Clash with Yun Bo-seon

After the Lunar New ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Year, the revolutionary government began to unveil one reform measure after another. On February 6, the very day after Seollal, it set forth the Five-Year Technical Promotion Plan, announcing that by 1966 it would train 580,000 technicians, technical workers, and skilled craftsmen, and raise enrollment at technical high schools by twenty percent. It was a departure from the governments that had come before, which had opened each new year chiefly with agricultural policy. The will to industrialize was laid bare. On February 8 came a further measure, forgiving the delinquent taxes of the poor—relief for those with no means to pay, even though revenue was already short.

On February 10 it was announced that Chairman Park, together with the members of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, would tour the provinces to gather public opinion on a wide scale, traveling through Jeolla, Gyeongsang, and Gangwon. Watching measures pour out every other day, Kijo expected the Chairman to step into politics in earnest. If the constitution was to be amended and a general election held within the year, time was already tight. His expectation became fact the very next day.

On February 11, before he left on the provincial tour to sound out opinion, Chairman Park announced that prior censorship of the press would be abolished, and that a national referendum on constitutional revision would be held on March 15. The step came nearly a year earlier than in the original history.

At the press conference he defined the heart of the fifth constitutional revision as a four-year presidency renewable once, a unicameral legislature, and a party-centered political system, and said the referendum would follow at once after a thirty-day period of public notice. He stressed that every one of these measures was an effort toward a swift transfer to civilian rule. Then he added a further step certain to draw fire.

It was the Political Activity Purification Act. In the name of “purifying political activity and establishing a fresh political morality,” the law would take written pledges from 4,369 politicians in all. The pledge was a vow to commit no anti-democratic act, and not to repeat the rotten politics of the old order. A man had to present himself before the Political Purification Committee, set up under the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, deliver that vow in writing, and pass a qualification review before he could resume political life.

Kijo marked how the act had changed from the original history. There, the Political Activity Purification Act was announced on March 16 of that year, and it banned political activity for some four thousand politicians outright. This time, because of the promise made to Kennedy after the visit to the United States, politicians would be allowed to act freely—but break their pledge to the revolutionary government, and the ban would fall on them again.

Having taken a measure that drew welcome and alarm in the same breath, Chairman Park left on his provincial tour on the twelfth. Kijo expected a political storm on account of it. For the moment, the press judged his “resolve” favorably. Lifting censorship, amending the constitution so as to hasten the handover to civilian rule—there was little in it to fault. Established politicians, however, recoiled hard from the Purification Act. How could the very men who had committed the anti-democratic act of a coup lecture politicians against anti-democratic conduct, and demand pledges into the bargain?

President Yun Bo-seon objected at once. With Chairman Park away in the provinces, he issued a statement declaring the Political Activity Purification Act a bad law. After that press conference of protest, Kijo sat down with Chang Key-young—co-president of DBC, and publisher of the Hankook Ilbo—in the president’s office at DBC.

“President Yun’s caught between a rock and a hard place. Word is, if he refuses the purification law the Supreme Council drew up, he’s breaking the constitution.”

Under the constitution as it stood, Chang Key-young said, the president had no right to reject a law enacted by the legislature.

“And if he simply doesn’t sign a newly passed bill?”

“He’s broken the constitution. They’d impeach him, wouldn’t they?”

Under the cabinet system, Yun Bo-seon was a symbolic head of state without real power, and he was boxed into a dead end. Accept Chairman Park’s bill, and he endorsed an anti-democratic law. Refuse it, and he violated the constitution. In the original history he chose to sign the Political Activity Purification Act and then resign—keeping the constitution, and keeping his political conscience by protesting the injustice as he stepped down.

Kijo waited for Chairman Park’s response. In the original history the Chairman went to Yun Bo-seon, worked to persuade him, and held fast to the act. This time, out in the provinces, he offered no response at all. Then, on Friday the sixteenth, the president issued a statement giving notice of his resignation.

Only when President Yun Bo-seon moved to step down did Chairman Park stir. He broke off the tour, came up to Seoul, and delivered an emergency address from the Supreme Council building.

It was an unexpectedly hard stroke. In this history the posture was plain: if you mean to go, then go. As if startled by that hard line, the Blue House fell silent through Saturday and Sunday. Had President Yun Bo-seon pictured Chairman Park clutching the leg of his trousers, begging him not to resign? When the Chairman paid no call at the Blue House all weekend, President Yun left it on the morning of Monday, February 19.

The presidential spokesman said that in departing, President Yun had notified the Supreme Council of his resignation—by word of mouth, not in writing. Even so, the Council issued a statement accepting it.

Yun Bo-seon’s resignation carried weight. He had been only a symbolic head of state, yet he was legitimate power, seated by the people’s vote, and the sole hope of those who could not accept the May 16 coup. Now that he had walked away of his own accord, only the revolutionary core remained in the government.

The very day Yun Bo-seon left the Blue House, Chairman Park moved in. He allowed the president not the slightest opening, taking possession of the Blue House in a single stroke, and public opinion split in two. Some said he had done it cleanly, and well. Others said he ought to have gone to the president several times and tried to persuade him—was he not simply blinded by power?

Kijo set no particular store by the seizure. Chairman Park’s occupation of the Blue House had been bound to come. What he marked instead was that the Chairman had grown more resolute, more unhesitating, than in the original history. There, when Yun Bo-seon spoke of resigning, Chairman Park went to him again and again, tried to hold him back, and was seen working to persuade him. Whatever lay in his heart, he often moved like a man watching the public eye. How this change would alter the history ahead, Kijo could not know.

A few days later, the turn in opinion ran against Yun Bo-seon. He had resigned in protest of the Political Purification Act, and yet the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction was thronged at its gates with politicians come to pledge democratic political activity. With the constitution all but certain to be amended by referendum, and a general election in December as good as fixed, they had come seeking leave to resume political life. Day after day Kijo studied the lists of those cleared to return, ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠which the Council kept releasing. Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung were among them. And newspaper pieces attacking Yun Bo-seon began to multiply—articles that called it irresponsible for an elder of the political world to abandon his post so easily.

February 28, the last day of the month, was also the anniversary of the February 28 Democracy Movement. That day Lee Young-hee, a reporter for the Hapdong News Agency, came to Kijo’s house. For his evening visitor Kijo laid a modest drinking table in the quarters across the way, where Yeongsu’s study was, and the two of them ate together. They had grown close sharing a room on the American trip, but Lee Young-hee’s coming was unexpected. Over stew and rice, after they had shared a few cups, Lee Young-hee asked him a question.

“What do you make of Chairman Park, President Lee?”

Kijo turned it over, wondering why the question should be put to him. There seemed only one reason. Press censorship had been lifted, and the Purification Act had loosened the restraints on civilian politicians, and a current of opinion favorable to Chairman Park was taking shape. People were giving him their support on the strength of a prediction: that he would keep the promise made at the time of the coup—if fresh, conscientious politicians appeared, he would hand over power and return to the army. The mood of the country itself was recovering its vigor.

But Kijo saw that, contrary to the surface, the work Kim Jong-pil was driving to found the Democratic Republican Party must have gathered speed as well. Under the Korean Central Intelligence Agency, an operation to scout talent would be raging in full. Astonishingly, in the original history Lee Young-hee himself becomes a target of that recruiting. He too is urged to join, because Kim Jong-pil had set the party’s political position as a progressive party of reform, one that would take in the whole of the reformist camp.

The Democratic Party and the New Democratic Party, effectively in ruins, were conservative parties, and the revolutionary core that had taken power meant to set itself apart from them by gathering in every force outside their ranks. In the midst of drawing famous progressives into the fold, the original history shows a startling breadth of embrace—it even takes in Lee Young-hee, who had exposed that Park Chung-hee’s visit to the United States had produced no real result. In this history Lee Young-hee had made no such exposure. All but certain he had been asked to join, Kijo turned ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠the question back.

“And how do you see Chairman Park?”

At that, Lee Young-hee emptied the cup he had been given.

“I am unsettled. Until not long ago, a great many people who resented the military government were looking on Chairman Park with favor. They have changed all at once. Frankly, I am bewildered.”

Kijo nodded. Reformists such as Shin Chang-gyun, of course, and a number of reporters who had worked with Lee Young-hee at the Hapdong News Agency, would already have gone into the organization founding the Democratic Republican Party. Among them were university professors of Lee Young-hee’s acquaintance, and they would have pressed him hard.

“Have you heard why the people who changed their minds have done it?”

“It’s just that…… they say a reform party supporting Chairman Park is being formed to contest the general election, and that if it wins, they have promised to release the reformist figures under detention. Among them, they say, is Cho Yong-su, publisher of the Minjok Ilbo…….”

Kijo thought he had gone quite deep. That was not a story to be told carelessly. The people drawing him in would have warned him to keep a tight lip, and since he had confided it anyway, Kijo felt he owed him an honest word. In the original history, Kim Jong-pil’s promise to revive the reformist camp was never kept. The reformists were used by the Democratic Republican Party and campaigned hard for it through the general election, and what came back to them was betrayal.

“Don’t listen to other people, reporter. Trust your own feeling.”

“My feeling…?”

“Yes. You don’t truly know who made that promise, or whether it can be believed. Isn’t that why you’re asking me?”

“Well… yes.”

“Then trust your own instinct.”

Lee Young-hee nodded slowly. He still seemed unable to set aside his distrust of Chairman Park.

“I think I ought to help only with the policy research, and then withdraw……,” he said.

In the original history, too, he writes a single paper on international relations for the Reconstruction Comrades Association—the body organizing the Democratic Republican Party—and then slips back out. Seniors from Gyeongseong Technical High, classmates from his army days, reporters he had worked beside, and others close to him urged him to join, and he did enter the association. But he recoiled from its rigid, top-down military culture and quit of his own accord. It seemed he would make the same choice this time.

At the same time, Kijo had a feeling the Democratic Republican Party would succeed again. If reformists like Lee Young-hee were entering the Reconstruction Comrades Association in such numbers, the party looked likely to take still more of the vote. When Kim Jong-pil’s Democratic Republican Party fought its first election, it was not a conservative party. Kijo remembered that its image had been that of a progressive party of reform, tinged with socialism. The harder the economy, the stronger the public cry to try something different, and the Democratic Republican Party drove straight into that mood.

Whether the advice had lightened him, Lee Young-hee accepted the cup Kijo poured and smiled, faintly.