Lee Young-hee
When the first summit ended, Kijo attended the reception hosted by the Korean Embassy.
Ambassadors stationed in Washington were there, along with American generals led by Lemnitzer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and through it all Kijo went on interpreting. Partway through he traded off briefly with an embassy staffer, slipped into an office, and ate his dinner alone. Then he rode with Chairman Park to Blair House, the presidential guest residence set aside for visiting heads of state.
After a banquet there hosted by Secretary Rusk, they returned to the embassy. It was nine at night.
He had come back into a young body, but the schedule left him no room to breathe, and the time difference and a grinding ache in his lower back were wearing him down. Fourteen hours was not a gap a man closed in two days. He had to stand ramrod straight or sit through one function after another in that state, and his back paid for it.
The official program was over and they were back at the embassy, but Kijo could not rest. A meeting had been called to prepare for the second round with Kennedy, and Chairman Park had him sit in—the man who had distinguished himself in the talks.
Originally only the first meeting with Kennedy had been confirmed. His offer of a second, nowhere on the schedule, lifted the whole delegation, Chairman Park included, even as it set them on edge.
The discussion converged on the dispatch of troops to Vietnam. In the first meeting Kennedy had raised Vietnam before anything else, and at the close he had said he was pleased by the proposal to send Korean forces. That was the ground they stood on.
Chung Il-kwon, ambassador to the United States, spoke.
"Kennedy is reluctant to send American troops to Vietnam, but the pressure at home to do so is no small thing. If Korea goes in first and offers to do the work the Americans would otherwise have to do themselves, wouldn't he be glad of it?"
The room seemed to agree.
Park Chung-hee put the question to Chung Il-kwon—the same age as himself, and his senior from the Manchurian army.
"There's the same current inside the U.S. military, isn't there? When we met Chairman Lemnitzer at the embassy, he said American aircraft are already spraying defoliant over the Vietnamese jungle."
"That's right. After his talks with Khrushchev, Kennedy said as much to a New York Times reporter. 'If America does nothing in Vietnam,' he told him, 'we will lose our credibility.'"
Hearing that, Chairman Park asked whether the rumor was true—that Secretary of Defense McNamara had recommended sending six American divisions, two hundred thousand men, to Vietnam.
Chung answered that the story was already circulating among Washington's diplomatic set as received fact.
The men at the table began to parse, line by line, what Kennedy had said in the room. When he remarked that it was not easy for white men to operate in Vietnam, they concluded he wanted them to go in—men the Vietnamese would not immediately mark apart from themselves.
Yu Yang-su, chairman of the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, proposed sending intelligence and special-operations units. A seventh-class graduate of the Korea Military Academy, Yu had served as chief of the combat intelligence section in the Army Headquarters Intelligence Bureau, and before the Korean War broke out he had insisted, alongside Park Chung-hee and Kim Jong-pil, that the North might invade. His superiors had marked him for it and pushed him aside. A product of that bureau, he now wanted them to offer Kennedy special-operations troops dispatched to Vietnam in civilian clothes.
And he brought up Kim Tai-sung of Shinheung Yanghaeng.
"There's a man named Kim Tai-sung who's already established in Vietnam. They say his firm is the largest Korean company operating there."
"What does he do?" Chairman Park asked.
"Anything that turns a profit, from what I hear. He sells Korean goods across Southeast Asia, and he brings timber from Southeast Asia back to Korea."
At the name, Park Tae-joon spoke.
"Cheongsan does business with Shinheung Yanghaeng. Best to ask President Lee."
As the Supreme Council member charged with commerce and industry, he knew Cheongsan's dealings down to the last detail.
Chairman Park turned to Kijo.
"What business do you have with Shinheung?"
"They import Malaysian logs for the plywood mill Cheongsan runs. We're also moving ahead together on a transport business inside Vietnam."
"Is that so? What sort of man is this Kim Tai-sung?"
"He has a wide reach all across Southeast Asia, and he seems to have lines into the core of the Saigon regime. Personally, he struck me as a man who could be trusted."
"Good."
Chairman Park nodded, and the others with him.
If secret operatives were to be sent to Vietnam, the conclusion was that they ought to go disguised as employees of Shinheung Yanghaeng. They asked Kijo to prepare the contact with Kim Tai-sung. He said he would.
The meeting turned to a strategy for the press. Someone proposed that they make aggressive use of the American papers during this visit and sell Korea's usefulness. They meant to take a lesson from President Syngman Rhee's own trip, when his offer had fallen flat—if the United States would bring its navy and air force against China, Korea would mobilize its army to help. This time the line would be different. America could stay where it was. Korea, as a representative of the free world, would go into Vietnam and help; all they would ask was that America supply the Korean forces.
There was one reason the talk of leaping into another country's war came so easily.
Money.
American aid had been shrinking ever since it peaked in 1957, and Kennedy was signaling ninety million dollars for 1962—a forty-percent cut in assistance to Korea. The sum had never once fallen below a hundred million, and the room went taut. Korea depended on American aid for most of the national finances. As of 1960, forty percent of the budget came from the United States, and ninety-five percent of defense spending. Trade was no better. Exports that year were a mere thirty-two million dollars; imports ran more than ten times that, three hundred forty-three million. A grim sense hung over them that it would be no surprise if the country went under in 1962.
Every man there had lived through the war and was not ignorant of its horror. Even so, their desperation came down to this: if the nation was not to collapse, they would have to sell blood in Vietnam to keep American aid coming.
Near midnight the argument settled. The loan for the power plant they would win by sending special forces to Vietnam. The loan for the steel mill they would try to assemble through KISA.
It was past midnight when the meeting broke and Kijo returned to the Shoreham Hotel. He dragged his heavy body into the room and found Lee Young-hee at the desk, writing an article.
"Writing a piece to send back to Korea?"
"Yes."
Lee Young-hee answered in a rush, covering the pages.
Kijo knew well enough what the man was about, so he did not go straight in to wash. He drew up a chair, sat down beside him, and asked.
"Did you get hold of what was said in the talks?"
Lee Young-hee started.
"How did you know?"
"You were writing so hard I had to ask. The other reporters will just cable home whatever press release Director Won Chung-yeon hands them. You're writing it yourself."
The rest of the traveling press had already filed, exactly as the public information director's materials instructed, that the summit had been an unqualified success. Lee Young-hee had done otherwise. He had sought out a Washington Post reporter who had covered the April 19 Revolution, reported on his own, and managed to interview an official at the State Department. In the morning he would send Korea a story like this.
The piece would be splashed across the papers the next day. For it, Lee Young-hee would be thrown off the press corps—and Won Chung-yeon, the public information director who had put him there, would be dismissed. Chairman Park would sink into a deep distrust of the press and clamp down on it harder still.
Kijo wanted to keep that from happening. It would help no one.
"You know I interpreted at the summit in Lieutenant Colonel Han Sang-guk's place?"
"I know."
"Then may I check whether the article you're writing is accurate?"
Lee Young-hee hesitated. He seemed uneasy about a piece no one would welcome.
Kijo pressed him gently.
"If I check it against what I heard in the room, the piece will only be more accurate, won't it?"
The offer of a cross-check moved him.
"If you promise not to tell the public information director what I wrote, I'll show you."
"All right."
Kijo gave his word and read the pages. They were no different from the original history. He handed them back.
"There's going to be a second meeting."
"Truly?"
Lee Young-hee's eyes lit.
"Is what I wrote the truth? A State Department official told me. Please confirm whether it's fact."
Kijo shook his head.
Disappointed, Lee Young-hee asked, "You're refusing because it is true?"
"No. Because what you've written holds only half the truth."
The words seemed to catch the reporter's instinct. His eyes brightened.
"Can you tell me more? If only half is true, then tell me only what isn't. I'll cut that and file the rest."
Kijo took his hand.
"I'm asking you. Keep what you've learned to yourself for a few months. There are talks underway beneath the surface that I can't speak of."
"Beneath the surface?"
"Yes. When the time comes, you'll come to know them in the natural course of things. I'm afraid an inaccurate report now would harm the national interest."
At those words, something in Lee Young-hee's gaze wavered. He was a man who would spend his life on the left, opposing American imperialism and contending with Park Chung-hee—yet he was also a citizen of the Republic who wanted his country to do well. To Kijo he looked caught between patriotism and conscience. He appealed to that conscience once more.
"What you obtained seems to be what America meant to demand of Korea. What Korea means to demand of America isn't in it yet."
What Lee Young-hee intended to file was not wholly false, but the second meeting could still change it.
"Are you truly guaranteeing this on your conscience as a Korean?"
It was Lee Young-hee who turned the question of conscience back on him.
"Of course. If I've lied to you here, shame me later in print."
Kijo said it calmly, and the edge in Lee Young-hee's eyes softened.
He did not sleep until two in the morning. He had told Lee Young-hee as much as he could of the scene and the atmosphere in the meeting room, and he had listened to what the man thought, and so he could not turn in early. He fell asleep without even washing, and woke at five.
The moment he rose he went quietly to the bathroom. There was a second summit that day, but the schedule began at eight, and the delegation had to be at the Korean Embassy by six. When he came out of the shower, Lee Young-hee was awake.
"Did the Korean government draw up this schedule, or the Americans?"
Kijo, toweling his hair, smiled.
"The American government."
"Aren't you exhausted?"
"Exhausted? When I think about getting our position through to America, I find the strength."
He had come in late and talked half the night, and had slept less than three hours, yet he answered brightly, and Lee Young-hee looked sorry for it.
"I hope the second meeting brings something good."
Lee Young-hee stood and offered his hand. Kijo shook it, dressed, and left the room.
Park Tae-joon was already waiting in the lobby. He too seemed not to have slept; his eyes were bloodshot red. His face, though, was as firm and composed as a general's on the eve of battle.
One by one the delegation gathered. Every face looked drawn and gray with fatigue. Once they were all there, they left at once for the embassy.
In the car, Won Chung-yeon, seated beside Kijo, spoke to him.
"I'm counting on you again today. The Chairman was very pleased with your interpreting. When we get back to Korea, I'll buy you a drink."
He said it with a satisfied smile.
Looking at the man's face, Kijo thought of what he would have to do tomorrow to save him. In the original history, Won Chung-yeon would be harshly rebuked by Park Chung-hee over Lee Young-hee's exposé and further missteps, driven out of the revolutionary government, and shunted into a sinecure. Whether from the grudge that followed, in 1965 he would clumsily plot a coup, be discovered, and be sentenced to death.
A man's life, it struck him, was a thing no one could predict. A small mistake, a small accident, could send it somewhere no one had imagined. But that was what a life was. Great things grew out of small ones.
Having thought that far, Kijo thought only of the day ahead. From eight in the morning until the second summit at four, the schedule was packed tight, with no room to draw a breath.