Report to the Nation

Soon after he landed at Washington's National Airport last week, Assistant Secretary of State Walter Robertson rode to the White House to report to President Eisenhower and Secretary of State Dulles on his trouble shooting mission to Korea. Two days later, Robertson and Dulles made a radio-TV report to the nation.

Their words contained none of the bitter, carping hostility toward Syngman Rhee that had showed itself in the U.S., and even more in Europe, after Rhee balked at the truce terms. Said Robertson: "The Korean people were not opposed to the armistice because they like to suffer and die. They were opposed to it because of a deep fear that [it is] a Communist trick and device to win by negotiation what they have failed to achieve on the battlefield, a deep fear that the United Nations . . . might sacrifice Korea as Koreans feel they have been sacrificed in the past to great power interests. My task was to convince President Rhee that . . . our differences lay not in objectives but in methods to be used for the achievement of a common objective." The U.S. must not in any case, Robertson added, let itself get into a tangled situation where it takes arms against "the brave people of Korea . . . who have suffered incredibly for their cause and ours."

Secretary Dulles asked Robertson what Rhee's attitude was "when you said goodbye to him." Robertson replied that the U.N. command was confident that Rhee "would offer no obstruction" to an armistice. Dulles noted that some Americans "ask if we can trust President Rhee to carry out his assurances." Said Robertson: "There are many in Korea who ask whether the Republic of Korea can trust the U.S. to carry out its assurances. I have no doubt on either score."

Dulles, who last week wound up the foreign ministers' conference (see below), defined the U.S.-British-French attitude toward a Korean armistice: "We are not suppliants. We are ready for honorable peace. But if the Communists want war, we must be ready for that, too." The three powers had agreed, said Dulles, "that we shall try our best to bring about Korean unity by peaceful means, [and] that a Korean armistice would not automatically lift our embargo on strategic goods to Red China or lead to the acceptance of Communist China in the United Nations."

At Panmunjom meanwhile the Chinese drafted Korean farmers--"peace volunteers," the Reds called them--to begin hurried work on a T-shaped, wood-and-straw building to serve as the scene of the armistice signing.

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