Syngman Rhee's Visit to America
The permits from the Ministry of Commerce and Industry and the Ministry of Transportation were bound to wait. Until Syngman Rhee returned from his visit to the United States, no decision could fall.
While he waited for Rhee to come back from America, Gijo watched events at home and abroad. History would run the course he already knew, yet some wary part of him kept checking the current all the same.
What had stayed with him was a line Rhee had delivered at the press conference the day before leaving Korea. He had departed for the United States having said that if the Chinese communist troops stationed in the North withdrew, the problem of North and South would solve itself.
Gijo read the words in the paper and let out a short, dry laugh. Not because the man was wrong, but because he already knew what Rhee would say when he stood before the United States Congress.
Will the old gentleman say something different in this history...?
He tried to picture the original history breaking from its track, and found he could not believe it. Rhee would do as he had done.
The day Rhee left for America, the papers had run a political cartoon: Rhee holding up two enormous empty suitcases for Eisenhower, a satire of a president off to beg the United States for money.
Two great empty suitcases, held up before Eisenhower.
"The urgent business is this, first..."
That same day's front page carried a story about the whole nation pinning great hopes on the meeting of the two heads of state. People knew. They knew Rhee was going to demand still more aid from America. There was no helping it. In those days Korea was a little corner shop of a country, kept running on American money.
On July 25, 1954, Rhee left Gimpo Airport aboard a special aircraft the United States had sent. On the twenty-seventh, local time, he met Eisenhower at the White House, and on the twenty-eighth he at last addressed Congress. That very day, before a joint session of the Senate and the House, he unleashed a shocking declaration: the United States must fight a third world war against the communist armies, and the battlefield must be China.
To Americans who had lived through the Second World War and the Korean War and wanted never again to be dragged into a fight, it was an ultra-hardline demand that they launch yet another world war.
Rhee offered to furnish forty divisions in all, if America would supply only its navy and air force and come with Korea to strike China. He even laid out the method in detail, stressing that a U.S. naval blockade of the Chinese coast could cut off sixty percent of the cargo bound for China. Send no ground troops, he asserted. Isolate China by sea, let the American Air Force bomb, let the Korean Army occupy Chinese soil, and the Communist Party could be driven off the Chinese mainland.
He did not hesitate to unload on the Soviet Union as well. If the Soviets entered the war while America and Korea were striking China, so much the better — seize the chance, and have the U.S. Air Force bomb Moscow into rubble. The justification was that the Soviet Union had to be hit before it could build still more hydrogen bombs. Within a few years, he urged, the Soviets would deploy enough of them to destroy the United States, and so America ought to strike first.
He delivered this staggering speech in fluent, unbroken English.
Gijo did not believe Rhee himself thought the argument would land. The hard line was bravado, meant to remind them that Korea was the blade that could check China, and to swagger his way into more money and a modernized Korean military.
Members of Congress applauded him more than thirty times. That, however, was only congressional custom. They were dumbfounded by the fantasy of an old man from the East.
The very next day the major American papers treated the speech as lunacy and tore it to pieces. Rhee's mad dog strategy failed completely in the United States. It was so extreme that even America's hardline hawks turned their faces away. The policies that followed proved as much.
Uneasy at Korea's belligerence, the United States left only the 2nd and 7th Divisions in the country and withdrew the rest of its forces. It made a show of helping to modernize the Korean military, but it would not hand over offensive weapons. Fearing that a stronger Korea might start a third world war, it supplied arms for defense alone. That current would hold for some time. America did not welcome a Korean army that grew too strong.
Korea was an ally, yes — but the moment it bared its teeth like a mad dog ready to risk a third world war, America clapped a muzzle on it. To that degree, Rhee's speech had branded Korea's belligerence deep into American political and official circles.
The failure was inevitable. What country would trust a nation that proposed to start a third world war in order to unify its own divided land?
At home, by contrast, people applauded. The Korean papers of July 30, 1954, were unanimous in their praise. The mood was that the president had gone to America and, with his head high, said what needed saying. Let's smash China to pieces. That line in particular blew a clean hole through the anger Koreans were carrying toward China. No one took it seriously, though. Koreans who had already lived through a war knew well enough that if Korea marched forty divisions into China, most of those soldiers would die.
Rhee returned to Korea on August 13. Welcomed home with full ceremony at Yeouido Airport, he pronounced the visit an unqualified success before the prime minister, the ministers of every department, and General Taylor, commander of the Eighth Army. Despite the heat, the seventy-nine-year-old looked startlingly hale and vigorous, his years nowhere in evidence.
The day after Rhee's return, Gijo went to Myeongwolgwan to see Lee Seong-ryong. Every down payment on the Hannam-dong houses had come in, and he had come to hand her the ten percent of those deposits that was hers.
When she took the money, she looked astonished.
"It actually worked. When you said you were going to take deposits on houses that weren't even built, Yeongsu's dad, I really wondered if it could."
In the 1950s, selling a house that was not finished flew in the face of common sense. You looked at a house that existed, and then you bought it. Selling first and building afterward would not become ordinary until the 1970s. Even so, the Cheongsan houses had sold out, thanks to the quality Gijo's people had shown and to Seong-ryong's gift for selling. She had told the members of her gye — her rotating savings circle — that she would answer for it herself, marketed hard, and kept the mood aloft.
"It's entirely thanks to you, ma'am."
"Aigoo, as if I did anything."
Tucking away the money he had given her, Seong-ryong went on.
"And it turned out just as you said, Yeongsu's dad. Dr. Rhee went to America and came back, the dollar still hasn't fallen, and the ROK–U.S. Mutual Defense Treaty still hasn't taken effect. Isn't that something..."
The exchange rate, which had looked ready to slide still lower, was holding its ground and refusing to drop. Seong Dae-ik, who went to see Baek Grandma every week, had said as much.
"Boss, the dollars showing up in Myeongdong seem to be drying up."
Even with the government and the press trumpeting that Rhee had secured two hundred and forty million dollars in aid, the current ran that way. A flood of dollars ought to have pushed the rate down. It had not. Most of the aid, of course, arrived as American goods, or as goods America bought in Japan and handed over to Korea — but at least the urge to dump dollars had calmed.
"Is Hee-yeop changing the dollars for you all right?"
"Yes. Better than dealing with Chairman Dan Sa-cheon, I'd say."
Baek Grandma — Baek Hee-yeop — kept faith no matter which way the rate moved, steadily exchanging more than a million hwan for him every week. Had they been changing money with Dan Sa-cheon, his side would likely have been cutting the business back by now, or trying to stop it altogether. No one smelled money faster than Dan, and he would have caught at once the strange turn in the way the country was moving.
Gijo knew that in six days tens of thousands of demonstrators would march past the American ambassador's residence in Jeong-dong, protesting the defense policy America had announced after Rhee's visit: the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Korea. For a while the whole country was due to ache with demonstrations — until November, when the Mutual Defense Treaty took effect.
"Now that Dr. Rhee's back, your permits come through, don't they, Yeongsu's dad?"
"Well. I couldn't say."
"Your face looks sure of itself, though. You're not answering like that on purpose, afraid you'll jinx it?"
Gijo only smiled. Watching him, Seong-ryong put on a sly look.
"How was it when you met that man Choi last time? Does he handle things as brilliantly as they say?"
"Yes. I was surprised. He took care of everything himself."
"There, see? Didn't I tell you? The man's first-rate."
Since she had brought Choi up, Gijo asked what he wanted to know.
"May I know who put me in touch with Mr. Choi?"
"Mm... that's a matter of my credit. I can't tell you. They asked me to keep my mouth shut, too."
Gijo nodded. Thanks to the lobbyist Choi, he had managed to hold briefings before both the Bureau of Mines and the Shipping Bureau, but the afterimage of the man lingered. He suspected Choi belonged inside Rhee's government — and to an organ that actually wielded power. Otherwise he could not have moved both bureaus at once. Even a lobbyist with the finest touch would have found that difficult.
Seong-ryong, stealing a glance at his face, spoke.
"If you tell me a little about the man, Yeongsu's dad, I'll tell you a little about the contact."
"I only met him for a moment. I don't know much."
"How old did he seem? Is he tall?"
"He looked to be in his thirties. Not tall."
"I see... Is he handsome?"
"I made a point of not looking at his face. I was watching the Jirisan moon bear."
"The Jirisan moon bear?"
"Yes. We met at Changgyeongwon, the zoo..."
"Hohoho..."
Seong-ryong laughed for a good long while.
"What about his voice?"
"Deep, and cold."
"You didn't happen to see his hands? I'm curious what he looks like... He might turn up at my place as a guest someday, you know. Hiding who he is."
"His hands were in his pockets."
Even so, Gijo had been able to tell that a thick ring sat on the man's hand. Something like a ring had bulged in the trouser pocket where the hand was shoved. He did not tell Seong-ryong. He wanted that for himself alone. The ring would be an important key to recognizing him.
"Mm. Then it's my turn. The person who put you in touch with this Choi is a woman."
"A woman?"
"Yes. There used to be a place called the Nangnang Club... Do you know it? The Nangnang Club?"
Gijo shook his head as if he did not. The Nangnang Club had been a social circle of women spies that ran wild through the years of the U.S. military government. It gathered elite women who could speak English freely, set them to prostitution or to becoming local wives for senior officers of the military government and for U.N. officials, and moved those men through them. They were also the ones who turned Ambassador Menon, interim chairman of the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea, who in 1948 had opposed holding an election in the South alone. The Nangnang Club woman who captured Menon's heart helped bring him to deliver a speech supporting Syngman Rhee and endorsing a separate government in the South.
"Anyway, there's this Nangnang Club, and a girl who came out of it drops by my place now and then. We talk of this and that and trade information."
Gijo was certain the girl Seong-ryong met was the après girl he himself had met.
"Is that enough of a trade between us? Satisfied, Yeongsu's dad?"
"Yes, I'm satisfied. A woman for a contact... I can't quite picture it."
"Yeongsu's dad. You're not looking down on women right now, are you?"
"Ah — no. What are you saying..."
Gijo and Seong-ryong laughed together. She seemed to have judged it safe to tell him the contact was a woman, since he showed so little interest in women. What business would Gijo ever have with the Nangnang Club? That must have been her thought. But what he had gained was large. He had already inferred that Choi belonged to the government; now he could narrow down where. He knew which government organs were tied to the Nangnang Club. One of three.
When the talk was finished, Gijo returned to the office. The moment he stepped in, the staff broke into applause all at once.
"What's all this?"
He looked at the five department heads.
"Boss, the permits came through from Commerce and Transportation at the same time!"
"Already?"
He broke into a wide smile and took their congratulations. Even as he accepted them, he was thinking.
Rhee. Does that man mean to claim a share of the credit again...?
Like the wired-radio rollout before it, this tungsten-export shipping venture might well be folded into the president's list of achievements. A chemical-processing plant for tungsten ore, and the bringing in of large freighters, would package neatly as fruits of Rhee's American visit — tied, as they were, to American companies. That was why he must have heard the report on tungsten exports the moment he set foot back in Korea, and approved it at once.
The wired-radio program had already been made into a Daehan News reel and was playing in the movie houses, advertised as the president's own idea. Thanks to that, subscribers were growing even without any special advertising of their own. Syngman Rhee himself had never intended it. All the same, in ways both open and hidden, he was helping Gijo along.