The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History Read online

  PARK CHUNG HEE

  The dominant figure in South Korea was in many respects almost the opposite of his North Korean counterpart. Whereas Kim Il Sung had been an anti-Japanese guerrilla fighter, Park Chung Hee had attended the Japanese military academy, had become an officer in the Japanese army, and, as required at the time, had even temporarily taken a Japanese name, Masao Takagi. And whereas Kim was a big man, who tended to dominate with his presence and his outgoing, confident personality, Park Chung Hee was small and wiry, seemingly self-contained and often aloof. During my one personal interview with Park, in June 1975, this powerful and greatly feared political leader seemed reticent and shy, almost smaller than life, as he sat in a big chair in his Blue House office. As we talked, he toyed with a tiny chihuahua dog in his lap and rarely looked me in the eye.

  Responding to different sets of external relationships and espousing different ideologies, Park and Kim had one thing in common: each had come to dominate his respective section of the Korean landmass. In his eighteen-year reign, from the military coup he led in 1961 to his assassination in 1979, Park left his mark on South Korea to a greater extent than any other person in modern times; his tenure and his impact were equaled only by Kim’s extraordinary run of nearly a half century in the North. Both men were strong rulers who owed much to the Confucian tradition of deference to authority that long predated twentieth-century Korea.

  Park was born in a village near Taegu on September 30, 1917, the son of a small farmer who had been a minor county official. At age twenty, he graduated from a teachers’ college and taught primary school for three years before volunteering for the Japanese army. Soon his record was so outstanding that he was sent to the Japanese military academy in Manchuria and was commissioned a lieutenant. His orderly mind and neat handwriting from his teaching days proved to be lifelong attributes, as did the sense of organization and use of power that he learned in military training. When his private safe was opened after his death, aides discovered files of handwritten personal notes on individuals, meticulously arranged in Park’s own indexing system.

  After the Japanese surrender and the division of the country in 1945, Park joined the newly established South Korean military academy and graduated as an officer the following year. In a much-disputed episode of his life, Park was arrested as leader of a communist cell at the Korean Military Academy following the 1948 Yosu rebellion, in which army troops under communist leadership refused to follow orders and proclaimed a short-lived “people’s republic.” Park was sentenced to death by a military court, but his sentence was commuted by President Syngman Rhee at the urging of several Korean officers and on the recommendation of Rhee’s American military adviser, James Hausman, who knew him “as a damned good soldier.” Park then switched sides, turning over a list of communists in the armed forces and becoming an intelligence official at army headquarters whose job it was to hunt them down.

  This bizarre history caused worry in Washington when then major general Park suddenly emerged as leader of the 1961 military coup. At Park’s request, Hausman flew to Washington and told high officials that despite his early history, Park was no communist and “there is nothing to worry about.” The US Embassy, in a cable to the State Department, rejected the possibility that Park could be a secret communist, “mainly because his defection from communists and turnover apparatus would make him victim no. 1 if communists ever took power.” Park’s political opponents sought to use his early leftist activities against him, but when he was strong enough he prohibited further public mention of it. In the early 1970s, an American correspondent, Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor, was barred from the country for writing an article discussing Park’s past.

  Given his prewar Japanese education, his Confucian heritage, and his military background, there was nothing in Park’s previous life to suggest fealty to democracy American style, which he considered an inconvenient and unproductive practice. After he led the 1961 coup, it took heavy pressure from the Kennedy administration to persuade him to return the country to nominal civilian rule and to run for election as president. He successfully did so in 1963 and 1967, then insisted on a change in the constitution permitting him a third term. He narrowly won that third election in 1971 against opposition leader Kim Dae Jung after pledging never to ask the people to vote for him again. In 1972 he redeemed that pledge literally, though certainly not in spirit, by abolishing direct presidential elections and creating a method of indirect election, under which he could be (and was) reelected by an easily controlled national convention for the rest of his life.

  An assessment by the US military command in Korea in 1975 noted, “From the time he led the 1961 coup, it has been evident that President Park had little admiration for or interest in the craft of politics. His approach to his stewardship as ROK head of state has remained that of a general who desires that his orders be carried out without being subjected to the process of political debate.”

  South Korea under Park was dependent militarily and to a large degree economically on the United States. This dependence grated on Park, who worked steadfastly to increase his independence from Washington, much as Kim Il Sung struggled to gain independence from his Soviet and Chinese sponsors. Park’s relationship with his principal foreign backer was fundamentally lacking in trust. The extent of American confidence in Park in the 1960s is suggested by the later disclosure of former ambassador William J. Porter that US intelligence had installed listening devices in Park’s Blue House office, though he said they had been removed by the time of his arrival in 1967. Following disclosure of the bugging, Park had the Blue House swept by his own surveillance experts and installed special multilayered glass windows with static between the panes to foil electronic eavesdropping from outside, activated by a switch near his desk. “Whenever he’d call me to his office, he’d turn on the switch and lower his voice,” one of Park’s ministers recalled.

  Fifteen years after his death, however, Park was remembered less for his conflicts with Washington and successive waves of political repression than as the father of his country’s remarkable economic progress. More than two-thirds of South Koreans polled by a Seoul daily in March 1995 said Park was the country’s greatest president, more than five times the number that gave that honor to any other chief executive. The overwhelming reasons cited were the economic progress and development under his regime and its relative stability. (Park’s standing went down again during liberal President Roh Moo-hyun’s rule [2003–2008], when focus was again put on his repression.)

  South Korea’s economic rise under Park started from a low point. Looking back after a decade in power, Park wrote that when he took over the country as leader of the 1961 coup, “I honestly felt as if I had been given a pilfered household or a bankrupt firm to manage. Around me I could find little hope. . . . I had to destroy, once and for all, the vicious circle of poverty and economic stagnation. Only by reforming the economic structure could we lay a foundation for decent living standards.” For Park, rapid economic growth was essential not only as the source of prosperity but also for two other goals, which he held even higher: enhancing national security, in an era when US willingness to protect the country against the North was waning, and winning political legitimacy for his regime, which had taken power by force of arms against a legitimately elected government.

  Only a month after seizing power, Park established the Economic Planning Council, which later became the Economic Planning Board, to provide central governmental direction for the economy. The first five-year development plan, produced shortly thereafter, declared that “the economic system will be a form of ‘guided capitalism,’ in which the principle of free enterprise and respect for freedom and initiative of free enterprise will be observed, but in which the government will either directly participate in or indirectly render guidance to the basic industries and other important fields.”

  As that passage suggests, Park’s model for economic development was the highly successf
ul postwar Japanese system. In 1965, in a very unpopular personal decision that nonetheless gave a powerful boost to the Korean economy, Park normalized relations with Japan. Despite fierce domestic opposition based on antipathy to the former colonial masters, the Seoul-Tokyo normalization, which was strongly encouraged by Washington, brought an immediate Japanese assistance package of $800 million and led to many more millions in Japanese investments and valuable economic tie-ups with Japanese firms. In another far-reaching decision of the mid-1960s, Park sent two divisions of Korean troops to fight alongside American forces in South Vietnam, for which he received Washington’s gratitude and Korean firms received a major share of war production and construction contracts. In 1966 revenues from the war made up 40 percent of South Korea’s foreign exchange earnings, making Vietnam the country’s first overseas profit center.

  Park took personal charge of the economy, bringing highly professional economists, many of them American educated, into the planning agencies. He established an economics situation room next to his office in the Blue House to monitor the implementation of the plans, and he frequently met with economic officials and businessmen who were developing projects with government support. Much like the “on-the-spot guidance” practiced by Kim Il Sung in the North, Park incessantly visited government offices in the economic area and construction sites in the field to check up on what was happening.

  Park refused to be guided by economists when he was determined to move ahead with one of his visionary projects. When American and World Bank economists said that South Korea could not successfully build, operate, or support an integrated steel mill and refused to approve financing, Park remained determined to build it. Declaring that “steel is national power,” he obtained Japanese loans and personally pushed through construction of a massive mill at Pohang, on the southeast coast, which became the world’s largest steel-production site and a foundation of Korea’s heavy industry. Park was the driving force behind the ambitious Seoul-to-Pusan expressway, which experts had also said was impractical. An engineer on the project recalled that “after a while, I found myself thinking of him, of all things, as a sort of conductor of an orchestra—with his helicopter as his baton. Up and down he would go, this time with a team of geologists to figure out what was wrong with some mountainside that had crumbled on our tunnel-makers, the next time with a couple of United Nations hydrologists to figure out how our own surveyors had got some water table wrong. If he didn’t know the answer on Tuesday, Mr. Park was back with it on Thursday or Saturday.”

  “President Park monitored the progress of every single project, both public and private, and closely governed the industrialists by the stick-and-carrot method,” according to Kim Chung Yum, who was a senior economic aide to Park and eventually his chief of staff. Park chose the firms that would be awarded contracts on large government-backed projects and provided or withheld credit through government banks, depending on their performance. The growth sectors of the national economy came to be dominated by a few highly organized, diversified industrial-business conglomerates known as chaebols, loosely modeled on the Japanese prewar zaibatsu or its postwar zaikai. Although this facilitated Korea’s dramatic economic rise in the 1970s and beyond, the intimate relations between government and business also set the mold for the corruption charges that later were to plague the retirement years of Park’s successors.

  Although he wielded enormous economic power, Park never became a rich man and was not personally corrupt. He usually had a simple bowl of Korean noodles for lunch and ate rice mixed with barley, to save on rice. He had bricks placed in his Blue House toilet to conserve water. Setting a modest style, he wore open-collar shirts without neckties in the summer months and encouraged civil servants to do the same.

  Park’s personal hold over the economy was embodied by his ambitious Heavy and Chemical Industries Promotion Plan, a massive program to build up six strategic industries—iron and steel, shipbuilding, chemicals, electronics, nonferrous metals, and machinery. Initiated in late 1971 and formally announced in January 1973, the plan was designed by Park to enhance his political legitimacy and to respond to what he saw as a perilous security combination: the North Korean military buildup, which became intensive as Pyongyang asserted greater independence from the Soviet Union and China in the mid-1960s, and his decreasing confidence in American security assurances, as the United States disengaged from the Vietnam War and sought to reduce its commitments elsewhere in East Asia.

  The Heavy and Chemical Plan, which Park conceived and rammed through despite the misgivings of the Economic Planning Board and other economists, was the foundation of Korea’s later success in automobiles, shipbuilding, and electronics, but it was also very costly and eventually was scaled back considerably. Cho Soon, a prominent economist and scholar who later became mayor of Seoul, wrote in a retrospective analysis that the scale of Park’s projects “exceeded by far what the country could accommodate” and substituted government decision making for private initiative in the economy. Accordingly, Cho wrote, “The results were waste and distortions in resource use, inflationary pressure, the emergence of immense conglomerates, and widening inequality in the distribution of income and wealth.”

  Nevertheless, the overall results of the development program that Park put in place between 1961 and 1979 were spectacular. In broad terms, according to the World Bank, South Korea’s inflation-adjusted GNP tripled in each decade after Park’s first year in office, thereby condensing a century of growth into three decades. At the same time, the country dramatically reduced the incidence of poverty, from more than 40 percent of all households living below the poverty line in 1965 to fewer than 10 percent in 1980. Per capita income shot up from less than one hundred dollars annually when Park took power to more than one thousand dollars at the time of his death and more than ten thousand dollars today. In view of these achievements, it is small wonder that he is viewed by most South Koreans in retrospect as a leader of unparalleled greatness.

  WASHINGTON BLINKS AT PARK’S COUP

  At 6:00 P.M. on October 16, 1972, Park’s prime minister, Kim Jong Pil, notified US ambassador Philip Habib of a sweeping change in the country’s political direction, requesting that it be kept secret until made public twenty-five hours later. The surprise announcement by Park, a copy of which was handed to Habib, declared martial law, junked the existing constitution, disbanded the National Assembly, and prepared a plan for indirect election of the president. At the same time, to silence opposition, Park arrested most of the senior political leaders of the country.

  Park called his new system yushin, which his spokesmen translated as “revitalizing reforms,” and justified his actions on the grounds that the nation must be strong and united to deal with the North and maintain its independence in a changing international environment. The proposed announcement laid heavy stress on perils beyond Korea’s shores, as “the interests of the third or smaller countries might be sacrificed for the relaxation of tension between big powers.”

  Despite the emphasis on external threats, Habib had no illusions about the real purpose of Park’s dramatic moves. He cabled Washington within a few hours to say that “the measures proposed are designed to insure that President Park will stay in office for at least twelve years with even less opposition and dissent and with increased executive powers” and that “if these proposals are carried out Korea will indeed have, for all practical purposes, a completely authoritarian government.” While the ambassador conceded that Park might believe that he must strengthen his domestic position to deal with the North, Habib informed Washington that “there is little doubt that these measures are unnecessary given any objective view of the situation.”

  The pressing question was what the United States should do in view of its extensive interests and its historic leverage in South Korean politics. In the aftermath of World War II and the division of the peninsula, Washington had played the central role in anointing Syngman Rhee as the country’s first president,
and in 1960, in the face of a student-led popular uprising, it had also played a major role in forcing him to leave power. In 1961 the US Embassy and the US Command had spoken out publicly but ineffectually against General Park’s military coup against the constitutionally elected post-Rhee government, but it had then successfully applied steady and persistent pressure to force Park to reestablish civilian government. Now the United States was confronted with what amounted to a coup in place, a power grab by Park to eliminate all legal opposition and retain power for as long as he wished.

  Habib, a tough-talking, politically astute Foreign Service veteran from Brooklyn with extensive previous experience in Korea, was furious that his embassy had obtained no early warning of Park’s surprise from its own sources. As he was well aware, the timing for the move had been chosen with care. Only three weeks earlier, Washington had done nothing when Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos, in a very similar maneuver that had been closely watched by Park, declared martial law and jettisoned his country’s existing political institutions. Both Marcos and Park had sprung their power grabs during the campaign period of a US presidential election, when American presidents are more reluctant than usual to make controversial decisions in foreign affairs. The Nixon-Kissinger White House, which prided itself on realpolitik in diplomacy, was fixated on the politically difficult situation in Vietnam, according to then Assistant Secretary of State Marshall Green, at the time the State Department’s senior Asia expert. “They didn’t have time to be bothered” by Korea developments, he recalled.