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Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion, 1950-1953. By steven casey. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. 488 pp. $55.00 (cloth).
Steven Casey's Selling the Korean War is an exquisitely documented and exceptionally detailed chronological narrative of the Truman and Eisenhower administrations' domestic propaganda campaign aimed at popularizing the Korean War in the United States. Casey principally relies on published as well as unpublished official documents from the presidential libraries and the National Archives and Records Administration. This is not a book about the Korean War in the sense that it is not about Korea or the Koreans, and neither is it an examination of American strategic leadership or policy. Other historians and political scientists have already laid a solid foundation for American archivesbased scholarship on U.S. policy making for Korea and the Korean War, including Donald S. MacDonald, Bruce Cumings, and William W. Stueck. To the existing historiography, Casey adds the complex story of how the U.S. government exercised the "power to mold, manipulate, and control media coverage" in wartime (p. 13). By successfully convincing the American public of the necessity of intervention as well as the global Cold War implications, the Truman administration was able to pass NSC-68, indefinitely committing the nation to militancy and nearly quadrupling U.S. defense spending. Even after the war quickly turned into an interminable stalemate, the Truman administration was able to consistently maintain enough public support for the war that even the first...