One day last April, Gay Talese was a guest at an analytical writing class I was teaching at the University of Southern California. Introducing my old friend from The New York Times, I said that he and Tom Wolfe and David Halberstam were the greatest reporters of their generation.

“That’s sweet of you to say,” said Mr. Talese, whose elegant writing in The Times and Esquire changed the way other reporters, including Mr. Wolfe, thought about their craft. “But David was the best reporter.”

So he was. I should have said that they were the three most influential craftsmen of that generation. As a reporter, Halberstam was the best of them, far more important, though he couldn’t write nearly as well as Mr. Talese or Mr. Wolfe. His subjects, particularly civil rights and Vietnam, were heavier, of greater consequence—although, God knows, he could be ponderous on the printed page.

Less than a week after Mr. Talese talked of his friend—his best friend—David was dead, killed in a tragic accident near San Francisco.

I’m sure there are many who think newspapers and television newspeople make too much of their own, but not this time. Halberstam’s work and life are symbolic of a golden age of reporting, a time when journalism was much more than just another entertainment, a time when energetic young men and women made a difference, made this a better country.

Halberstam led the way, literally. There was something of Paul Revere and Thomas Paine in his journey from Harvard to becoming the only reporter on the smallest newspaper in Mississippi—because he thought race and civil rights was the biggest (and untold) story in the country. Others came after him with typewriters and cameras and their hearts in their throats to make Americans confront this stain on the flag.

Then he went to Vietnam, not because he was antiwar—his father was a U.S. Army doctor. More than anyone else, Halberstam made Americans confront the reality of what our government was doing there. Others, younger men, particularly Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed his lead, showing that the highest officials of the U.S. government were essentially mounting a coup against country and Constitution.

Is that mythology? Yes. But it’s not a myth. Halberstam, not an easy man to ignore, was at the center of it. His 1972 book The Best and the Brightest has become an American classic not because it eviscerated the American government but because it was so American, so idealistic in its belief that America was better than what America was doing.

Then a couple of years ago, he began telling anyone who would listen that his upcoming book on the Korean War would be his best. It’s not—The Best and the Brightest still is—but it is an important book, compelling in David’s wordy, authoritative way.

And, though the battle scenes and analysis are strikingly vivid—that’s why it’s compelling—The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War isn’t really about Korea.

In his introduction, he writes of going into the public library in Key West, Fla., and seeing that there were 88 books on the war in Vietnam but only four on the Korean War. He notes, “To the degree that the Korean war ever had a niche in popular culture, it was through the Robert Altman antiwar movie (and then sitcom) M*A*S*H, about a mobile surgical hospital operating during that war. Ostensibly about Korea, the film was really about Vietnam, and came out in 1970, at the highwater mark of popular protest against that war.”

And The Coldest Winter is really about Iraq and Vietnam.

I was home from school, sick I guess, on June 30, 1950, when a black-and-white map of the Korean peninsula appeared on our little Philco television screen. The communists in North Korea had invaded the good guys of South Korea. Soon enough a voice from somewhere mentioned things like the 38th parallel—and said that United States troops would soon be there to teach the Reds a lesson they would never forget.

“Yes!” I thought or maybe shouted. Finally! It seems I was not alone. President Harry S. Truman was saying, “By God, I’m going to let them have it!” The commander of United States forces in the Pacific, the immortal Douglas MacArthur, came to see it as a chance to destroy Red China.

Of course, there was a difference: I was a 12-year-old boy who thought America was invincible.

Or was there much difference? In this telling, the president and the egomaniacal general come across as being as ignorant as I was regarding the mind and strength of the enemy. It’s the same old (or is it new?) story of a diminished military, lousy intelligence and worse arrogance. Halberstam tells this sad tale powerfully, though intermittently soars off into flights of sometimes unnecessary biography and analysis. He never uses one word when 13 will do. He writes that Americans were “surprised” at how poorly our troops fought at the beginning, then adds, “it was more than a surprise; it was nothing less than shock.”

So be it. The more important impact of the book involves the way the military works. If The Best and the Brightest was about the hubris and lying of Washington, The Coldest Winter is about the hidden hubris of generals and colonels, beginning with the mad genius and willful stupidity of MacArthur—a man feared by everyone above him, even President Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Much of the book in fact revolves around the weakness of political figures afraid to take on the self-promoting national monument that MacArthur became. Few people my age will ever forget being called into school auditoriums in 1952 after Truman finally dismissed MacArthur for obvious insubordination. We were seated there not to hear the president, but to hear MacArthur’s “old soldiers never die” farewell speech to his right-wing idolaters in Congress.

There’s wonderful reporting in this book. As always Halberstam roamed the countryside, interviewing at length (and again and again) the old men who had been in Korea almost 60 years ago. He got their stories, and they tell us what it was like in that place at that time.

What will stick with me, and I hope with many Americans, is from Col. Paul Freeman, West Point ’33, commander of the 325th Regiment, Second Division, United States Army, writing home to his wife, Mary Anne, on September 12, 1950:

“It’s poured for the last three days. … Our artillery planes can’t go up and we are blind. We’re just sitting here, taking it. We’ve already repulsed thirteen attacks in force—ten of them at night. The nights are the worst. The gooks pour in all over, and we continue to slaughter them. The rest of the time we’re continually under fire. … Our losses are terrific. I have left less than 40 percent of what I had on the 31st of August when this particular battle started. Almost all of my company officers have been lost. We are bitter about the whole thing. We fight desperately for all we’re worth; not only because our course is right, but also because we’re fighting for our survival. But it all seems so useless and stupid. To ‘liberate’ South Korea, we’re destroying it and its people. All Koreans hate us. Everyone here is an enemy. We can’t trust anyone. … I feel more and more that we have made a supreme error in committing our forces to this bottomless pit.”

Richard Reeves, author of 14 books and senior lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, was a colleague of David Halberstam at The Times.

A few years ago, when I was working on my book about the Presidency of Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger came up behind me in a restaurant in New York and, with his hands on the back of my shoulders, asked: "So, why aren't you talking to me?"

"Well," I answered, "I want to know as much as you do about some things before I ask questions about them."

"That will be difficult," said a friend at my table.

"Impossible, I'd say," rumbled Mr. Kissinger.

We all laughed. He was right, of course.

The great diplomat is a wonderful man with words-after all, what is diplomacy but a graceful rearranging of words under pressure to clean up the sins of the world? The same could be said of the writing of history, another Kissinger talent. It is doubly difficult to catch the very clever diplomat in an actual lie. The whole truth, never.

This one is my favorite Kissinger twists:

In his 1979 memoirs, White House Years , artfully dodging charges that he and Nixon betrayed or abandoned the Chinese Nationalist regime in Taiwan in the American haste to make a deal with what used to be called Red China, Mr. Kissinger wrote of his preliminary sessions with Chou En-lai: "Taiwan was mentioned only briefly during the first session." The transcript of that session, declassified 25 years later, showed that the brief mention was Mr. Kissinger's pledge to Chou that the United States would never support independence for Taiwan. Smiling, Chou replied, "Good, these talks may now proceed."

In fact, the former National Security Advisor (1969-75) and Secretary of State (1973-77) is so enamored of his own words and versions of his tales that he tells them twice in this new book, which is a reworking of sections of four of his previous works. He has plagiarized three volumes of his own memoirs, including White House Years and Diplomacy , winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History in 1994: "I have rearranged and occasionally rewritten the material to provide a consecutive narrative from the anecdotal tone of memoirs to a more general account of the period, provided connecting text where necessary, and added new material."

A footnote adds: "All this is clearer to me in hindsight. My own views evolved only gradually, paralleling the increasing ambivalence of our society." Yes. The most qualified reviewer of the specifics of the ending of America's longest war, Larry Berman, author of No Peace, No Honor: Nixon, Kissinger and Betrayal in Vietnam , writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review a couple of weeks ago, takes the old material apart, writing of "an Alice in Wonderland quality." He then suggests that if Henry Kissinger were an honorable man, he would return the Nobel Peace Prize he was awarded in 1973.

It is true that most of the old dodges-most particularly the convoluted denials that the American-installed government and people of South Vietnam were left twisting in the wind when the United States signed some papers and left the place-are still in the main text of this paperback version of the lies upon lies of the public dialogue of those days. The format and price of Ending the Vietnam War , along with some simplifications, indicate that what this is really about is Mr. Kissinger's determination to get his side of the story to a new generation in a textbook.

He puts that this way in a new six-page foreword:

"My purpose in undertaking this task is not to settle the debate of a generation ago retroactively but to leave for a new generation, hopefully untouched by the passions of the past, an opportunity to obtain as accurate an account as possible of how one group of America's leaders viewed and tried to surmount a tragic national experience."

The most interesting material in the text itself is the footnotes. A note on page 69, discussing the double bookkeeping of the secret bombing of Cambodia, says the deception-years of it-was just a simple "bureaucratic blunder." It seems, according to Mr. Kissinger, that only the first mission was supposed to be secret-a secrecy maintained by Air Force records listing targets in Vietnam rather than Cambodia. But oh my goodness: No one remembered to tell the Pentagon to go back to keeping honest books.

The foreword ends with a ludicrous paragraph:

"As these lines are being written, America finds itself once again at war-this time with no ambiguity about the nature of the threat. While history never repeats itself directly, there is at least one lesson to be learned from the tragedy described in these pages: that America must never again permit its promise to be overwhelmed by its divisions."

Oh, those damn Americans and their passions! The people never get it right. This is how Mr. Kissinger explains the nation's "divisions":

"Stimulated by a sense of guilt and encouraged by modern psychiatry and the radical chic rhetoric of upper middle-class suburbia, these outbursts symbolized the end of an era of simple faith in the traditional values of mid-America. Ironically, the insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma."

Others might call that popular resistance, the essence of democracy. But Mr. Kissinger does not really believe in democracy. Neither did Nixon. Their fatal flaw was the contempt they had for American institutions-and Americans. The real enemies in their many books are, routinely, not the totalitarians they publicly and militarily opposed, but the Congress, the press and that misguided electorate. The America these two gifted, troubled men wanted was something like what scientists call a "black box": What happened inside could be disconnected from the rest of the universe around it. The darker side of each man's nature-each trying to reconstruct governance (in Nixon's case) and foreign policy (in Mr. Kissinger's) in his own image-combined into a toxicity that poisoned at least a couple of American generations. Now Henry Kissinger is after another one.

I worked on the Nixon Presidency for the better part of 10 years, and found some of what I just said difficult to understand, at least at first. If one thing brought that together for me-and it was what I thought of while reading this book-it was something told me by Winston Lord, who was Mr. Kissinger's principal assistant at the National Security Council and was often part of conversations between the President and his National Security Advisor. "They deliberately mirrored adversaries who were secretive," said Lord. "In China, only two or three people were involved in decision-making."

It is that ambition, that secrecy-and the lies it took to protect the secrecy-that Henry Kissinger is now defending as traditional American values. Put to music, it is the world turned upside-down.

Richard Reeves is the author of President Nixon: Alone in the White House (Simon and Schuster). He is currently working on a book on President Reagan.