CEASE-FIRE: The Round Table

In sweltering Kaesong, Admiral Joy played a card from a new deck. Since the truce talks had long been deadlocked on the issue of a cease-fire line, he suggested last week that the matter be turned over to a subcommittee—one delegate from each side, with assistants. They could meet informally around a table—rather than facing across table in stiff two-sided array. There would be no stenographers’ reports, no press briefings on the progress of the subcommittee, and a bare minimum of newsmen in Kaesong. There would be every reason to get down to business, and no further need for what Matt Ridgway called “parroting of elaborate and illogical propaganda slogans.”

The Reds agreed, proposing only that each side have two delegates in the subcommittee instead of one (so that the North Koreans and the Chinese “volunteers” could both be represented). Joy was willing.

For the first meeting of the small group, Joy named Major General Henry Hodes and Rear Admiral Arleigh (“31-Knot”) Burke. The Communists named North Korea’s Lee Song Cho and Red China’s Hsieh Feng. That day only four allied newsmen went to Kaesong—one reporter, one photographer, one newsreel cameraman and a radioman. The Reds obliged by sending only four newsmen of their own.

Through the glassless windows of the conference house, the allied newsmen could see the delegates huddled over maps on a small round tea table. Several times laughter was heard and the spokesmen were seen to be talking off-the-cuff, two or more sometimes talking at once, which was a refreshing change from the stiff silences and the set speeches of the plenary sessions. When the meeting was over, General Hodes allowed himself to be photographed with his arm around North Korea’s complaisant Lee.

Impressed by Admiral Joy’s immovability at the full-dress councils, the Peking radio had taken to calling him “Stonewall Joy.” Also from the Communist radio came the first hints of a compromise. Their position was “not inflexible,” the Reds said: “adjustments” were possible and the “first steps” toward peace had been taken. Presumably these adjustments meant that the Chinese would abandon their insistence on a 38th parallel cease-fire line, and agree to some kind of defensible military lines for both sides, as the U.N. has urged all along.

In the U.N.’s advance base and press camp at Munsan, though correspondents were irked by the lack of hard news, optimism ran higher than at any time since the truce talks started. Subject to change, of course, without notice.