Salvage

There is no such thing as an absolutely inextricable position.

--Nikolai Lenin

Good Communists, following Lenin's doctrine, will try to salvage what they can even from the most disheartening setback. At Panmunjom last week, the Communist negotiators were making a fairly effective job of it.

The Reds had suffered a tremendous setback in prestige and solidarity when 100,000 of the U.N.'s prisoners, including some 60,000 Chinese and North Korean soldiers, voted against repatriation. To retrieve the situation, the Communist high command in North Korea, apparently working through a grapevine to the prisoners on Koje Island, engineered the kidnaping of General Dodd. They also presumably directed the ensuing parleys which produced the astounding message from General Colson that the U.N. had been guilty of "forcible screening" (TIME, May 19), a statement which is either meaningless or untrue.

That was just what Nam II needed. In one of the truce tents Nam read from Colson's message and declared: "Your absurd principle of voluntary repatriation has collapsed in utter bankruptcy."

U.N. correspondents had never seen Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy so angry as he was last week. "You mouth this nonsense in the hope your misguided subjects will thereby be deceived and will continue to remain supine while you lead them and the world into more bloodshed and destruction," he said. "You dare not admit . . . the truth that many thousands of the personnel formerly under your control would choose death to returning to your side. [Only that] stands in the way of an armistice. There is no other issue."

Again & again, Joy suggested an indefinite suspension of the truce talks, for if the Communists would not accept the final U.N. offer, there was no more to say. Nam blandly insisted on meeting every day. The Communists, he said, wanted to put the "truth" before the world. Nam, in effect, dared the U.N. itself to break off the talks, and counted on the U.N.'s obvious reluctance to do so.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.