The Beginning of 1958
On the first morning of the new year, Ki-jo reported in at the DBC studios and looked over the new corporate identity of Daehan Broadcasting Corporation.
He had commissioned a commercial artist to turn out a handsome graphic built on the company name in Hangul, and now he went over the finished pieces with Chang Key-young.
"DBC is a fine name as it stands. Do we really need Hangul in place of the alphabet?"
Chang Key-young put the question to him.
"Out in the countryside, plenty of people can't read the Roman letters. If we have it ready beforehand, there ought to be a use for it later, don't you think?"
Ki-jo let the matter pass with that. There was, all the same, a reason he had prepared a Hangul logotype reading Daehan Broadcasting Corporation. This August the government would order every signboard in the country replaced with Hangul, and it seemed wiser to have the work done than to scramble when the order came down.
After they settled on the simplest of the proposals—Plan B—Ki-jo drank tea with Chang Key-young and talked things over.
"There's a general election this year. What stance do you mean the Hankook Ilbo to take?"
"The same as always. The Hankook Ilbo is a paper of the center. We'll tear down what ought to be torn down and praise what ought to be praised, and we'll go right on doing it."
"Even so, please be careful. Wouldn't it be wiser to cut the political coverage back as far as you can?"
"A newspaper is a business, and a business has to be worth reading. The subscribers like political news, so we can't cut it. But just as we always have, we won't take only one side."
Ki-jo nodded. Chang Key-young, it seemed, was not a man he needed to worry over.
In 1958, as Syngman Rhee began in earnest to feed his hunger for a long reign, the clash between the government and the press would reach its height. The Rhee regime would resolve to take the critical papers in hand, and as a warning to the rest it would shut down the Kyunghyang Shinmun. From that year the regime would start in earnest down the slope.
There had been wreckage enough before. Even so, in earlier years they had read the room, compromised, waited for a suitable moment, and at least piled up a pretext; and when something truly would not do, they had known how to let it go. But perhaps because Syngman Rhee had turned eighty-four, the regime was growing ever more impatient and short-tempered.
Ki-jo found himself thinking that Rhee's course and Park Chung-hee's last years had been much the same. The face of dictatorship was always alike. It did not matter whether a president came out of civilian life or out of the army. Live long enough as a dictator and a man's thinking seemed to converge; Korea's dictators branded whoever opposed them a Red, pressed them down, and killed them. All three had done it—Syngman Rhee, Park Chung-hee, and Chun Doo-hwan.
The year held several brutal political events that would foreshadow the fall of the Rhee regime. Ki-jo's notion was to keep as far from politics as he could and look to his own safety. Reality, however, was not so obliging. He had already promised to look after the Yeoncheon election of former Minister of Home Affairs Lee Ik-heung, and at the drinking table the night before, Kim Doo-han had made a request of him.
"Mr. Lee, I'm counting on you again next year. This Kim Doo-han will run hard for another four years. Ha ha ha!"
Bound by loyalty, he could not refuse. Already he was tied to the general election twice over.
"President Lee, I heard something a few days back..."
Chang Key-young eased into it.
"What was it you heard?"
"You were on good terms with the former Minister of Transportation, weren't you? Lee Jong-rim."
"Yes. That's right."
"Word's going around that he's going to stand in Seoul's Tenth District. I wouldn't be surprised if he comes asking you for help as well... the way Assemblyman Kim Doo-han did."
Former Minister of Transportation Lee Jong-rim would take the Liberal Party nomination, run in Seoul, and lose, finishing second. The Tenth District was Seodaemun Gap, the ground west of Seoul Station that took in Jungnim-dong, Manri-dong, and Yeonhui-dong.
"He hasn't brought the election up with me yet."
"They say it's all over political circles that Assemblyman Kim Doo-han owes his seat to you. Watch yourself, President Lee. You could get tangled in something troublesome..."
"Idle talk. Who would ask a man who never even finished primary school to handle an election?"
"That's not how it works, President Lee. If it means getting elected, a politician will lean on a fortune-teller. Be careful."
"I will."
As they talked, the shape of the thing reversed. He had set out worrying over Chang Key-young, proprietor of a newspaper, and it was Chang Key-young who ended up worrying over him.
When the conversation was done, Ki-jo returned to his office and turned over in his mind everything the year would bring, weighing how he ought to meet it. If Minister Lee Jong-rim asked for help, that too would be hard to refuse. Yet no matter what anyone tried, the Liberal Party would take only one of Seoul's sixteen seats. Help him or not, former Minister Lee Jong-rim would lose, and Kim Doo-han had no real prospect either.
How did I ever get a name as a political broker...
Ki-jo let out a sigh.
Finished with Chang Key-young, Ki-jo headed for the Han River to meet Chung Ju-yung, who was at work on the Hangang Footbridge.
Above the water, frozen hard, the bridge—widened to four lanes—had found its shape again. Ki-jo watched the people out on the ice around it. Come to greet the new year, children and grown men and women rode sleds and skated across the locked surface, while others broke the ice to fish, and the place was crowded. A knife-edged wind was blowing, and still they were merry.
In the 1950s the Han was easy to reach and bound tight into daily life. All year round people did their washing there. In summer it was where they went into the water to beat the heat, and the white-sand beaches along the banks were part of ordinary living—places where folk boiled down samgyetang, ginseng chicken soup, or bosintang, the old dog-meat stew.
Ki-jo watched them making use of the river, then went to find Chung Ju-yung. At a glance the work looked all but finished. In the original course of history the Hangang Footbridge had been fully restored and opened on May 15, 1958; this was a full four months ahead of that, thanks to the heavy equipment Ki-jo had supplied. Chung Ju-yung, however, had screened off part of the span and was disguising the job as if it were not yet done. When Ki-jo asked why, Chung answered.
"They told me to hold the opening ceremony on His Excellency the President's birthday."
Ki-jo nodded. It seemed they meant to stage the ceremony on March 26 on purpose, so they could boast of the achievement right up through May 2. On May 2 would come the election for the Fourth National Assembly.
"So that's why you put the screens up."
"Reporters slipped onto the site on the quiet, caught on, and left. I begged them not to print it, and they went along."
Chung Ju-yung said it with a face full of discontent.
Through the 1950s he had silently swallowed the government's absurd demands, and this, no doubt, was part of why he would later praise the Park Chung-hee government to the skies. He liked Park. Park had demanded that things be done ppalli-ppalli—hurry, hurry—in a way that matched Chung's own temper, and he had backed the demand with support to match. Unlike the Rhee regime, which skimmed thirty percent off the construction money before a shovel went in and then caught a man by the ankle, Park had done neither. Chung could hardly help liking him.
Chun Doo-hwan, by contrast, he detested. Chun had taken the company Chung built with blood and sweat and, on a whim of his own, handed it over to another firm. There would be no Chun Doo-hwan in the years ahead, Ki-jo thought, and so Chung Ju-yung ought to rest a little easier.
"Anyway, it's got to sit like that for two months. I was pleased, thinking I'd set a record on a bridge job, but the world... a man never gets his way. Me especially. Hand me a bridge and this is what I get. Ha ha ha!"
Optimistic as ever, Chung Ju-yung laughed a bright laugh that got the better of the facts.
Ki-jo walked with him out as far as the Jungjido stretch—Nodeul Island—looking over the state of the bridge. He studied it so long, and with so grave a face, that Chung Ju-yung asked him about it.
"You see something wrong with it?"
"Ah, no. It looks truly solid. You've built it well."
"Of course I have. This bridge won't so much as flinch for a hundred years. It's a bridge with grief in it, so I put everything I had into making it strong."
He said it with confidence, and Ki-jo nodded for him.
Unlike Chung, who was thinking of the far future, Ki-jo was thinking of the near one—three years from now, close enough to touch. Around four in the morning on May 16, 1961, Major General Park Chung-hee would lead the Marine brigade and the paratroopers across the very stretch where Ki-jo now stood. If Park failed to cross this bridge, the May 16 coup would not succeed. The fate of a nation and the fate of a single man hung on whether he passed over it or not, and it was the weight of that which had set the grave look on Ki-jo's face.
"Did you build it strong enough that it won't come down even if a bomb goes off?"
At the question Chung Ju-yung laughed, a rough rolling laugh.
"So you took me at my word, back then. Where's the bridge that can stand up to a bomb? Ha ha ha!"
When the laugh was done, he went on.
"What I did instead was build in a place where the bridge can be cut. The Ministry of National Defense asked that in wartime a small charge be enough to sever it. Set a few sticks of dynamite in that spot and blow them, and one whole deck span drops straight into the river."
He said it, glanced once around, and spoke again.
"President Lee, you mustn't repeat that to anyone else."
"Repeat what?"
"What I just said. It's top secret."
"But you didn't say a thing, President Chung."
When Ki-jo pretended from the first that he had heard nothing, Chung Ju-yung's eyes narrowed to crescents and he laughed.
"I know how tight you keep your mouth. That's why I told you."
Ki-jo laughed with him, and together they walked back to where the piers began.
Thinking of May 16, it was a strange business. The men carrying out the coup had not been thorough, and the men trying to stop it had not been firm. The plot had already been uncovered the day before it was to be carried out, and even earlier it had leaked until it was an open secret. Even so, Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young took no measure worth the name. He sent a handful of military police to the units hatching the coup, issued an order forbidding every unit to move, and stopped there. There were even plainclothes military police posted in front of Park Chung-hee's house to watch him. On the night before the coup, officers came and went through that house, and when Park left with them they let him go. They went no further than tailing the jeep he rode in. If Chang Do-young had arrested him then, the coup would not have succeeded.
When a thing is meant to happen, does it find a way no matter what?
That was precisely why Ki-jo found Park Chung-hee so hard to reckon with. Whether it was luck or fate, he could not say. The very men who might have stopped him had behaved as if they wanted his coup to succeed, and that remained a pure mystery. Word had spread until they were all but shouting it aloud.
"I'm staging a coup! Such-and-such a date—I'm really going to do it!"
It had reached that pitch of boasting, and they had even sent Army Chief of Staff Chang Do-young a letter asking him to back the coup. Units that were supposed to roll never rolled. The whole affair lurched forward in a shambles, and from the side charged with stopping it the answer never rose above this.
"Hey, hey, hold still. Easy now—don't you do that. You're going to listen to me, aren't you?"
They met it at that pitch, and in the end the thing broke open.
Reaching the end of the bridge, Ki-jo looked once more at the Hangang Footbridge behind its screens. It was a bridge that carried many tragedies. In the Korean War it had been blown so the refugees could not flee; on May 16 it would be the bridge that failed to keep the revolutionary army out of Seoul. When he sighed, looking at it, Chung Ju-yung spoke.
"Don't you worry, President Lee. Even if the opening comes late, our profit is already in hand. The government won't pick a fight over our work. Ha ha ha!"
He had not read what was on Ki-jo's mind.
"Yes, President Chung. I'm sure it'll come to nothing. You've had a hard time of it."
Ki-jo said only that, and climbed into the jeep. All the way back to the company, as he drove, the mystery of Korean history kept turning in his head.