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neighborhood, tied by a military alliance to North Korea. Since the announcement of the “Nixon Doctrine” in mid-1969—that Asians should provide the manpower for their own wars—the United States had appeared to be moving steadily toward disengagement. Early in 1971, over Park’s vehement objections, Washington had withdrawn twenty thousand of the sixty-two thousand American troops stationed in South Korea, at thesame time that it was pulling back American forces from South Vietnam. Despite the reassuring words of US political leaders and diplomats, Park took these developments as “a message to the Korean people that we won’t rescue you if North Korea invades again,” according to his longtime aide, Kim Seong Jin. Now on top of everything else, the White House was suddenly, and without notice to him, consorting with Beijing.
    Meeting privately with reporters at the Blue House on the day Kissinger’s secret trip to China was announced, the South Korean president was gloomy. “The United States has long been trying to reach a rapprochement with Red China, but China has not changed,” Park complained, suggesting that Washington had made all the concessions. In a subsequent off-the-record dinner with Blue House correspondents, Park declared that 90 percent of the Nixon visit to China was a domestic maneuver intended to aid the president’s reelection. In view of Nixon’s “low-posture diplomacy” toward Beijing, Park told reporters, the pressing question for South Korea was, “How long can we trust the United States?”
    Weeks later, Park addressed his concerns directly to Nixon in a letter that was delivered to Secretary of State William Rogers by Foreign Minister Kim Yong Shik. The South Korean president was particularly worried that deals might be made about the Koreas during Nixon’s forthcoming trip to Beijing, and he wanted to discuss it with Nixon at a meeting. But in Washington Park’s concern was such a low-priority question that it took three months for the State Department and Nixon’s National Security Council (NSC) staff to frame and present a presidential reply. When it finally came, it was a ritual declaration from Nixon that during his Beijing trip, he would not seek accommodation with China at the expense of South Korea’s national interest. Park was told that a summit meeting was out of the question. Recalling his feelings about the maneuvering surrounding the US rapprochement with China years later, Park wrote that “this series of developments contained an unprecedented peril to our people’s survival. . . . [The situation] almost reminded one of the last days of the Korean Empire a century earlier, when European Powers were similarly agitating in rivalry over Korea.”
    Even before Kissinger’s secret trip to Beijing, North Korea had been putting forth discreet feelers for direct talks with the South, and Park’s government had been quietly discussing how to respond. After Kim Il Sung’s August 6 announcement, the South moved quickly by proposing a meeting in the context of Red Cross societies. The North immediately accepted.
    On August 20, 1971, eighteen years after the armistice ended the Korean War, representatives of the two Red Cross societies met in Panmunjom for the first exploratory discussions between the two halves of the divided peninsula. To no one’s surprise, the talks did not go smoothly.
    On November 20, after three months and nine rounds of fruitless sparring, South Korean “Red Cross delegate” Chong Hong Jin, who actually was deputy director of the international affairs bureau of the South Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA), handed a note proposing private and separate meetings at Panmunjom to his counterpart, North Korean “Red Cross delegate” Kim Duk Hyun, actually a senior official of the Workers Party Organization and Guidance Department, the party’s most important department. Like these two, many of the participants in the Red Cross exchanges