Mr. Bitter Truth
Chairman Park, shut inside the Blue House, was slowly losing his grip on power.
After Kim Jong-pil left Korea, the fracturing of the revolutionary camp must have left him deeply anxious and at a loss. Outside those walls, though, the mood was not nearly so bad.
Ki-jo thought back to 1963, before the regression. Back then, unlike now, the presidential election had come first and the general election afterward. In the race that August, candidate Park Chung-hee had beaten candidate Yun Bo-seon by the slimmest of margins, and the general election followed three months later, in November. The feel of that vote rose again in his memory.
A Monday. The day before the general election.
Ki-jo had finished his shift on the docks and was drinking makgeolli with his coworkers at a cheap bar near the job. The talk turned, of its own accord, to the vote only a day away. Ki-jo, who cared little for politics, listened to the others and drank.
Then one of them put a question to him.
"Ki-jo. You live in Choryang-dong, don't you?"
"Yes. That's where I live."
"Who are you voting for?"
"I couldn't say. I haven't made up my mind."
"Hold on. Who's been sitting as the assemblyman from Choryang-dong all this time?"
Another man answered for him.
"Park Soon-cheon."
"Right. That woman held the seat twice, didn't she?"
"Once, really. She won the fifth election, and it wasn't long before the revolution hit and the whole thing was thrown out."
"Yeah. I know that much."
Busan had always been an opposition stronghold, every bit as fierce as Seoul, Daegu, or Gwangju. This was an age when men said, without a flicker of hesitation, that a house went to ruin the moment a hen began to crow. And yet a woman had stood for office, and because she ran under the Democratic Party banner, close to sixty percent of the vote had poured in for her in a bloc.
"Who's running in Choryang this time?"
"For the Democrats, Yoon Byung-han. For the Republicans, Lee Jong-soon."
"Where's Yoon Byung-han from?"
"Tongyeong."
"And Lee Jong-soon?"
"Busan."
"Well, then. Ki-jo ought to vote for Lee Jong-soon."
Ki-jo kept quiet while the two of them fell to arguing over the men running for the Assembly from Choryang.
"You can't just hand a man your vote because he's from Busan. Voting by hometown is a waste of a ballot."
"I'm not telling you to vote for him just because Busan is his hometown. I voted for Yun Bo-seon of the Civil Rule Party for president myself. But for the Assembly, I'm not giving the Democrats a single vote."
"And why won't the Democrats do?"
"God, you're thick. You didn't see what those bastards did in the National Assembly? Day after day they were at each other's throats, and while they were at it the night was gone and the revolution came down on their heads."
"Even so, you've got to prop up the opposition. Otherwise nobody checks the president."
"Check? What check? I didn't vote for Park Chung-hee either. But if the Assembly starts tripping him up now, this country really will go under. We elected a Republican president, so we've got to fill the Assembly with Republicans too. Sink or swim, win or lose—if we don't lock arms and push that president for four or five years, how's the country ever going to amount to anything?"
As Ki-jo remembered it, the mood around that table had drifted away from checking Park Chung-hee and toward a simpler line. He had been elected, so they ought to back him.
Coming out of the memory, Ki-jo said to Chairman Park:
"Pitiful?"
"Yes."
Chairman Park stared at him, then lit a fresh cigarette. He was already chain-smoking.
"I ask you how it looks outside, and out of nowhere you tell me to look pitiful. That's a bolt from the blue."
He plainly did not care for the advice. Ki-jo did not back down.
"Who weighs on you most right now? Tell me straight."
He was all but certain the answer would be Song Yo-chan. Before coming to the Blue House he had risen at dawn and gone through the newspapers piled up unread. Ever since Song Yo-chan had walked out of the revolutionary government and founded the Liberal Democratic Party, he had been attacking Chairman Park day after day.
"Nothing hurts worse than being attacked by a man I worked beside..."
Song Yo-chan, just as he had thought.
"What I can least stand is a man who never even took part in the revolution—who came into the revolutionary government late—sinking his teeth into me and the Republican Party."
Song Yo-chan was declaring himself the only man fit to inherit the revolutionary spirit, and attacking Park Chung-hee and the Democratic Republican Party as incapable of practicing liberal democracy.
"Pay that man no mind. People already see him as a traitor."
"A traitor...?"
Chairman Park stopped with the cigarette halfway to his mouth and looked at Ki-jo.
Ki-jo remembered the showing Song Yo-chan's Liberal Democratic Party had made in the general election. Nine seats in all, district and national list together—five percent of the chamber, and no more. Most voters had taken a dim view of the way he had turned his back on Chairman Park so suddenly after the Republican Party was founded. The impression of a man without loyalty had stuck, and they had not given him many votes.
"Whatever Mr. Song says, don't answer him. Not a word."
"What he says would have to be worth answering before I answered it. I haven't been, from the start."
"You did right."
Ki-jo meant it as praise, and he went on.
"In the eyes of the people, the bad blood between you and Mr. Song will look a great deal like a quarrel between brothers. When he slanders you, it will seem like a younger brother cursing his elder. Show them the face of a deep-hearted eldest brother, listening in silence while a childish sibling rants."
Chairman Park nodded slowly, as if the point had landed.
"And the feeling toward the Democratic Party?"
"The Democratic Party is already finished."
In the original history the Democrats had taken fourteen seats—eight percent of the Assembly, and that was all. The memory of the Second Republic still clung to them: the infighting they had staged in the National Assembly, and Prime Minister Chang Myon bolting for cover the moment the coup began. People had turned their backs. They had tried to clear the air by putting the woman politician Park Soon-cheon forward as their face, but the result had been shabby.
"The Civil Rule Party?"
The Civil Rule Party was the successor to the New Democratic Party, which the old faction had founded after storming out of the Democrats. With Yun Bo-seon at its head it had opposed the Republican Party more fiercely than anyone, yet in that same history it had managed only to become the second party. Forty seats in all. About twenty-three percent.
"The Civil Rule Party, at least, stands better with the public than the Democrats do. When the revolution broke out, Mr. Yun didn't run. He held the Blue House, didn't he?"
At the mention of May 16, Chairman Park gave a short laugh.
"He did. Yun Bo-seon was a hard man to face. Stiff-necked as they come, that old aristocrat."
"That's why people think the Civil Rule Party at least behaves like a real opposition. The head of an opposition party has to show a straight back, no matter what anyone says. But Mr. Yun is a defeated leader too, the same as Mr. Chang. In the end he raised a white flag to you and stepped down of his own accord, didn't he? Even voters inclined toward the opposition regret that. If you're going to fight, you have to show them a fight to the finish."
As Ki-jo laid out the public mood in one clean sweep, Chairman Park's expression softened.
Ki-jo could speak with an easy mind and real certainty, because he already knew how the election for the Sixth National Assembly would turn out. Chairman Park, who had not yet seen the lid come off, must have been badly unsettled, his mind anything but at ease. If needless anxiety and impatience drove him to declare an extension of military rule, American punishment would drop the Korean economy back into the mire, and the country might do nothing but spin its wheels for as long as two years.
Ki-jo pressed a word of counsel on him.
"Chairman. Over the next month the election is going to burn hot. The hotter it gets, the more you should stand back from it and tend to the people's livelihood with a cool head. If the people point out a fault, then say, without condition, that you were wrong. Say it was all your fault. Do that, and the people will take your side."
Chairman Park answered shortly.
"I will."
Seeing him like that, Ki-jo felt it to the bone. The man needed an adviser who had come up as a civilian.
Everyone around him was ex-military, and their view of the world was narrow. The loyalists would pledge themselves to him without question and, like soldiers, were bound to say the obvious thing—Give ground and it's over. You have to go in hard. The rest would offer no honest counsel at all. By his own temperament, harsh words to Chairman Park did not come easily to Ki-jo. What was needed in his place was a Mr. Bitter Truth, someone who could carry an opinion to the chairman without flinching.
"Talking with you settles my mind. I wish I had a civilian beside me. Anyone you'd recommend?"
As it happened, Chairman Park wanted a civilian aide. Ki-jo named a man at once.
"I recommend Shin Hyun-hwak."
"Shin Hyun-hwak?"
The name drew a visible recoil.
"Shin Hyun-hwak. Isn't he the one who was locked up over the March 15 rigged election? And you want a man like that at my side..."
"When you have the time, look over the record of his trial. And consider whether the Minister of Reconstruction even had the power to meddle in a rigged election. As I see it, he was dragged in when he had done nothing to deserve it."
Shin Hyun-hwak had been Minister of Reconstruction in the last days of the Syngman Rhee government when he was unjustly numbered among the Eight Masterminds of the rigged election. He had even confronted Choi In-gyu, the Minister of Home Affairs who had engineered the fraud, demanding to know what on earth he thought he was doing.
As minister he had been ordered to intervene in the election, but the Ministry of Reconstruction had no organization in the provinces. With nothing it could do, it did nothing. When orders came down from above and he had no choice but to go out on a provincial tour, he never so much as let Syngman Rhee's name pass his lips. All he ever said was that the voters would cast their ballots properly on their own.
Even so, after April 19, swept up in the rush to punish the old regime, he was paraded in shame, arrested as an offender in the rigged election, and—when no proper evidence appeared—thrown in prison on the claim that the circumstances implied guilt. It made no difference that putting the screws to the ministry's civil servants had brought out testimony that the minister had never intervened in the election at all.
May 16 changed nothing. The revolutionary tribunals the soldiers convened existed to punish more harshly the men already branded criminals, not to sort out the truth. Wrongly cast as a criminal, Shin Hyun-hwak had protested his innocence in his final statement to the court. You name me a ringleader of the rigged election, so sentence me to death. But I did nothing wrong. Send me back two years, and I would live the same life again.
Ki-jo knew the man was guiltless only because he had read the record after the facts had been unearthed and the judgment revised. In the present, that was not yet so. Right now Shin Hyun-hwak was simply one of the men everyone had already decided ought to die.
"How sure are you about Shin Hyun-hwak? Is he honest enough, and able enough, that I could trust him and actually talk with him?"
There was no need to think twice. Of that much, Ki-jo was certain.
"I'll vouch for him."
Leave him alone and Shin Hyun-hwak would still, later, catch Chairman Park's eye and spend the whole of the Third Republic moving through its highest posts. All Ki-jo meant to do was bring that selection forward a little. In the hours after President Park's death he would stride into the conference room at the Ministry of National Defense and bellow at Kim Jae-gyu to say straight out what had happened. All through the Fourth Republic, left tottering by that sudden void, he would show the nerve to stand against Chun Doo-hwan as the man reached to seize the regime. The economic policy Shin laid down would be taken up by Kim Jae-ik and become the foundation of the program that launched the Korean economy in the 1980s. Called in time by Lee Byung-chull, he would become chairman of Samsung C&T and help see Lee Kun-hee through the succession at Samsung.
He had been a prodigy whose brilliant mind had set him apart since the Japanese colonial period, and there was nothing he could not do. He may never have thought of himself that way, but he had a hand in every critical affair of the Republic and brought decisions through without forcing them.
Above all, Ki-jo had fixed on him as an adviser for Chairman Park because of an episode in the original history—the day the chairman summoned Shin Hyun-hwak and asked for his counsel. Shin had offered three things. A president must never go into the money business; however good the purpose, the people would not see it that way. He understood that the army had risen to overcome a national crisis, but soldiers had to return to the place that was properly theirs. And a president should not meddle in the particulars. He should leave them to his ministers.
Hearing that, Chairman Park had put a question to him.
"There's a great deal of talk on the street that the revolutionary government is corrupt. What do you make of it?"
"It is corrupt."
"How corrupt would you say?"
"At least ten times more corrupt than it was under the Liberal Party."
At that unflinching answer, Chairman Park had managed only an "Ah. Is that so?" and then lost the rest of his words.
A man capable of advice and flat assertion to that degree belonged at Chairman Park's side, and the sooner the better. The harder the chairman's days became, the more weight that counsel would carry, and the more its worth would show.
"Will you see him first? Find out whether he even has the will to help me. If he does, I'll meet him myself."
At the chairman's request, Ki-jo agreed at once, and took his leave of the Blue House.