Syngman Rhee's Visit to Yeonji-dong
May 29, 1959. Busan.
Ki-jo watched, his face drawn tight, as the distinguished guests gathered at the Yeonji-dong factory. Every notable of Busan and South Gyeongsang had turned out without exception, crowding in before the yard of the plant.
Paik Sun-yup, president of Cheongsan Defense Industries, received them with practiced ease. Put him among general officers, and he more than earned his salary. Every army, navy, and air force general in Busan and South Gyeongsang was assembling to celebrate President Syngman Rhee's visit to the Yeonji-dong factory, and each time one of them came in, Paik met him without a trace of stiffness. Ki-jo had only to stand at his side and bow as the introductions were made.
They were in the midst of the greetings when Paik Sun-yup's younger brother, Paik In-yup, came up to him.
"That bastard Park Chung-hee still hasn't shown, has he?"
At the question, Paik Sun-yup kept his expression carefully in hand and answered in a whisper.
"He'll come. Don't you speak to the man."
"I've nothing to say to him. He's the one who ought to come over, greet me, and act as if he knows me. I used to be his commanding officer."
The exchange left Ki-jo ill at ease.
"Say hello, In-yup. This is the chairman of Cheongsan Group."
"How do you do? Major General Paik In-yup, Republic of Korea Army."
Paik In-yup, a sharp light in his eyes, offered his hand.
"How do you do? I'm Lee Ki-jo. I hear you're posted to Army Headquarters. I look forward to working with you."
Ki-jo smiled as he said it.
"I understand you've been a great help to my brother. My eldest sister told me."
Paik In-yup knew that Ki-jo had saved his brother's life, and yet he treated him, ever so slightly, as a man beneath him. Paik Sun-yup seemed uncomfortable with his brother and let a flicker of displeasure show.
"Get in there and sit down."
"Yes, Brother. If you say so."
Paik In-yup followed a Cheongsan staff member to his assigned seat. Once he had moved off, Paik Sun-yup turned to Ki-jo with an apology.
"I'm sorry, Chairman. My brother's temperament runs a bit strong. Ever since he was a boy……."
"It's quite all right, President. There's a solidity to him. He looks as though he were born a soldier."
Ki-jo said it with a smile. He knew perfectly well who Paik In-yup was.
The man was notorious as an officer who made free use of the power of summary execution. In wartime, that authority let a superior shoot a subordinate dead for refusing an order, and during the Korean War such executions were hardly rare. Soldiers who retreated against orders, or who grew lax on watch, were sometimes shot as an example to the rest. Paik In-yup, though, was famous for abusing the power. No official record survived the war, yet the talk persisted: that he had shot a second lieutenant dead on the spot for answering him with gum in his mouth, and that he had personally shot a driver where he stood for stalling a jeep in the dead of winter. He was also said to have ordered the officers under his command to shoot, then and there, any subordinate who disobeyed — and he drew rebuke for the way summary executions ran rampant as a result. In any case, he was plainly no ordinary man.
And unlike his brother, he and Park Chung-hee were bound by the bitterest of bad blood.
During Paik In-yup's tenure as commander of the Sixth Corps, Park Chung-hee had served under him as deputy corps commander. Whenever the chance arose, Paik insulted him and held him in contempt. Even at a full muster of the Sixth Corps, every soldier and officer assembled under alert, he humiliated Park in the open. There was testimony that he had walked up to Park — standing at the head of the formation in full combat gear and steel helmet — and rapped the shorter man's head with his swagger stick, tap after tap, pouring out curses and lectures. There were accounts, too, that whenever Park suffered such treatment he swallowed it down, then drank after duty until he lost consciousness, trying to drown the rage.
In the end, unable to endure it any longer, Park committed an act of insubordination and stood up to him. Shrewdly, rather than object to the insults themselves, he made an issue of Paik In-yup's corruption. Paik, who had irregularities enough to his name, flared — but he could not bring himself to shoot an army major general, and so he gave a step of ground. The matter was settled by transferring Park Chung-hee out of the Sixth Corps.
In the original history, Paik Sun-yup had thrown himself into resolving the conflict between his brother and Park. In this history, too, he might already have settled their quarrel out of sight and talked sense into his brother. Even so, the thought of Paik In-yup and Park Chung-hee in the same place sat uneasily with Ki-jo.
"Chairman Lee Ki-jo, might I have a word with you over there?"
The chief of the Busan police came up and asked to speak with him aside. Ki-jo stepped away with the man to a quiet spot, but it amounted to very little. He had something to pass to Kwak Young-joo, who would be escorting the President, and wanted a moment arranged for it. Ki-jo said he understood and returned to his place.
When he came back to Paik Sun-yup's side, Park Chung-hee was already in his seat. He must have arrived while Ki-jo was briefly away. Their eyes met, and Park gave a nod so slight it was barely there. Ki-jo inclined his head a little in return.
Then he saw Paik In-yup walking, step by heavy step, toward the seated Park. Paik Sun-yup saw it too, and a sigh escaped him.
"I told him not to go near the man……."
The words were barely above a breath.
At the sight of Paik In-yup, Park rose and brought his hand up in salute. Paik In-yup did not return it. He set a finger on the rank insignia at Park's shoulder, said something, and went back to his own seat. Denied so much as an answering salute from his superior, Park held the posture for a long moment. Then, quietly, he let his arm fall and sat. He seemed to bow his head and release a long breath.
"Hah……."
Watching him, Paik Sun-yup sighed as well.
When the guests were all seated, they waited for the President.
Thirty minutes later a siren rose by the main gate of the Yeonji-dong factory, and a police car came through. Everyone gathered at the plant stood to receive him. Guarded by Kwak Young-joo, Syngman Rhee mounted the platform, looked out over the crowd, and smiled with deep satisfaction.
"Salute His Excellency, President Syngman Rhee!"
What followed was one of Syngman Rhee's familiar addresses. He lavished praise on the fragmentation mines made by Cheongsan Defense Industries, declaring that they would win distinguished merit in holding back the communist puppets and that, exported to the nations of Asia then fighting communist states, they would lend strength to the free world. He went on to boast that with the loans he himself had brought in from West Germany and the United States, he would develop the national economy. The Democratic Party, he said, had no interest in stopping communism and did not know how to make the people prosper — and with that he tore into the opposition. An attack on the opposition was an indispensable fixture of every speech he gave.
Each time the Father of the Nation offered a few words, the notables assembled at the Yeonji-dong factory answered with applause.
When the speech ended, the President inspected the factory, with Paik Sun-yup as his guide. Once the event was over, Kwak Young-joo took Syngman Rhee on into the city of Busan.
Ki-jo was commending Paik Sun-yup for his labors when he saw Park Chung-hee approaching from a distance. He braced himself, expecting a greeting — but Paik In-yup came up first and spoke.
"Chairman Lee Ki-jo, could you demonstrate the new fragmentation mine, the one with the strengthened charge, before the staff of Army Headquarters?"
He seemed taken with the large fragmentation mine whose destructive power had been raised to half again as much, and he asked it with a smile.
"Yes, we can. Name the time you prefer, and we'll show you."
While Ki-jo was speaking with him, Park Chung-hee, who had been walking his way, disappeared. He seemed to have turned back on account of Paik In-yup. Paik Sun-yup must have seen him come and then turn away, for he had a word for his brother.
"You. Come see me for a moment."
He asked Ki-jo's leave and took Paik In-yup off to the president's office.
Ki-jo sat on the sofa in the VIP room beside it, let the tension drain out of him, and drank cold water. Through the wall came voices from the office next door.
"You. What did you say to Park Chung-hee just now?"
"What is there to have said? I only told him that a man who sees his old commanding officer ought to offer a greeting."
"Why are you so desperate to tear that man to pieces! Park Chung-hee is three years older than you. Subordinate or not, you owe him some respect for his years."
"Brother! You know that bastard is a Red — you know it as well as I do!"
"How can you say such a thing! A major general of the Republic of Korea Army, a Red!"
"Be honest, Brother. Back then you spared him because he looked pitiful, because you couldn't bear the sight of him. Isn't that so?"
"He may have been a communist then, but he isn't now. We fought a war together. To go on like this is a discourtesy, on both sides."
"Do you really think so? Truly? Are you certain that bastard Park Chung-hee is no Red!"
The two brothers were locked in a grim quarrel.
Ki-jo drew a hand across his brow and thought of them — two brothers, both of them trouble. Paik In-yup was a man flawed in his very character, and Paik Sun-yup's past was hardly spotless either. Ki-jo called up the autobiography he had read before his regression. In the memoir, the man had set down what he himself had done before liberation in these words.
Having finished at the Fengtian Manchukuo Military Academy, I was commissioned in the spring of 1942, served one year with the Jiamusi unit, and was then transferred to the Korean contingent of the Gando Special Force. I was in my third year of that service when liberation came.
A very calm account, and a very brief one. But the Japanese edition of his memoir was nothing like it. Passages absent from the Korean text had been set down there.
Among the guerrillas we pursued were a great many Koreans. Whatever the difference in principle, it was Koreans suppressing Koreans who were fighting for independence, and so we had fallen entirely into the Japanese stratagem of using the barbarian to check the barbarian.
Yet it cannot be said that Korea's independence was delayed because we threw our whole strength into the suppression, nor that independence would have come sooner had we turned our coats and fought as guerrillas ourselves. Even so, it is a fact that we aimed our guns at our own countrymen, and if we are criticized for it, there is nothing to be done.
The Japanese edition recorded in detail what he had done with the Gando Special Force. And, almost by way of excuse, he passed judgment on his own deeds.
Criticized or not, there is nothing to be done…….
Ki-jo turned the memoir's closing sentence over in his mind. Was it resignation — regret, yes, but the past could not be changed, and so there was nothing for it? Or a protest that the age itself had left him no other road? It was hard to say.
He recalled, too, what the memoir had written of Park Chung-hee. It concerned the time after the Yeosu-Suncheon Rebellion, when Park had been caught in the purge of the army and sentenced to death.
Major Kim further asked that I be sure to see Major Park Chung-hee, citing the fact that, in the course of the investigation, Major Park had actively assisted in uncovering the leftist organization that had infiltrated the army.
Once I agreed, Major Kim promptly brought Major Park Chung-hee to me. I received him in the office of the Director of Intelligence. Major Park sat silent for a long while before he spoke.
"Could you not help me, just this once?"
In his work clothes, he was a pitiable sight. Yet through the whole of the interview he was not in the least servile, and never once lost his composed bearing. I had known a little of his character in ordinary times, but his calm even in such straits moved me for a moment.
"I will help you."
Truly, the answer slipped from my mouth before I knew it. After an interview of about twenty minutes, I sent him on his way.
He wrote less as a man convinced that Park was no communist than as a man whose heart had been stirred by pity. Whether Paik Sun-yup had truly believed it remained a matter of controversy afterward. Immediately after the May 16 coup, while serving as ambassador to the Republic of China, he told the American ambassador there, in a private meeting, that Park's ideology ought to be held suspect on account of his past. Perhaps for that reason, benefactor though he was — the man who had saved Park's life — he spent the whole of the Park regime rotating through unimportant posts.
Thinking it through only tangled Ki-jo's head further. Had it not been for the CIA connection, and for Hausman, there would have been no reason to give Paik the presidency of Cheongsan Defense Industries at all. But Paik Sun-yup had connections in every direction, and if only for the American officer who had become his fast friend at the Battle of Dabudong — the battle that had made his career — Ki-jo needed to keep him close a while longer. That officer was Harold K. Johnson, who from 1964 through 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War, would serve as Chief of Staff of the United States Army.
Ki-jo rose from the VIP room, where the racket still carried, and went outside. The sound of the two brothers fighting over Park Chung-hee was growing steadily louder. He made for the bearing factory and found Professor Kim Moon-hwan.
The professor was a man who took no interest in any of it — whether Syngman Rhee came calling, or whether Paik Sun-yup and Paik In-yup quarreled over Park Chung-hee.
"Look here, Chairman Lee. When is Krupp going to deliver those bearing machines? And when are we building the prime-mover plant?"
Aflutter at the thought of the advanced technology and machinery about to pour in from Germany and America, Professor Kim fretted with a child's impatience.
"They'll arrive within the year."
Ki-jo had every preparation in place to start the business before the April 19 Revolution broke. He looked at Kim Moon-hwan, ever and always the same, and asked,
"Professor, have you had lunch?"
"No, not yet."
"Then let's go have milmyeon with Kim Hae-soo, the president of the radio company. I'd like a glass of soju."
"Ah, splendid. Let's go."
Ki-jo set off with Kim Moon-hwan for the radio factory, to fetch Kim Hae-soo.