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By Root 1752 0

United States and the two Koreas that Vance had suggested early in the adminstration had gone nowhere. However, the establishment of full U.S. diplomatic relations with China on January 1, 1979-a major accomplishment of the Carter administration-revived the possibility that Beijing might help to defuse the conflict on the divided peninsula. At the end of January, when Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited Washington, Carter asked him to help arrange North-South talks. Deng responded that the North was ready to talk to Americans, the Park government, and others in the South on the terms that it had previously proposed (which were unacceptable in Seoul and Washington). Deng said China would not pressure North Korea, lest it lose its influence there, but he assured Carter there was absolutely no danger of a North Korean attack.

Rebuffed in his June 1979 plan for a grand three-way summit meeting in the DMZ, Carter settled for proposing three-way talks of lesser diplomats. The South Koreans, however, had strongly resisted such an idea for many months, fearing a sellout by the United States in the pattern of Vietnam diplomacy. Ambassador Gleysteen, directed by Washington to obtain agreement in Seoul, found that the entire South Korean government was adamantly opposed to threeway talks except for Park himself, who was persuaded to consider it in the context of ending the U.S. withdrawal program. In the end, Park ordered his government to accept the proposal, possibly believing that he would win points with Carter and that Pyongyang would reject it anyway. The proposal, which was announced during Carter's trip to Seoul, appeared to be stillborn when North Korea lodged the expected objections. But as Korean diplomacy developed later on, the idea of three-way talks came back to life in a variety of circumstances.

On the evening of June 29, Carter arrived in Seoul aboard Air Force One from the G-7 summit meeting in Tokyo and immediately helicoptered to Camp Casey, the headquarters of the Second Infantry Division, to spend the night. After jogging with and addressing the troops, he traveled back to Seoul for a rousing official welcome by an estimated 500,000 people and bands playing such Carter favorites as "Onward, Christian Soldiers," lining the motorcade route to the Blue House.

Inside the presidential palace, Carter and six aides settled down across a long table for the talks with Park and his delegation. The South Korean president had been asked in advance by American officials to say little or nothing about the withdrawal issue so as not to upset the delicate minuet they had devised for Carter, but Park had his own ideas. The former schoolteacher had written out in his neat hand a lengthy presentation of the strategic and peninsular reasons why withdrawing American troops would be a cataclysmic mistake in view of the North's growing strength, and he boldly delivered it to the increasingly furious American president.

Nicholas Platt, the National Security Council expert on Asia, could see Carter silently working his jaw muscles, as he tended to do under great tension, and on the other side of the table he observed Park snapping his fingers to make his points, as he did unconsciously under extraordinary stress. Vance could feel the temperature in the room drop with Carter's cold fury. As Park continued his forty-fiveminute oration, the president passed a note to Vance and Defense Secretary Brown: "If he goes on like this much longer I'm going to pull every troop out of the country." Instead of responding at once, Carter adjourned with Park to the next room for a private talk where he brought up human rights issues and demanded to know why the ROK, with a far bigger economy, did not match the North militarily. It was, as Assistant Secretary of State Holbrooke later observed, "as terrible a bilateral meeting between treaty allies as you can have."

When the meeting was over, Carter, Vance, Brown, and Brzezinski climbed into the presidential limousine for the short ride to the U.S. ambassador's residence. Gleysteen, summoned by