Memorandum of Conversation with Secretary of State Dean Acheson and President Harry S. Truman
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OCR Page 1 of 6172
IOF
OEGRET
SECORITY
May 22, 1952
MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION WITH THE PRESIDENT
Item 1.
Korean Negotiations.
I reviewed for the President the various messages which
had been coming in recently from Admiral Joy, General Clark
and Ambassador Murphy, relating to the undesirable effects
which were occurring in the Far East as a result of the
continuance of daily meetings at Panmunjom with the vituperative
propaganda of the communists which issued therefrom.
I told the President that we might soon expect recommendations
from General Clark and that my guess was that he would
recommend discontinuance of daily meetings. I said
that
the Department believed that there was much to be said for
this attitude and that the Department is not taking any rigid
attitude that the daily meetings must continue. Indeed, we were
actively at work on a proposal which would permit recessing
the meetings for say two weeks or ten days, but that it was
imperative at the same time to take some steps which would
restore international confidence in the moral position which
we had taken on the POWs. I thought that international
opinion and some opinion in this country had been shaken by
the Dodd-Colson episode and the continuing difficulties in the
prison camps.
The President interjected that he had given Secretary Pace
instructions to take vigorous measures to regain control of the
camp situation. I suggested to the President that if it were
possible to get two or three nations who did not have troops in
Korea to undertake an impartial rescreening of the prisoners
we had already screened--the nations which suggested themselves
were perhaps India, Sweden and Switzerland--I thought we could
then have strong international support for requesting the hearings
while this took place. I said that I was not asking the President's
approval of such a plan which, if possible to work out, would come
to him through regular channels, but that if it did come to him
during
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