The New Outspokenness

NATIONAL AFFAIRS

As bright and smiling as the Washington spring day. South Korea's Ambassador You Chan Yang showed up at the State Department one day last week in answer to a summons from Secretary Christian Herter. Thirty minutes later he emerged glumly. Within the hour. State Department Press Officer Lincoln White told reporters that Herter had expressed the U.S.'s "profound and growing concern" over 1) the highhanded suppression of political opposition by South Korea's 85-year-old President Syngman Rhee, 2) brutal Korean police action against student protest marchers, and 3) other "repressive measures unsuited to a free democracy." In Seoul, Ambassador Walter P. McConaughy made the U.S. point of view unmistakable to President Rhee in a 45-minute interview.

There were special reasons for the public rebuke to South Korea: the U.S. had led a three-year war (1950-53) to preserve South Korea from Communist invasion, had financed and advised Rhee's government after the armistice, and was bound to share the blame in Asia for his increasing transgressions against democratic processes. Whether State planned it that way or not, the public protest echoed far beyond Korea as a signal that the U.S. intends to speak up to errant friends as well as enemies when their conduct--even though internal--offends the basic principles for which the U.S. stands.

The State Department had followed a similar policy last March in its prompt official condemnation of Premier Henrik Verwoerd's South African government (ironically, an ally in the Korean war) for its bloody suppression of Negro demonstrations against apartheid. Said the State Department spokesman: "While the U.S., as a matter of practice, does not ordinarily comment on the internal affairs of governments with which it enjoys normal relations, it cannot help but regret the tragic loss of life . . ."

Not even in yanqui-conscious Latin America was the new outspokenness regarded as unwarranted interference in internal affairs. For months the U.S. had suffered in relative silence while Fidel Castro's Cuban government made a mockery of personal legal rights, suppressed newspapers, confiscated property and howled at the U.S. such epithets as "bandit, hypocrite, imperialist beast and thief." Secretary Herter gave the Cuban charge d'affaires a good dressing down for the direct insults, but it was President Eisenhower who, after long restraint, finally passed public judgment on internal Cuban affairs. Writing to Chilean students who had asked about U.S.-Cuban policy, Ike said: "The idea of intervention into Cuban affairs is as distasteful to the U.S. as would be intervention into domestic affairs of any other American republic. In all candor I must state that many longtime friends of Cuba . . . have been gravely disillusioned by betrayals of the ideals of freedom of expression, equal protection of the laws and the right freely to choose a representative government."

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