Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

  Closely watched by its rivals, the KCIA seldom strayed from serving Park’s interests, developing multiple roles and missions. As a political

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  weapon for Park, the agency, under Kim Chong-p’il’s leadership, set up the Democratic Republican Party as a new ruling party, with funds generated from wrongful operations in 1962, as we saw in Chapter 3.10 Park used Kim as a scapegoat when he left the KCIA to join the DRP as its chairman in 1963, and forced Kim to go abroad in brief exile for the agency’s illicit activities, while Park campaigned as the DRP’s presidential candidate.

  When Park plotted to prolong his rule by amending the constitution to allow him to run for a third term in 1969 and then to stay in power for life through the declaration of the yushin constitution in 1972, the KCIA again became his main political instrument. To break Kim Chong-p’il’s desire to succeed Park by fighting to retain the constitutional limit of two presidential terms, Park had the KCIA, now led by Kim Hyông-uk, bully Kim Chong-p’il’s “crown prince” faction with threats of a purge, while DRP finance chairman Kim Sông-gon coaxed Kim Chong-p’il’s followers to back down with soft talk in 1969.11 The two-track strategy of repression and co-optation worked, persuading Kim Chong-p’il to support the constitutional revision.

  Three years later, with Kim Chong-p’il tamed and Kim Sông-gon immersed in wishful thinking about instituting a parliamentary system after Park’s third term ended in 1974, the KCIA on Park’s orders struck against Kim Sông-gon and forced his retirement after abusive interrogations.12

  With such ruthless crackdowns on Park’s one-time allies and followers in 1962, 1969, and 1972, the KCIA helped clear the way to Park’s first election, third term, and the yushin regime. Even when Park was not plotting a political intrigue, the agency worked diligently in Park’s shadow to build up and guard his power, intimidating legislators, feeding on jealousy and mistrust among opposition leaders, and harassing journalists.13 During election season, moreover, the KCIA became a campaign strategist, a political fund-raiser, and a “pollster” for Park, given the institutional shallow-ness of the DRP.

  The KCIA was also a critical player in foreign policy. When normalization talks with Japan became deadlocked over the issue of reparations, Park had Kim Chong-p’il, then the agency’s director, fly to Tokyo in 1962

  to broker a deal clandestinely and “shamelessly”—to quote protestors during South Korea’s 1965 treaty crisis.14 In 1972, when U.S. president Richard Nixon’s trip to China rekindled South Korea’s deeply ingrained mistrust of U.S. security commitments, Park again turned to the KCIA for covert operations. KCIA director Yi Hu-rak obliged, visiting the North Korean capital, P’yôngyang, as Park’s envoy in May after bilateral Red Cross talks on family reunions, and greeting the North’s second deputy prime minister Pak Sông-ch’ôl when he made a corresponding visit to Se-

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  oul a month later. The high-level exchange produced the July Fourth Joint Declaration for peaceful reunification and more. Soon after his return from the North, Yi Hu-rak urged Park to suspend direct presidential elections and amend the constitution to centralize his power, with the goal of defeating P’yôngyang’s totalitarian regime in a new era of détente. Park concurred. Having seen his national emergency declaration in December 1971 severely criticized and ridiculed for its blatant unconstitutionality and his belatedly legislated Law on Special Measures for National Security neutralized by opposition parties in early 1972, Park decided to draw up a new constitution and dissolve the National Assembly. This task, too, became Yi Hu-rak’s. The KCIA director joined Park’s presidential staff in weekly meetings to review plans for regime change prepared by his agents under the code name “Good Harvest” until August. Their document was then handed over to Minister of Justice Sin Chik-su and KCIA deputy director Kim Ch’i-yôl for detailed legal work.15 The KCIA’s role as an instrument of foreign policy overlapped with, spilled over into, and was reinforced by its domestic role as the watchdog of Park’s political interests, power, and mission.

  Yet the KCIA’s domestic and foreign agenda had profoundly negative consequences for Park’s relationship with Tokyo and Washington after 1973. To slow down, if not reverse, the United States’ staged military disengagement from South Korea, the KCIA brought in Pak Tong-sôn, a lobbyist with an exclusive right to import U.S. rice into South Korea, and Kim Han-jo, a South Korean expatriate entrepreneur, into what the KCIA hoped would become a strong Washington lobby modeled after Taiwan and Israel’s efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy. In August 1973, Yi Hu-rak had KCIA agents abduct South Korean opposition leader Kim Dae-jung from Tokyo, where he had been seeking political asylum in the wake of the yushin declaration, in order to stop him from building overseas anti-Park forces. These KCIA operations backfired, quickly developing into the Koreagate scandal with its resultant “Park bashing” in the U.S. Congress and a serious rift in relations with Japan.16

  The strains on South Korea’s relations with its two most important allies strengthened the domestic opposition, especially after South Korea recovered from the shock of Saigon’s fall in 1975. The rise of opposition forces within society predictably dragged the KCIA further into political intrigues and foreign policy problems. To preempt the NDP’s mobilization of societal opposition forces in 1979, Park expelled its leader, Kim Young-sam, from the National Assembly, only to see the opposition lawmakers resign en masse and the United States recall Ambassador William Gleysteen. The brutal repression of workers on strike at a small bankrupt

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  garment factory backfired as well, politicizing oppressive labor conditions. The residents of economically depressed Pusan and Masan in Kim Young-sam’s native South Kyôngsang Province also broke out into a massive protest against Park’s gross political blunders. At the center of each of these missteps were KCIA director Kim Chae-gyu and Presidential Security Service chief Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl. They drew up “moderate” and “radical”

  countermeasures that had more to do with internal power struggles than with problem-solving.

  Given the KCIA’s multiple political roles, sweeping power, and cohesive organization, its director served as a de facto senior presidential secretary on domestic as well as foreign and security policy in Park’s Blue House.

  The president began his work every morning with reports from the KCIA director. To guard his innermost thoughts on priority issues, Park met the KCIA director alone, without even his chief of staff. The KCIA director could also knock on his door anytime day or night, if necessary. There were only two other people who enjoyed similar privileges: the head of the army’s Security Command and the Presidential Security Service chief. The talk among these three praetorians could run for hours when Park faced major issues.17

  The Blue House

  Park also knew that the KCIA was ill-equipped to handle economic issues.

  When he entrusted it with handling economic policy in 1962, his move almost ruined South Korea’s already feeble economy, as we saw in Chapter 3. From his 1962 policy disasters, Park learned what not to do: to use the KCIA for economic policymaking rather than for political goals.18 Nonetheless, it took time for him to learn what to do: where to put his trust within the state bureaucracy and how to organize his presidential team in the economic realm. In July 1961 Park had established the Economic Planning Board as his pilot agency, but left it out in the cold during the early military junta years because of his reliance on Kim Chong-p’il’s KCIA. The task lying before him after 1962 was to find ways to make the EPB his lead economic agency in both name and reality and yet place it under his personal control. The issue of balancing institutional development and patrimonial control was crucial for Park, because as with the KCIA, the EPB was too powerful to be left alone. With its power to draw up the nation’s budget as well as to authorize foreign loans and investments, which at the time were South Korea’s main source of capital in the context o
f low domestic savings, the EPB could independently raise money for industrial projects it deemed necessary to achieve the targeted rate of eco-

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  nomic growth without bringing in the Ministry of Finance for any close consultation. As with the KCIA, the EPB was kept under Park’s tight rein with the help of his Blue House presidential Secretariat.

  Set up to balance the goals of institutional development and patrimonial control, the Blue House resembled a mini-cabinet. At its apex sat the chief of staff with a rank equivalent to that of minister. Immediately below were the vice ministerial-level senior secretaries, whose number increased from one to six after a series of organizational overhauls in 1968 and 1969.

  Thereafter, until Park’s death a decade later, the number of senior secretaries ranged from five to eight, each presiding over secretaries with a rank equivalent to that of general bureau director or assistant vice minister in the state bureaucracy. Each secretary, in turn, had exclusive jurisdiction over one or two state ministries with which to transform Park’s vision into a detailed, workable policy package.19 The organization of the Blue House thus more or less paralleled that of South Korea’s state ministries. Because Park relied on his three praetorians—the KCIA, the Army Security Command, and the Presidential Security Service—to guard his power and deal with political issues, the “political” part of the presidential Secretariat always remained weak. Before 1968, Park did project an image of privileging politics within the organization of the Blue House by appointing a senior secretary with a “political” portfolio. This formal title, however, was misleading. The aide functioned more as a deputy chief of staff than as a senior staff member with an exclusive jurisdiction over political issues.20

  His role was to facilitate coordination between the chief of staff and nine lower secretarial units, only one of which dealt with the National Assembly and party politics. The 1969 reorganization seemingly set up a more secure place for politics within Park’s Blue House by creating a separate political unit at a newly inserted vice ministerial layer of senior secretaries, but this new unit too defined its mission bureaucratically, as one of watch-ing over seven “political” state ministries as diverse as Culture and Information, Education, Government Affairs, Justice, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Home Affairs. For Park, the real counterpart to party politicians and legislators was his KCIA.

  To be sure, Yi Hu-rak played a central political role during his tenure as chief of staff between 1963 and1969, but he was more the exception than the norm. During these six years, Yi allied himself with KCIA director Kim Hyông-uk and DRP finance chairman Kim Sông-gon to squeeze Kim Chong-p’il out of power and prepare for Park’s third presidential term in 1969. The three allied not only because they lacked personal charisma and popularity to compete with Kim Chong-p’il for the position of crown prince, but also because Park himself had no thought of retiring from politics. When Yi Hu-rak left, Park appointed Kim Chông-ryôm—a hy-

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  brid technocrat with prior vice ministerial and ministerial experience in the strategic Finance as well as Commerce and Industry ministries—as the chief of staff. Kim Chông-ryôm stayed on for nine long years until the DRP lost a National Assembly election in 1978. The successor was Park’s reluctant old friend from his army years, retired general Kim Kye-wôn, whom Park persuaded to become the chief of staff as a “companion” in his old age.21

  The nature of the Blue House staff was primarily technocratic and bureaucratic. There were senior secretaries for political affairs, but their primary task was to check on and polish up political plans prepared by the KCIA. The real senior aide on politics, in short, was the KCIA, which explains why Park’s Blue House political team remained organizationally weak both before and after 1968.

  The Blue House staff as an organization was “80 percent economics,”

  to quote a senior aide.22 Moreover, unlike the KCIA and its rival security agencies, which Park staffed with his lifelong confidants from his military years in accordance with his military view of politics as a game of control, mobilization, and divide-and-conquer policies, the “80 percent economics” Blue House recruited its personnel from South Korea’s state bureaucracy, the source of expertise in a thoroughly bureaucratized political society. Park knew the importance of the state bureaucracy and organized his daily schedule to win loyalty from state bureaucrats by personally visiting construction sites and closely monitoring governmental projects.

  The strategic role of the Blue House does not mean that it was a large organization. Even after dramatic expansions in July 1967 and April 1968, Park’s Blue House Secretariat had only 227 staff members, with 99

  enjoying the civil service rank of Grade 3B (fifth-highest grade among 10) or higher. Park imposed an upper ceiling on his Secretariat’s organizational growth because he desired his Blue House aides to remain as aides and to exercise power by working with and through—not around—state ministries.23 In fact, the state bureaucracy constituted his single largest source of Blue House aides, supplying 37.9 percent of senior secretaries. The armed forces followed with a 27.6 percent share. Park also maintained a division of labor, recruiting his senior economic aides primarily from the elite EPB

  and Ministry of Finance and his Blue House spokespersons from among journalists, while retired military personnel took up posts in political and civil affairs. Park knew where power and expertise lay and acted accordingly, showering South Korea’s bureaucratic elite with privileges.The crucial point, of course, was who controlled whom. The “guards” could build a “human curtain” (in-¤i changmak) around Park and make him a captive of the state bureaucracy or of the guards themselves, distorting informa-

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  tion, setting the national agenda, and formulating policy options to advance respective agencies’ powers and privileges rather than Park’s. To keep the Blue House Secretariat in line, Park could instill fear among his aides, but only to a limited extent, lest fear destroy any incentive they had for actively engaging in interministerial coordination to implement the policy goals that Park wanted them to work toward. The ideal aide for Park was Kim Chông-ryôm. Brought in from South Korea’s central bank to work on the KCIA’s clandestine currency reform in May 1962, Kim Chông-ryôm then saw his role as a “neutral” bureaucratic facilitator and as someone to “limit the damage of the KCIA-led currency conversion by drawing up a workable reform plan” based on his experience participating in a similar currency reform as a technocrat at the Bank of Korea in 1952.24 The 1962 currency reform failed dismally, but Park took in Kim Chông-ryôm as a top economic aide, making him finance vice minister in 1962 and trade and industry vice minister two years later. Subsequently, he became minister of finance as well as of trade and industry before heading Park’s Blue House as the chief of staff from 1969 until December 1978.

  Kim Chông-ryôm’s career exemplifies Park’s systematic way of cultivating loyalty among his Blue House staff through predictable political patronage. Among the 29 senior secretaries of Park’s presidential years (1963–1979), 44.8 percent rose to a cabinet post and 24.1 percent became legislators. Moreover, Park looked after his former presidential staff members even after they left the Blue House. Excluding the seven who were serving as senior secretary at the time of Park’s death in October 1979, senior aides typically faced a 50 percent chance of moving on to another assignment during Park’s political rule. Once Park made a technocrat part of his presidential staff, he promised lifelong political patronage. For an additional assurance of loyalty, Park also preferred to recruit rising young stars and Kyôngsang natives, especially for strategic political and economic policy work. To build up personal ties as well as to develop an institutional memory of the Blue House, he had senior political and economic aides stay on in their posts for a little over two and a half years, on average. The tenure of other senior aides averaged longer, reaching a little over five years in the
case of senior secretaries in protocol offices. Equally important, 48.3

  percent of the senior secretaries had served as a mid-level secretary in the Blue House, resulting in a considerably higher total average years of service in the presidential Secretariat. The Blue House’s protocol and civil affairs sections even appeared frozen, with their senior aides staying on in various capacities for an average of 5.3 and 8.0 years, respectively. The Blue House was an integral part of the state bureaucracy, recruiting its elite as secretaries and senior secretaries and sending them back to the minis-

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  tries as high-level policymakers—with a reinforced sense of mission and loyalty inculcated by Park during their Blue House service.

  Despite the systematic nurturing of bureaucratic support groups, however, Park knew that in the end it was only he himself who could truly look after his political interests. Consequently, he took a hands-on approach to crucial policy decisions and especially to monitoring policy and ministerial performance. Every month he held an Export Promotion Meeting with cabinet members and chaebol executives, and summoned bureaucrats for a

  “Report on Economic Trends.”25 In other policy areas, Park convened an Inspection and Analysis Meeting every quarter. After Nixon announced U.S. plans for a military disengagement from continental Asia, Park added a Quarterly Meeting on Defense Industry Promotion to the list of interministerial coordination meetings he chaired.26 There was also the annual tour of inspection (yôndo sunsi), which occurred in January. Park toured all state ministries that month, with his entire cabinet and Blue House senior secretaries plus National Assembly leaders, including the Speaker, in tow. The tour was organized to review the annual work plans of the state ministries, as well as to “check on and boost up state bureaucrats’ morale and capability.”27 Typically Park sat alone, motionless, in front of his delegation in a packed room, overwhelming all with his silence, while bureau directors of the state ministry under inspection each went through a thick briefing chart. Park spoke only occasionally to raise substantively very focused and strategic policy questions. To check on ministerial performance as well as to set clear goals, moreover, he preferred quantifying his questions and comments.28 During his inspection tours, Park also tested the capabilities of each state ministry’s rising stars and, when a person proved capable, he did not hesitate to call on the bureau directors directly and even on lower Grade 3A civil servants to answer his questions.29 Many of the most talented bureaucrats were picked by Park to work as Blue House aides.