With or Without

This week the U.S. indicated that it intends to go ahead with a truce in Korea, with Syngman Rhee's assent if possible, without it if necessary.

U.N. Supreme Commander Mark Clark dispatched a letter to North Korea's Kim II Sung and Red China's Peng Teh-huai. asking for resumed truce talks "in an earnest endeavor to achieve an early armistice." The U.N. Command is a military command, he said, and it does not control the sovereign South Korean government. By agreement, it is supposed to control the ROK armed forces; therefore, the Rhee government broke an agreement when ROK soldiers, acting on their government's secret instructions, aided and abetted the escape of 25,000 North Korean prisoners. But, Clark insisted, "the recovery of all these prisoners would be as impossible for us as it would be for your side to recover the 50,000 South Korean prisoners 'released' by your side during the course of hostilities."

General Clark did not guarantee that he could control Syngman Rhee. He promised only: "Where necessary, the United Nations Command will, to the limits of its ability, establish military safeguards to insure that the armistice terms are observed."

To make old Syngman Rhee see reason if possible, Washington had dispatched a task force to Korea headed by greying, courtly Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson. The latter bore a friendly but forceful letter to Rhee from Secretary of State John Foster Dulles. Excerpts:

"The principle of unity cannot work without sacrifice. No man can do precisely what he wants. The youth of America did not do what they wanted . . . They went because, at a dark hour, you invoked the sacred principle of free world unity to save your country from overwhelming disaster. Of those 1,000,000 American boys who have gone to your land. 24,000 died, another 110,000 were wounded. The cost to us in money is counted in the tens of billions of dollars. That was part of the price we paid for loyalty to the principle of unity when you invoked it ... You know full well that we did not come to fight and die in Korea to unite it by force, or to liberate by force the North Koreans . . ."

The question was whether rhetoric, or indeed any kind of diplomatic persuasion. could get anywhere with a man who has shown that he will go to just about any lengths to get what he wants. After four conferences with Rhee. Walter Robertson had made no progress whatsoever, despite optimistic statements put out by Rhee's forces. A U.S. official said privately: "Rhee has thrown up a great smoke screen of words, often accompanied by a studied show of amicability. But his position has not altered in the slightest."

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