The First Meeting
The day after the talks about a public meeting with Kim Young-sam had been settled, Ki-jo boarded one of Cho Choong-hoon's Korean Air taxis at Gimpo Airport and flew for Mokpo.
He was close enough to Kim Young-sam that a single telephone call might have persuaded him. Kim Dae-jung was another matter. They had glimpsed each other at the funeral of Kim Young-sam's mother, murdered by a spy, but they had never so much as exchanged greetings. If Ki-jo meant to win him over, he would have to sit down with the man and talk.
As the four-seat Cessna carried him toward Mokpo, he turned Kim Dae-jung over in his mind. In the original history the man had come within a breath of death more than once under the military government, and had been among the politicians most relentlessly crushed. Even so, he and Chairman Park had met face to face only a single time, and then only long enough to look at each other and exchange a few words. The tie between them had been that thin. Ki-jo was not inclined to shrug off the tendencies of that history. Kim Young-sam had stood near enough to Chairman Park to sit down for a summit between the government and the opposition. Kim Dae-jung had not. He expected that same current to keep running in this age to which he had returned.
The plane set down at the Mokpo naval airfield. He had asked Chairman Park to let him use the field nearest the place where he could reach Kim Dae-jung, and so a military strip had been opened to him. From there he took a taxi he had reserved in advance and rode into the city, trading small talk with the driver along the way.
"Flying into a military airfield like that—you must be a KCIA man, sir."
The driver had mistaken him. In those days people still called the Korean Central Intelligence Agency the CIA.
"Not at all. I came on business. The work is connected to the military, so they let me use the field."
Ki-jo dissembled.
"Ah, is that so? Military business, and all the way to Mokpo. Ship repair, I suppose."
The driver's curiosity did not let up.
"I work on the shell side of things. We're developing shells for naval guns."
The lie was a lie, but he did not let it drift entirely clear of the truth. Cheongsan had a munitions division, and producing artillery shells at home was a project the group meant to pursue over the long term.
"A patriot, then. We've got to have shells of our own, and ships of our own. Let those North Korean bastards come charging in, and we'll hit them straight back."
"Of course."
They pulled up before an inn in the heart of Mokpo. Ki-jo had the driver wait, set his bags inside, and came out again.
"Care to see the sights while you're here?"
In those days a taxi was also how the well-off went sightseeing, so the question was a natural one.
"I'd like to go where Mr. Kim Dae-jung is speaking today. Could you take me?"
"Ah, sure. Kim Dae-jung's speeches are something else. Hear one and you lose track of the time. Folks from Seoul hardly get the chance. Climb in. I'll have you there in no time."
The driver set him down at the playground of an elementary school in town. A large crowd had already gathered, and Kim Dae-jung was speaking. Ki-jo took a place off to one side and listened. From the platform came that clear, ringing voice.
"Today we drove out the immoral regime of Syngman Rhee. We shed our blood, and only just managed to raise a democratic government. Then the soldiers sprang up all at once with guns and swords, drove Prime Minister Chang Myon out, dissolved the National Assembly, and made President Yun Bo-seon walk out of the Blue House of his own accord. And what do they say? That if a politician of conscience appears, they will hand the government over and go back to the army. That is what they tell us. Do you believe a word of it?"
"And yet why are they building a party of their own? What do you imagine they mean to do with a Democratic Republican Party? If the Republican Party wins this election, Chairman Park—who swore he would take no part in civilian politics—will stand for office himself. And if the soldiers seize the presidency on top of that, they will clutch power for a thousand years and never let it go. Because for a soldier, laying power down is defeat. And for a soldier, defeat is death. They have no other choice. That is what I am telling you."
Applause broke over the crowd at the unrestrained speech.
"I have looked through the history of East and West, ancient and modern, and nowhere have soldiers staged a coup and then practiced democracy. A soldier, by his very nature, does not do democracy! The army itself is no place for democracy—what do they know of it? Napoleon of France was the same, and in every country on earth where a coup has been raised, soldiers have never once practiced democracy! This is not Kim Dae-jung inventing things to suit himself. It is historical truth. It is the way of the world. That is what I am telling you."
The crowd laughed and clapped. Ki-jo applauded him as well. If the world ran on as it had in the original history, the man's flat assertion would prove exactly right. The driver had not exaggerated. The speech drew a person in and held him: humor measured out just so, a voice strong and ringing, confidence and learning fused until the words struck the listeners' chests the way snowballs do in a snow fight—hard, and dead on.
When it was over, Ki-jo went around behind the platform and found an official of the Democratic Party. He showed a press pass from the Hankook Ilbo and asked for a meeting with Kim Dae-jung. A little later they led him into a tent, and there he came face to face with the man.
"A pleasure to meet you, Candidate Kim. I'm Lee Ki-jo of the Hankook Ilbo."
Kim Dae-jung studied him.
"Lee Ki-jo. If that is truly your name, then you are not simply a reporter. You are the president of the Hankook Ilbo, are you not?"
He had known him from the name alone.
"Yes, that's right. Might I ask you for an interview?"
"You must be frozen through from standing out there to hear me. Have some hot tea first."
A stove had been set up inside the tent, a kettle resting on it. Someone brought Ki-jo a cup of hot leaf tea in porcelain. He blew across the surface and drank it a little at a time. The suggestion that Kim Dae-jung meet Chairman Park was not a thing to make in front of other people. He would have to ask him alone.
"When did you arrive in Mokpo?"
"Just now."
"You've come a long way. Have a meal with me."
As it happened, Kim Dae-jung himself had offered a way out of the crowded tent.
"Let me treat you. My reporting budget is ample."
"I couldn't allow it. How could I let a guest who came from so far buy me a meal? Mokpo is not that stingy a town."
They went on to a restaurant. The aides ate in the main hall. Ki-jo and Kim Dae-jung took a small room by themselves. It was Jeolla, and perhaps for that reason the low table was crowded with side dishes. The speech seemed to have left Kim Dae-jung hollow; he ate heartily, and a great deal. They talked of the election as they ate, and somewhere in the middle of it Ki-jo eased the real question onto the table.
"Would you consider meeting Chairman Park in Seoul?"
Kim Dae-jung answered without a heartbeat of hesitation.
"That would be difficult. I would need leave from the party elders, and I have been going about the campaign cursing Mr. Park Chung-hee. How could I suddenly sit down with him?"
Ki-jo nodded. The man's political weight was still light. Unlike Kim Young-sam, who had entered the National Assembly as its youngest member and grown seasoned there, Kim Dae-jung would have little room to move inside the Democratic Party. In the 1961 by-election in Gangwon he had only just pinned on an assemblyman's badge and stepped into the Assembly—or so it had seemed—when a "revolution," three days after his victory, wiped the result away. To speak with Chairman Park he would first have to win the permission of the party president or its senior men.
"You have no wish to meet him at all?"
Asked outright, Kim Dae-jung answered, for the record, that he did not. It was a disappointment, though not a great one. Ki-jo had expected him to be the hardest man of all to bring to the table.
"But why does Mr. Park Chung-hee say he wants to see me?"
Having come to arrange a meeting with Chairman Park, Ki-jo knew he would look, in Kim Dae-jung's eyes, little different from the chairman's own envoy. He was not a man to be bound by a camp, and he wanted that understood.
"He is willing to meet you because I persuaded him that he should."
At that frank admission Kim Dae-jung laughed, broad and easy.
"Then why did you, President Lee, tell him to meet me?"
The question called up the whole hard course of Kim Dae-jung's political life. He had always meant to run for the Assembly from his hometown of Mokpo, but a senior man of his own party, Assemblyman Jeong Jung-seop, had already claimed the district, and so he could not step forward. Then the seat for Inje County in Gangwon fell vacant, and he applied for the nomination. The road to Inje was a path of thorns. In those days a candidate needed the signed consent of local residents, and when he arrived he found the Liberal Party had already gathered up every villager's seal. He tried to have new seals carved so the people could recommend him, but the police leaned on the carvers, and the seals were never made. Then one of his aides happened to notice a pumpkin and wondered whether they might carve seals from that. With pumpkin seals he gathered the recommendations and was able to file. The Liberal Party interfered again, claiming that because the forms had not been stamped with wooden seals they were void, and his registration was canceled. Stifled by it, Kim Dae-jung went to the commander of the 7th Division, which had jurisdiction over Inje, meaning to appeal the wrong. He found the commander's residence near the county office, but Division Commander Park Chung-hee happened to be out.
Ki-jo had often thought that if the two men had met that day, history might have bent a little. Kim Dae-jung had been thirty-four then, Park Chung-hee forty-one, and they had shared a conviction: both lamented that the Liberal Party's corruption had grown so rank the country was sinking into misery. Had those two sat down over a drink and talked through the state of the nation, the modern history of Korea might have run another way.
"You once went to see Division Commander Park Chung-hee, didn't you?"
Kim Dae-jung nodded.
"I had been done an injustice, and I went to appeal it. But how do you know about that?"
"The orderly on duty at the residence remembered you, Candidate Kim. He reported your visit, of course."
"Ah. Yes. Of course he would have."
Kim Dae-jung accepted it.
"Chairman Park seems to have something weighing on him now as well. That is why I recommended that he meet you."
"What help could I be? I am a man who opposes the military's part in politics."
Ki-jo smiled.
"Didn't Chairman Park say it himself, in Revolutionary Pledge Number Six? That he would hand power to politicians of conscience and of a new stamp, and then take his leave. I thought you, Candidate Kim, were precisely that young politician—conscientious, and new."
Kim Dae-jung burst out laughing.
"To become a conscience that acts is the motto of my life, I'll grant you. But I am not so great a man as that. The praise is more than I deserve."
Ki-jo tried, calmly, to persuade him. Kim Dae-jung did not budge. Unlike Kim Young-sam, who already had a record in the Assembly and could carry a rally as a one-man show, he was still bound to the party. Even so, Ki-jo had not given the matter up entirely.
"I will keep a plane waiting at the Mokpo naval airfield."
"A plane?"
"Yes. Whenever you decide you ought to meet Chairman Park and talk with him, even once, take that plane and come to Seoul."
"A plane, of all things..."
Kim Dae-jung looked nonplussed, as if he could not understand why anyone would keep an aircraft standing by for him. Watching the man who was not yet a giant, Ki-jo smiled. It was his belief that Kim Dae-jung would not turn his back on someone who came to him in earnest.