Read Online The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History by Don Oberdorfer, Robert Carlin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Don Oberdorfer, Robert Carlin
Ads: Link
section of the Korean landmass. In his eighteen-year reign, from the military coup he led in 1961 to his assassination in 1979, Park left his mark on South Korea to a greater extent than any other person in modern times; his tenure and his impact were equaled only by Kim’s extraordinary run of nearly a half century in the North. Both men were strong rulers who owed much to the Confucian tradition of deference to authority that long predated twentieth-century Korea.
Park was born in a village near Taegu on September 30, 1917, the son of a small farmer who had been a minor county official. At age twenty, he graduated from a teachers’ college and taught primary school for three years before volunteering for the Japanese army. Soon his record was so outstanding that he was sent to the Japanese military academy in Manchuria and was commissioned a lieutenant. His orderly mind and neat handwriting from his teaching days proved to be lifelong attributes, as did the sense of organization and use of power that he learned in military training. When his private safe was opened after his death, aides discovered files ofhandwritten personal notes on individuals, meticulously arranged in Park’s own indexing system.
After the Japanese surrender and the division of the country in 1945, Park joined the newly established South Korean military academy and graduated as an officer the following year. In a much-disputed episode of his life, Park was arrested as leader of a communist cell at the Korean Military Academy following the 1948 Yosu rebellion, in which army troops under communist leadership refused to follow orders and proclaimed a short-lived “people’s republic.” Park was sentenced to death by a military court, but his sentence was commuted by President Syngman Rhee at the urging of several Korean officers and on the recommendation of Rhee’s American military adviser, James Hausman, who knew him “as a damned good soldier.” Park then switched sides, turning over a list of communists in the armed forces and becoming an intelligence official at army headquarters whose job it was to hunt them down.
This bizarre history caused worry in Washington when then major general Park suddenly emerged as leader of the 1961 military coup. At Park’s request, Hausman flew to Washington and told high officials that despite his early history, Park was no communist and “there is nothing to worry about.” The US Embassy, in a cable to the State Department, rejected the possibility that Park could be a secret communist, “mainly because his defection from communists and turnover apparatus would make him victim no. 1 if communists ever took power.” Park’s political opponents sought to use his early leftist activities against him, but when he was strong enough he prohibited further public mention of it. In the early 1970s, an American correspondent, Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor , was barred from the country for writing an article discussing Park’s past.
Given his prewar Japanese education, his Confucian heritage, and his military background, there was nothing in Park’s previous life to suggest fealty to democracy American style, which he considered an inconvenient and unproductive practice. After he led the 1961 coup, it took heavy pressure from the Kennedy administration to persuade him to return the country to nominal civilian rule and to run for election as president. He successfully did so in 1963 and 1967, then insisted on a change in the constitution permitting him a third term. He narrowly won that third election in 1971 against opposition leader Kim Dae Jung after pledging never to ask the people to vote for him again. In 1972 he redeemed that pledge literally, though certainly not in spirit, by abolishing direct presidential elections and creating a method of indirect election, under which he could be (and was) reelected by an easily controlled national convention for the rest of his life.
An
Park was born in a village near Taegu on September 30, 1917, the son of a small farmer who had been a minor county official. At age twenty, he graduated from a teachers’ college and taught primary school for three years before volunteering for the Japanese army. Soon his record was so outstanding that he was sent to the Japanese military academy in Manchuria and was commissioned a lieutenant. His orderly mind and neat handwriting from his teaching days proved to be lifelong attributes, as did the sense of organization and use of power that he learned in military training. When his private safe was opened after his death, aides discovered files ofhandwritten personal notes on individuals, meticulously arranged in Park’s own indexing system.
After the Japanese surrender and the division of the country in 1945, Park joined the newly established South Korean military academy and graduated as an officer the following year. In a much-disputed episode of his life, Park was arrested as leader of a communist cell at the Korean Military Academy following the 1948 Yosu rebellion, in which army troops under communist leadership refused to follow orders and proclaimed a short-lived “people’s republic.” Park was sentenced to death by a military court, but his sentence was commuted by President Syngman Rhee at the urging of several Korean officers and on the recommendation of Rhee’s American military adviser, James Hausman, who knew him “as a damned good soldier.” Park then switched sides, turning over a list of communists in the armed forces and becoming an intelligence official at army headquarters whose job it was to hunt them down.
This bizarre history caused worry in Washington when then major general Park suddenly emerged as leader of the 1961 military coup. At Park’s request, Hausman flew to Washington and told high officials that despite his early history, Park was no communist and “there is nothing to worry about.” The US Embassy, in a cable to the State Department, rejected the possibility that Park could be a secret communist, “mainly because his defection from communists and turnover apparatus would make him victim no. 1 if communists ever took power.” Park’s political opponents sought to use his early leftist activities against him, but when he was strong enough he prohibited further public mention of it. In the early 1970s, an American correspondent, Elizabeth Pond of the Christian Science Monitor , was barred from the country for writing an article discussing Park’s past.
Given his prewar Japanese education, his Confucian heritage, and his military background, there was nothing in Park’s previous life to suggest fealty to democracy American style, which he considered an inconvenient and unproductive practice. After he led the 1961 coup, it took heavy pressure from the Kennedy administration to persuade him to return the country to nominal civilian rule and to run for election as president. He successfully did so in 1963 and 1967, then insisted on a change in the constitution permitting him a third term. He narrowly won that third election in 1971 against opposition leader Kim Dae Jung after pledging never to ask the people to vote for him again. In 1972 he redeemed that pledge literally, though certainly not in spirit, by abolishing direct presidential elections and creating a method of indirect election, under which he could be (and was) reelected by an easily controlled national convention for the rest of his life.
An
Similar Books
