Larry Blomstedt, Truman, Congress, and Korea: The Politics of America's First Undeclared War. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. xvi + 305 pp. $50.00.

“I am not a member of any organized political party,” humorist Will Rogers once said. “I am a Democrat.” Larry Blomstedt provides fresh evidence validating his observation, describing how during the Korean War “[President Harry S.] Truman and the congressional Democrats failed each other in important ways” (p. 221). But he exaggerates when he claims to have written “the most detailed political history to date of the Korean War during the Truman administration” (p. xv). Steven Casey's Selling the Korean War: Propaganda, Politics, and Public Opinion in the United States, 1950–1953 (2008) remains the authoritative account. Blomstedt, however, has made a welcome contribution to the literature on the U.S. domestic side of the Korean conflict, complementing two older but still excellent works on the Republican Party—Ronald J. Caridi's The Korean War and American Politics: The Republican Party as a Case Study (1968) and David R. Kepley's The Collapse of the...