The Wall Street Lawyer

A white-haired lawyer from Wall Street sat in a straw hut at Panmunjom last week, while Chinese and North Korean Communists on the other side of the table paid him their respects. "Warmonger! Liar! Rogue! Slicker!" they cried. "You are bloody-handed, deceitful, stupid. We must warn you to behave!" The American leaned back and laughed.

The Communists charged that the "perfidious" U.S. had masterminded Syngman Rhee's release of 27,000 anti-Communist

P.W.s last summer. At this, the American remarked: "What utter nonsense! What utter garbage! How silly can you get?" And when the Reds repeated the slur, the Wall Street lawyer replied in his best courtroom style: "Your charge is untrue. I therefore treat it as a notification that you want these talks recessed indefinitely."

Then he got up and stalked out of the hut, leaving the Communists open-mouthed and stunned. Thus did U.S. Special Ambassador Arthur Hobson Dean call off the deadlocked preliminaries for a Korean peace conference.

The Lawyer. Ambassador Dean, 55, was sent to Panmunjom last October by his longtime law partner in Sullivan & Cromwell, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. He arrived in a neat, pinstriped suit and polished, low-cut shoes. But as the days wore on Dean changed to the only other outfit he had brought along: a rumpled grey suit and a brown sweater that looked as if coffee had been freshly spilled down it.

Dean quickly proved to the men across the table that he was resourceful. He recited verbatim extracts from the armistice agreement, from relevant U.N. documents he had learned by heart. Through 39 sessions, he displayed cool good sense. And when he walked out last week, he did so not because of the Communist insults, but because he had decided that the Communists were deliberately stalling the conference, as they also stalled the P.W. explanations. Behind the scenes, too, Dean turned in a crisp textbook performance. He had his staff prepare "situation papers" every day, and sent poorly reasoned ones back with such comments as "This would never stand up in a court of law."

The Talks. As per the book, Wall Street Lawyer Dean did not come out at once with the best U.S. offer. At the end of the first month, he said that the U.S. was ready for Asian neutrals to join the Korean peace conference as "observers." But the Communists wanted Russia included as a neutral, and this Dean would not have. Russia would be "a back-seat driver constantly telling everyone where to go, how to get there, what turn to take . . . We can't have the Soviet Union there like the proverbial mother-in-law, all gab and no responsibility."

Dean will fly back to the U.S. this week.

If the Communists really want to resume the talks and make sufficient amends, his aides are ready to go on. Dulles had a special reason for sending Dean to Panmunjom: he wanted a fresh reconnaissance of Chinese Communist diplomacy. Dean's counsel: "The best approach to the Communist mentality is to get a reasonable proposal, and stick to it."

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