The Information Gap
Just as he had expected, a great noise began to rise from the house next door. Ki-jo soothed Sunrye, who was fretting, and told her it would be nothing. Then he stepped out into the yard, lit a cigarette, and looked across at the neighboring courtyard. The men of the eighth class were so worked up they could no longer keep their voices down.
"Jong-pil! The wrong isn't that you did it. It's that you hid it from us. That's what stings!"
"A boat can't carry too many boatmen. I had no choice. Try to understand."
"What? Boatmen? So in your eyes we're just the ones pulling the oars?"
"That isn't what I meant. If the thing was going to stay secret, I had no choice. That's all."
"Oh, you kept it so secret the papers ran a story? I hear Kim Jae-chun reported to the Chairman that you were scheming something, and he did it before the press even broke it. Why was the whole business so sloppy?"
"Too many civilians got involved, and it leaked. They're not like us, are they?"
"If you knew they were different, you should have told us."
"Bear with me. I meant to tell you soon."
"That sounds like an excuse, Jong-pil."
Kim Jong-pil was being cornered outright by his classmates, and it was plain how many of them felt the slight.
"Jong-pil, it isn't only the party. What are you doing up at Walker Hill?"
"Now what is this about?"
"Word is the Counterintelligence Corps is digging into you. Why are you trailing crumbs everywhere you go? That isn't like you. Were you that desperate? The more rushed you are, the harder it gets, the more you ought to have asked your classmates for help."
"Ha..."
A sigh escaped Kim Jong-pil. It sounded like a plea that he had had no choice, with the schedule for founding the party closing in so fast.
"Won-sik. What have you been up to lately?"
The talk turned to Yu Won-sik.
"Me? What about me?"
"You're cooking something up too, aren't you?"
"What would I be cooking? You know perfectly well what a man on the Finance and Economy Committee does."
Yu Won-sik's voice wavered. In the strictest secrecy he was pushing a currency reform, and by now he would have commissioned a British firm to print the new banknotes.
"The stock market's been in an uproar lately. That isn't your handiwork, is it? It reeks of you."
"Don't go hanging this on an innocent man!"
"Won-sik. If this is one of your games, know when to stop. A lot of people are afraid the market could come down in a single blow."
"I told you it isn't me! I don't know either—why stocks suddenly shot up..."
Yu Won-sik's voice eased a little. His classmates could not even imagine a currency reform; once they began suspecting him only of meddling in the stock market, he seemed to feel safe. If word of the currency reform reached the public—far more dangerous than word of the party preparations—an economy already frail could collapse outright, and Yu Won-sik had every reason to be strung tight. The eighth-class men, ignorant of the particulars, had caught the scent that something was afoot. What it was, they could not yet say.
Then Lee Seok-je's voice carried over. He was a man who would live out a life as clean and incorruptible as Chae Myung-shin's own.
"Senior Chae Myung-shin's face these days is something else. He says the corruption he's turning up on inspection duty is enough to kill him. None of you are itching to line a side pocket, or looking the other way for somebody, are you?"
"A side pocket? The national coffers are empty. Lay a hand on them, and are you even human?"
"Who said anything about touching the budget? I mean taking favors from contractors. Holding your hand out to businessmen. Nothing like that going on?"
True to the incorruptible chief of the Board of Audit and Inspection he would one day become, Lee Seok-je was laying down the law to his classmates.
"Seok-je's right. At least among us of the eighth class, that sort of thing must not happen. We staked our lives on the revolution. Let's not sell our consciences for a fistful of money and turn ugly."
"Right. That's the truth of it!"
Listening to their talk drift over as if it belonged to the air, Ki-jo smiled a bitter smile. The man in that gathering with the most reason to flinch was Kim Jong-pil. To raise twenty billion hwan for the founding of a party, he had put his hand in the national treasury, rigged the stock market, and taken money under the table from pachinko operators. He might tell himself it was not embezzlement for his own pocket—that he meant only to create a government and carry on the spirit of the revolution—but it was no lawful way. And it was doing someone serious harm.
The door opened, and the neighboring yard grew bright. Oh Jeong-geun came out under the yellow glow of an incandescent bulb. Ki-jo hastily stubbed out his cigarette and turned to go inside, but Oh Jeong-geun had seen him and called across.
"President Lee. Have a cigarette with me."
Oh Jeong-geun crossed from the house next door into Ki-jo's yard. The two of them sat together on the wooden porch and smoked. Ki-jo was just about to speak when Oh Jeong-geun caught the voices drifting from next door, and his eyes went round. He seemed rattled that their own words were carrying so clearly. He recovered at once, though, scratched the back of his head, and spoke.
"President Lee, did you hear all of that?"
Ki-jo could hardly deny it, so he answered as if he had caught only the end.
"I heard Committee Member Lee Seok-je urging everyone to live cleanly."
"Haha. Then you heard all that was worth hearing. I'm the blockhead who set us down next door to the president of the Hankook Ilbo. I'd be much obliged if this didn't turn up in tomorrow's paper."
He asked it with the look and the tone of a man certain Ki-jo had heard every word. Ki-jo agreed, his face telling the other not to worry.
When the talk was done and he stepped back inside, Ki-jo saw it confirmed once more. Even among the eighth-class men, the protagonists of the revolution, a gap had opened in power and in information. Some of them had been certain Chairman Park would hand the government back to civilians and return to the army. Others had been so pure that, disillusioned by the Chairman's turn toward civilian politics, they had opposed it to the point of trying to take off the uniform themselves. Men like that, for the most part, held little power, and even less information.
Perhaps because they had gathered after so long to unburden themselves, the eighth-class men drank and talked deep into the night before they finally went home.
A few days later, just as expected, the government's new press policy was announced. Under the single-edition system now coming into force, the Hankook Ilbo had to decide whether it would go morning or evening. Ki-jo called a meeting of the senior staff at the paper's building and set them to debating it.
Opinion broke into two broad camps. There was an accommodation faction, which wanted to wait and see whether the Dong-A Ilbo chose morning or evening and then avoid its time slot, and a confrontation faction, which insisted they publish in the same slot and meet the Dong-A head-on. Knowing the Dong-A Ilbo would take the evening edition, Ki-jo wanted the morning. Better, he judged, to compete with the more manageable Chosun Ilbo and win than to crack themselves against the Dong-A, solid as an iron wall.
When neither camp could settle it, the executives tossed the decision to him.
"I'll take the morning edition. The readers who pick up a paper in the morning are a solid base. And isn't it better to set the previous day's events calmly in order, and deliver a settled account with the morning?"
Once he had given his view, everyone accepted it. Just as Chang Key-young had foreseen, Ki-jo already had the Hankook Ilbo staff behind him. Before the government could even demand a raise for reporters, he had lifted wages above the figure the government meant to require, and his support ran not only to the reporters but to the typesetters and the delivery men as well. It was not simply that he paid them more. He left the editing of the paper to the reporters' own judgment, went out onto the floor, and heard every employee out, treating what they said with respect.
Having decided the Hankook Ilbo would be a morning paper, he closed the meeting and went to the city desk. Jeong Beom-tae, a city reporter just back from an assignment on Ganghwa Island, was cleaning up his copy and checking photographs still fresh from the darkroom. Ki-jo asked what story he had covered.
"I covered the gangsters running wild on Ganghwa. I'm thinking of headlining it Holiday, Driven Off."
Ki-jo nodded and read the article Jeong Beom-tae had written.
The piece denounced what local gangsters on Ganghwa had done the previous Sunday to citizens out for a picnic around Jeondeungsa Temple. The Ganghwa thugs, it reported, were on friendly terms with the soldiers and threw their weight around the district with the military at their back. Near the temple they had stolen food from picnickers and picked fights; they had even snatched liquor from American soldiers out on an outing, started a quarrel, and brawled.
"I got the pictures right, too. I even caught the gangsters grabbing an American by the collar."
Jeong Beom-tae showed him a photograph of American soldiers fighting the thugs.
"How on earth did you get this?"
"We had a tip that gangsters were raising hell around Ganghwa, and a photographer and I covered it for two days. Word was they were molesting women who'd come out for picnics, so we went up to Jeondeungsa, where the flowers were in bloom—and wouldn't you know it, there they were, doing exactly that."
It was no scoop, exactly, but Jeong Beom-tae was plainly pleased with himself for bringing back photographs of the violence in the raw. Ki-jo was sorry for it—he was on good terms with the man—but he decided the story would not run.
"Reporter Jeong. Have you eaten?"
"Not yet. I'll eat after I file with the desk."
"Let's eat first."
"A meal...?"
Jeong Beom-tae looked toward City Editor Lee Mok-woo. Ki-jo spoke to him as well.
"City Editor, you come too. There's something I need to say."
"Yes, President. Jeong—food first, he says."
Ki-jo moved first, and Lee Mok-woo hauled Jeong Beom-tae along after him. He took the two of them to a beer hall, poured their glasses, and then, heavy-hearted, drained his own. They watched him oddly as he kept throwing back beer instead of eating. He ordered soju from the proprietor, mixed soju and beer in the beer glasses, and pushed the drinks across.
"This is what's called a bomb shot. Tonight we drink until our noses go crooked."
At the suggestion, Jeong Beom-tae hesitated.
"President, I still have to finish the article. Drinking too much is a bit..."
"Drink first. City Editor, you go ahead and knock one straight back."
Ki-jo, who never ordinarily pressed liquor on anyone, kept urging it on them. They were glad enough to drink expensive beer without limit, but they could not fathom what had gotten into the president. After several rounds of the bomb shots had gone around, he spoke.
"I'm sorry, but I won't be running this article."
"What? You're not going to print it?"
Jeong Beom-tae's voice rose. Lee Mok-woo stared at Ki-jo, startled.
"No. It can't run."
At that flat answer Jeong Beom-tae asked, his face thick with disappointment,
"President... this isn't even a political piece. It's a city-page exposé on gangsters. Why?"
He was dumbfounded by the decision, and yet, because they were close, he could not even bring himself to get angry. Ki-jo looked at him with regret.
If the Jeondeungsa gangster story ran on the city page of tomorrow's paper, the April 16 edition, the Hankook Ilbo would earn the military government's hatred all over again. The soldiers had boasted that the gangsters had been swept away after the May 16 Revolution. Here was proof they were still there—and worse, that these particular gangsters kept company with the troops. The leaders of the revolutionary faction would look at a photograph of thugs brawling with American soldiers and rage that Korean-American friendship had been harmed.
In the original history, that Ganghwa article had gotten City Editor Lee Mok-woo and reporter Jeong Beom-tae arrested for violating the Anti-Communist Law and Article 3 of the Special Measures Law. Lee Mok-woo's indictment was in the end dismissed, but Jeong Beom-tae was sentenced to two years, served his term, and came out a year later when the execution of his sentence was suspended. A story that amounted to nothing would be taken as an affront, and the price exacted would be far too great.
To Jeong Beom-tae, still asking why his article was being stopped, Ki-jo spoke.
"Reporter Jeong, I'm sorry I can't run a piece you worked so hard to bring in. Let me begin with an apology."
"I'd rather hear the reason than an apology, President."
"It's... purely a hunch."
"A hunch?"
"Yes. If I were a public-information member of the Supreme Council, or a soldier with real power, I think this article would make me angry. The gangsters are tied up with the military, and they're fighting American soldiers, aren't they?"
Jeong Beom-tae's eyes wavered. He wanted the story in the paper, but what Ki-jo said had force. City Editor Lee Mok-woo had already accepted it, and he patted Jeong Beom-tae on the back.
"Ha... What stifles me is this reality—that I find myself thinking the president is probably right."
Jeong Beom-tae bowed his head. Ki-jo filled the bowed man's glass to the brim.
"Reporter Jeong. Your wife's time is nearly here, isn't it?"
"Yes, President. Any day now. Today or tomorrow."
"I'll give you leave for the birth. Stay home with your wife until the child arrives."
"What?"
In an age when the very notion of such leave scarcely existed, Jeong Beom-tae looked bewildered.
"It will be paid leave. After the baby is born, spend about fifteen days at home."
"P-paid...?"
Ki-jo nodded.
"Work matters, but so does looking after a mother who has suffered to bring a child into the world, and giving your care to the baby just born."
"Th-that's true..."
Better, Ki-jo thought, to send the man off on paid leave than to let him suffer in a cell and frighten a woman in childbirth.
"Thank you for thinking of me, President. But..."
"The stories you will write from here on will be without end, Reporter Jeong. Keep this one safe, photographs and all, and in the 1970s bring it out as a book looking back on the 1960s. I will support the publication."
Jeong Beom-tae did not answer at once. Ki-jo could see that the man's pride as a reporter had been wounded. But he had a family to look after.
"I expect the child will take after its mother, and be beautiful."
At that, Jeong Beom-tae looked up.
"You've seen my wife?"
"You gave me a wedding invitation. I stopped by the hall for a little while."
Jeong Beom-tae knew Ki-jo had sent a generous gift of money. Businessmen, though, usually sent cash to a reporter's family occasions and did not come themselves, so he had assumed Ki-jo had not come either.
"I thought you hadn't come to my wedding, President..."
"If I receive an invitation, of course I go. And aren't you and I particularly close, Reporter Jeong?"
He spoke of how Jeong Beom-tae had stayed on at the flood sites after Typhoon Agnes and Typhoon Sarah and worked the recovery alongside Cheongsan's people.
"Most reporters leave the scene the moment they have their story. You stayed to the end and worked the recovery with us."
When Ki-jo turned the moment around and praised him instead, tears welled in Jeong Beom-tae's eyes.
Is this the strength of President Lee Ki-jo, the man who has led Cheongsan without a single labor dispute?
The president had killed his story, and yet he could not dislike him. Jeong Beom-tae poured Ki-jo's beer with both hands.
"President, this time I'll do as you say. But if you keep doing this, I'll be in a difficult spot."
"I understand. Even if you come to resent me, please stay on at the Hankook Ilbo. If you left, I think it would pain me more than I can say."
At those words City Editor Lee Mok-woo tapped Jeong Beom-tae's shoulder.
"Reporter Jeong! You're not leaving the Hankook Ilbo without the president's say-so! I won't forgive it either!"
Jeong Beom-tae felt his superiors trying to comfort him. The urge to talk back drained away, and all that came out was an empty laugh.
"Chief. Why would I leave the Hankook Ilbo, the paper that pays the best? President! Let me have one of those bomb shots!"
He held out his glass. Ki-jo mixed him the drink, clinked glasses with Lee Mok-woo and Jeong Beom-tae, and said,
"Come! Let's raise the Hankook Ilbo into the finest morning paper there is!"
Ki-jo held the Hankook Ilbo to be of the greatest importance. In a Korean press where the conservative papers and the progressive papers were forever the loudest voices, he believed a centrist commercial paper like the Hankook Ilbo had to be built up if public opinion was ever to find its balance.