Truce, with Misgivings

A truce in Korea seemed to be at hand and, for an end to the bloodletting, the U.S. would be grateful. But, as the negotiators at Panmunjom signed an agreement on the exchange of prisoners and prepared to issue a cease-fire order (see INTERNATIONAL), there was little U.S. elation. Presidential Aide Sherman Adams, delivering a commencement address at St. Lawrence University, struck a note of sober warning. "At the moment of a Korean truce," he said, "we shall be in danger. There will be nothing in the terms of such a truce which will give any permanent relief from the ominous threat which confronts the free world."

The Big Pressures. Misgivings about the Korean truce had dogged U.S. policymakers ever since last March 30, when Red China's Chou Enlai, just back from Moscow, modified the Communist stand on forced prisoner repatriation and prompted reopening of the Panmunjom talks. Where the U.S. hesitated, lest basic principles be betrayed, its allies, led by Britain and India, urged it on.

On his trip last month to the Middle East and South Asia, Secretary of State Foster Dulles was startled to find that India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was convinced that the U.S. really did not want a truce. Dulles persuaded Nehru that the U.S. was sincere in.its insistence on "honorable" terms. Nehru relayed his own changed opinion of U.S. intentions to Peking. From that point on, the negotiators at Panmunjom swiftly came to terms. The prisoner agreement as finally signed was, in essence, Nehru's plan.

The Big Break. News of the decisive break at Panmunjom clacked onto a Pentagon teletype machine in the small hours of Thursday morning. By 9 a.m. the official report from Tokyo had been sped by courier across the Potomac to State's Office of Far Eastern Affairs. There, Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson studied the message, then hurried word up two floors above to Secretary Dulles, who relayed the word to the White House. Before the day was out, a wave of truce optimism spread from Washington to U.N. headquarters, and on to the capitals of the West. But in the South Korean capital at Seoul, closest to the front and most concerned with the goal of a free Korea, there was no optimism: President Syngman Rhee cried that the truce terms were a betrayal of his government's hope for the land's unity and security.

Rhee's stand, a last-ditch menace to an armistice, was grave enough to warrant Dwight Eisenhower's intervention (see col. j). For the U.S., it became the first tough problem rising from the truce deal. Others as dangerous lay ahead. The truce left the whole issue of Chinese Commu nist aggression unsettled. The Chinese Reds not only were relieved of military pressure, but they were enormously more powerful in Asia, by reason of being encamped in North Korea. Until the Red troops vacate, a unified Korea has about as much chance as a unified Germany with the Red army occupying East Germany.

Yet Eisenhower doubtless will be pressed to accept the Korean truce as evidence of Soviet good faith in clearing the way for Four Power talks. In the Far Eastern political conference to be called after the armistice is signed, Red China will probably demand the seat in the U.N. that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government now holds. To this, the U.S., as its President and Congress have made clear, is resolutely opposed. But, continuing to resist what its biggest allies call an obvious next step, the U.S. is more than ever on the defensive.

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