The First Summit
At 9:15 on the morning of November 14, 1961, a fine rain was falling over Washington.
Ki-jo had been waiting with the delegation for Chairman Park. When the Chairman appeared, they left the embassy together and the motorcade set off. The first stop was Arlington National Cemetery. Chairman Park stepped from the car, took the salute of a United States military honor guard, and laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He stood for a moment of silence in the drizzle, and then they went straight on to the Department of State.
The morning’s schedule called for no interpreter, so Ki-jo rode with Won Chung-yeon, director of the Office of Public Information. As they passed the Lincoln Memorial, Won spoke.
“I wish our country had a president worth commemorating like that. I do envy America.”
Even as he envied the United States, he did not forget to take Ki-jo’s measure.
“How are you feeling?”
“Never better.”
“Good. I’m counting on you.”
Won closed his hand tightly around Ki-jo’s as he said it. The hand was terribly cold. The man riding in Chairman Park’s service was wound tight as wire.
The moment they reached the State Department, Ki-jo and Won were out of the car as if sprung from it, taking their places at the Chairman’s shoulder. Secretary of State Dean Rusk received him at the entrance. Ki-jo followed just behind, turning Rusk’s English as they went. They rode the elevator together to the seventh floor and entered the Secretary’s office.
The subject of the meeting with Dean Rusk was money. Chairman Park asked him to hold aid to the Korean armed forces at the 1959 level until the First Five-Year Economic Development Plan had run its course. Rusk answered that the United States was reassessing fifteen years of foreign assistance and devising a new approach, and he declined to commit himself. Military aid, grant aid, and short-term aid would certainly shrink, he said; development assistance, by contrast, would be strengthened.
Then and there he put two important questions to the Chairman. The first was this.
“You say Korea is maintaining a force of six hundred thousand. Could you not put those troops to work in construction, communications, and public health?”
Chairman Park answered.
“Korea is already committing the military to economic development. More troops will be committed from here on.”
The second question concerned relations with Japan.
“You are pursuing the normalization of relations with Japan. What is it Korea hopes to obtain from them?”
“We mean to demand reparations for the damage done under colonial rule, and to use that money as capital for economic development.”
Ki-jo rendered it for Rusk, then quickly dropped his voice for the Chairman alone.
“Please tell him that if Korea receives reparations from Japan, the United States must not cut its aid on that account.”
Park Chung-hee delivered the point he had been fed, and Dean Rusk answered with a smile.
“Of course. It is only right that Korea be compensated for colonial rule. American aid and Japanese reparations are separate matters. Set your mind at ease.”
Hearing that, the Chairman pressed him once more.
“I would like the Secretary to give me a hopeful answer on the aid request I have raised.”
“On that, you should speak first with the man who does the work—Director Hamilton of the Agency for International Development. You and I will have another chance to talk before you leave the United States. And President Kennedy will of course raise the question of aid when you meet.”
The summit still lay ahead, and nothing had been decided in any official sense. Every exchange was bound to stay woolly.
When the talk with Secretary Rusk ended, Chairman Park went to see Director Hamilton of USAID, elsewhere in the same building. There he laid out Korea’s five-year plan and asked for support.
“Korea needs power plants and a steel mill. Set the rest aside if you must, but please support these two.”
At that, Director Hamilton asked whether Korea had no steel mill at all.
“You explain it.”
Delegated by the Chairman, Ki-jo took over.
“There is a company called Samhwa Iron and Steel, but it doesn’t make iron from ore. It melts scrap and turns out pig iron. Output runs to about sixty thousand tons a year.”
“Then why not expand that mill? Scale it up fivefold, produce something like three hundred thousand tons, and domestic demand ought to be well covered.”
The question was sharp, as one would expect from a man who lived in the details. When Ki-jo interpreted it, Chairman Park’s eyes went keen. He had already visited Samhwa in September, for the first firing of the No. 3 blast furnace the company had built, and the works at Samcheok had been small, shabby, and obsolete. Having seen the place for himself, he spoke with open distaste.
“Tell him that won’t do. Explain it properly.”
Ki-jo turned to Hamilton.
“Director, the Samhwa works is a mill the Japanese built during the Second World War to supply war matériel.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes. In the early years they made iron from ore and anthracite dug up around the plant. Productivity was so poor they had to keep taking money from the Government-General just to go on making iron. If it hadn’t been wartime, Japan itself would not have run that mill.”
“Why was productivity so low?”
“Because they used what the neighborhood produced. The ore was low-grade, and anthracite burns with a weak flame. There was no economic case for it from the start.”
“I see.”
Ki-jo had made the first point: a mill built on Korean ore and Korean coal would not pay.
“These days they collect scrap and melt it in a furnace to make pig iron, but the price is high, the technology is lacking, and the iron is full of impurities. The quality is poor.”
“So expanding that mill still wouldn’t make economic sense.”
“That’s right. To make proper pig iron you have to buy ore and bituminous coal from places like Australia. And if you’re going to bring raw materials in by the shipload, only a large integrated steelworks will pencil out.”
When Ki-jo finished, Hamilton said no more about expanding Samhwa. The director had been persuaded, calmly and cleanly, and the strain eased out of Chairman Park’s eyes. He left Hamilton with several further charges and set out for the White House.
This time Ki-jo rode with him. Whether the first meeting with Kennedy had him on edge, the Chairman did not say a word. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes. Both were bloodshot—the eyes of a man who had not slept. At last the car drew up at the White House gate. Chairman Park stepped out, and Kennedy, waiting at the entrance, came forward to meet him.
The two men shook hands, climbed the steps together, and posed for the photographers. In his sunglasses, Chairman Park was awkward from expression to posture. Kennedy, by contrast, looked as much at ease as a man welcoming a guest into his own house. Park introduced the delegation, and they went into the lobby together. A Marine honor guard was playing Arirang as Kennedy led him up to the second floor and presented Mrs. Jacqueline and the children. Chairman Park gave Kennedy two hanging scrolls, and a set of hanbok—traditional Korean dress—each to the First Lady and the children.
They moved on to lunch. Park and Kennedy sat side by side, with the principal Korean and American figures ranged to either side of them. On the American side were Secretary Rusk, Secretary of Defense McNamara, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Lemnitzer, Special Assistant Rostow, Ambassador to Korea Berger, USOM Director Killen, Assistant Secretary of State McConaughy, and others. Many of them had served in Korea, or were serving there still. Lemnitzer had commanded U.S. Forces Korea. McConaughy, as ambassador in Seoul, had taken an active hand in Syngman Rhee’s resignation. It was fair to say that everyone with the power to sway Korea had been gathered in one room.
Ki-jo was one of the twenty-three on the Korean side, seated behind the Chairman. The White House lunch included abalone, a dish Park favored. Ki-jo could not share the table, but he had eaten his fill at the hotel before they left at first light, and for an hour and forty minutes he interpreted without letup. Nothing of real weight was said over the meal. Chairman Park offered something close to what he had told the students in Chicago—his case for surgery on the Republic, the claim that he would operate as hard as he could in order to save the life of the nation—and Kennedy made a point of endorsing it.
Watching the President from behind, where he sat beside the Chairman, Ki-jo had the impression that Kennedy did not take Park very seriously. It was only a feeling. Still, the way Kennedy handled him put Ki-jo in mind of a man indulging some innocent student who had come to tour the White House.
When lunch ended, the Korean party returned for the time being to the embassy. At half past three they were back at the White House for the first round of talks.
The room was packed with photographers. Kennedy sat in a rocking chair whose armrests were covered in white cloth; Chairman Park took the sofa beside him, the delegation with him. Kennedy crossed his legs and rocked, easy and unguarded. Ki-jo sat in a chair at Park’s side. Beside Kennedy sat the interpreter, Alfred Campen—a man whose soft, yielding face sat oddly against his record. From the look of him alone, it would have been hard to suspect a covert officer of the CIA.
The meeting opened on a light joke. Kennedy addressed the Chairman.
“I hear the staff at our embassy in Seoul are worried, now that the revolutionary government has pushed through tax reform. They’re fretting over how to pay the taxes they’ve been letting pile up. Americans fear taxes more than they fear war.”
He said it smiling, but it sounded like a question: were they truly going to strip Americans of the exemptions they had enjoyed, and actually tax them? It sounded, at the same time, like another—did Park mean to walk away from the Korea–U.S. economic agreement concluded with the Chang Myon government? The pleasantry had plenty of bone in it. Ki-jo interpreted, and slipped a word in beside the translation.
“You don’t have to answer that. Fend it off with something else.”
Chairman Park smiled.
“Now that I’ve come to America, I see the camera reporters are the real masters.”
He indicated the photographers packing the room. He seemed to be turning the talk on the strength of what rude American reporters had done to him at the Seattle airport. When he had neatly stepped around the question of taxing Americans in Korea, Kennedy laughed.
“I agree with the Chairman entirely. Reporters are the true enemies of democracy.”
It was American humor, bad-mouthing in the open the reporters who make a politician’s life difficult. Everyone in the room, delegates and press alike, laughed.
The two leaders spent a while in friendly exchange, then sent the reporters out and began the meeting in earnest. Kennedy said he liked the joint communiqué that had been prepared in advance, and proposed that if it suited Chairman Park as well, they issue it exactly as it stood.
Ki-jo could read the intention. Kennedy was about to refuse every request Park would make, and he seemed determined to lock in a friendly joint statement before the Chairman’s mood could sour. Born to a powerful political house, a congressman since the age of twenty-nine, he was seasoned beyond his years. Chairman Park, a onetime elementary-school teacher who had spent the rest of his life as a soldier, was a novice in politics, and Kennedy was playing him with a practiced hand.
Even sensing that design, Ki-jo interpreted it straight.
“Good. I agree as well.”
Chairman Park assented. Ki-jo thought he, too, had little choice but to settle the communiqué now. Whatever came of the talks, a joint statement that Korean–American friendship stood firm, and that the United States would support Korea without reserve, was a result the Chairman absolutely had to carry home.
Ki-jo drew one short breath and glanced at Campen beside him. So far, the man did not seem to have noticed that Ki-jo was feeding the Chairman counsel of his own. What he longed for, in this first meeting, was for Kennedy to bring up a nuclear power plant—and, when that subject came, for Campen not to notice him stepping in.