A World in Turmoil
On May 29, Syngman Rhee at last left Korea. At half past eight that morning, in the strictest secrecy, only two men were there to see him and Francesca off: Heo Jeong, head of the transitional cabinet, and Vice Foreign Minister Lee Si-young.
Ki-jo folded the paper and turned his attention to the wind of purification sweeping the Republic. It was not only businessmen who faced the prosecutors. Civil servants, too, were investigated en masse on suspicion of illicit fortunes, and one finding, when it was made public, stunned the country: Yu Tae-ha, minister at the Korean Mission in Japan, had accumulated twenty million dollars. Nearly all of it had come from peddling passports. The price of a single passport varied with the applicant's means, but it commonly ran from two hundred thousand to five hundred thousand hwan.
He had the impression that the country was growing cleaner. Yet quite apart from that cleansing, grievances long held down were bursting out all at once, and demonstrations were becoming a part of daily life.
In Busan the entire faculty stopped classes and demonstrated on the school grounds, condemning the administration's undemocratic handling of personnel. In Masan, merchants from Burim Market marched through the northern part of the city under placards demanding "Lower the current tax rates" and "Corrupt tax collectors, get out at once," then tried to force their way into the Masan Tax Office, only to be turned back by military police from the martial-law office. In Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province, transport operators halted some sixty vehicles at a stroke and drove them all the way to the Hongseong branch of the Daejeon District Prosecutors' Office to protest the corrupt rationing of gasoline.
Demonstrations and strikes of that kind spread over the whole country. Merchants in Jeonju took to the streets demanding lower taxes and the punishment of predatory collectors. In Daejeon, workers at the textile mills demonstrated to have their wages doubled and the working day cut to eight hours. In Daegu the women of the mills launched a protest against their company-controlled union and would not withdraw until every union officer had pledged to resign. In Busan, staff of the Jung-gu District Office, furious at personnel decisions by the bureau chief and the district head, occupied the city council chamber and settled in for a sit-in.
Teachers, market traders, laborers, civil servants, university students — no one was exempt, and the whole nation was sick with protest. The students, above all, split along rival lines of struggle and even came to blows among themselves.
Before the National Assembly, students from Dankook University who had been sitting in and crying for the immediate dissolution of the present Assembly and the rejection of the transitional government collided with students from Dongguk University, who insisted the citizens wanted no such demonstration. The clash turned into a bloody melee. Two students and a reporter were badly hurt. Hundreds of students from Kyung Hee University arrived to stage a demonstration whose demand was that people stop demonstrating. Students from Korea University brought a microphone and demonstrated on the theme that students ought to study.
All of it unfolded on a single day, May 31, in front of the National Assembly. Things had come to such a pass that the country was now holding demonstrations against demonstrating.
Ki-jo's own affairs were not spared the disorder. The April hiring of new staff had never properly begun, lost in the unsettled mood that followed the rigged election of March 15, and after the April 19 Revolution hardly a university student applied.
He went to Seoul National University to see President Yun Il-seon. On the day of April 19, Yun had struggled to keep students and police from clashing right up to the moment the police opened fire, and he was a younger cousin of the politician Yun Bo-seon. Ki-jo meant to ask him to recommend his best students to Cheongsan, promising a stronger scholarship program in return. It was how he had long secured talent ahead of anyone else: offer a senior a scholarship, and a place at Cheongsan upon graduation.
President Yun received him, heard him out, and sighed.
"I am an educator, but these days I can hardly bring myself to speak in front of the students."
He looked stricken.
"Lately they seem to care more for changing society than for their own advancement. And they have begun a campaign to drive out incompetent professors...."
The president sighed again.
"Students and faculty are at war with each other. The professors answer with suspensions, discipline, slashed grades. The harder they press, the harder the students push back."
Then Yun said,
"I am on the students' side. What they are doing is criticism that comes from a pure heart. I know perfectly well that they want to change society. But...."
He gave a bitter smile.
"Just now, in their eyes, the whole of the older generation looks rotten. I doubt I can be of much help to you."
He had gone to ask a favor, and left having heard nothing but the distress of the president of Seoul National University. For the time being, he judged, new people would be hard to come by. He took what comfort he could from the fact that not a single demonstration or strike had broken out at a Cheongsan workplace. For six years the company had paid the best wages in the industry and run itself in keeping with the Labor Standards Act; relations between labor and management were sound, and not one site had seen a dispute.
Back at headquarters, Ki-jo turned to the report on the radio business.
The honor of building the first Korean radio had slipped from his hands on November 15, 1959, when Lakhee produced its A-501, but he was not a man to cling to being first. Lakhee had brought its set to market under the brand name Lucky Star at twenty thousand hwan, yet the early run had not reached even a hundred units. Set against the American radios selling in the shops for thirty-three thousand hwan, it was cheap enough, but the numbers were small and trust in domestic goods thinner still, and genuine mass sales had never begun.
Ki-jo stepped into that opening. Ten thousand Cheongsan radios, made ahead of time and inspected piece by piece, went out across the country at once. He had read in the papers and heard in the rumors that Lakhee had released a radio; he drove straight at the simple fact that the thing itself was almost nowhere to be seen.
From the beginning of May, Cheongsan Radio had gone to market in earnest. Advertisements went out over the broadcasts themselves, and trucks loaded with sets roamed every province and down into the country villages, crying up the Cheongsan radio. The heart of the pitch was plain. The set would sound even on a weak fifty volts, and it was light and tough enough that a fall would neither shake a screw loose nor crack the case. In Cheongsan Stores throughout the nation the radios were placed where they could not be missed, so that anyone who came in for groceries or sundries could take one in hand and hear it play.
Inside every box they laid a warranty, a letter of thanks, and a postcard with the stamp already affixed. If the set ever failed, the customer had only to drop the card in a mailbox. A Cheongsan man would come in person, exchange it for a new radio, and carry the broken one away. It was, in its way, an advanced system of after-sales service, and the response was warm. Nor did Cheongsan lose by it. When a set failed, an employee heard the complaint directly and carried it back into the making of the next model, and at the Busan plant the failed radio was taken apart, the fault traced, and weaknesses no one had foreseen brought to light.
The line took hold. Consumers hesitating between an American radio at thirty-three thousand hwan and a Lakhee set at twenty thousand chose instead the Cheongsan radio at twenty-six thousand, with a replacement if it failed. Cheongsan thus took a higher margin than Lakhee, and sold more sets besides.
At the same time he began a program to send radios into the countryside. A rural household had only to pay six thousand hwan to have the use of a radio for ten years. It was a symbolic attempt to narrow the gap in information between village and city. The program was a loss from the first day, so he limited it to thirty sets a month, but he believed it would win him the customers of the years ahead. A family content with a Cheongsan radio would, in time, be a likely buyer of appliances from Cheongsan Electronics.
He was going over the May sales report when the telephone rang. The call was from the sales department of Cheongsan Radio.
"Sir, a claim has come in from the military about the Cheongsan radios."
"A claim?"
The sets had never been supplied to the military PX, though there had been a promotion offering soldiers and police a discount of ten percent.
"What sort of claim?"
"They say a full hundred units went bad all at once. I can't make sense of it myself."
"A hundred, all at the same time?"
It was impossible. The Cheongsan Radio plant in Busan shipped nothing that had not passed a strict inspection.
"Where did the claim come from?"
He took up a pen, ready to make a note. If he knew where the sets had gone, he could fix the date of production, and then he would have to learn what had happened at the plant in that stretch of time.
"The 6th District Command."
At those words he set the pen down.
"Who called?"
"It came from the commander's own office, so I can hardly dismiss it, and I don't know what to do, sir. I suspect they may be angling to demand something of us."
"I'll handle this myself."
"Sir, we were going to—"
"No. I'll see to it."
He left it there with the head of sales and put down the receiver.
Since taking command of the 6th District Command, Park Chung-hee had sent word several times, through Kim Jong-pil, that he wished to meet. Ki-jo had declined, pleading one circumstance after another. This time Park seemed to have stepped forward himself.
He telephoned the 6th District Command, and Park Chung-hee's secretary answered.
"This is Lee Ki-jo, president of Cheongsan Radio. I was told there was trouble with our product, and so I am calling."
"Ah, President Lee. The Commander is out inspecting the units under his command. He said he would come straight home, so perhaps you might call at his residence this afternoon? I can give you the address."
"I already know it."
"You do? Then I shall take it that you will call on the Commander yourself."
Ki-jo said that he would, and rang off. The secretary, it seemed, had been told that if a call came from him, he was to be directed to the house.
He set the receiver down and went to the window, looking out over Sejong-ro. The avenue that on April 19 had been packed with furious crowds had returned to a peaceful coming and going of cars and people. But Syngman Rhee, who had held the Republic fast in his grip, was gone to Hawaii, and the people, impatient that the world would not change quickly enough, were still pouring out their anger.
Ki-jo knew the Republic would not change so quickly merely because a single man had vanished. Even those who bore the blame for April 19 would not be properly punished; they would be acquitted, or let off with light sentences. The courts would try, under the law of the Republic, to stand as far as they could with the victims and to punish the guilty, but the law would fail to keep pace with the public heart. Then the people would be disappointed all over again, and their pent-up fury would break. They would despair that nothing at all had changed.
Into that opening, Park Chung-hee and a number of other soldiers were taking aim. There were several groups of officers who believed the country could be saved only by a coup. Among them, Park Chung-hee — the man with the best chance of succeeding — was seeking him out.
Ki-jo searched his memory, turning over the knowledge he had carried from his previous life.
Before the Masan uprising of March 15, Park had fixed the date of the coup for May 8, the day Army Chief of Staff Song Yo-chan was to leave Korea on a visit to the United States. When the uprising broke, Park grew impatient and tried to move the day forward. The new date he settled on was early April. Colonel Yu Won-sik of Army Headquarters, who was of one mind with him, even proposed that they kidnap Syngman Rhee when the president went to Jinhae to rest.
The officers then marked for recruitment were many. Around Busan, he looked to units under the Logistics Base Command. In Seoul there was Brigadier General Choi Ju-jong, chief of military history at Army Headquarters, and beneath him the field-grade officers, Kim Jong-pil among them. In Daegu there were Brigadier General Chang Do-young, commander of the Second Army; Brigadier General Yun Tae-il of the Andong Division; and Lee Ju-il, chief of staff of the Second Army. In Incheon there was Lieutenant Colonel Jeong Seok-yun, commanding an antiaircraft battalion. At Jinhae, the plan was to draw in the officers studying at the Army College.
So concrete were the men he meant to bring over, and so determined was he to lead a coup. What stopped him was nothing other than April 19.
By an account Park himself later dictated, on the way back from a trip to Seoul just before April 19 he had stopped in Daegu, met Brigadier General Chang Do-young of the Second Army, and pressed him to rise in revolution. When Chang dithered and produced one reason after another, Park decided to leave him out and to strike with the organizations already secured in Seoul, in Busan, and at the front. But the student demonstrations breaking out across the country, and April 19 itself, stood in his way.
Turning that memory over, Ki-jo waited for his guest. The man coming to see him was Chang Jun-ha. They were to meet before Chang appeared on a discussion program at DBC.
The people he had to see were as unsettled as the times. Before he faced Park Chung-hee, he would first have to face Chang Jun-ha.