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.
With U.S. advice and encouragement, Park raised interest rates to encourage savings, and balanced the national budget. Such policies ushered in several years of rapid growth and laid the foundation for South Korea’s later emergence as an economic “tiger.”
Park was reelected in 1967, yet he remained on unsteady political ground. Many older conservatives still considered him a usurper despite his two electoral victories. There was little emotional connection between the South Korean people and their dour president. Official corruption and graft were still pervasive problems. The roaring economy buoyed Park’s government, lending it more legitimacy than it otherwise would have had. But the newfound prosperity was far from bulletproof.
One of the biggest threats to economic expansion was stepped-up aggression from the north. Park knew determined terrorist attacks against vulnerable South Korean utilities and factories could disrupt the economy and undermine popular support for him. Following the Blue House raid, he tightened security at such installations.
But the nearly successful attempt to kill him and his family shook Park badly. By exposing his inability to protect his capital from Kim Il Sung’s commandos, it cost him a major loss of face. And the thought that his beloved son might have died horrified him. By February 1968, the South Korean leader was drinking heavily and sleeping with a loaded rifle next to his bed.
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Captain Kent Lee was on the Enterprise’s navigation bridge when the call from Washington came through. He picked up the phone and, to his surprise, heard the distinctive Texas drawl of his commander in chief.
“Are those people from up north botherin’ you?” LBJ wanted to know.
“Not at all, sir,” Lee replied. “There’s lots of ocean out here and we’re doing very well.”
A few days before, Soviet premier Aleksey Kosygin had complained to Johnson about the growing concentration of U.S. forces in South Korea and the Sea of Japan. The arrival of so many aircraft and warships, Kosygi
n warned, would only cause Pyongyang to dig in its heels over the Pueblo. In a secret reply, Johnson promised to halt the buildup, which was substantially complete anyway, and move the Enterprise away from Wonsan. Now the president personally ordered Captain Lee to steam the giant carrier south, stopping when he was about 12 hours from North Korea.
Even as the White House pulled back some forces, the Pentagon moved ahead with plans for a large-scale attack on North Korea, in case LBJ ultimately chose that route. On February 3, Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, commander in chief of all American forces in the Pacific, cabled the Joint Chiefs of Staff that contingency planning “continues on an urgent basis at all command levels.”
One ambitious plan, code-named “Fresh Storm,” was designed “to eliminate without delay the North Korean air order of battle”—the entire communist air force—“by striking all North Korean airfields.” U.S. tactical fighters and B-52 bombers, possibly assisted by South Korean warplanes, would pound communist air bases and support facilities in around-the-clock attacks. In addition, General Bonesteel recommended that U.S. soldiers join the South Koreans in “black operations”—secret hit-and-run attacks—against the north. But higher authorities poured cold water on that idea.
As the days wore on, however, it became clear that no Pentagon scheme was any more likely to achieve the president’s main goal—getting the crew back alive—than any of Sam Berger’s options. At the same time, Johnson began to despair of the value of diplomatic efforts. Asked at a White House press conference whether he was confident of being able to bring home both sailors and ship, he replied flatly, “No, I am not.”
Some of the president’s men, meanwhile, were privately concluding that the Pueblo mission had been badly botched.
In a phone conversation with LBJ, McNamara characterized the eavesdropping foray as “poorly conceived.” Anticipating a barrage of barbed questions at an upcoming hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the defense secretary worried that administration officials were “flat on our ass” because of the feeble first reaction to the hijacking. And in a private letter to a State Department colleague, Ambassador Porter complained of the Navy’s foolhardiness in not withdrawing the spy ship from the North Korean coast after the Blue House attack.
The sharpest critique came from George Ball, the former under secretary of state whom the president asked to investigate the circumstances surrounding the capture. Ball had formed a small committee whose distinguished members included General Mark Clark, commander of all U.N. troops in the Korean War, and Admiral George Anderson, who’d been in charge of the U.S. Navy blockade of Cuba during the missile crisis. Johnson hoped the Ball Committee’s findings could be used to head off any embarrassing congressional hearings, and he’d pledged to make them available on Capitol Hill. But the committee’s candid conclusions evidently never were presented to Congress.
Ball’s group criticized the “planning, organization, and direction” of the mission. A draft of the committee’s report said spy ships should be equipped with reliable means of destruction and shouldn’t be ordered into hostile waters without protection from a nearby combat vessel.
Since small states like North Korea regarded offshore eavesdropping as “a hostile act vaguely threatening their security,” Ball and his colleagues added, Washington should carefully consider the likely reaction before sending barely armed surveillance boats into harm’s way. The committee also criticized the Navy’s orders to Bucher—to stand his ground yet not provoke the communists—as “ambiguous and self-contradictory.”
Ball went over the report line by line with his committee members until they reached unanimous agreement. Then he delivered their conclusions in a face-to-face meeting with the president. At Clark Clifford’s request, Ball destroyed all hard copies of the report, including his own. Its findings were scandalous and no one wanted them leaked to the press.
While the White House digested Ball’s critique, more trouble was percolating in South Korea.
Porter cabled that many South Korean military men seemed to believe now might be the best chance in their lifetimes to conquer the north. With more American combat power in their country than at any time since 1953, the South Koreans thought the moment was ripe to pull the United States into a war to annihilate Kim Il Sung. Porter warned of the military’s “hungering desire, which [President] Park shares, to close with the North Koreans.”
In an effort to calm Park, Johnson sent him a private letter, detailing the cornucopia of U.S. military aid he’d soon receive. LBJ also acknowledged the “political and public relations problem” the Panmunjom talks had created for Park’s government, and promised that the United States “will not . . . humiliate itself” in order to secure the sailors’ release—a pledge that in coming months he wouldn’t be able to fully honor.
The president advised Park to focus on the long-term problem of stopping communist intrusions and sabotage rather than on short-term difficulties arising from the Pueblo and Blue House outrages. LBJ had previously asked Congress to boost military aid to South Korea by $100 million for that fiscal year. In his letter to Park he threw in another $32 million for counterinfiltration equipment, including a dozen Huey helicopters, a self-propelled howitzer battalion, 900 rolls of barbed wire, 12,000 metal fence posts, 3,600 trip flares, starlight scopes, xenon searchlights, radio sets, and field telephones.
Johnson’s words, however, didn’t have the desired effect. When Porter delivered LBJ’s message at the Blue House, the still-rattled South Korean president vented at him for two and a half hours. The Enterprise, he snapped, should have sailed north, not south, in order to blockade Wonsan. Park denounced Kim Il Sung as “a pirate and a thief” and warned that he’d have no choice but to retaliate if the communists struck his country again. That, he said bluntly, would mean war.
After Porter had departed, a Blue House aide telephoned him to say Park had changed his mind and now formally opposed the bilateral talks at Panmunjom. In addition, the CIA reported that Park was asking the National Assembly for emergency powers to withdraw his troops both from Vietnam and from General Bonesteel’s U.N. command. The ambassador hastily cabled Washington that the United States and South Korea “may be approaching [the] showdown stage.”
The situation was lurching out of control. LBJ needed to do something, and fast.
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On the night of February 9, an Air Force transport jet landed at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York to pick up a lone passenger: a tall, patrician-looking man named Cyrus R. Vance.
Vance was a successful Wall Street lawyer and veteran Washington insider to whom President Johnson often turned in times of turmoil. The publicity-averse former deputy secretary of defense had been dispatched as the president’s personal envoy to defuse crises in Panama and the Dominican Republic. In 1967, he’d helped to avert war between Greece and Turkey. During the Detroit riots that same year, he urged LBJ to deploy thousands of federal troops to restore order in the city’s roiling streets; Johnson immediately did so.
Unflappable and relentlessly polite, the 50-year-old Vance had a low-key but forceful negotiating style and a lawyerly mind that rapidly analyzed complex political problems. Hobbled by chronic back pain, he often had to lie on the floor of his Pentagon office in order to work. Partly as a result, Vance returned to his law practice in 1967. (In later years he’d serve as President Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state.)
Now Vance was flying to Seoul at Johnson’s behest in an effort to talk President Park down from the roof. Vance’s marching orders were to extract two solemn promises from the South Korean leader: that he wouldn’t disrupt the talks between Washington and Pyongyang, and that he’d launch no military attacks without first consulting the United States. Vance’s briefing book contained a memo, drafted by Sam Berger, intended to give him some insight into Park’s personality and its quirks. The memo said the South Korean president was prone t
o fits of “anger and violent temper,” but was too disciplined to let outsiders witness them. He was “usually forthright” rather than “Machiavellian or devious” in his dealings with others, and he didn’t like flattery. His thinking was methodical; he was direct and terse in conversation. He had a disconcerting habit of snapping his fingers as he spoke, but probably wasn’t conscious of it and Vance shouldn’t let it bother him.
After picking up two trusted aides in Washington, Vance touched down in Seoul on February 11. The city was palpably on edge.
The jumpiness was particularly noticeable at the Blue House, where the atmosphere, General Bonesteel reported, resembled that of “the Mad Hatter’s tea party.” Park seemed “almost irrationally obsessed” with striking back at Kim Il Sung. The normally controlled South Korean, Vance was told, was in a volatile emotional state, drinking and throwing ashtrays at his wife and staff in anger and frustration. The troubleshooter made a mental note to be ready to duck. Despite the gravity of the situation, he expected to be in South Korea only a few hours.
Park coldly rejected Vance’s request for an audience immediately upon his arrival. Instead, the president spent the afternoon target shooting in the Blue House basement. Vance walked into the lion’s den the next day, meeting with Park and several of his key ministers.
Park wasted no time in stating his thesis that his archnemesis in Pyongyang was gearing up for war. While in the past the North Korean dictator had contented himself with blowing up barracks and railroad tracks, the Blue House and Pueblo incidents marked a dramatic escalation of his aggressiveness.
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