A Merciless Reality
The air in the conference room had frozen solid. Chairman Park and the rest of his delegation sat in shock. If this was how it was going to end, why had Kennedy insisted on a second meeting at all? What had yesterday's warmth amounted to? A look crossed their faces that said, without a word, that this was going too far.
Kijo went blank as well, at first, and could not get his thoughts in order. Chairman Park's silence stretched on. While the Chairman bought time, Kijo raised the glass beside him, took a sip of water, and forced himself to think it through, slowly.
In the original history, pressure of this kind from the United States had existed as well. It had come the very next day—November 16. Secretary of State Dean Rusk had brought Samuel Berger, the American ambassador in Seoul, to call on Chairman Park, and had spoken to him like this.
"Some of your aides seem dissatisfied with next year's grant-aid figure of ninety million dollars. If anyone goes back to Korea and raises that dissatisfaction in public, it will damage relations between our two countries."
It was a threat, delivered sideways—a gag order. Take the aid as America saw fit to give it, return to Korea, and say nothing. And then Rusk had told Chairman Park this.
"I have had occasion to deal with a good many foreign leaders, but you are the first I have seen go home having accomplished so much, Mr. Chairman."
A mere secretary of state had threatened the head of another state, then turned about and played the aggrieved party. Of course, only a great power could practice diplomacy of that sort.
Chairman Park—whether he had resigned himself, or judged that Rusk was conveying Kennedy's true mind—had answered like this.
"The friendship between Korea and the United States cannot be weighed in ninety million dollars. Let us forget the question of the sum."
That was the first time Chairman Park tasted the reality of relations between Korea and the United States. International relations were merciless. Before a great power, a weak nation was expected to take what it was given and keep its mouth shut.
Even then, Kennedy had pressed him to end military rule as quickly as possible and hand power to a civilian government at an early date. What Kennedy had just done—piling discourtesy on discourtesy, demands that amounted to interference in domestic affairs—was something that had existed in the original history as well. Only the method had changed.
Little by little, Kijo recovered his composure. Of all the Koreans in the room, he was the first to come back to himself, and he ran quickly through the ways this reality differed from the original history.
Perhaps, he thought, it was a mercy that they had been spared the humiliation of being threatened by a mere secretary of state. In place of the order to voice no complaint, take what you are given, and go back to Korea, they were being offered a condition that looked almost unprecedented: meet our demands, and we can give you the aid you want.
There was a reason he saw it that way.
Looking again at the first demand, it did not seem so bad. Chairman Park had meant to adopt an American-style presidential system in any case, and he knew the American side was curious about the direction the revolutionary government's constitutional revision would take. When Lee Seok-je, chairman of the Legislative and Judiciary Committee, had advised him, Park had accepted without hesitation.
"It would set American minds at ease, and it would be wise to invite American constitutional scholars and use them as advisers."
Professor Rupert Emerson of Harvard and Professor Gilbert Flanz of New York University were brought to Korea. With that, the constitution of the Third Republic would be recast along American lines, its core a four-year presidential term with the right to stand again, a unicameral legislature, and a party-centered political system.
If Chairman Park did not take Kennedy's demand purely as an insult, Kijo thought, he might well be able to accept the first of them.
The second demand was reasonable enough, too. The ban on political activity by civilian politicians was to be lifted as of January 1, 1963, regardless. Lifting it now, at the end of 1961, would only move the date forward by about a year, and withdrawing the restrictions did not look as if it would cause any serious trouble.
Since May 16, a state of emergency martial law had been declared over the Republic of Korea. Kennedy had not said to lift it, and so long as martial law remained, the political activity of civilian politicians would still have its limits. Those tried by the revolutionary courts on charges of being major spies had already been executed. Releasing the people still in prison would be no great burden on the revolutionary government. There were also those who had been unjustly locked away by the military government's revolutionary trials, and this would help set them free.
The third demand, though—holding the general election before the presidential election—looked harder. It called for a political decision from Chairman Park.
In the original history the presidential election had been held on October 15, 1963, and the general election on November 26 of that same year. Kennedy seemed to be pressing them to put the general election first, so as to make the transfer to civilian rule certain. On Chairman Park's side, preparations were already under way, under Kim Jong-pil's lead, to found the Democratic Republican Party and seize control of the National Assembly.
It was a question of which comes first, the chicken or the egg. If they were confident of winning a general election held ahead of the presidential one, it was a condition they could accept. In the sixth general election, held on November 26, 1963, the Democratic Republican Party had taken more than half the seats.
The fourth demand—a tax exemption for American nationals, and a corporate-tax exemption for American firms that entered Korea—was one Kijo wanted accepted without condition. Korea already had little enough to tempt investment. If they meant to draw American companies in, they would have to offer tax relief at the very least.
To people of the 1960s, tax breaks designed to lure foreign firms were a policy hard to swallow. From the 2000s on, that way of thinking had begun, little by little, to change, and incentives for investment would later become ordinary practice. What Kijo regretted was that he could not advise them outright: even if the tax went uncollected, they could put the unemployed to work, revive the economy, and absorb the technology of foreign companies.
As for the last matter, the dispatch of troops to Vietnam, he judged it something Chairman Park could well accept.
The papers on the Vietnam deployment preserved in the government archives showed many traces of the Park Chung-hee administration hesitating to the very end over the sending of combat troops. Directives from the Blue House made it plain that Chairman Park had by no means simply welcomed America's request for fighting forces.
Kijo thought he could read Kennedy's intention as well. Reluctant himself about Vietnam, Kennedy seemed to fear that if Korea went in first and the fighting widened, the United States would be swept in automatically. America always wanted Korea kept bound under its control.
Taken together, Kennedy had framed conditions that were, in their own way, rational. From his standpoint he would see democracy driven through in Korea, and he would also open a road to making use of Korea should the United States be drawn into the Vietnam War. Kijo could feel, too, the intent to seize a chance to recover from the international humiliation of the previous April.
On April 15, 1961, Kennedy had launched a large-scale landing to bring down the regime of Fidel Castro, who had turned Cuba communist. The affair, known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, had been a plan to train Cuban exiles, put them ashore in Cuba, and drive all the way to the capital. They never even got clear of the beach. Every last one of them was wiped out.
It was bad enough to be recorded as the most wretchedly concluded operation in American military history, and at home the business had put Kennedy in a bind. His rivals attacked him by saying that if anyone wanted to see how incompetent he was, they had only to look at the Bay of Pigs—and the attack went down well with the public. That the strongest nation in the world had been beaten in Cuba, a tiny island country lying right beneath it, was a shock even to Americans. The United States had not committed its own troops, but the thinking of the time was that a place like Cuba would collapse if America backed the effort.
Judged diplomatically inept from the very opening of his administration, Kennedy could make up for the failure in Cuba if he could claim that, with a little money and a little diplomacy, he had set to rights a Korea where a coup had taken place.
Thinking that far, Kijo felt that the warm, friendly atmosphere of yesterday's talks had not been wholly meaningless. Kennedy seemed to have gone a long way toward accommodating Korea's position.
He looked at Chairman Park, sunk in thought, and inwardly he shouted at him to accept. The situation was deeply humiliating, and from Park's point of view it meant staking a political gamble. But if a nuclear power plant and a steel mill could be raised at the same time, it would be an immense gift to those who came after. In his heart, Kijo begged him to accept what Kennedy asked.
Chairman Park, who had been holding his head slightly lowered, lifted it straight. He looked at Kennedy and spoke, slowly.
"What President Kennedy hopes for accords with the direction in which I mean to shape the political situation. These are also matters I had intended to pursue over the long term."
Kijo felt a wash of relief at the Chairman's words. Park, too, was a man who had thrashed for more than ten years simply to stay alive. Politically he was still a novice, but he was someone who had come through more than one brush with death and slipped the blades of men in power, and he showed the self-control that came of it. That he had not made an ugly scene of losing his temper in front of Kennedy was, by itself, worth a high mark.
To Kijo's eye, Chairman Park seemed to be trying to buy time. Kennedy, though, appeared to have seen through that intent as well.
"I would ask you to decide here, today. If you agree to all five points, let us issue a statement from the White House at once."
By announcing a joint statement before the press, Kennedy meant to bind Chairman Park so he could not talk differently later. Their judgment, it seemed, was that he would not dare overturn a promise made standing beside the President of the United States and announced from the White House.
Kijo studied him again. At this moment Chairman Park held absolute power in Korea. With the constitution suspended, he had become a military governor, able to exercise legislative, executive, and judicial authority all at once. He could draft a constitutional amendment on his own and put it to a national referendum. The question was whether he could bring himself to give that up.
Kijo wanted to tell him to relinquish that unchecked power.
In the original history, on the eve of the transfer to civilian rule, you wavered and reversed yourself again and again, throwing the people into confusion and driving America to fury. Kennedy's conditions contain no demand that would bar you from running for president as a private citizen. And holding the general election quickly, then the presidential election, just as he asks, works to your advantage as well.
The public, sickened by the attempt to prolong military rule and by your reversal of the pledge not to run, did not give you many votes in the fourth presidential election. You defeat Yun Bo-seon—the rival you denounced as a politician of the old order—by a margin of only 156,026 votes. That difference will stand for decades as a record no one breaks. If you dream of the presidency, you must let go of the power now in your hands and return the Republic of Korea to a democratic order.
Remembering that in his previous life Chairman Park had come home from America having gained nothing, only humiliation, Kijo closed his eyes for a moment.
Then he heard the Chairman's voice, and opened them.
"President Kennedy wants my answer at once, I see. Very well. Then, before I give it, I will ask someone."
With that, Chairman Park turned his eyes on Kijo.
"Say, Kijo. What kind of decision do you think I ought to make? You're the only civilian in this room. Speak as an ordinary citizen back home would."
Everyone in the conference room fixed on Kijo. His throat burned, but he could not touch the water beside him. He had been through moments like this a few times before, though, and the lesson he had taken from them was that he must not let himself freeze solid.
Kijo gave Chairman Park an easy smile and answered.
"Whatever decision you make, Mr. Chairman, the Korean people will follow it. No one doubts that you are carrying through reforms to save the country—and no one doubts that your will toward democracy is firm."
Even as he spoke in generalities, he put into the look he turned on Chairman Park the plea that he accept Kennedy's terms.
At that, Chairman Park broke into a broad, unguarded laugh—the same plain one he used to give when the two of them met alone to talk, before the coup. Still chuckling, stroking his chin, he looked at Kennedy and opened his mouth.