Nation: In Pueblo's Wake

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Moments after Johnson finished, the TV cameras switched to the U.N. Security Council, which had held up its own deliberations until the President had finished his speech. The Russians, who missed the last major debate on Korea in 1950 because they were boycotting the Security Council, were on hand this time to take the role of Pyongyang's advocate. Soviet Delegate Platon D. Morozov immediately moved to strike the issue from the agenda, won support only from Hungary and Algeria and was voted down, 12 to 3. U.S. Ambassador Arthur Goldberg then called on the council to "act with the greatest urgency" lest the U.S. be forced to seek "other courses which the U.N. charter reserves to member states."

Some other course may well prove mandatory. For one thing, a Soviet veto of any constructive proposal is a strong possibility. For another, Pyongyang has clearly announced that it would ignore any suggestion from the U.N., under whose shield, after all, South Korea has remained a free nation.

The Joint Military Armistice Commission at Panmunjom seemed an even less fruitful court of resort. Meeting there the day after Pueblo's seizure, as they have for more than 14 years of sterile harangue, the U.S. and North Korean representatives exchanged angry denunciations.

U.S. Rear Admiral John V. Smith, son of the late Marine General Holland M. ("Howlin' Mad") Smith, protested both the Pueblo incident and an attempted attack on South Korea's President Chung Hee Park by a North Korean suicide squad earlier in the week. His Communist counterpart, Major General Pak Chung Kuk—known to American officers as "Frog Face"-claimed that the U.S. ship had been caught spying in North Korean waters and that the suicide squad was actually made up of "patriotic" South Koreans. To that, Smith angrily retorted: "I want to tell you, Pak, that the evidence against you North Korean Communists is overwhelming, and I am in no mood to listen to an obfuscating smoke screen." Pak, in turn, scored Lyndon Johnson as a "war maniac" and added: "They are burning Johnson's effigies today, but tomorrow they will burn Johnson alive." His rhetoric was a match for Pyongyang radio, which described how North Korean attacks had "left the U.S. imperialists shivering."

Nothing Printable. North Korea has certainly done its best to keep its brethren in the South shivering. Late in 1966, Premier Kim II Sung launched a program of guerrilla subversion designed to disrupt the South and humiliate the U.S. at every turn.

With the capture of Pueblo, Kim went a long way toward achieving one of his goals. He also had possession of a U.S. spook ship packed with supersecret gear and if he did not have Lyndon Johnson for burning, he did have the hapless Commander Bucher. Nobody can be certain what happened to Bucher, but the Pyongyang regime was plainly making every effort to exploit him. It was a sad conclusion to Lloyd Bucher's first command.