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The War Was Over in Korea. That Camera Which Caught Every Moment of Everyone's Life Was Adjusted to Run Backwards So That

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The War Was Over in Korea. That Camera Which Caught Every Moment of Everyone's Life Was Adjusted to Run Backwards So That “‘Bullwhip Barbarians…the Worst of This Breed': Postwar Portrayals of ‘North Korea’ in the U.S. media, 1953-1963” Brandon K. Gauthier Fordham University “The war was over in Korea. That camera which caught every moment of everyone’s life was adjusted to run backwards so that they were all returned to the point from which they had started out to war. Not all.” 1 - Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate I. THE ENEMY THAT REMAINED The last bomb fell less than thirty minutes before the cease-fire was to go into effect ending the Korean War. As the exceedingly anxious residents of P’yŏngyang waited, and—for the lucky few that had a clock—watched the ticking hand of war wind down in the moment, a single U.S. B-26 bomber sailed stealthily through the night-sky over the enemy capital, dropping one last piece of ordinance. At 9:36 PM, that detonation shook the city, leaving a single trail of acrid smoke wafting upwards.2 The flames were temporary, but the thundering roar of that explosion, like so many others, would reverberate in the public memory of North Koreans. On July 27, 1953, active combat in the Korean War came to an end—but there was no unconditional surrender, no decisive victory for either side, only a temporary reprieve from the slaughter. Somber celebrations seized both sides of the newly minted Korean Demilitarized 1 Richard Condon, The Manchurian Candidate (New York, 1957), 106-107. 2 Bruce Cumings, The Korean War: A History (New York, 2010), 159; Brandon K. Gauthier, "This Day in the History of the DPRK: June 18, Juche 41 (1953),” NKnews.org, June 18, 2012 < http://www.nknews.org/2012/06/this-day-in-the-history-of-the-dprk-june-18-juche-41-1953/> 2 Zone, yet there was little escaping the fact that nothing was settled. Far from it, the conflict in Korea had only entered a new phase. The cease-fire did, however, bring a sigh of relief from the American home front. It was a break from three years of unrelenting carnage in a faraway, and exceedingly unpopular, conflict that many had feared would escalate into a thermonuclear war, ruining the surging prosperity of 1950s America. The United States had pledged to defend South Korea, but it had little interest in continuing to risk World War III for the sake of Syngman Rhee’s emphatic insistence on the reunification of his country at any cost.3 After the upheavals of the Great Depression and World War II, and three years of inglorious bloodshed in Korea, the allure of the crabgrass frontier loomed large for the American people.4 Unprecedented numbers enjoyed the tangible benefits of capitalist modernity, relishing well-manicured lawns in cookie-cutter suburbs, electric vacuum cleaners, and kitchen appliances galore.5 Most wanted nothing more to do with Korea. But beneath that placid surface of Cold War domesticity, Americans could not escape the war’s consequences in the decade after July 27, 1953. David Halberstam noted in the final work of his career that the conflict in Korea would remain “largely outside American political and cultural consciousness,” but a survey of the popular media during and after the war suggests 3 The United States and South Korea initialed a Mutual Defense Treaty on August 8, 1953, in which both sides pledged to defend each other against “armed attack… in accordance with its constitutional processes.” In January 1954, the U.S. Senate—eager to avoid renewed combat instigated by Rhee— ratified the treaty with the explicit understanding that nothing in the agreement could “be construed as requiring the United States to give assistance to [South] Korea except in the event of an armed attack against territory which has been recognized by the United States as lawfully brought under the administrative control of the Republic of Korea.” For the text of the treaty, see: U.S. Department of State, American Foreign Policy: Basic Documents, 1950-1955, Vol. 1 (Washington, D.C., 1957), 898. 4 See: Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York, 1985). 5 On postwar consumerism, see: Lizbeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York, 2003). On Cold War domesticity, see: Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York, 1988). 3 otherwise.6 Memoirs and films told the stories of American POWs who survived North Korean and Chinese prison camps. Newspapers reported on repeated military and diplomatic clashes in Korea. Thousands of young Americans arrived on the frontlines of the Korean DMZ for the first time. The public could not forget a conflict that had never ended. In the ten years after the armistice, the Korean War’s painful legacy—and the woeful experiences of U.S. prisoners of war—led Americans to associate North Koreans with barbarism and a perceived weakness of national character in the United States that heightened public animosity towards the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea [DPRK]. Of 7,190 Americans captured in the conflict—just 4,428 returned home, an appalling 38% death rate, higher than any other war in U.S. history.7 The stories of those former prisoners, much to the public’s morbid fascination, emphasized North Korean atrocities and Chinese “brainwashing” techniques.8 POW accounts occasionally spoke to the humanity of Koreans north of the DMZ, but they more often described North Koreans as ruthless killers. That enemy, many believed as 6 David Halberstam, The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (New York, 2007), 3. 7 See: Raymond Lech, Broken Soldiers (Chicago, Il, 2000), 1-2. For the official Department of Defense report on U.S. POWs in the Korean War, see: The Report of the Secretary of Defense’s Advisory Committee on Prisoners of War, POW: THE FIGHT CONTINUES AFTER THE BATTLE (Washington, D.C., 1955). 8 CIA Agent Edward Hunter, Charles S. Young notes, invented the term “brainwashing,” using it for the first time in a 1950 article in the Miami Sunday News. See: Young, Name, Rank, and Serial Number (New York, 2014), 134-135. Publications on “brainwashing” in the American media proliferated in the decade after Hunter made up the term, see for example: Edward Hunter, Brainwashing in Red China (New York, 1953); idem., Brainwashing: The Story of Men Who Defied It (New York, 1956); Raymond A. Bauer, “Brainwashing: Psychology or Demonology?” Journal of Social Issues 13:3 (1957): 41-47; Rear Admiral D.V. Gallery, USN, “We Can Baffle the Brainwashers!” Saturday Evening Post, January 22, 1955, 94; K. Lamott, “Memoirs of a Brainwasher,” Harper’s Magazine (June 1956): 73-76; Anthony Leviero, “For the Brainwashed: Pity or Punishment,” New York Times Magazine, August 14, 1955, 12; Robert J. Lifton, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of 'Brainwashing' in China (New York, 1961); Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing (Cleveland, OH, 1956); Edgar H. Schein, “Brainwashing and Totalitarianism in Modern Society,” World Politics 11 (1959): 430-442; George Winokur, “Brainwashing—A Social Phenomenon of Our Time,” Human Organization 13:4 (1955): 16-18. 4 a result, was one of the United States’ most barbaric foes in a global struggle against communism, a pawn of the Soviet Union and China—yes—but a uniquely brutal force in its own right.9 At the same time, the public memory of the Korean War often focused more on the supposed collaboration of thousands of American POWs rather than Chinese and North Korean atrocities.10 The conflict became known as the “Exceptional War” in the American imagination, a time when young Americans forlornly crumbled before a new enemy: “totalitarian Communism” of a peculiar Asian vein.11 Cinematic portrayals of North Korea on the Hollywood big screen thus merged with those of “Red China” in the late 1950s and early 1960s, reminding Americans of a festering insecurity about themselves and a monolithic enemy who remained undefeated in East Asia.12 This essay argues that the prisoner of war experience created a lens through which Americans imagined “North Korea” as a subjective construct from 1950 to 1962. It recounts 9 It is widely known that the Truman administration and the American public viewed North Korea as a pawn of the Soviet-dominated “Communist world.” U.S. and ROK officials continued to encourage that erroneous view after the Korean War—though they increasingly argued that the People’s Republic of China controlled North Korea in Moscow’s stead. In reality, the 1950s saw North Korea increasingly emerge as an independent state. After the August 1956 Plenum of the Korean Workers Party (KWP) in particular, the DPRK gained unprecedented autonomy from Soviet and Chinese influence and—as Andrei Lankov notes—moved towards becoming “one of a handful of Communist countries that managed to leave the orbit of Soviet satellites,” see: Crisis in North Korea: the Failure of De- Stalinization, 1956 (Honolulu, HI, 2005), 222-223. 10 The American press rarely defined what it meant by “collaboration,” but the term often encompassed acts that ranged widely in severity. “Collaboration” could mean signing peace proposals against the war, leading “progressive” study sessions on socialism, or informing on other POWs. 11 Eugene Kinkead’s sensationalized coverage of the POW experience encouraged the erroneous belief that such misconduct was unprecedented in American history. See: In Every War But One (New York, 1959), 9-15; idem., “A Report at Large: The Study of Something New in History,” The New Yorker, October 26, 1957, 102-153. 12 The latter, of course, is best represented by the endlessly analyzed book and film, The Manchurian Candidate.
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