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OCR Page 1 of 153/14/54: Reel 1, ack 2,
te 1
MR. KENNAN:
My impression, in looking at it from the outside and later as an Ambassador
in Moscow, that perhaps the truce negotiations were stickéer than they
might otherwise have been, due to the extreme militarization of the talks
and the publicity that attended them. This business of going into the
tents with all these journalists waiting there to be given whatever was
exchanged at least didn't seem to me to be the most suitable way of going
at it if you had wanted to exhaust your possibilities there. Whether
anything else could have been done naturally no one can say, but it
wasn't tried; it couldn't be, really for a very good and sound reason.
I can see that.
MR. RUSK:
I might just comment on that. The principal reasons why the talks were
limited to military talks were: first, that neither Peiping nor Moscow
had accepted any political responsibility for their troops in the field.
We thought it would make it easier to avoid great issues of prestige and
responsibility if we took that theory of the case, if by doing so we
could get it settled. Secondly, there was the problem of status. Should
we have representatives of the Government of the United States sit down
HARRY
on a political basis and talk to those people who call themselves the
Kansas realism TRUM
representatives of the Chinese Volunteers in Korea on the one side and
the North Korean regime on the other? That did not seem to be in keeping
with our own dignity, as it were, as a government; and we would not be in
touch with responsible representatives. And third--and perhaps even more
important, political talks might easily have broadened from the Korean
situation into other Far Eastern questions such as Formosa, the recogni-
tion of Peiping, Peiping membership in the UN, Indochina, etc. We thought
that, if we injected those broad political issues into the Korean affair,
it would be possible for the Communists, by appearing to agree on Korea,
to shift the burden of the casus belli in Korea away from the agression
in Korea to our refusal to give them Formosa, for example. And we would
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have a very great difficulty in holding together our allies if the Com--
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