The Stumbling Block
Kijo watched Chairman Park in profile, scarcely daring to breathe.
The question of how the people would take Kennedy's demands had been heavier than it sounded. It had been tossed off like a joke, but Kijo was receiving it as anything but. What Chairman Park needed was the support of the nation.
In the first days after the coup, Park Chung-hee's hold on the government had been anything but secure. He had not made the "revolution" alone. The coup was the work of men who thought in different ways, gathered under one banner. Each had joined for his own reasons, and each saw a different road for the revolutionary government to travel.
In the immediate wake of May 16, Chairman Park had cut away everyone whose thinking diverged from his own. He cast out Chang Do-young, who wanted military rule ended in six months, or in two years at the latest, and he swept aside the fifth class of the Korea Military Academy when they rose against him. He purged and purged again, until what remained were the eighth-class men with Kim Jong-pil at their center, and the officers from his own Yeongnam country.
Had that made his power stronger? Not quite. Thanks to the eighth class, authority had gathered in Chairman Park's hands, but the eighth class, now his inner circle, had grown stronger still, and their voices louder with it. There was no longer any faction inside the revolutionary government that could check them. The structure itself made it hard for him to decide a great matter of state alone. And even among the entourage that had come with him now, there would be men who believed Kennedy's demands must not be accepted. However carefully the delegation had been filled with pro-American figures, they might still conclude that America had gone too far.
Kijo looked at Kennedy, waiting for an answer in the rocking chair, legs crossed, one foot tapping.
In the history as it had originally unfolded, the second meeting had ended in a bare thirty-five minutes. As it was known, Kennedy had cut Chairman Park short—"At this stage, there is no need to send Korean troops to South Vietnam"—and that refusal of a Korean deployment had been the substance of the session. There were traces that Kennedy had spent something like a day weighing the offer of troops Chairman Park had made at the first meeting. He might even have discussed with his staff the notion of putting Koreans into Vietnam in place of Americans. If he had, then Kennedy, who opposed sending American forces to Vietnam until the day he died, would have come to a negative conclusion about Korean troops as well. And so, the next day, he might have called Chairman Park in, refused the deployment, and brought the talks to a swift close.
Why, then, had it grown so tangled? Why was Kennedy pressing unreasonable demands and insisting that the decision be made here, in this room?
Kijo turned over the record of the man who had become president at the end of January this year. In April, only three months after the inauguration, the Cuban invasion he had planned with such ambition failed in misery, and Cuba's dictator, Castro, mocked him for it. A month later, in May, a coup broke out in Korea, where American troops were stationed, and toppled the lawful government. The United States held even peacetime operational control, and still the coup had shaken its grip on the country; whether from anger or not, Kennedy dismissed the commander of U.S. Forces Korea. Another month on, in June, he sat down in Vienna with Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Kennedy's ordeal did not end there. The moment the ceremonial greetings were finished, Khrushchev denounced him for the invasion of Cuba and handled him like a son. Khrushchev had lost a son in the Second World War, a man who had spent his short life drinking and chasing women, and he treated Kennedy—twenty-three years his junior—as if he were that dead boy. Kennedy had expected that a meeting between the leaders of two superpowers, age aside, would be wrapped in mutual respect and careful courtesy. Instead he took a heavy blow. Flustered, he even committed the error of admitting before Khrushchev that the Bay of Pigs invasion had been his own misjudgment.
At the second session the next day he proposed a joint American-Soviet expedition to the moon and mutual limits on nuclear testing. The answer that came back was cold. A moon shot cost too much money; America could do that sort of thing alone. Limits on nuclear tests were absurd. All Kennedy heard from Khrushchev was a threat: war or peace would depend on what America chose. In the end the summit, two days of it, closed without so much as a joint statement.
Turn over the ten months since the inauguration, and it was easy to see why a president who had known nothing but failure from the moment he took office might be in a hurry. Kennedy needed a diplomatic success.
Kijo looked at Chairman Park again. The chairman wore that face of his, blank, and cold to look at. At last he opened his mouth.
"I am not a man who succeeded at a revolution by himself."
He stopped there a moment, then went on.
"If I decide a vital matter of state alone, in this place, I cannot predict what may happen in Korea while I am still here."
A full ten days remained before Chairman Park would go home. The moment he settled every question by himself in America, discontent inside the revolutionary camp could gather into one voice. Kijo took the words as a confession of how fragile the power he had seized still was. He had once read, in a book, the testimony that right after the revolution Chairman Park had told James Hausman, "The eighth-class tigers are trying to push me aside." Whether that claim was true or not, it was a fact that in the early military government the eighth class had been formidable. He hoped Kennedy would hear what lay under the words.
Kennedy, listening with a grave face, seemed to have caught something between the lines.
"It seems you need time to think, Mr. Chairman. It's a little close in here. Shall we step outside and get some air?"
Chairman Park accepted. Kennedy rose first, and the chairman followed. Kennedy would not let his staff come along, interpreters excepted. Chairman Park, too, took only his interpreter, Kijo, and went out onto the grounds in front of the White House.
Free of the room thick with cigarette smoke, the chill air of mid-November felt clean. The sun had already sunk far toward the west. Walking the yellowed lawn, Kennedy asked him a question.
"Does the civilian interpreter beside you trouble you at all?"
If a civilian sitting in on a conversation where security mattered made him uneasy, Kennedy was suggesting, he was welcome to trust the American interpreter instead. Chairman Park glanced once at Kijo and answered.
"It's fine. Better, in fact."
Kennedy glanced at Kijo as well, and gave him a smile. Then he set his face to seriousness again, looked once at the sky, and asked,
"If you accept my proposal, do you believe the unity inside will come apart?"
It was a sharp question. As usual, Chairman Park did not answer at once. What came out of him was oblique.
"I am not a man who took power by winning the people's support, as you did, President Kennedy. In that sense I envy you. In a democracy there is no force stronger than the support of the people."
"But winning that support is no ordinary piece of work."
Kennedy smiled as he seconded him. For a while the two of them walked the grounds without a word. It was Chairman Park who spoke first.
"No one asked me to make a revolution. But in the end, I did. Before the sun was even up on the day of it, I made six promises to thirty million people. Those six articles of the revolutionary pledge are still in force, and they will remain so."
Kijo had the feeling that Chairman Park meant to accept what Kennedy was asking. Kennedy, too, was listening hard.
"I said I would relieve the suffering of a people gasping on the edge of starvation, and bend every effort to rebuilding the economy. And I said that when the revolutionary task was accomplished, I would hand power to fresh and conscientious politicians and go back to the army."
He was speaking of the fourth article of the pledge, and the sixth. Accept President Kennedy's demands, he went on, and it might help him fulfill the fourth—but the sixth might be left unfinished.
Kennedy answered.
"Do 'fresh and conscientious politicians' even exist in this world? Conscience is the word that sits least comfortably next to politician."
He had made a joke of the sixth pledge, and Chairman Park laughed. When the laughter faded, the chairman said,
"I think of the two promises as one thing. If the people are to eat well and live well, the politicians have to be clean. If they aren't, Korea will slide back into the past and become a country with no future all over again."
Kennedy made a gesture of agreement, then stopped walking and asked,
"You don't happen to think of yourself as a fresh and conscientious politician, do you?"
At the question that came in so directly, Chairman Park gave a dry chuckle.
"Where anticommunism is concerned, I am confident. The first article of the revolutionary pledge was that anticommunism would be the policy of the nation."
"That's a relief."
Kennedy laughed, looking down at the grass, and then said,
"If Chairman Park becomes president through a fair election, I won't oppose it. All I mean is that you mustn't post armed soldiers at the polling places and frighten the people."
At words offered like a joke, Chairman Park's face stiffened for an instant, then eased. It looked like a reflex at having his mind read so plainly.
"If you will only keep, without fail, the promise to hold a general election within a year and constitute a National Assembly, I can protect you."
Kijo's heart hammered as he interpreted. Kennedy was saying, in effect, that so long as democratic procedure was observed, he did not much care who held the power. Of course what mattered to him was that a pro-American government stand in Korea, but he did not seem worried on that score. He appeared to judge Chairman Park pro-American enough already, and he looked confident that Korea's leading politicians would be watching America as well. And since the chairman had already swept the left with more than enough thoroughness, the fact that no leader of the left was likely to rise in a coming presidential election seemed to set him at ease.
Kennedy went on.
"Send the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency to the United States. We'll hold him here for about three weeks."
"What do you mean by that?"
Chairman Park put the question to the man who was recommending a trip to America for Kim Jong-pil, all but second in the regime.
"Wouldn't it help you carry out the revolution within the revolution that you mean to pursue from here?"
Kennedy said it while looking off into the distance.
"We won't be careless in our hospitality to the KCIA director. On the contrary, it would be good to have him meet the Director of Central Intelligence, and to have him meet my brother as well. The follow-up talks on building a nuclear power plant can be conducted with him. What do you think, Mr. Chairman?"
He was telling Chairman Park to push, at home, the political timetable he himself had set out—while Kim Jong-pil was in America. Without Kim Jong-pil in Korea, changing that timetable would be easier. Wasn't that the point? Even to Kijo, it looked like a perfect pretext and a perfect solution. Tell Kim Jong-pil to go to America to negotiate a nuclear plant, and he would go willingly. A meeting with the CIA director, and even with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, the president's brother and the real power in the White House—JP was not a man who would turn that down.
When Chairman Park delayed his answer, Kennedy spoke.
"In the second joint statement, let us say only that the United States and Korea shared an important political timetable. That we reached an understanding taking one step closer to freedom and democracy, and that the matter of extending a special loan to Korea is already being carried out."
Having laid it out so cleanly, Kennedy pressed Chairman Park for a decision.