Ki-jo's December
On December 8, along the bottom of the front page of the Dong-A Ilbo, there ran a brief so slight a reader might have passed it over.
Hardly anyone noticed it. That short item gave away nothing of how Park Chung-hee had thrashed and clawed simply to stay alive.
In truth, he had been marked for retirement in the December personnel orders. In November, Magruder, commander of the U.S. Eighth Army, had written to Army Chief of Staff Choi Kyung-rok, pressing him to be rid of Park Chung-hee and Park Byung-kwon alike, and the Chang Myon government had pressed Choi as well: force Park Chung-hee out.
Through all of it, Park had gone from door to door just to survive, bowing his head and begging to be spared. Ki-jo had seen that struggle in the life before this one, and it had been wretched enough to look like groveling — the kind of effort that costs a man blood and tears.
He had gone to Chang Do-young, a man soft to old feeling, and asked to be saved. He had gone to Han Woong-jin, a classmate from the military academy, and asked him to plead with his friend, Assemblyman Lee Chul-seung. At first it was Han who carried the request. Later Park Chung-hee went himself, and begged, in person, to be allowed to live.
Lee Chul-seung, chairman of the National Assembly's Defense Committee, came away from that meeting resolved to save him, and went to Prime Minister Chang Myon. Lee belonged to the same New Faction as Chang, and so the door opened easily. Face to face with the prime minister, he took Park Chung-hee's part.
"Park Chung-hee may have been the man in charge of the South Korean Workers' Party's military organization, but didn't he admit what he had done, and turn? He laid the whole network open, took off the uniform, and served again from the ranks. He distinguished himself in the Korean War, and in the end he rose all the way to chief of the operations staff. What sense is there in driving him out now?"
And he stayed for hours, telling Chang Myon that the Defense Committee under his charge would stand guarantor for the man, and begging him not to force the retirement. So Park Chung-hee survived. Humiliating as it was, instead of being discharged he became deputy commander of the Second Army, and kept a foothold inside the service. In effect the post was a message: your retirement is not far off, so sit there, pass the time, and take the uniform off yourself.
It was a strange business. Chang Do-young was a man who, after May 16, would be used by Park Chung-hee for as long as he was useful, then branded a traitor and flung out of the army. Assemblyman Lee Chul-seung would one day stand beside Kim Young-sam in the New Democratic Party, working against Park himself. And yet it was by their efforts — Choi Kyung-rok's, Chang Do-young's, Lee Chul-seung's — that Park slipped the cold edge of the Chang Myon government's blade, the purge of the officer corps. Before long, at Second Army headquarters in Daegu, he would be plotting a coup with the old comrades of his Manchukuo Army days.
Ki-jo read the brief on Park Chung-hee where it sat just above Cheongsan's help-wanted notice, and folded the paper. The great wheel of history was turning slowly on, in the track it had always followed. The smaller gears meshed to that great wheel called Park Chung-hee were moving on schedule as well.
On December 14 the New Democratic Party was founded. The Old Faction of the Democratic Party, with Yun Bo-seon at its head, broke from the party and made itself an opposition in its own right. Shoved aside in the factional fight, the Old Faction launched its new party under a single banner: to stop the one-party dictatorship of the Democratic Party's New Faction.
But the New Democratic Party never drew the following the Democratic Party did. In the local council elections that came one after another, it went down to defeat. The political map of those days was a peculiar one. In Honam, Kim Young-sam's New Democratic Party was received more warmly than the Democratic Party, to which Kim Dae-jung belonged.
When the local elections were over, Ki-jo went looking for Kim Young-sam. Young-sam had promised to come see him once his mother's funeral was done, but the December elections came and went and still there was no word. Ki-jo understood. The Democratic Party's split had torn through so hard and so fast that Kim Young-sam, he thought, could hardly have kept his feet, and through the campaign itself he had gone down to Yeongnam, his own ground, and spent himself backing candidates.
Ki-jo went to the New Democratic Party's temporary headquarters in Samgak-dong, and there he found him. Young-sam welcomed the visit with an open, almost startled gladness. Asked how he had been living, he answered this way.
"We took a proper thrashing in the Gyeongnam provincial council elections. Honam went well enough, but Gyeongnam was mine, and I haven't got the face to show anyone. I was too ashamed to walk around out there. You coming to find me first, President Lee — I can't tell you how glad I am. Hahaha."
He was grateful that Ki-jo had come looking for him after the local elections had made a beaten man of him.
"People's hearts run cold, I'll tell you that. I come back to Seoul after a rout, and there isn't so much as an ant showing its face at the New Democratic Party office. The reporters don't come either. The world isn't full of men like you, President Lee."
Talking with Ki-jo, he let the hollow place show.
"This past year has brought me one trial after another. I feel as if I've done nothing but march in place, and the people around me keep vanishing. Nothing built, and the people gone. A strange year."
Ki-jo understood. Sensing that sympathy, Young-sam went on.
"I wish there were more men like you, President Lee — men who don't sort the Democratic Party into New Faction and Old, and who stand with you when a thing is right."
"Me?"
Young-sam nodded.
"I know how much you've done lately to publicize the National Construction Service that Prime Minister Chang is pushing. You give your support to the New Faction, and you still look after an Old Faction man like me. I can't help being grateful."
"You're mistaken. I didn't move because I had taken a side. The National Construction Service is a fine thing in its own right, and Mr. Chang Jun-ha asked for help, so I gave it. I came to see you, Assemblyman Kim, only because I respect you."
At that, Kim Young-sam laughed aloud.
"You're on close terms with Mr. Chang Jun-ha as well? A man who knows everyone — I've never seen a reach as wide as yours, President Lee. Government party, opposition, even the people who stand outside the parties altogether. You don't pick and choose. Hahaha."
He had been praising him half in jest and half in earnest, and he was not finished.
"I met Mr. Chang Jun-ha once myself, only briefly. He struck me as a man with a truly clean soul — a good man. That's why so many people respect him. A man like that ought to have come over to us in the New Democratic Party. Ah well. Haha."
Watching Young-sam climb back out from under the split and the lost election and spin his bright jokes, Ki-jo felt himself ease — and then he thought of Kim Young-sam and Chang Jun-ha, two men who would be bound to Park Chung-hee by a long and bitter tie. It sat poorly with him to think their days ahead would not run smooth. But if that was the way history's current went, there was nothing Ki-jo could do about it.
The day after he saw Kim Young-sam, Ki-jo boarded Cho Choong-hoon's air taxi and headed for Busan. He meant to see the year out, and to look in on the new works.
Kia Industry, which he had taken over in the wake of Typhoon Sarah, was developing a chromoly-steel frame to succeed the carbon-steel frames it had long used for its bicycles. A carbon-steel bicycle was sturdy and cheap, but it was far too heavy, and it rusted at the first excuse. They meant to build the next ones from chromoly steel — two or three times the tensile strength, far slower to rust — without letting the price jump. Kim Chul-ho, president of Kia Industry, vowed that in 1961 he would bring out a bicycle both lighter and far stronger.
From there Ki-jo went on to the Cheongsan plywood plant. With technical help from Krupp, Cheongsan Plywood had declared 1961 the year it would meet Dongmyeong Timber head-on, and it was pouring itself into the soybean glue Ki-jo had shown them. Soybean glue was a natural adhesive meant to supplement the chemical glues used in bonding plywood: it would cut the formaldehyde those glues gave off, and at the same time make the board stronger. Once plywood bonded with it was coming off the line, Ki-jo believed, they would be more than a match for Dongmyeong Timber, the reigning power in the trade. And with Park Hee-jun due to bring timber out of Indonesia at a low price and feed it to the mill, they had every chance of taking the lead in both price and quality.
Satisfied that the Busan works were driving hard toward 1961, Ki-jo headed for Ulsan. A finished harbor was waiting for him there, a fertilizer plant taking on its shape, and a cultivator factory that had finished its trial runs.
He encouraged the West German engineers who had come all the way to Korea to install the fertilizer plant, and he walked through the German Village that had been built for them. It was a settlement where the German engineers lived together, the houses raised in a likeness of German homes, to take the edge off their homesickness. He had given them cars as well, and did what he could so that their days in Korea might be even a little easier. He fussed over them for a reason. If they grew too eager to be gone, they might teach the work sloppily and clear out in a hurry.
Then he toured the Singsing Cultivator factory, trial production behind it and full-scale manufacture about to begin. Jung Se-young, Chung Ju-yung's younger brother, was working there as president. Chung Ju-yung, who had built the harbor alongside Cheongsan in Ulsan and put up the cultivator plant, had taken a keen interest in the factory. One day he had asked Ki-jo whether his younger brother might be taken on at the company, and Ki-jo had said yes. Knowing Jung Se-young for the "Pony Chung" who would build the legend of Hyundai Motor, he had gone so far as to give him the title of president.
True to that name, Jung Se-young brought a fierce passion to the making of cultivators. He ate and slept at the factory with the workers, laboring day and night to build, properly, a thing that rolled on wheels. The proof of it was his hair. At the start of the year he had still had a thick head of it; by year's end it had thinned a great deal.
When Ki-jo had made his rounds of Busan and Ulsan and the air taxi set him down again in Seoul, it was December 22. Nine days of 1960 remained.
The next day, December 23, he went in to DBC without a day's rest and looked over the Christmas special. He was watching a church choir rehearse, letting the feeling of Christmas settle over him, when a commotion rose outside the studio. A woman with a child on her back was trying to get in to see him, and a guard was blocking her way. The moment Ki-jo saw her, he hurried over and stopped the guard who was about to drag her off.
"Just a moment. I know her. Please — don't."
One look at Kwak Young-joo's wife — her face undone, sobbing as if she might come apart — and a pain went through him.
"Ma'am, come with me. We'll talk in my office."
He did not ask why. He took the weeping woman straight to his office, put a cup of hot tea in her hands, and only then asked what had brought her. In truth he had no need to ask. He knew why Kwak Young-joo's wife had come looking for him. His son, Seung-geun, had been kidnapped. Ki-jo had been so buried in the inspection of his businesses that he had forgotten the thing was coming.
"President, my son has been kidnapped. Please — help us."
Kwak Young-joo's wife had gone to her knees on the floor to plead. Ki-jo lifted Shin Ok-gyun to her feet, sat her on the sofa, and told her he would help.
"Give me a photograph of Seung-geun. We've set televisions up all over Seoul. We'll show people his face."
"Truly? You would really do that for us?"
Shin Ok-gyun looked at him as if she could not believe it. She had come clutching at straws, never imagining he would be the one to offer help first. She had expected him to draw back, on account of a husband reviled as one of the chief villains of April 19.
"Are you sure it's all right? If we only bring trouble down on you for nothing..."
She could not get the rest of it out. The tears came in a rush. Ki-jo held out his handkerchief to her as she wept aloud.
"It's all right. We have to find Seung-geun, whatever it takes. Don't think about the rest of it."
He knew the boy would come home safe on the first day of January, in the new year. That was how it had gone, in the history he remembered. But a tragedy unlike that history might yet unfold, and he wanted to ease, if only a little, the heart of a mother whose son had been taken. And when he thought of Kwak Young-joo — sitting in a detention cell, about to learn that his son had been kidnapped — he felt he ought to do at least what one person owes another.
"Ma'am, come home with me. I'll take you in the jeep. Find me a photograph of Seung-geun there."
"Yes, President. Thank you. Truly — thank you."
Ki-jo took Shin Ok-gyun by the arm and walked her out of the station. He put her in the jeep and turned toward Kwak Young-joo's house. He hated the man's crimes. Even so, a son's kidnapping seemed too cruel a thing to lay on a man who had less than a year left to live.
On the way, the days he had spent with Kwak Young-joo came back to him. He saw him again, stepping into a secretariat office that rampaging soldiers had torn to pieces, putting the wreckage to rights, and walking out with that wide, sudden grin. Kwak Young-joo was a man you could not quite bring yourself to hate, however much you wanted to — a man with a sore, aching place in him....