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    "title": "Transcript of Princeton Seminar Discussion, Reel 2, Track 1",
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        "Dean Acheson Papers",
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    "seq": 4,
    "pageIndex": 0,
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    "ocrText": "3/14/54 Reel 2, Track 1, Page 4\nis a major decisior of United States governmental policy which is regarded\nby the whole government as a most vital one; and you come back into a multi-\nlateral debate with 60-odd people, most of whom have no particular concern\nwith the issue one way or another. That particular point, plus the fact\nthat in this debate, as you will see, we came within a hair's breadth of\na major blow-up with our principal ally, the British, and only got out of\nthat box by the fact that the Russians were stupid enough to save us from\nthe consequences, so they were right around the corner for us. Now the wg.\nway all this developed is quite interesting. The UN meeting took place-\nit began, I think, on the 15th of October, 1952. About a month earlier,\nin the middle of September '52, the State Department raised with the De-\nfense Department for purposes of discussion the possibility of dealing\nwith the prisoner exchange matter in an armistice in this way : to provide\nthat you would exchange at the going-into-effect of the armistice all\nprisoners who wanted to be repatriated. That would be done right away,\nand that we would then reinforce in our statement our principle of non-\nforceable return, but we would leave the disposition of the prisoners for\nlater discussionse We did not, I donot think, put this forward as a\nthe us the a 3 3\nState Department view which we were ready to fight to the end about, but\nas anething to be discussed, with rather an inclination on our part to\nfavor it. The military people opposed that very vigorously; they had\npretty good grounds for opposing it and had grounds which, I think, con-\nvinced me that they were right. They pointed out that if we were unable\nto solve the question of the prisoners who did not want to be repatriated\nwhen we had the pressure of military operations going on, we would be still\nless likely to solve it when that pressure was taken off. And therefore\nit could be put down as an insoluble problem. They thought also that the\nCommunists might hold back a considerable number of our men who really did\nwant to come back on the statement that they didn't want to come back"
}