Lame Duck
On November 20, 1962, Ki-jo returned to Korea and drew his collar tight against a wind that had turned raw.
From the boarding stairs the sky was a clouded ash-gray, already promising winter. Gimpo Airport had sent no one to meet him. Not wanting to put anyone out, he had deliberately kept his arrival date to himself, and he was already thinking of the bus into Seoul as he came through the arrivals hall—only to find Han Nam-hee of the Hankook Ilbo waiting there, though she was home on maternity leave.
“Sir, did the business trip go well?”
Ki-jo stared at her in surprise, then understood at once. In those days the major dailies ran items on the comings and goings of prominent figures through Gimpo, and it seemed Han Nam-hee had been checking the passenger lists every day, waiting to see when he would come in.
“I thought you’d want to enter the country quietly, so I asked the other papers not to print anything about your arrival.”
He smiled at her, grateful that she had read his mind.
“Let me take the bag.”
“No, I’ll carry it.”
“Please don’t. Give it here.”
She took the bag from him anyway, and Ki-jo climbed into the Hankook Ilbo jeep parked in front of the terminal.
“Shall I take you home?”
At her question he hesitated. Home was exactly where he wanted to go, but it felt wrong to say so outright to someone who had come out to meet him on purpose.
“Has anything been happening in Junghak-dong?”
When he asked about Junghak-dong, where the Hankook Ilbo building stood, she answered.
“While you were in Vietnam, stories kept breaking one after another on the political desk. Even so, Political Editor Kim Ja-hwan held the center and handled them well.”
Ki-jo nodded. With the general election barely a month away, a quiet political desk would have been the stranger thing. Once he was sure the paper was all right, he said, “Let’s go to Jongno. I need to set my bags down first.”
“Yes, sir.”
His heart was already racing before they crossed the Han River bridge. It had been nearly a month since he had seen his family, and the excitement would not be stilled. At last the jeep stopped in front of the house. Ki-jo knocked at the gate, and Sunrye’s voice came from inside.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
At that single sentence the latch was thrown back in a hurry. Sunrye had been about to throw her arms around him the moment the gate opened, but she checked herself at the sight of Han Nam-hee standing behind him, turned, and called into the yard.
“Children! Your father’s home!”
“Dad!”
Yeongeun and Yeongjun, who had been playing in the yard, came running and shouting. Han Nam-hee, still behind Ki-jo, smiled at the happiness written across his back.
His family was ordinary to the point of plainness. The man hugging his children was neither the head of the Cheongsan Group nor a newspaper publisher. He was simply a father. And yet the children, beside themselves with joy, and the light in his wife’s eyes—the delight she could not hide at the sight of a husband home from a long trip—looked unbearably precious.
All at once a line Tolstoy had written came back to her. Happy families are all happy for much the same reasons, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Han Nam-hee, who had only recently had a child of her own, found herself wanting a home as happy as his.
The day after he returned, Ki-jo went to the Blue House to report on what had happened in South Vietnam. Chairman Park Chung-hee, looking over the personal letter and the memorandum of understanding Ki-jo had brought back from the South Vietnamese president, asked a question.
“All of this is fine, and I’ll set the port aside—but what do you intend to do about paving Vietnam’s national highway?”
Paving National Route 1, more than a thousand kilometers of it, was a project worth thirteen billion won on its own—a hundred million dollars. South Vietnam would put up the hundred million, and Cheongsan would bear any additional construction costs. For fifteen years Cheongsan would collect the tolls and take the profit; after that, the road would pass to a private South Vietnamese operator. But the Republic of Korea’s foreign reserves at the time hovered around two hundred million dollars, so Chairman Park had reason to worry. On top of that, the South Vietnamese government wanted Seoul to guarantee overrun costs no one could yet predict.
Ki-jo smiled. “You don’t need to worry too much.”
“Can Cheongsan really cover the extra costs? Looking at the whole thing, it seems to me you bid too low. Will you even recover a profit over fifteen years?”
To the chairman, uneasy about a lowball contract, Ki-jo explained calmly. “The highway paving won’t cost nearly as much as it looks. We don’t have to buy land. All we’re doing is laying asphalt over an existing dirt road, and there are no tunnel sections. The Cheongsan consortium also includes Hyundai Construction, which knows how to build roads.” He told him about going to Vietnam with Chung Ju-yung. “President Chung and I went out and ran the estimates on site. Even with the hundred million dollars the Vietnamese government is providing, the work can be done.”
Chairman Park nodded. Hyundai Construction was famous for taking the government’s road contracts and finishing them cheaply and fast.
“And the Korean government’s liability is limited. If the Cheongsan consortium fails to keep its promises, all that’s owed is the indemnity.”
“Yes. I know that.”
“The route is split into ten sections. We pave a hundred kilometers a year, and I’ve attached an option letting Cheongsan renew the contract annually. If the first section goes badly, we can walk away.” He laid out the safeguards he had built in.
“Even so, doesn’t the Korean government have to guarantee as much as ten million dollars? That’s still a great deal of money.”
“That figure only applies if Cheongsan does no work at all and bolts at the outset. That won’t happen.”
Chairman Park laughed. Ki-jo added that in the worst case, if he left the government holding a debt of ten million dollars, he would sell Cheongsan’s domestic assets to pay it back. The fertilizer plant alone was worth more than thirty million.
“And if war or guerrilla attacks interfere with the construction, Cheongsan has the right to renegotiate the schedule and the cost.”
“You handled that well.”
Listening, Chairman Park looked somewhat reassured. Drawing on what he knew of the future, Ki-jo spoke with certainty.
“Mr. Chairman, I believe a war is about to break out in Vietnam. Once it does, National Route 1 will become infrastructure the war cannot do without, and the United States will not sit still. They’ll come to Cheongsan, the holder of the rights, with money in hand and ask us to finish the paving early.”
“That could happen…”
Chairman Park set a cigarette between his lips and nodded. Then came the silence peculiar to him, that stretch of time in which he thought. Smoking slowly, weighing the odds of success, he said, “You’ve worked hard. I’ll move this along quickly on my end. Get the project underway as soon as you can.”
It struck Ki-jo as strange that the chairman was not merely approving the plan but pressing him to hurry. From the moment they had met, something about the man had looked ill at ease. Clearly a great deal had happened while he was out of the country.
“Did something happen while I was away?”
He had already guessed that Chairman Park was passing through a difficult season. The world believed that after the May 16 coup he had driven out Chang Do-young’s faction and locked his grip on power, but that had almost never been the truth. He had struggled most of all while Kim Jong-pil was out of Korea, drifting from country to country. Matters advanced inside the Supreme Council without his knowledge. There was even an open movement to put a particular opposition leader forward as the next president. Learning of it in the middle of a meeting, Chairman Park had slammed his fist down on the table and walked out without a word.
As the second man, Kim Jong-pil had monopolized power and committed his share of abuses, but he had also waged a bold game inside the revolutionary camp, crushing those who would not fall in line and keeping them in check.
At Ki-jo’s question, Chairman Park drew the smoke deep and let it out. “I don’t know how long I’ll be sitting in this chair. That’s why. I can back you while I still have the strength. Once that strength is gone, I won’t be able to.”
He said Ki-jo’s plan looked promising, and dangerous enough at the same time that opposition would be fierce. He wanted it pushed through quickly, while he could still promise a government guarantee. Ki-jo studied him in silence. The chairman, eyes elsewhere, smoking hard, seemed to come to some decision.
“While you were out of Korea…”
He appeared ready to speak his mind honestly. Kim Jae-chun, who had succeeded Kim Jong-pil as Director of the KCIA, had proposed dissolving the Democratic Republican Party.
“He said the Republican Party Kim Jong-pil founded is nothing but trouble, so we ought to break it up and fight the general election with a new party. Or at least change the name and purge the ranks.”
What had happened in the original history was happening again. Kim Jae-chun, Kim Jong-pil’s rival, had swept every one of Kim Jong-pil’s people out of the KCIA and was trying to dissolve the Democratic Republican Party, where Kim Jong-pil’s influence ran deep. But to make such a proposal with the election so close looked less like genuine concern for Chairman Park than like a hard intent to make certain Kim Jong-pil could never rise again. Kim Jae-chun had never looked kindly on the chairman’s entry into civilian politics, so the move was hardly surprising.
“After that, Supreme Council member Kim Hui-deok came to see me. He said there was a movement inside the Council to put the opposition politicians Kim Jun-yeon and Kim Do-yeon forward as presidential candidates. People were already lining up behind the old politicians…”
Chairman Park lamented that he had staked his life on the revolution, only to watch power drift back toward the old politicians and their factional squabbles.
“Not long ago Song Yo-chan, who had been head of the cabinet, founded a new party and drew off a great many people from the Supreme Council. I never knew so many would side with him…”
Since declaring that he would not enter civilian politics, Chairman Park had been watching the men who turned against him grow more numerous by the day. In the original history he had reversed that refusal and kept his subordinates on edge. This time he was holding firmly to the declaration, and those leaving him seemed to do so with easier minds. The power he had held as leader of the revolution was leaking away, and already the lame-duck season was gathering speed.
“These days I can’t even tell whether what I said to Hausman was the right thing…”
With the election approaching, Ki-jo had the sense that the chairman’s resolve to stay out of civilian politics was weakening. It also seemed he had been burning up inside, with no one to whom he could tell the truth. But for him to announce now that he would enter civilian politics, or extend military rule, would be good neither for the man himself nor for the Republic of Korea. Ki-jo steadied himself and asked a question.
“Mr. Chairman, have you been sleeping properly these days?”
Chairman Park let out a short laugh. A man whose subordinates were shaking him to pieces was hardly going to sleep soundly.
“Telling you to dissolve the Democratic Republican Party is the same as telling you to lose the election. Don’t accept it. Changing the party name or purging the ranks makes no sense either. It’s too late.”
It was the first time Ki-jo had spoken of politics, and Chairman Park asked in open surprise, “What’s gotten into you?”
“I heard it from the political reporters at the Hankook Ilbo. Only five parties can put up candidates in this election and actually get them elected. It’s one ruling party against four in opposition, and three of those are the old political forces, so the pro-government vote is expected to concentrate on the Democratic Republican Party. They also say that since Mr. Kim Jong-pil left the country, public opinion of the party has improved a great deal.”
He passed it off as something he had heard in his capacity as publisher of the Hankook Ilbo.
“Will you tell me what people are saying out there?”
Ki-jo remembered the resolution he had made on the road to Wonju and back: that he would show this man where the road lay, and where it did not. Chairman Park, still unseasoned in politics, looked like a truck with its headlights out—stopped on a black mountain road at night, with no idea which way to turn.