The Painful Question

For 22 months, the United Nations has been pursuing peace at the truce table in Korea, while the fighting has gone on. With the Communist generals calling the combat turns, the U.N. was only fending off the enemy. Time after time, the prospect of a truce seemed bright, then faded as the casualty lists inexorably grew. This week there were signs once more that a Korean truce might be a reality in a matter of days.

But as the truce prospect brightened once again, the U.S. grew more conscious of a basic question about the Korean situation: Under present conditions, is truce on the same side as right? It is a question which a peace-minded nation faces reluctantly. Yet it was an inevitable question once the U.S. entered a war for a moral principle and then permitted its will-to-win to be hobbled by hesitation on the battlefield and by the pressures of domestic and international politics.

Last week the question of right prompted widespread misgivings, based largely on the fear that truce--on the most lenient terms the U.N. has yet offered--might turn out in fact to be victory for the Communists. Fearful of impending advantages for the Communists in Asia, the Senate Appropriations Committee, by a vote of 20 to 3, attached a rider to an appropriations bill providing that the U.S. will cut off funds for the United Nations if Communist China is admitted to the U.N. In Cincinnati, Senate Majority Leader Robert A. Taft proposed that the U.S. "forget the United Nations" in Korea and work out its own solution if the new truce drive fails. Bob Taft touched a sensitive nerve: many U.S. citizens believe that perhaps the U.S. is yielding up its leadership in an effort to find a settlement formula agreeable to its allies, without safeguarding the oft-repeated promise of a unified Korea.

The question of right took on new and more dangerous proportions when Syngman Rhee's South Korean government voiced its violent opposition to the new United Nations truce plan (see WAR IN ASIA). Furious because the current plan does not point toward a unified Korea, the South Korean leaders threatened to pull their troops out of the U.N. and fight on alone.

Perhaps the clearest answer to the question of truce v. right came from South Korea's Ambassador to the U.S., Dr. You Chan Yang. Facing reporters on NBC's Meet the Press television show this week, Dr. Yang expressed a truth that the U.N. has not yet accepted. Said he: "If the [Communists] are talking about peace it is not as you and I are talking about peace. When we talk about peace we're talking about real peace. When the Communists are talking about peace they're talking about something else; they're talking about conquest."

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