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happened, I was among the earliest to learn firsthand of Carter's determination. In late May 1975, he visited Tokyo for a meeting of the United States-Europe-Japan Trilateral Commission, while I was serving as Washington Post correspondent for Northeast Asia, based in the Japanese capital. Over drinks with me and New York Times correspondent Richard Halloran and in a speech the following day, Carter said he favored withdrawing all U.S. troops, both ground and air force, from Korea over a period of perhaps five years. To accomplish this, he advocated a major buildup of South Korea's own air force. When Halloran observed that the ROK air force had deliberately been kept weak so that it would not be used to attack North Korea and start another war, Carter began to have second thoughts. Within days he limited his withdrawal proposal to ground troops only, proposing to leave the U.S. Air Force in place or even build it up.

My story on Carter's statements in Tokyo was reduced by Post editors from eight paragraphs to two sentences. This was typical of the short shrift that would be given his views on Korea during the campaign, during which it never became a high-profile issue.

In itself, the idea of reducing or even completely withdrawing U.S. ground troops from Korea was hardly novel. In 1971, President Nixon had withdrawn the Seventh Infantry Division, which constituted roughly 20,000 of the 60,000 U.S. troops then on duty in Korea, despite passionate opposition from the Seoul government. Later Nixon's secretary of defense from 1969 to 1972, Melvin R. Laird, signed off on a plan within the Pentagon to reduce the remaining U.S. ground combat unit, the Second Infantry Division, to a single brigade, but its implementation was blocked by Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, who feared its political effects in Asia after the American opening to China. By coincidence, the very day I met Carter in Tokyo, May 27, 1975, the Ford White House launched a secret study of American policy toward Korea, specifically including the question of reducing the American military presence. No decisions were reached.

In 1977 Carter's White House press secretary, Jody Powell, in seeking to explain the roots of the policy, told me that Carter had been familiar with the discussions in Washington surrounding Laird's withdrawal plan. Powell added that Carter's views arose from "his basic inclination to question the stationing of American troops overseas." Carter, in his 1994 letter to me about his views, said, "Contrary to the opinion of many U.S. leaders, then and now, it was not a goal of mine just to deploy as many of our forces around the globe as host countries would accommodate."

While Carter was making his run for the presidency, the postVietnam aversion to military involvement abroad was at a high point. In the month that Saigon fell, April 1975, only 14 percent of Americans responding to a Louis Harris public opinion poll favored U.S. involvement if North Korea attacked the South, while 65 percent said they would oppose it. This made a strong impression on Carter, who still recalled the results in his letter to me two decades later.

Two weeks before Inauguration Day, when the first informal meeting of the Carter administration's National Security Council team took place, policy toward Korea was one of fifteen items Carter selected for priority review and decision making. Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC 13 (PRM-13)-issued January 26, 1977, six days after Carter's inauguration, and sent to the heads of key national security departments and agencies-ordered "a broad review of our policies toward the Korean peninsula," including "reductions in U.S. conventional force levels." Despite the neutral-sounding words, officials of the new administration were shocked to discover that the basic decision had already been cast in concrete. The new secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, returned from the White House with instructions that the review should not consider whether to withdraw American ground troops from Korea, but only how to withdraw them.

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