The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [54]
The showdown on the withdrawal issue came on April 11, when Brzezinski met with the secretaries of state and defense and senior Asia experts of the administration. Brzezinski informed Carter in advance that based on his soundings, "everybody, even Vance, is against you" on proceeding with the troop withdrawal. Carter pleaded with his subordinate, "Zbig, you've got to protect me. This is my last foreign policy proposal from the campaign I haven't walked away from."
By this time, most of the policy advisers privately had grave doubts about the U.S. troop withdrawal or even opposed it for strategic reasons, but none was so bold as to say so in the White House Situation Room. They believed, as Brown acknowledged later, that officials "had either to support [Carter's] decision or resign." Instead the officials made a case for delaying the withdrawal because of the unwillingness of Congress to approve funds to compensate South Korea as promised. "The issue is not the withdrawal but the Park Tong Sun affair," Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke told the meeting. "Because of `Koreagate,' congressmen fear political retribution at the polls if they vote for any sort of aid to Korea this year." Moreover, Holbrooke said, to proceed with withdrawal without the aid package would be seen "as part of a retreat from East Asia" and could torpedo the administration's plans to normalize American relations with China. Michael Armacost, then a National Security Council staff member and much later U.S. ambassador to Tokyo, said "it will have extraordinarily adverse consequences in Japan" to withdraw troops without providing compensating aid as promised. The Defense Department's Morton Abramowitz said that proceeding without the compensation package would likely bring about the resignation of General Vessey, the U.S. military commander in Korea. He added that such a move "will lose the Joint Chiefs of Staff," which had reluctantly accepted the withdrawal policy.
With Brown, Vance, and most of the others counseling delay or cancellation of the next withdrawal element, only Brzezinski addressed the real but unspoken issue. "This [withdrawal policy] may have been the wrong decision, but now it has been made. We cannot afford to go back on it," the NSC adviser said. In the end Brzezinski devised and sold Carter on a plan to water down rather than delay the first pullout of combat troops, limiting the immediate withdrawal to only one battalion of troops, about 800 men, plus about 2,600 noncombat personnel, instead of the planned 6,000 combat troops, with the rest theoretically to come out later. As many in the meeting hoped and assumed, the administration's rollback signaled a weakness that made further withdrawals much less likely.
Carter reluctantly accepted the face-saving maneuver, which was announced on April 21. In private he bitterly upbraided Brown for seeking to stymie his program. He expected more loyalty, he told his defense secretary heatedly. Brown was surprised at Carter's outburst but stood his ground, saying he felt obligated to give his best advice and judgment in private, especially since he had been the administration's point man in defending the withdrawal in congressional testimony. Earlier in his long governmental career, Brown had found himself intimidated by the powerful opinions of presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Now he was determined to tell Carter what he really thought despite the potential damage to their relationship. "Carter felt he was up against the establishment" on the touchy withdrawal issue, said Brown, "whereas we felt we were trying to save him from doing things that would cause big trouble with allies."
THE VIEW FROM PYONGYANG
In Pyongyang, Kim Il Sung was keenly aware of Carter's proposal to withdraw