At a bridge leading to Panmunjom, U.S. soldiers fired warning shots to stop a march by 500 students demanding an end to the covert negotiations. American spokesmen said none of the marchers, most of them teenage girls, were injured; Korean police reported nine seriously hurt. It was the first time American troops had clashed with South Koreans, an ugly and foreboding precedent.
South Korean politicians and editorial writers were as incensed as the country’s youth. The National Assembly passed a unanimous resolution expressing “national indignation” at the talks; one legislator urged his colleagues to march on the American embassy and “make them come to their senses.” Newspapers stressed the need for “resolute action” against the north and denounced U.S. diplomatic efforts as “appeasement, indecisive, disappointing, wishful thinking, and nonsensical.” When Defense Secretary Robert McNamara acknowledged in a February 4 television interview that he couldn’t say for certain the Pueblo hadn’t crossed into North Korean waters at some point, many South Koreans interpreted the remark as a prelude to a craven American mea culpa.
Rather than parley with the North Koreans, many southerners advocated attacking them. “We have got to do something to teach them a lesson even if it starts a world war,” fumed the chairman of the unicameral National Assembly’s Foreign Relations Committee. South Koreans in and out of government demanded an immediate halt to the Panmunjom talks. Prime Minister Chung Il Kwon tried to explain to Porter the depth of his countrymen’s anger by posing a hypotheticaclass="underline" If Cuban commandos attempted to storm the White House and murder President Johnson, and South Korea subsequently entered into closed-door negotiations with Fidel Castro, how would Americans feel?
Like his constituents, President Park, a former army general, was getting more upset over the talks. Since 1961, when he seized power in a coup, Park had presided with authoritarian boldness over his frontline state, the Berlin of the Far East, mortally threatened not only by its bellicose cousins to the north but by the twin colossi of the communist world, China and the USSR, right behind them. No one understood the precariousness of South Korea’s position better than its austere, chain-smoking president.
At 50, Park was physically unimpressive, thin and short. He delivered dull speeches in a high-pitched monotone and lacked any semblance of personal magnetism. But he had a laserlike gaze that, as one observer noted, was intense enough to split rocks, and he excelled at dividing and neutralizing political enemies. The son of an impoverished farmer, Park lived modestly despite his high office, wearing inexpensive suits and stretching his rice dishes by adding barley. After seven years in power, the proud, nationalistic president was steadily leading his country toward its remarkable future as an industrial powerhouse, and he was acutely conscious of his growing stature as one of South Korea’s greatest statesmen.
Park had grown up in the 1920s and 1930s, when Korea was under the harsh colonial thumb of an aggressively expansionist Japan. After training to be a schoolteacher, he joined the Japanese occupation army in Manchuria—which Kim Il Sung was fighting—in 1940, and later attended the prestigious Japanese Imperial Military Academy. After the war he returned home and became an officer in the fledgling South Korean armed forces.
Park fought against the north during the Korean War, rising to the rank of brigadier general. By the late 1950s, however, he, like many military officers, had become disgusted by the ineffectiveness and endemic corruption of the civilian government. In 1961, he led 4,000 paratroopers and marines into Seoul, taking control of the capital in a virtually bloodless coup.
Park moved quickly to “disinfect” South Korean politics. He imposed martial law, dissolved the National Assembly, arrested former cabinet members, and shut down newspapers. Suspected communists were tossed in jail; thousands of petty criminals were arrested and paraded through the streets in public humiliation. In a burst of puritanical zeal, Park’s junta broke up prostitution rings and closed bars, dance halls, even coffee shops. “I resolved to uproot all the existent germs by cleaning the entire contaminated area as if digging with a shovel,” he later explained.
But stories made the rounds that Park himself had a communist past. Shortly after the coup, The New York Times reported that he’d once been “under sentence of death as the ringleader of a Communist cell in the South Korean constabulary.” The newspaper said Park had saved himself by giving South Korean intelligence a list of communist sympathizers in the army, setting off a “massive purge.” The elimination of communist elements helped the army fight better when the North Koreans invaded in 1950, according to the Times.
Whatever his earlier political beliefs may have been, Park became one of the world’s most staunchly anticommunist rulers. South Korea’s salvation, he felt, lay in strong centralized government and rigid public discipline. At the time of the coup, his nation was a basket case, its people fearful and fatalistic, its anemic economy kept alive by huge infusions of American aid. Per capita income was a miserable $82 annually; 35 percent of the workforce was jobless or underemployed. Though ambitious, creative, and hardworking, South Koreans were burdened by a national inferiority complex born of generations of dominance by China, Japan, and, most recently, the United States.
American officials considered South Korea a vital bulwark against communist expansion in Northeast Asia and, between 1953 and 1963, reinforced it with more than $5 billion in aid, much of it military. Pledging to guarantee South Korean security, Washington stationed thousands of U.S. troops backed by nuclear weapons in the south. By the early sixties, American aid accounted for half of South Korea’s budget and 70 percent of its military expenditures. So reliant on American largesse was their country that South Koreans had, in the words of one State Department analyst, “an almost psychopathic fear” of what would happen if the subsidies were reduced or canceled.
Not long after seizing power, Park began to revitalize South Korean society, enacting long-overdue reforms in banking, agriculture, foreign trade, and education. He initiated public works projects to employ more people, and confiscated billions of won from “illicit fortune makers.” To the relief of American diplomats, the junta leader also promised an eventual return to civilian rule.
Park was suspicious of Western-style democracy, believing it had been grafted onto South Korea too abruptly, after centuries of feudalism, by U.S. troops at the end of World War II. In spite of that view, as well as initial suspicions that he might be a communist sleeper agent, American officials embraced Park as a “forceful, fair and intelligent leader who can be trusted with power.”
By early 1963, however, popular support for Park’s regime was crumbling. With inflation, corruption, and infighting among junta members on the rise, Park announced that elections scheduled for the spring were to be postponed and military rule extended another four years. Dismayed U.S. diplomats worried that the delay would lead to “upheaval, division, and probably bloodshed.” After the Kennedy administration threatened to withhold economic aid, Park backed down, reinstating the elections. And following a bitterly fought but essentially aboveboard campaign that fall, he was elected president by a slim margin.
Park exchanged his army uniform for civilian garb and resumed his intrepid reforms. He normalized diplomatic and economic relations with Japan, Korea’s ancient enemy, in the face of strong public opposition, including student riots so fierce that he briefly reimposed martial law. At the request of President Johnson, with whom he developed a close friendship, Park in the mid-1960s dispatched 46,000 of South Korea’s best troops to fight alongside GIs in Vietnam—an act of considerable political courage in light of South Korea’s internal security problems.