Ike and the Democratic Party
With the fifth general election set for July 29 drawing near, President Eisenhower of the United States paid a visit to Korea. Even before he arrived, the country was in an uproar.
People thought of America as their "benefactor." The April 19 Revolution had certainly dealt a blow to Syngman Rhee's regime, but they believed it was America that had forced him to step down. When Rhee issued his statement of resignation on April 26, U.S. Ambassador McConaughy had gone into Gyeongmudae and come out again, and from that people concluded that America had pulled Rhee down. Afterward Rhee went so far as to take exile in Hawaii, and the belief only hardened. America, they were convinced, had taken him away for Korea's sake.
It was a season in which, after liberation and the Korean War, America rose once more as the nation's benefactor.
On July 19, the day Eisenhower arrived, the front page of the Chosun Ilbo carried a headline vast as a gate plank, and beside it a letter set in English.
In the plaza before City Hall a massive monument had been raised to welcome him, and across it, too, the greeting was written enormous.
Banners and monuments greeting Eisenhower went up in every quarter of Seoul. His popularity defied imagination.
Landing at Gimpo Airport on July 19, he was to ride in a motorcade from Yongsan, where the American base stood, all the way to the ambassador's residence in Jeong-dong. But a crowd of more than a million already packed the way from Seoul Station through Namdaemun to City Hall. Ten thousand police and units of military police were called out in full to keep order, and still a million people could not be managed. Even the roadway was jammed solid, so much so that the car bearing Eisenhower could hardly pass.
The president of the United States was a greater celebrity, a more honored guest, than any sports star or movie actor. In the years after 2000, people would come to treat the cheering throng that filled the plaza before City Hall during the 2002 World Cup as the measure of popularity, but the atmosphere of July 1960 was several times that.
Setting out in an open car from in front of the Yongsan base, Eisenhower was busy returning the greetings of crowds that packed the streets and even the rooftops. Perhaps startled, and glad of so fervent a welcome, he sprang to his feet and threw both arms high in answer to the cheers. The car could not move forward at all, and he himself had to gesture to the people choking the road, asking them to make way.
It was a reception the very opposite of Japan's. He had meant to visit Japan first, but when hundreds of thousands of leftist demonstrators rose against his coming, the visit was canceled and he flew on to Korea ahead of schedule. From the windows and rooftops of buildings, Koreans waved the Stars and Stripes and welcomed their "benefactor" Eisenhower with wild fervor. His press secretary, Hagerty, would later recall that of all the many countries Ike had visited, none had received him as Seoul did.
That night, fireworks celebrating the visit bloomed across the Seoul sky.
"Ike," bathed in the Koreans' ecstatic support, spent his second day in the country—July 20—inviting Chang Myon, leader of the Democratic Party's new faction, to the ambassador's residence and seating him at his right hand. The invitation was deliberate, and so was the seating. It was an indirect declaration that America had chosen Chang Myon and meant to stand behind him.
Already, eight days before the visit, he had sent a directive to the American ambassador: meet the leaders of every Democratic faction, impress upon them that selecting Chang Myon as leader was the ideal course, and deliver the same message to Heo Jeong, head of the interim government. Through the ambassador he also conveyed his own wishes to Chang Myon himself, pressing him to accept the post.
Was it thanks to this unqualified American backing? In the general election of July 29, the Democratic Party won a victory that could only be called a landslide.
Ordinarily, whenever Syngman Rhee's popularity slumped, independents swept into office in great numbers. This election was different. Independents went down in droves, and the Democratic Party filled their seats. Of the 233 seats in the House of Representatives, 175 went to the Democrats; of the 57 seats in the House of Councillors, 31 were theirs. It was a crushing win—seventy-five percent of the lower house, fifty-three percent of the upper. Even the forty-nine seats that fell to independents were largely absorbed when the winners joined the Democratic Party en masse, and a one-party Democratic order was complete.
Caught in the middle of it, the Liberal Party, which managed only two seats, spent the entire campaign suffering in full the very treatment it had inflicted on others through the 1950s. Citizens who loathed the party raided Liberal campaign offices, occupied candidates' houses, and used every means they could find to force withdrawals. The result was a record: more than seventeen hundred election offenses.
The Democratic Party had not directed these crimes. What drew Kijo's attention was the trouble concealed behind the landslide.
In no fewer than eighty-one districts, the party committed the absurdity of running a new-faction candidate and an old-faction candidate against each other at the same time. The two factions were so bitterly at odds that negotiation itself had become impossible, and the conflict between them ran to the bone. The strife inside the giant ruling party cast a shadow over the Republic's future, but on the surface, for the moment, all was calm. The old evil of the Liberal Party had vanished, the election had ended in a great victory for a Democratic Party backed by America, and society appeared stable.
On the surface, it plainly was.
On Monday, August 1, the week after the National Assembly election, Kijo sat down to drink with Kim Doo-han, who had lost.
Except for the third general election of 1954, when Kijo had helped him, Doo-han had gone down to defeat race after race. In the fourth election, in 1958, he had run for the Labor-Farmer Party and finished second. In the fifth, in 1960, he had run as an independent and finished second again. Two losses in a row, both of them second place.
Beside him sat Kim Young-sam, already a second-term assemblyman at only thirty-two. Doo-han and Young-sam had entered the National Assembly in the same class, kept up the friendship, and often drank together. That day, too, when Kijo offered to buy the drinks, the irrepressible Doo-han brought Young-sam along.
Drinking with them, Young-sam set out to comfort Doo-han and ended by piling on the hard words.
"The trouble with our Assemblyman Kim is that he can't get along with the religious folk. Why do you fight with religious people? Go to church and pray. Go to a temple and bow. Take the church's side when you're at church and the temple's side when you're at the temple, and the votes come in. Why on earth do you carry on like this?"
Thirty-two-year-old Young-sam took forty-three-year-old Doo-han to task as if he were lecturing him.
Even so, Doo-han answered as calmly as a man taking advice from a friend.
"You know it yourself, Assemblyman Kim Young-sam. It isn't that I go looking for a fight with the religious world. It's my temper. I couldn't help it—that's what I'm saying."
"Then why not kill that temper and sit quiet? Why did you take the celibate monks' side in the Third Assembly and get yourself hated by the married monks?"
"You're telling me. Haha. Why did the married monks' headquarters have to be in Jongno, of all places... hahaha!"
Kim Doo-han tossed his glass straight back.
Kijo knew what the two of them were talking about.
Under the Liberal Party regime, Syngman Rhee had tried to drive out the Japanese-style monks—the married clergy who lived in the temples with their wives. Shaped by Japanese Buddhism in the colonial years, those married monks had taken the Government-General's support and been friendly toward Japan. Even after liberation, some temples still had things like the "Oath of Imperial Subjects" posted up in plain sight. Furious, Rhee tried several times to expel them, but they held nine hundred of the roughly one thousand temples in the country, and they could not be driven out easily.
In answer, the unmarried monks staged hunger strikes, and bloody brawls broke out between the married clergy and the celibates, throwing the Buddhist world into chaos for a time. The celibate monks cursed the married ones as pro-Japanese collaborators; the married monks branded the celibates a pack of Reds and hunted them as pro-North. At the height of the conflict a celibate monk even disemboweled himself, and the situation grew grave.
Amid that turmoil Kim Doo-han stepped forward and took the celibate monks' side, and so control of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism passed to them. When other assemblymen, afraid of earning a religious body's hatred, would not move, he came out with a chivalrous heart. For this, the married monks came to hate him.
And was that all? Afterward he did something else that brought the Christians' hatred down on him.
A bill had come before the Assembly holding that a child not born of the legal wife was to be called illegitimate—a bill backed by Christian organizations. Kim Doo-han put a question to the assemblyman who had introduced it.
"Are you arguing religion in here, or are you arguing law?"
With that for an opening, Doo-han asked his question.
"If an unmarried girl bears a child alone, with no husband, what does the law call that?"
"An illegitimate child."
The sponsor of the bill answered.
Doo-han asked a second time.
"I'm terribly sorry for this. Please don't misunderstand me. When the Holy Mother Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ in a stable, what was that, under the law?"
At those words the man who had brought the bill clamped his mouth shut.
So Doo-han went on.
"This is a law that will not stand. I asked a pastor, and he tells me that even a traitor of the highest order is forgiven by the love of Christ and shown mercy. That's in the Scriptures, he says. A man may go out and do wrong and bear the guilt of it, but the child is guilty of nothing."
He laid out his logic.
"If a law passes saying that any child not born of the legal wife is illegitimate, then hundreds of thousands of illegitimate children get made, and that goes against the love of Christ."
In the end the bill was voted down that day, and from the spectators' gallery on the second floor the cries flew thick to kill Kim Doo-han. Faced with that murderous reaction, he fled out the back door of the Chosun Ilbo, and when he reached home he found the house smashed to pieces. It was the work of Christian believers who had favored the illegitimacy bill.
In this way, by his own convictions and his nerve, Kim Doo-han kept colliding with the religious world.
"I've taken such a hiding from the religious groups that from now on I won't touch religion at all. Not a finger. Truth is, I like the Buddha just fine, and I like Christ too. Both of them are admirable men—that's what I'm telling you."
Kim Doo-han laughed, a great rolling belly laugh.
Kim Young-sam, who had been pressing him, seemed to feel sorry after the fact and began to praise him instead.
"Still, our Assemblyman Kim Doo-han was magnificent during April 19. You ought to tell the president here about that."
At Young-sam's words, Doo-han looked at Kijo.
"Haha—what I did back then, well, listen. You know the red-brick building behind Pagoda Park? Up on the second and third floors there's the National Student Labor League. I'm the president of that league."
Doo-han's mouth grew busy.
"Before April 19, Seoul was quiet, wasn't it? Things were exploding down in Masan, and in Seoul nothing was happening. So I called in the self-supporting students from Sungkyunkwan, Seoul National, and Dongguk."
Color came into his face.
"At first I gave money to the self-supporting students at Sungkyunkwan, Seoul National, and Dongguk. Told them to demonstrate. Those schools sit close to the center of Seoul."
"I see."
Kijo nodded.
"But the police caught wind of it, and the students were hauled in and beaten to a pulp."
Kim Doo-han took out a cigarette.
"So I had no choice. I spread money around the schools farther from downtown—Korea University, Hanyang, Chung-Ang, Yonhui. And that bastard Lee Jeong-jae took the Anti-Communist Youth Corps and went and pounded the Korea University students flat."
He seemed to be speaking of April 18.
"So I said, this won't do. I'll have to step in myself. I had experience fighting the Communist Party in the old days, you know. At the league we stayed up all night making pamphlets and sent them around to every university and every middle and high school in Seoul. Rise up, we told them. I spent a tremendous amount of my own money. Haha."
Kijo and Young-sam were drawn in by Doo-han's gift for talk.
"That day I occupied the Gyeonggi Provincial Office with my men. If we were pushed back there, it was the end. Even if thousands died, we had to force the president to step down—otherwise the president was going to kill tens of thousands. That was the only thought in my head."
It was a tale of heroics, according to Kim Doo-han.
Once he had finished boasting of what he had done, the sting of defeat seemed to leave him, and his face brightened. He had been drawing on his cigarette with relish; now he ground it out in the ashtray and spoke.
"I've got one request to make of Assemblyman Kim Young-sam. Congratulations on being reelected as a Democratic assemblyman. I congratulate you—but from here on. Even granting that America has chosen the Democratic Party, you keep your wits about you."
"I will, Assemblyman Kim."
Kim Young-sam, now a winner, took the advice with humility.
"Now, Assemblyman Kim Young-sam belongs to the old faction, so he'll have a fine time fighting the new faction—but you remember, that isn't what the people want. Three-quarters of the nation gave you their votes and told the Democratic Party to do right by them. Fight the way you used to, and the Democrats will end up like the Liberal Party. Mark my words."
"I'll take your weighty counsel gladly, Assemblyman Kim."
Doo-han's warning cut sharp.
But Young-sam denied it.
"That won't happen. The Democratic assemblymen all gathered to see the country set right. How could it come to that?"
"I'm saying it because it well might. Well, the talk's finished, so let's have another round! Hahaha!"
Kim Doo-han turned the mood in an instant and raised a toast.
"To the democracy of the Republic of Korea!"
Kijo had arranged the gathering to comfort Kim Doo-han, and the sight of the man so full of fight set his mind at ease. But when he looked at Kim Young-sam—who would before long walk out to the New Democratic Party after it split from the Democrats—worry stirred in him as well.
Nineteen sixty would be the year the Democratic Party, grown now into a great ship, broke in two.
Kijo had many regrets about the Democrats. They had come into a golden hour in which democracy might be raised again; the people had given them strength, and America had given them its support.
And the party was bound to fail the part laid upon it, and sink into the mire of faction against faction.