No Whistles Blew

The Kremlin had spoken, and the sound of fighting dropped to a halfhearted rattle. The Kremlin had spoken, and the response had come chattering over the Peking radio in the thin, staccato voice of the Chinese spokesman. Peace was in sight in Korea.

All week long U.S. citizens had waited, hopeful but feeling that to hope too hard was humiliating, suspicious but feeling that to be too suspicious was self-defeating. The U.S. had never sued for peace, and it was anxious not even to appear to be suing now. Peace, if it was to be peace, was coming in an almost unreal diplomacy of indirection, in hints and hopes, in negotiations by men intent on proving that they didn't really have to negotiate.

There was no blowing of factory whistles; no pretty girls were kissed on the streets. At best, there was a soiled feeling of an ordeal ended by mutual exhaustion. Nobody talked of a V-K day. Universally, there was recognition that the respite was only temporary. "What good is it?" demanded a Tacoma logger. "They'll be at it again somewhere, just you wait and see."

Was it victory? The U.N. had stamped on the reaching fingers of an aggressor, then forced him to snatch his fingers back. But few could accept with any enthusiasm Dean Acheson's insistence that a truce at the 38th parallel would mean "a successful conclusion" to the war. Acheson said: "Our objective is to stop the attack, end the aggression, restore peace--providing against the renewal of the aggression." That, said Acheson, was what the United Nations had set out to do.

But a tie had never been to an American's liking, nor the sense of walking away from a job half-done. "I'm not satisfied at all," grumbled Ohio's Robert Taft. "Rather than punishment, it looks like a reward for aggression." But few, even among those who grumbled, insisted on pressing a war which, on its present ground rules, the U.S. could not win and was unwilling to lose. Over all, there was a pervading sense of a settlement that settled nothing, of a peace that would be neither a beginning of real peace nor the end of threatened war.

The shooting might stop. For that, a people who had always opposed shooting was duly and wearily grateful. But every U.S. citizen knew that the Kremlin, which had given the word for peace, could and would speak again.

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