The Winner of the Talks
The four-party talks began again.
Kijo settled in to watch the four men talk. He expected little from this meeting. He only hoped they would look at one another as people, not as objects of ideology and factional war, and simply speak.
"Now that I've met you and talked with you myself, Chairman, I find you gentler than I expected."
Kim Dae-jung was the first to speak.
"Do you? What did I look like from the outside?"
"In the photographs and the newsreels, you always seemed grim and stiff."
At that, Chairman Park laughed with an easy, unguarded warmth.
"I was born a soldier. A man who lives braced for war can't go around grinning all the time, can he? But meet me over a drink, and you'll find I'm good company."
They all laughed.
"I hear you taught children once, Chairman. What were those years like, when you were a hundo?"
Chang Jun-ha asked.
Hundo—under Japanese rule, the word for an elementary-school teacher.
Park Chung-hee, who had come out of Daegu Normal School and taught children at Mungyeong Public Common School, grinned and turned the question back.
"You held a teacher's pointer yourself once, didn't you, Mr. Chang?"
"I did. For about three years I taught at a primary school in Pyongan Province."
"What grade did you start with?"
"Fifth."
"I taught third."
Chairman Park began to talk about his days in the classroom.
"I was posted to Mungyeong, a place walled in by mountains on every side. There must have been about three hundred and twenty children."
Remembering those years, his face softened further still.
"At first I took a room in a boarding house, and the children came looking for me even there. I thought I'd been strict—checking homework hard, handing out punishment when it was due—and still they came."
"Strict, and fond of them too, weren't you? Children always know whether a teacher likes them."
Chang Jun-ha, who had taught children himself, said it.
"Well, I did ask them often enough what they dreamed of becoming. And if I'd bought sweets and they dropped by, I'd give them one apiece. My pay then was forty-five won. Eight went to the boarding house, and the rest, I think, all went on sweets and drink. Ha ha ha."
Chairman Park laughed without ceremony and went on.
"Singing with the children was a real joy. Nearly all of them came from hard, poor homes, but when they sang they were bright and full of strength. I liked the look of that, so I taught them a great many songs."
He added that at Daegu Normal he had learned both the reed organ and the trumpet, and that he played the horn so well his classmates called him the Bugler. Having spun out his own story, he turned to Chang Jun-ha.
"Don't you have a memory from your teaching days that stays with you, Mr. Chang?"
"My first year there, I built a schoolhouse with the fifth-graders. There wasn't a proper building."
"You built it with the children?"
Chairman Park looked startled.
"The children and I only cleared a site on the hill behind the school. Then the young men from the church came, and the parents, and they put their strength to it. The parents pooled their money, hired one carpenter, and we raised it together."
Chairman Park heard him out, nodded, and said, "That must have been hard going."
He was showing Kijo exactly the side Kijo had hoped to see. The common testimony of the many who had met him—Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung among them—was that Park Chung-hee in person was plainspoken and gentle. And in truth, that was how the Chairman treated people. Rather than speak in sharp edges, he laughed at what the other man said and let him see that he understood. He was showing that face to the three of them now.
When he had finished with Chang Jun-ha, he asked Kim Young-sam about his family.
"How many children do you have, Assemblyman Kim?"
"Two sons and three daughters."
"A full house. That's a good thing. I wish I had one more son myself.... The rest of you all have at least two, don't you?"
At the Chairman's question, everyone, Kijo included, said yes. Kim Dae-jung had two sons; Chang Jun-ha, three sons and two daughters; Kijo, two sons and a daughter. In an age that wanted many children and favored sons, two boys was the baseline.
"I've only the one son, so I always worry the boy may be lonely."
He was thinking of Ji-man, born in 1958. Kim Young-sam answered.
"He'll be all right, Chairman. I had nothing but five younger sisters, and I grew up just fine. Never lonely."
"Is that so? An only son, then, Assemblyman Kim."
"Yes. So I go down to my hometown now and then to do a son's duty. Even when you carried out the Revolution, Chairman, I was on Geoje, helping my father."
The moment Kim Young-sam brought up May 16 again, the air drew a little tight.
"Dawn, out on the fishing grounds off Geoje, helping my father, and the radio we'd left on for the weather started going on about some proclamation or other."
Kijo worried, just a little, over what Kim Young-sam—never a man you could predict—meant to say next.
"It was a Japanese broadcast. The announcer was rattling off proclamation number this and proclamation number that, and at first I thought, a coup in Japan. This is bad."
Everyone laughed.
"But something felt wrong, so I turned the dial, and there was our own announcer saying, 'Vehicles on the streets are requested to reduce their speed.' The moment I heard that, I knew—ah, the coup is here. If Japan had had the coup, our cars would have had no reason to slow down, would they?"
The second joke loosened what had gone tense. Kijo was curious what Chairman Park would say.
"And what did your father say then?"
"Get yourself up to Seoul, quick. Don't you fret about things here. That's what he told me."
They all nodded.
"The truth is, when I said I'd won the right to stand and meant to enter the Assembly, my father was dead set against it. Don't do that sort of thing, he said. Take the family business in comfort and live an easy life. But my mother took my side from the start, and in the end he came around."
At the mention of Kim Young-sam's mother, a solemn quiet settled over the room. They all knew she had been killed by a spy's bullet. Kim Young-sam had a gift for lifting a room up and setting it down again.
"There was a way I might have saved her, before she died."
Every man leaned in to listen.
"Before she passed, President Lee here asked me how it would be if I brought my parents up to live with me in Seoul. Do you remember, President Lee? What you said over knife-cut noodles in Myeongdong?"
"Yes. I remember."
Kijo nodded.
"If I'd listened to you then and asked them to stay with me in Seoul, even for a month.... I've regretted it a great deal."
While the others held their tongues before the sorrow of his family, Kim Young-sam turned the mood himself.
"No one in this room isn't an anti-communist, am I right? I won't so much as mix words with the pro-communist lot, or the ones soft on communism."
He closed the account of his mother's unjust death on a vow against communism, and the others agreed, each adding a word of his own. Kijo felt the relief go through him. Kim Young-sam had, without question, the star quality to take hold of a room and draw every eye. The talk that followed ran on without much strain.
In the end it came around to democracy, and it was Chang Jun-ha's question that brought it there.
"Chairman, what philosophy do you hold on democracy?"
An easy thing to ask. A hard thing to answer. Chairman Park smoked and turned it over slowly before he spoke.
"I've brushed past death more than once in my life. But if I'm to speak of the most recent time, it was this October, when I went out to inspect Ulleungdo."
They had asked him his philosophy of democracy, and he had begun a story of how he nearly died. Kijo knew the anecdote. Chairman Park had gone by warship, and the harbor had no place for a ship to tie up. He had no choice but to transfer to a boat; a squall rose, and he went into the sea. Navy Colonel Choi Hyung-sup, then his chief administrative secretary, leapt in after him and pulled him out. Telling it, the Chairman said a thought had come to him as he went under.
"The country is poor, and so an island lacks the facilities it ought to have, and a man can die of it. Poverty is a terrible thing. It takes lives. I felt it all over again."
He went on.
"I wanted to circle the island once, but I couldn't. There's no ring road, so that was that. I finished looking over the harbor and sat down with the officials at the county office, and one of them said this to me."
A bitter smile touched his mouth.
"Your Excellency, if you're going to leave Ulleungdo abandoned like this, you might as well sell the island to Japan."
Every man in the room was fixed on him.
Kijo nodded.
"Well.... Mr. Chang, Assemblyman Kim, Candidate Kim—none of you may agree with me, but that is what I thought. Poverty tramples even a man's pride, until he will ask to be sold to Japan. What use is democracy to people living that hard? Call it communism if you like. Feed them properly, and what reason would they have to stand against you?"
He was saying something open to misunderstanding, and not without its danger, and yet he was calm, and coldly clear.
"And was Ulleungdo comfortable in the colonial days, then? It was not. From that little island they conscripted a hundred young men and dragged them off, and they cut down every tree on the island. Even now, I expect, a great many of the junipers in Japan's temples and buildings were taken from Ulleungdo."
He ground his cigarette out in the ashtray.
"What people who had suffered like that, who lived so hard, wanted from me was not democracy. It was that I do something about their hunger. Of course—"
He broke off, then went on.
"We must have democracy. Let us have it. But if democracy is to flower in this land, the people's hunger has to be answered first. That is what I think."
Chang Jun-ha, who had asked the question, raised another.
"Can't we practice democracy and answer hunger at the same time?"
Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung looked as if they agreed.
"Can we?"
Chairman Park did not look persuaded.
"Then let me ask you one thing, Mr. Chang. In the Liberal Party years, voters took the rubber shoes a Liberal candidate handed them and cast their ballots, and if he stood them a bowl of makgeolli they gave him their vote. Is the fault with the man who bought the votes? Or with the man who ate and drank and marked the ballot?"
"Both were at fault, I think."
"Good. Let's grant it, as you say—both were wrong. Then I'll ask you this. If those households had been comfortable, could the buying of votes have happened at all?"
"It wouldn't have."
"That is the point I'm making. When the whole nation lives well, the strength to think rightly grows with it. You won't even have to say, don't rig the election, don't take the food and cast the vote. It will come of itself."
No one could answer him. Kijo watched to see whether Chairman Park would drive the point home once more, hard, or step a little back. He hoped for the latter. Open a distance here, he thought, and the Chairman would lose them. He only prayed Park would not scatter the common ground so carefully made with the three. This was not the hour, in Kijo's mind, to sort out who was right and who was wrong.
At last Chairman Park spoke.
"I think my view and yours may differ. We agreed to talk today for a set time, so let's not try to settle it in this room. Better to meet a few more times, have a drink, and talk it through. Who knows—my own thinking may shift a little in the meantime."
He undid, himself, the question with which he had pressed them. Everyone said that would be good.
Watching him, Kijo thought he was every inch the man who had prepared a revolution in the army by staying in conversation with men in their thirties. A way of speaking that, rather than forcing his own mind through by age and rank, left hot-blooded men with something still to say, so they would come back. He seemed to have learned that art. Perhaps, in the course of making a revolution, he had come to see that when you meant to win a man over, it was better to leave him looking forward to the next meeting than to tell him you were right and he must simply follow.
And Kijo thought the Chairman had laid his view of democracy out with remarkable boldness and honesty. He was unlike the politicians of a later age, who even in private could not be frank—who talked with a recorder running, or fretted that the other man might be filming or taping them in secret. It was possible only in a time when private talk among politicians was strictly kept between them.
To turn the mood, Kijo offered a suggestion.
"Our time is nearly gone, and we ought to close—but it seems only Chairman Park has been hearing the three of you out. Shouldn't we, this once, hear what the Chairman asks of us?"
The three agreed. Chairman Park laid a charge on them.
"When a new president is chosen next year, I'll ask it of him as well. But I want to ask it of you here first. Around next year, KISA will undertake the building of an integrated steelworks in Korea. This project must succeed, no matter what happens. I ask you to do what you can so that friendly opinion gathers around it, inside the Assembly and out."
Every man promised that he would.
At last the two hours ended. Chairman Park rose first, and the others rose with him, shook his hand, and saw him to the door of the room. By rights they should have gone out of the building to send him off, but in the middle of a campaign it would have been a burden for opposition men to be seen publicly escorting the head of the administration. Only Kijo, comparatively free of that constraint, walked him out to the front of the offices.
Before the Chairman got into the car, Kijo said, "Don't dislike Assemblyman Kim Young-sam too much. He's the man who went to Gyeongmudae in President Syngman Rhee's day and told President Rhee himself to step down."
He was recalling how Kim Young-sam, face to face with Syngman Rhee as Rhee pressed the Third-Term Constitutional Amendment, had told him the presidency ought to end with this term—and that if it did, he could remain the nation's president for all time. Kim Young-sam had been right. Had Rhee simply not pushed for that third term, he might have remained in Korea with his honor, and enjoyed the rest of his life.
"I know. That Kim Young-sam—the man who said at first he couldn't recognize the Revolution—didn't he later bring up the story about his father, and speak of 'when you carried out the Revolution, Chairman'?"
He did not seem to think ill of Kim Young-sam. Just before he got into the car, he turned back to Kijo.
"You had a hard day of it."
He took Kijo's hand, warm in his own.
Kijo watched the car head for the Blue House, then went back to the conference room and said his goodbyes to the three who remained. Once Kim Young-sam, Kim Dae-jung, and Chang Jun-ha had gone, he sat down to write the article that would run in the Hankook Ilbo the next day.
When it was finished, he carried the piece he had written himself to the political desk and handed it to the editor. The reporters passed it around and let out sounds of admiration.
"You write a fine article, sir. You could carry the title of senior correspondent for the Hankook Ilbo."
They all praised the piece for being concise and cleanly put together. Kijo took it for courtesy and asked, "Will it do as it stands?"
"Of course, sir. I'm not being polite. It's a balanced piece. Tell me a professional wrote it, and I'd believe you."
Kim Ja-hwan, the political editor, said it. Kijo asked the reporters what they made of the talks, and with one voice they praised Kim Young-sam.
"Assemblyman Kim really does know how to do politics. When people read the article, I think he's the only one they'll remember."
They named Kim Young-sam, who had pressed Park Chung-hee hard, the winner of the meeting. Kijo, who had been in the room, gave his highest mark to Kim Dae-jung—but that was the judgment of a man who had watched the closed session as well. Looking only at the article that would go out to the public, it did seem the hardest of them, Kim Young-sam, would draw the eye.
"And Assemblyman Kim Dae-jung?"
"Asking for Prime Minister Chang Myon's release looks loyal. It can also look as if he's only looking after his own party's people."
Kijo nodded and asked their impression of Chang Jun-ha.
"Mr. Chang was neither good nor bad. He's a journalist himself, so I think he kept a careful neutrality."
Kijo thought that was enough. The winner of the talks, he decided, was not Kim Young-sam, nor Kim Dae-jung, nor Chang Jun-ha. Everyone had won.