Editorial Note
On August 2, 1953, Secretary Dulles, accompanied by Ambassador Lodge, Assistant Secretaries of State Robertson and McCardle, Consultant [Page 1466] to the Secretary Arthur Dean, Assistant to the Secretary O’Connor, Director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs Young, and Secretary of the Army Stevens plus his party of seven departed Washington National Airport for Seoul. Secretary Dulles had hoped to take along a bipartisan group of Senators, William Knowland and H. Alexander Smith for the Republicans and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Russell for the Democrats, but the Democratic Senators pleaded that the press of legislative business, particularly the President’s debt limitation request, prevented their accompanying the Secretary. Senators Knowland and Smith also decided that they could not go to Korea as long as Congress was in session. Information on the disinclination of the Senators to go to Korea can be found in the Eisenhower Library, Dulles papers, Korean file, box 54, memoranda of telephone conversations, July 31 and August 1, 1954.
A series of briefing papers dealing with the important aspects of the talks was prepared by officers in the Bureaus of Far Eastern Affairs and United Nations Affairs and is located in FE files, lot 55 D 338, “Korean Political Conference, July 16–31, 1953.” Dulles and his party arrived in Seoul on August 4, and, after discussions with President Rhee and Korean officials, left Seoul on August 8 for a short overnight stay in Tokyo. The next day, Dulles and his colleagues departed Japan for the United States.