There is a widespread impression in the U.S. that South Korea's experiment with democratic government has gone poorly mainly because of the autocratic personality of President Syngman Rhee. Published this week is a vigorous dissent from this view: The Korea Story (Henry Regnery; $3), by John C. Caldwell, a China missionary's son and a veteran of the U.S. foreign service in the Far East. His conclusion: the U.S. State Department, possessed by "some of the same naive notions that . . . lost us China," messed up the chance to promote democracy in Korea.
For a while in 1946, Caldwell...
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