Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  Declassified U.S. documents show Washington’s expectation that those new weapons would make Southern leaders feel secure enough to reduce the size of their own bloated, 677,000-man military by about one-tenth. Supporting South Korean troops with aid funds keyed to their numbers, Washington viewed the substitution of nukes for men as a budgetary economy measure. American officials also did not want the South to spend any more of its own scarce funds on defense. They were concerned because defense spending accounted for 71 percent of the entire South Korean budget. They hoped that percentage would decline in favor of spending on badly needed economic development initiatives. U.S. officials succeeded in negotiating a troop reduction—but it took months to overcome the obstinate opposition of President Rhee, who by then was senile but continued to cling tenaciously to power.94

  While preparations were under way early in 1958 for transferring a nuclear-capable missile unit to South Korea, Pyongyang issued proposals similar to those it had pushed at the failed 1954 Geneva conference. They included simultaneous withdrawal of all foreign troops from the peninsula, to be followed by a “free, all-Korean election … under neutral nation supervision with democratic rights and freedom of activity guaranteed for all political parties and social organizations.” North and South would negotiate the terms of the election as well as “economic and cultural contacts, and freedom of movement.” The two Koreas’ armed forces would be reduced “to minimum.”

  The Chinese endorsed the proposals. Both Beijing and Pyongyang pointed to the U.S. introduction of nuclear weapons to portray themselves as the champions of peaceful reunification, the South Koreans and Americans as its opponents. China claimed the United States had been the aggressor in the Korean War. North Korea repeated that the U.S. military “occupation” of South Korea was the “fundamental reason” why unification had not come.95 A few weeks later, on February 28, 1958, Kim Il-sung and Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai jointly announced that the Chinese “volunteer” troops, which had stayed on to protect North Korea against American–South Korean invasion, would be withdrawn by the end of the year. The Soviet Union quickly endorsed the move—and added a call for de-nuclearizing the Korean peninsula, Japan and Taiwan.

  The United States treated the series of communist announcements as a somewhat troublesome propaganda ploy, designed to exert pressure for full American withdrawal. After all, the Chinese troops did not need to stay, in the absence of an immediate invasion threat from South Korea. If they-were needed, they could come in quickly from across the border in northeastern China as they had done in 1950.

  Official American policy in the face of the Chinese withdrawal was that “we must maintain our forces in Korea until a satisfactory settlement is achieved.” Such a settlement would be a unification scheme leading to a Korea-wide government friendly to the United States—meaning noncommunist. In case of another North Korean invasion of the South, of course, it would have been time-consuming to get sufficient U.S. forces in from outside. More important, Washington saw the U.S. armed presence as deterring the sort of Northern attack that had followed by one year the previous withdrawal of U.S. troops. State Department thinking by this time apparently had reached the conclusion that the 1949 withdrawal was the key element that had inspired the invasion.96

  American officials had additional reasons for wanting to stay. They believed that keeping their military establishment in South Korea helped prevent communist subversion. And they thought they needed to keep operational control over the South Korean military to make sure Rhee would not try to invade the North. Perhaps another reason for staying on was the long-term hope—challenged daily by the unpleasant realities of life under the Rhee regime—that South Korea would achieve a thriving market economy and political democracy. It may seem that keen-eyed observers from afar should have been able to note Kim’s emphasis on going it alone and conclude that North Korea was growing out of its Soviet-satellite status. Nevertheless, there was no official Washington talk of pulling out the American troops—no repetition of the late 1940s finding that Korea lacked strategic importance to the United States. “Our own security interests” required the troops to stay pending a settlement, said a State Department memorandum.97

  Washington continued to see North Korea as a Soviet satellite, also influenced by China but hardly an independent actor. The perception of communism as a monolithic force remained. The Sino-Soviet split and other conflicts among communist countries, representing fundamentally different interests, were yet to come out fully into the open.98 Realistically, even if U.S. officials had come to perceive North Korea as acting essentially alone there would have been great reluctance to leave South Korea to the mercies of the North after all the blood and wealth Americans had expended in the Korean War.

  Beyond that, probably the biggest reason for considering Korea vital to U.S. interests was the expectation that a communist Korea ruled by Kim Il-sung would be hostile to capitalist Japan—-which was beginning to fulfill its promise as an engine of economic growth for the noncommunist world. It was not only American officials who felt certain that South Korea’s commu-nization would rock Japan. Belief that Korean communism posed a grave danger was and remained a powerfully felt conviction among establishment figures and others in Japan, also.99 As late as two decades later in a Tokyo conversation with an insider in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party I heard the matter-of-fact prediction that a communist takeover of Korea would shatter Japan’s fragile democracy, inspiring a quick reversion to dictatorial rule.100

  In 1958, when the communists made their proposals, Washington saw them as representing, in part, efforts to drive a wedge between Japan and the United States. At one meeting of top Pentagon brass and State Department officials, discussion turned to Japan’s reaction to Chinese troop withdrawal and the de-nuclearization proposal. Although the communist moves were calculated to appeal to the pacifism enshrined in the post-war Japanese constitution, the Tokyo government was disturbed by a belligerent tone in North Korea’s references to Japan and the United States. “Since then the Japanese Foreign Office has been anxious of our assessment of the reasons for the Chinese Communist announcement and particularly whether we intend to withdraw our troops from Korea,” says a memorandum of the meeting. “If so, the Foreign Office would be most distressed.”101

  Needing to respond somehow to the communist initiative, the Americans called a meeting of the sixteen countries that had contributed forces on the UN side in the Korean War. The sixteen sent the Chinese and North Koreans a note asking “whether, when the North Korean authorities speak of a ‘neutral nations organization’ to supervise the elections, they accept that these should be held under United Nations auspices.” The Chinese responded by accusing the UN group of trying to shift the focus. With Chinese forces being withdrawn, prospects for free elections and a peaceful reunification depended on corresponding withdrawal of the UN forces.102 Later in 1958, the Chinese dismissed the notion of holding UN-supervised elections. They charged—not without logic—that the United Nations, “under the domination of the United States, has been reduced to a belligerent in the Korean War and has lost all competence and moral authority to deal fairly and reasonably-with the Korean question.”103

  The parties were getting nowhere toward the creation of the reunified, democratic Korea that both sides claimed to want. As usual, other priorities intervened. In this case the communist proposals most likely were indeed a ploy. Washington was justified in its concern that withdrawing its troops again would not advance its elections-and-reunification agenda, but merely make it easier for North Korea to carry out its own quite different version. Once the American troops were gone, an American president confronted with a crisis in Korea would find public and congressional opinion far more cautious and cynical than in 1950. The North Koreans knew that a quick, Truman-style intervention would be extremely difficult to arrange the second time around under such circumstances.

  Basking in the praise he was hearing from people at home and abroa
d, and believing that he was gaining on his enemies across the DMZ, Kim took personal credit for the achievements of the period. There was more than a little justification for that, it appears. The 1997 defector Hwang Jang-yop, who had worked closely with Kim as party ideology secretary from 1958 to 1965, described Kim’s leadership in glowing terms.

  Kim Il-sung “was conscientious, wise and dignified,” Hwang wrote. At the weekly party political bureau meeting, held in a meeting room next to his office, the premier “would personally brief the attendants on each item on the agenda and propose alternatives. He used easy words to give a thorough explanation so that there was no room for misunderstanding or question regarding an issue. I thought that whatever he said was reasonable. He fully presented his opinion and then asked the rest of the officials for theirs.”

  As an example of Kim’s determination and persuasive powers once he had made up his mind, Hwang cited a scheme, begun in 1958, in which the premier tried to deal with the consumer goods shortages by having small factories built in the countryside. He assigned them to use whatever resources they could scrape together that might be left over from the big push in heavy industry. In his guidelines, Kim “strongly recommended the employment of women in these factories.”

  In a patriarchal society, that was revolutionary stuff. At a meeting, recalled Hwang, factory managers said that it would be better to be understaffed than to employ women. After all, women would need paid maternity leave of 90 days (later 150 days). Besides, the managers complained, women “put their children before their work, they talk too much and work too little and they tend to talk behind the supervisor’s back.”

  Kim replied that bringing women into the workplace was not simply a response to the country’s labor shortage. “If our women, who make up half our population, all stay home to work in the kitchens, they will lag behind the men in social awareness. Naturally, they will not understand their working husbands and so become a hindrance to their husbands’ careers.” It was necessary, Kim said, to “liberate our women from the kitchen and turn them into masters of society and the nation.”

  Thenceforth, Hwang noted, “child care centers, kindergartens and outpatient clinics were set up everywhere so that women need not worry about their children while at work, and this led to the flood of women entering the work force.”

  It was Kim himself who chose corn as the country’s main imported substitute for scarce and prohibitively expensive rice—a choice he apparently made based not on nutritional analysis but on his long experience making do with rice substitutes before 1945. In 1959, according to Hwang, “the issue of importing food was discussed during a political bureau meeting.” Kim listened to the discussion for a while before he said: “I’ve eaten a variety of grains before, and I think the best is corn. How about importing corn?” Hwang remembered being “quite impressed, because it was a judgment only someone who had gone through hard times could make.”

  According to Hwang, Kim “made policy decisions after taking into consideration the opinions of his subordinates.” When the premier started a new project, “he always gathered the party officials to explain his idea first. The secretaries would then write down his idea with more theoretical input and send the document down to the party organizations. And when giving instructions, Kim Il-sung always summoned the official in charge or called him on the phone. After setting the direction for a task, he left the details of execution to the independent decision of his subordinates. Kim Il-sung made frequent site inspections, from which he derived a lot of ideas. And when putting one of his ideas into practice, he would test it at a restricted level to gain more experience before making it the norm. He did not necessarily imitate other countries but tried to make adjustments to suit our situation. Thus he was not affected by the negative influence of other countries.”

  Hwang acknowledged that he had “learned a great deal from Kim Il-sung.” The premier “genuinely cared about us secretaries, and told us to accompany him whenever he made his rounds to the factories or farms.” When the aides were able to make time from the press of other duties to accept his invitations, they found that “Kim Il-sung did a fine job when he went to visit faraway places to personally guide the workers. He paid attention to the opinions of the workers or farmers, and did not act in an overbearing manner.”104

  Still, for a dynamo of energy such as Kim Il-sung evidently was during the 1950s, seemingly no detail of the country’s reconstruction was too small to deserve his “guidance.” In July of 1955, visiting the newly built railway station at Kanggye, he complained that the station signboard-was too small— and so was the greenery. Disdaining the small saplings he found planted around the station, he said: “You’ve planted small trees though many good big trees are available. … It’ll be long before such young trees grow big enough for old people to enjoy the view.” Thereupon he instructed that the saplings be replaced with bigger trees.105

  In another wallow in the nitty-gritty details of running the country, in January of 1958, Kim met with construction officials to press for increased housing production through prefabrication. “If you reduce the per-unit rotation time of cranes to seven or eight minutes, finish plastering while the units are being made in the factories instead of doing it at the construction site, you’ll be able to build houses cheaper and faster,” he is supposed to have advised them. The builders, “upholding his teachings,” refined their process to the point they could build an apartment in fourteen minutes—“Pyongyang speed,” as it was called.106

  Visiting one of the new flats, Kim asked a resident for a critique. At first the woman gave the formulaic praise, “We are living well with nothing to worry about, thanks to the State.” But Kim noticed that the apartment did not have heated floors. Getting the woman to relax, he drew from her an acknowledgment that she would have preferred that traditional Korean heating system, called ondol. Kim told the construction officials accompanying him to try to incorporate ondol in future apartment projects. Then, using a measuring stick, the premier criticized the proportions of the rooms. “He taught them in detail that they had better partition the flat in such an appropriate way as to provide best convenience for the dwellers, and lower the ceilings a little. … He told the building functionaries that they should make the kitchen bigger so that a wife could work at ease there even with a baby on her back. ‘Madame, what else do you want me to do?’ asked he. ‘There is nothing else,’ ” the woman replied.107 That is by no means the end of the tales of Kim Il-sung as Great Builder. Telling of one new apartment complex completed in Pyongyang around 1960, for example, Kim reported that he had “personally chosen the site of this block of flats for writers and anti-Japanese revolutionary veterans and had scrutinized its design.”

  On August 15, 1961, the sixteenth anniversary of liberation from Japanese rule, Kim “looked around the streets of the capital sunk in deep thought,” he was to write in his memoirs. “There was an animated holiday atmosphere in the streets. Sungri Street and the People’s Army Street, in which the movement to build 20,000 flats was launched, and all the main streets of Pyongyang had been improved with magnificent public buildings and multi-storeyed blocks of flats. In the eight years since the war, tens of thousands of Pyongyang citizens had left their dugouts and moved into the newly-built blocks of flats which were one of the wonderful achievements of post-war construction.”

  To be sure, Kim added, “the work of construction was only just beginning. As yet, most of the citizens of the capital were still living in shabby dugouts and old-fashioned one-room houses. They had made painful sacrifices and suffered appalling hardships, enduring the crucible of the anti-Japanese and the anti-U.S. wars, trials which no other people in the world had ever experienced. No people in the world had shed so much blood, braved such cold winds and missed so many meals as our people did. For these people we had to build more good houses, make more nice clothes and build more fine schools, holiday homes and hospitals. And we had to bring home more of our compatriots in forei
gn lands, who yearned for their homeland. This was what I had to do with my life, for the sake of the people. … These thoughts kept me awake at night.”108

  SEVEN

  When He Hugged Us Still Damp from the Sea

  Kim Il-sung might have gotten even less sleep if he had realized fully the meaning of an event in Seoul three months earlier, on May 16, 1961. Military officers led by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee took power in a coup d’etat. The coup snuffed out democratic rule, with which South Korea had been experimenting since Rhee’s overthrow the previous year in a student-led revolution. The intensely security-conscious new leaders in Seoul not only cracked down on dissent; they also made it clear very quickly that they would raise higher barriers to inroads by Northern agents and indigenous leftists. That alone would have been bad news for Kim, who counted on subversion to spark the Southern revolution that would pave the way for unification on his terms.

  Taking longer to become apparent were some even farther-reaching consequences of Park’s ascension to power. Although the North had gotten the jump on the South economically in the post–Korean War period, the military takeover in the South signaled a new phase in their contest. Within a few years Park’s authoritarian regime had unleashed Western-trained economists—some of them no less than brilliant—and dynamic business leaders. Their mission: build a market economy modeled on that of Japan, employing close bureaucratic guidance and taking full advantage of a low-cost, hardworking, well-trained labor force. The formula was not too different from the “state capitalism” that Kim Il-sung had rejected as inappropriate for the North. It worked for the South, producing a rapidly wealth-expanding, relatively free economy.1