examination of the Korean War will reveal that that war was not grounded in the best of intentions.
This is, indeed, what we find. Stone wrote the book to expose what one observer calls "the greatest swindle in the whole of military history" (xv). Specifically, Stone argues that the Korean War was a cruel fraud from its inception. When peace was at hand, it was sabotaged by forces which wanted the war to continue. Stone himself declares that his book has three basic purposes:
It is a case study in the cold war. It is also a study in wart propaganda, in how to read newspapers and official documents in wartime. . . . Finally, this book is what it purports to be, not "inside stuff" or keyhole revelations but the hidden history of the Korean War (xxii).
Stone bases his findings on "material which could not be challenged by those who accept the official American government point of view," including official documents of the United States and the United Nations, and "respected American and British newspaper sources" (xxi). Stone is emphatic in stating that he did not seriously consider the propaganda sources of either the American or North Korean side.
Stone does not come right out and declare his belief with respect to who started the war. He agrees that there was a tremendous amount of preparation for war on the side of the North prior to the outbreak of hostilities, and he points out that it would have been impossible for the South, and the Americans, not to have concluded that war was imminent.
The sources of the American government, however, are strangely ambivalent. There seems to have been a deliberate attempt on the American s...