The January 1968 North Korean seizure of the intelligence-collecting ship USS Pueblo
came close to sparking a second Korean War. Lerner, an assistant professor of history, synthesizes newly available documents and a large number of participant interviews to attribute the crisis to the Johnson administration's unsophisticated interpretation of contemporary international relations as bipolar global rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Sending the Pueblo
to monitor electronic communications and naval activity off North Korea's coast was regarded as a routine mission in the general context of the Cold War. The ship, its crew and captain were poorly prepared for any unexpected occurrences, able neither to resist nor escape the North Korean gunboats. Johnson and his advisers processed the seizure as having been orchestrated by the Soviet Union. U.S. responses focused on Moscow and on international agencies like the Red Cross and the World Court. Lerner, however, offers extensive documentary evidence that the U.S.S.R. was not involved in the Pueblo's seizure. Instead, he makes a convincing case that North Korea acted on its own and for domestic reasons. Kim II Sung, according to Lerner, was increasingly committed to structuring North Korea around the ideological principle of juche, or "self-identity." Juche
required the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea to act in all areas without regard for external influence. Even in its early stages, attempts to apply the concept had generated economic shortages and political dissent sufficient to impel Kim to assert "self-identity" in another way: seizing a ship whose presence, even in international waters, was in any case provocative. American efforts to resolve the crisis, pointed as they were in the wrong direction, only exacerbated it. In the absence of North Korean documents, Lerner's argument cannot be regarded as definitively proven, but expect it to get serious (if quiet) play among historians and policy makers. (May)
