The Return of Lee Byung-chull
In the last days of June 1961, the businessmen came forward, one after another, to confess the fortunes they had gathered by illicit means. They reported the sums and promised the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction that they would surrender everything they owned to the state.
These were the same men who, under Chang Myon's government, had closed ranks and lobbied the political world to water down the bill on illicit accumulation. Lee Byung-chull, then in Japan, had been no different. From abroad he too had sent Chairman Chang Do-young a letter vowing to turn over to the nation every last asset he had amassed by crooked means.
And at last, on the night of June 26, Lee Byung-chull came home. Arrest had been set for the moment of his return, and the instant he stepped off the plane the investigators waiting at the foot of the stairs took him into custody. The daily papers printed the news exactly as it stood, and each time the public cheered.
Ki-jo, however, knew what lay behind the headlines. Lee Byung-chull was never delivered to an investigative agency. He was taken instead to the Metro Hotel in Myeong-dong, a short walk from the Public Security Bureau.
It was special treatment.
And it was there that he would meet Park Chung-hee.
On June 29, Lee Byung-chull was released from his confinement in the hotel. The other businessmen were freed the same day. Those who walked out were summoned to the Supreme Council's conference room, where Lee Seok-je, chairman of the Legislation and Judiciary Committee, delivered a warning. Lee Seok-je was Park Chung-hee's closest aide, the man who on the day of the revolution had gone about at his side with a carbine in his hands.
Ki-jo had not been branded an illicit accumulator, and so he was not in that room. He knew all the same what had passed there. Lee Seok-je drew the revolver at his hip, set it down on the desk with a crack, and spoke.
"I was opposed to releasing any of you. Even so, Vice Chairman Park has ordered that you be let go, and so I am letting you go. But if you ever again play games with aid supplies or the national budget, then even if I am no longer in this seat, some junior officer of mine—a bastard cut from the same cloth—will step forward and shoot you dead."
With that warning hanging over them, the businessmen were set free. On June 30, the last day of the month, Ki-jo read the article that led the front page of the Dong-A Ilbo.
The revolutionary government had brought its handling of the illicit-wealth businessmen to a close with the surrender of their property, and, to revive an economy gasping through a slump, had begun to put a series of measures into effect. Ki-jo believed Lee Byung-chull had had a large hand in moving the revolutionary officers to act as they did. He knew the conversation Park Chung-hee and Lee Byung-chull had shared the day after the latter's return, when Park came to the Metro Hotel.
In the book written by Lee's son, Lee Maeng-hee, it was Park who sought Lee out. In the account written by Cho Gap-je, it was Lee who went to Park. Either way, the two men met alone. That much was fact.
Having met him, Park asked how Korea's economy might be rebuilt. Lee Byung-chull offered this remedy.
"The taxes Samsung paid last year came to something like three percent of all the taxes the state collects. Turn that around, and it means that if the country had only thirty companies like Samsung, the nation would never have to worry about taxes at all."
Lee later said that, hearing this, Park had understood him well. He went on and laid his thinking out in full. The root of the disorder, he said, lay in the country's poverty, and poverty could be driven out only if the economy were brought back to life. To revive the economy, businessmen had to be given the chance to serve the work of national reconstruction. Under the unjust tax laws of the past, and under pressure from the political world, the entrepreneur who had not evaded taxes was, if anything, the incompetent one. It was grossly unfair to lock up the man who had worked himself raw to save his company, and to acquit the incompetent man who had run his own into the ground. If the nation was to be rebuilt, factories would have to be raised, and a great deal besides. He asked that capable businessmen be put to proper use.
Park, having heard him, was said to have answered in this way.
"Listening to you, President Lee, I can breathe again. I told the scholars to bring me a plan for rebuilding the economy, and all they did was sit in meetings among themselves all day. No conclusion ever came of it."
When he then asked what ought to be done with those charged with illicit accumulation, Lee was said to have replied:
"Better to let them go, and put them to work."
At the suggestion that they be released, Park asked again.
"Will the people accept that?"
Ki-jo thought that, at that first meeting, Park Chung-hee and Lee Byung-chull had taken a liking to each other. Thereafter Park entrusted Lee with undertakings on a national scale, and Lee cooperated with him in earnest. During the honeymoon between them, it was said, Lee spoke not of collusion between politics and business, but of cooperation between politics and business.
Ki-jo decided to watch what course Lee Byung-chull—the greatest chaebol in Korea, and a man now held in Park's confidence—would take from here. Cautious as he was, Lee would move only after he had confirmed that power in the revolutionary government had passed securely into Park's hands.
And at last, on July 9, an evening paper set the arrest of Chang Do-young, chairman of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, across the top of its front page.
The Supreme Council's Office of Public Information announced that the counter-revolutionary faction had formed a clique inside the revolutionary government, plotted to assassinate Chairman Park Chung-hee and seize power, and that the conspiracy had been detected and crushed in advance, the plotters rounded up to a man.
The infighting within the revolutionary camp was over, and Park's power as chairman of the Supreme Council was secure. Ki-jo expected Lee Byung-chull to begin moving in earnest toward his cooperation with Park. As expected, once Park held the power of the Republic, Lee moved. On July 17, 1961, the thirteen businessmen released from prison formed the core of an Association for the Promotion of Economic Reconstruction. On August 16, Lee Byung-chull, designated by Park Chung-hee, took office as its first chairman, and the body's name was changed to the Korea Employers Association. The root of the Federation of Korean Industries had been born.
At the end of August, an invitation came from Lee Byung-chull, now chairman of the Federation. Ki-jo passed through the gate of the house in Jangchung-dong and crossed the yard, and there, standing before the entrance, was Lee himself. The color in his face was better than the last time Ki-jo had seen him.
"How do you do, President Lee. It's been a long time."
"A pleasure. Please, come in."
Ki-jo followed Byung-chull into the study. The air conditioner was running, and the room was cool.
"Hot out there, isn't it?"
Lee smiled, watching Ki-jo wipe the sweat from his brow with a handkerchief. He turned his gaze to the window, looked out for a moment, and went on.
"Well. The last time we met, I asked you when spring would come. And now it feels as if summer arrived all at once, with no spring in between."
Ki-jo thought the man had been shuttled from a cold bath to a hot one and back again, and had never had a moment in which to feel the warmth. Whenever the press wrote of him, it still hung the same epithet on his name: Mr. Lee Byung-chull, the nation's foremost chaebol and an illicit accumulator of wealth. Later generations would look at him as the founder who raised the great empire called Samsung. The people of his own time did not. To them he was the unscrupulous businessman itself—the man who had curried favor with the government, taken vested properties on easy terms, remade his station in life, and reaped windfall profits off aid goods. Anyone who did not work for Samsung spoke of him as "Money Byung-chull," chewing the name with contempt.
Ki-jo could see, too, that some of the hatred came simply from the sight of one man seeming to eat well and live well while everyone else was poor and worn down. The public's dislike had not faded. Even so, Lee's face looked at ease, as if the meeting with Park Chung-hee had gone well enough that he no longer expected political power to hound him. He drew his eyes from the window, looked straight at Ki-jo, and asked,
"Oughtn't Cheongsan to join the association as well?"
He meant the Korea Employers Association, of which he himself was chairman. Ki-jo did not answer at once. Lee gave a low, genial laugh.
"Worried you'll be blackened, keeping so close to the ink?"
"It isn't that."
When Ki-jo denied it, Lee went on, still smiling.
"Cheongsan's circumstances aren't the same as the other firms'. Even so, it would be better to stand together."
He explained the reason gently.
"The association does exist, in part, to assist the economic policy of the revolutionary officers. But it is also a body meant to protect the interests of us businessmen. The military will certainly come to us with demands, and we can hardly do everything they tell us to do. There will be times when we have to work out a compromise through the association and lay that adjusted proposal before the government."
Ki-jo nodded. He understood perfectly well what the man was saying. This would be the work of the Federation once it stood fully established: to guard the interests of the companies, and, as the price of that protection, to serve as the channel through which black money was paid up to the regime.
"I won't be joining the Employers Association."
Ki-jo said it gently, and he said it flat. Lee nodded, granting him the point.
"The same view as my son's. He asks me why I ever took the chair of a body like that. A father, he says, does nothing but suffer. That's where my boy Maeng-hee stands."
Ki-jo smiled. Lee was addressing him with full courtesy, but he and Lee's eldest son, Lee Maeng-hee, were only a year apart. He understood that, in Lee's eyes, he was little more than a son. He did not think Lee would press him any further.
Sure enough, instead of persuasion, Lee offered advice to a man of his son's generation.
"The Supreme Council is telling the businessmen branded as illicit accumulators to pay their fines in cash. We mean to answer that, rather than hand over cash, we will build factories and pay in shares."
Ki-jo nodded.
"Cheongsan has committed no offense. Even so, the government's demands will come to Cheongsan as well."
Ki-jo thought so too. The military government would require an effort toward economic reconstruction even of Cheongsan, and there would be no slipping past it.
"If those demands should ever grow too heavy, come to the association whenever you like and talk it over with me. I'll help you."
Ki-jo thanked him for the kindness. The kindness looked sincere. There was, no doubt, a fellowship in it—the feeling that the harder things became, the more tightly businessmen had to stand together. And though society condemned him, there seemed also a will to wash the disgrace away by doing work that served the public good of the national economy. In later years Lee Byung-chull would show so strong an attachment to the Federation that he would instruct that his gravestone need not record any other name, nor the work of any other organization, but that it must record his service as the Federation's chairman.
Having received counsel as earnest as that, Ki-jo wanted to offer some of his own. It might sound presumptuous. It was advice the man needed all the same.
"President Lee, on my way into the house just now I saw a Mercedes. Is it yours?"
"Yes. It is."
"Sell it. Or better still, I think you ought to turn it over to the state."
Lee laughed, a soft breath of a laugh. Just as Ki-jo had feared, the advice seemed to have landed as something trivial, and he felt a pang of regret.
"You're telling me to mind how I look to the soldiers. Isn't that it?"
"It is."
"Ha. Very well. I'll give it some thought."
Ki-jo believed Lee had to be rid of the Mercedes. If the man would not take the advice, there was nothing to be done. Park Chung-hee himself might have looked on that car without a flicker of feeling. The revolutionary officers beneath him would not. They would be deeply offended that Lee Byung-chull went about in a Mercedes, and every time the car was seen on the road they would nurse a grudge and tell themselves he needed to be taken down. And later they would in fact do him harm, and when they did they would cite the Mercedes. Perhaps because he had been raised a rich man's son, his sense of luxury was not an ordinary man's. The air conditioner humming in the study was of a piece with the car. Neither stirred any particular alarm in him.
Ki-jo worried for a man who looked on cooperation with the military government so optimistically. Unlike Park Chung-hee, who saw only the grand design, Lee did not yet know how narrowly the young officers gathering power beneath him saw the world.
Ki-jo left the house in Jangchung-dong and climbed into his jeep.
He meant to go on driving a jeep for ten years and more.