The Hour Is Late

All week long, stubborn Syngman Rhee, veteran fighter for a free Korea, sat on his terrace overlooking Seoul and waged a war of nerves. His object was unmistakable: to block the armistice as a ruinous compromise.

Specifically, South Korea's aging (78) President was objecting to the new U.N. truce plan, submitted to the Communists in a secret session last week. But his real complaint was as old as the truce talks themselves. Rhee's foreign minister, Pyun Yung Tai, summed it up: "We cannot accept any premise that leaves Korea divided and makes North Korea a Chinese colony." For decades Patriot Rhee and his followers have dreamed of, planned, suffered torture and exile for an independent and unified Korea. Now, a few miles away from his wistaria-covered terrace, U.N. negotiators were bargaining that dream away in the name of peace. What made Rhee doubly angry was that of all of the U.S.'s allies, only South Korea itself (which now holds two-thirds of the battle line and the longest casualty list) had not been consulted on the latest terms.

Meaning Business. When General Mark Clark, Lieut. General Maxwell Taylor and U.S. Ambassador Ellis Briggs came to sweet-talk him on his terrace, proud, headstrong Syngman Rhee held firm. "You came here to save us," he told one caller. "Are we saved if, after three years of war, you sign away the principles you have said you were fighting for?" The Americans tried to explain that the U.N. was fighting in Korea to stop aggression, that aggression had been stopped, that unification would have to wait for the peace conference. Unification, they said, is only a political objective, not a military one. Rhee dismissed that argument as a technicality. How can you expect to win from a political conference by persuasion what you could not win on the battlefield by force? he asked. The U.S. went away sheepishly, conceding Rhee's sincerity, uneasily afraid he might be right, and fearful of what he might do.

There were plenty of things the old man could do. The President could order his army not to withdraw from any agreed "demilitarized zone," and might even launch a wildcat attack of his own. His men are on guard at all the prison camps except Camp Eight, where balking Chinese prisoners are kept; ROK guards might turn loose all North Korean prisoners who refuse repatriation. Rhee's delegate to the truce talks, Major General Choi Duk Shin, boycotted one session, and Rhee commended him for "high patriotism." General Choi told correspondents: "People ask me if we can fight alone and win. I tell them you do not fight only when you know you can win. You fight because you have to fight."

Rhee dispatched his defense minister on a tour of front-line ROK commanders to test their loyalty. In the cities, hundreds of posters were slapped up on walls of bombed-out buildings (sample slogans, usually in English: "Give us unification or give us death." "Young men, hold on to your arms and advance north.").

The War Weary. Just how much support Rhee has among the inarticulate masses of his homeless, hungry people was harder to determine. Said one Korean interpreter: "The people say that they want the war to stop. They say they are tired of being the battlefield. They say why don't the Americans and the Russians go off and fight it out in Siberia?" The pressure of world opinion for peace, and the facts of the power situation in Korea might prove too much for Syngman Rhee; the heat was on him. Stubbornly, he held out for guarantees, and reminded his hearers that the last supposedly temporary division of his country had brought more than a million casualties to his people.

"You need not heed or care about the reaction from the outside world," Rhee told new graduates of the ROK naval academy. "Your cause is right." Commented Rhee's faithful, Austrian-born wife: "I know people are impatient with my husband, but they forget that for him the hour is very late."

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