SEOUL—Our week-long trip begins in South Korea, and our first stop is the Residence, the official home of U.S. Ambassador Donald Gregg and his wife, Meg, who happen to be the father-and mother-in-law of Bill Buckley’s son, Christopher. The Residence, built in 1971 on the site of an old Korean country house, is itself Korean in style, thanks to the insistence of the then ambassador, the late Philip Habib. “Otherwise,” comments Mrs. Gregg, “they would have put up a generic State Department embassy.”
Ambassador Gregg has summoned his country team to brief us on South Korea’s prospects. Seoul is only fifty miles from the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), and Communist North Korea’s propensity for trouble-making remains high. Only days before we arrived, a band of Kim Il-sung’s soldiers had been caught trying to infiltrate the South. North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program is a permanent source of anxiety—and a reason why most South Koreans devoutly wish the American presence to continue.
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