Good post.

One of the people in this world I respect the most is Korean War veteran. He certainly has an emotion attachment to the alliance. Of course, the fact that he was a Korean citizen during the war and is an American citizen living in Korea now may have something to do with it.

He was a trooper who had some logistics responsibility and gave away a lot of food to war refugees. Said Korea was the coldest place on earth. As a native of Tennessee, I wonder if he had the right frame of reference to say that (i.e. I doubt a Russian, for example, would say that)?

Anyways, he was in real bad health at the time and I doubt he’s alive now. Americans who do remember the Korean War are truly dying off and the alliance will have to adjust.

It might be more accurate to call Hyde part of the bipartisan foreign policy consensus that came of the WWII experience; from the US perspective of that generation, the Korean War was essentially a follow-on to their WWII fight against totalitarianism.

We are all products of our experiences:
“Hyde was born in Chicago on April 18, 1924, where he was an all-city basketball center. After serving in the Navy from 1944 to 1946, seeing combat in the Philippines, he graduated from Georgetown University in 1947 and returned to Chicago to earn a law degree from Loyola in 1949.

Raised a Democrat, he switched parties to vote for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952…..

But he has also on occasion parted ways with his conservative colleagues….

In the 1990s he joined the Clinton administration in opposing …. restricting [President Clinton's] authority to engage troops overseas [by] some GOP lawmakers [in] protest [of US] military operations in Haiti, Somalia and Bosnia….”

I vaguely remember looking up Hyde’s WWII experience (probably as a result of a previous posting here). I can’t remember the details offhand now, but since his Navy experience (on a vessel?) included time in Phillippine waters, he undoubtedly got first-hand information on the extensive Japanese atrocities committed in their defense of Manila (Feb-Mar 1945). I strongly suspect that was a key factor leading to his subsequent long-term interest in Asian affairs in general and Korean ones in particular.

He only got the standard written notice today (Sun morning US) on the “in memoriam” section that always concludes ABC News “This Week” (Sun morning news interview/panel discussion). But on NBC’s Meet the Press, towards the end of the hour the host Tim Russert took a minute or so to discuss Hyde personally, in a generally favorable light (showing some old footage of Hyde being interviewed on the Clinton impeachment, also Hyde’s son receiving the award of US Presidential Medal of Freedom on his behalf last year; this must have been somewhat concurrent with the Korean government award).

Russert came out of the same Irish Catholic political tradition as Hyde (which even in the pre-WWII era included a little-known Republican party subset); I suspect this at least partly accounts for the difference in coverage between the two Sun morning news shows.

I note this in detail because I see ROK President Roh is a Roman Catholic (also a lawyer like Hyde; and also Kim Dae-Jung was Catholic). Regardless of whether there was any personal friendship, their common experience may have been an additional source of current Korean administration affinity for Hyde, one that could be expressed regardless of whether any personal friendship (or even personal contac) had occurred between them.

I was never a big fan of Hyde but he definitely had a knack for getting the perspective right when it came to the Korean File.

“Bumps in the road.” HA! I can’t speak for the U.S. government but I sure hope they aren’t just bumps in the road.

Nor would I share his optimism on the FTA or Visa Waiver. However, he was dead on concerning the “Host.”