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KOREA: The Walnut

20 minute read
TIME

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In a refugee camp a few miles outside Seoul last week, Ahn Nam-chang and her family were getting ready to go home. Nam-chang’s husband was one of at least a million South Korean civilian casualties in the early days of the war, but she has a hunch that her old father is still living on his two-acre farm near Munsan. Nam-chang has three children. As if that were not enough, she has adopted a little girl—one of Korea’s 100,000 war orphans—who would most likely have died if Mrs. Ahn had not taken her in. The U.N. Civil Assistance Command has been looking after the Ahns for a couple of years; the kids are outfitted in olive-drab pants. Mrs. Ahn wears a dogskin neckpiece, a relic of the old days, of which she is very fond; at 31, a widow in a country where widows are unwanted, Mrs. Ahn has not much to look forward to, but if she can find her father, they will make a home.

On the roads that wind from Seoul to Munsan, to Uijongbu and farther east, in central and eastern Korea, many families like the Ahns were on the move last week. In a thousand hamlets and settlements, some within sound of artillery on the stalemated battlefront, the blue-grey ashes of prewar villages were being raked aside, raw pine uprights were being planted, and women & children were combing through the rice straw for thatching for new roofs. Of the 22 million people in South Korea, about a fourth are homeless. No matter how hard and hopefully they work they cannot soon replace their 600,000 destroyed homes, nor provide the 250,000 new dwellings necessary to shelter the refugees from the north.

North & South. After nearly three years of war, there is not much left of Korea. North of the 38th parallel the devastation is immense. U.N. intelligence estimates that bombing and strafing have destroyed 40% of all habitations of any kind; U.N. bombers no longer have profitable targets. The civilian population has diminished from 8,000,000 to perhaps 4,000,000—killed in the bombing, dead from malnutrition or cold, fled to the South for freedom, or carried off by the Communist occupiers. The North Korean army is a shadow: perhaps only 50,000 soldiers remain of their once formidable corps. The North Koreans have been beaten; it is their occupiers, the Chinese Communists, that U.N. armies now face.

In South Korea, the military picture is better, thanks to the might & main of the U.S., to the lesser but nonetheless real help of 14 other U.N. nations, to the tenacity of the South Koreans themselves, and to the singular dedication of Korea’s first & only President, Syngman Rhee. A 400,000-man ROK army, including twelve fully equipped divisions in the line, guards the young republic from further invasion and is building so fast that it may soon be strong enough to take over the whole front. It already holds more than half.

But back of that line, shadows gather in the picture. Destruction is widespread.

The capital city of Seoul is 80% uninhabitable. Public buildings everywhere lie in ruins, public utility services are makeshift, and two-thirds of the schools are unusable. Only in the South’s gaunt era of Reconstruction after the Civil War is there a U.S. parallel to what Rhee and his people are up against. The economy is shot to pieces. Some 75% of all mines and textile factories have suffered severe damage. Those industries which can function lack parts for maintenance and equipment for repair. The draft has absorbed much of the country’s youth, but there are still thousands of unemployed. Resourceful businessmen struggle with makeshift merchandise: they offer for sale cooking utensils fashioned from the aluminum of wrecked planes, buckets beaten out of old oleomargarine cans, canoe-shaped rubber sneakers made from worn-out truck tires, men’s & women’s clothing cut from discarded (and pilfered) U.S. Army uniforms.

A newly arrived U.N. officer, after a first look at Korean fashions, cracked: “U.S. olive drab seems to be the Korean national color.” With thoughts hardly less superficial, thousands of soldiers have moved backwards & forwards over this small republic (slightly smaller than Indiana), fighting its invaders, and sometimes laying down their lives in its defense. Overwhelmed by the physical aspect of war, they have no means of assessing the stark inner tragedy. The U.N. soldier does not know that a Korean schoolteacher’s salary will buy her only 16 lbs. of uncooked rice and ten cups of coffee a month; that a Korean doctor sells penicillin on the black market because his income is less than $10 a month.

Won & Lost. Last week in a moldering, pagoda-roofed hall in Pusan, once used by Japanese occupiers as a wrestling arena, South Korea’s National Assembly met to consider measures for halting the galloping inflation which has made a sad joke of wages and salaries. Diesel oil and kerosene fumes from six U.S. Army space heaters mingled with the heavy smell of garlic in the rear of the hall, where several hundred curious but impassive spectators watched the proceedings.

Nine days earlier the government had announced a very simple expedient for curing inflation: withdraw the present currency (won) and replace it with a new currency (hwan), at 100 won for one hwan. The question which occupied the Assembly was what proportion of existing bank deposits would be temporarily blocked from this trade-in. As the government worded the bill, a wide assortment of Koreans, from black-marketeers to most of the political opposition, would have 75% of their funds frozen.

Finance Minister Paik To Chin, poised and confident in a neat brown business suit, thought he had the Assembly exactly where he wanted it. Then the Assembly threw its bombshell: practically all existing won, it decided, should be convertible into hwan. Rather than have any part of their own private funds blocked, many Assemblymen were prepared to wreck the government’s chances of curbing inflation.

The fact that there was a semblance of order at all—in finance or in government—was still something of a miracle. It was due, in almost every respect, to a remarkable old man: President Syngman Rhee, 78, stern fighter for Korea’s freedom over more than half a century.

The Uncrackable. Syngman Rhee is the walnut of Asian politics. Brown, wrinkled, iron-shelled, he calmly resists the tremendous pressure of managing his tragic country.

Seated a few yards from him, the visitor does not notice the marks of strain—the extended eyelids, the twitching right eye, the flaccid skin—but sees only the hard, skeptical eyes, the restless energy of the small frame. Rhee is the last of the old heroes of the Korean struggle for independence, a man with long memories. Just outside Seoul lie the ruins of Westgate prison, where the Emperor Koh-Jong’s jailers spliced Rhee’s fingers between wooden wands which the jailers twisted until his fingers were almost ripped from the joints; there he was imprisoned for seven years.

As a youth, Rhee had attended the Pai Chai Methodist Mission school, and now the missionaries and their wives visited him in jail. There he became converted to Christianity. When the Japanese took over Korea in 1904, Rhee was released in a general amnesty and immediately went to the U.S. For six years he studied in American universities, got an M.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Princeton. Back in Korea, while heading up a Korean Christian student movement, he began undercover agitation against the Japanese. When the conquerors got his number, he slipped off to Hawaii in 1912. He was to be an exile from his native land for 33 years.

Head Worth $300,000. In Seoul the revolutionaries set up an underground provisional government, named Rhee as first president in absentia. The Japanese began a bloody purge of the nationalists and put a price of $300,000 on Rhee’s head. At a conference in Shanghai in 1920 the Korean nationalists laid plans for organized military action against the Japanese. Later, when the Japanese army attacked Manchuria, a 20,000-man Korean national army fought beside Chinese soldiers.

None of these events have, been forgotten by Korean patriots, for whom the national struggle for independence is as much in living memory as the American Revolution was in the minds of Americans in the early 1800s. Thus, to his countrymen, Rhee has something of the stature of George Washington; and if his people have not yet heard of a Korean Thomas Jefferson, it is because the political climate of Korea (and Rhee himself) is against the free development of such a typically democratic figure.

Vigilant Momma. In 1932, while attempting to put Korea’s case before an indifferent League of Nations in Geneva, Rhee met Francesca Maria Barbara Donner, 34, the daughter of a family of Viennese iron merchants. Two years later they were married in a Methodist ceremony in New York. The Rhees live in a modest mansion on the rolling hillside behind Seoul, only 30 miles south of the front. In their household Madame Rhee maintains constant vigilance.

A small, alert woman with greying hair and bright hazel eyes, she has lost none of her Viennese animation. Her billowing dresses are tailored for an Austrian peasant effect. She talks lightly of Washington society, Hong Kong social intrigue, New York or Paris fashions. But the observant visitor is not misled: Madame Rhee is a woman attuned to politics and power. She is present, or in the background, of most vital meetings. When she and Rhee met, their common language was English. Today she professes to have forgotten the German of her youth, and her English is so much better than Rhee’s that she often helps him out in difficult interviews. She also speaks what she calls “kitchen Korean.” In that language she needles the President’s lagging stenographers and orders his luncheons, and keeps tab on Rhee’s police organization. Korean generals and politicians pay her immense deference.

Never Underestimate . . . The extent to which Madame Rhee influences Korean politics is a matter of fascinated conjecture for all who have seen the Rhees together. Some have even gone so far as to say that Madame Rhee is the power behind the presidency, but the truth seems to be that the couple act in concert; in her own right Madame Rhee is a clever, strong, ever-watchful helpmate. At home and in politics it is “the Rhees,” a political relationship like that which once existed between Madame and Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek.

Rhee’s day begins at 6 with a Western-style breakfast of toast, coffee, ham & eggs, after which the President likes to walk his Chin-do dog through the garden. He then goes through the newspapers with his secretary and scans reports from his embassies and ministries. Last week he received a letter written in blood purporting to be Acting Premier Paik To Chin’s confession that he was a Communist. Rhee spotted the letter as a fraud, and investigation disclosed that it had been written in chicken blood by the madame of a Seoul tea house at the instigation of one of Paik’s enemies. No detail is too small for Rhee’s personal attention.

After his correspondence, the President, as he says, “settles down to the day’s work,” which may include 30 to 35 interviews or an official tour. Time & again he has climbed in & out of planes and jeeps on tours of the freezing Korean battlefront, stood stiffly to attention during the playing of the Korean or U.S. national anthems, the wind winnowing his thin white hair, his battered grey felt hat clutched to his breast. But on other occasions, particularly when he is tired, the aged President will droop. Whenever Madame Rhee thinks that a visitor has over stayed, she will interrupt with some such remark as “Poppa, do you haff coffee or tea this afternoon?” Hearing her voice, Rhee’s thousand-wrinkled face will crease into a smile. In private the President calls Madame Rhee “Momma,” and in recent months he has needed all her solicitude.

Government, as Rhee practices it, is almost a one-man job. He has a few trusted cabinet ministers, such as Acting Premier Paik To Chin and Information Minister Clarence Ryee. Below them are a number of lesser ministers and government officials who cautiously conform to Rhee’s wishes. Government favors can be obtained only through Rhee and this circle of his intimates. All foreign exchange allocations for more than $500, for example, must be personally approved by Rhee. Imposed to ensure the strictest honesty in government operations, this control has its drawbacks: important decisions inevitably await the President’s approval, and when he is incapacitated they await his recovery. Said a Rhee official last week: “When the old man is sick, Korea is sick.”

Sovereign Trust. In pursuing this policy, Rhee may well be moved by real distrust of Korea’s manipulating politicians. But there is something more to his actions than counter-manipulation: his passionate belief that he governs by sovereign right conferred on him by the Korean people. This belief he clearly demonstrated in his row with the National Assembly last year. According to Korea’s five-year-old constitution, the Assembly elects the President. Rhee’s term being about to expire, the Assembly wished to exercise its constitutional right. Since the majority were opposed to Rhee, this meant a new man in the job. Among the aspirants was ex-Premier John Myun Chang, a U.S.-educated (Fordham) intellectual.

Rhee insisted that the President should be chosen by vote of the people. The Assembly said no. Rhee declared martial law, had his cops arrest twelve Assemblymen, charged them with being Communist plotters, and sent a mob of his supporters to storm the Assembly chamber. Aspirant Chang took refuge in a U.S. Army hospital. Rhee threatened to pull out a couple of ROK divisions from the line to back up his police, hesitated only when his good friend, Eighth Army Commander Van Fleet, flew to Pusan and told the President that this would mean an open rupture with the U.N. forces. When the Voice of America commented on his action, Rhee cut it off the air and invoked a censorship of news and publications. To an official note of protest from the U.S., he retorted: “I know you don’t like me and I don’t care.” The truncated Assembly finally voted him an extension of his term, and in the August elections (which U.N. observers deemed fair) the people voted Rhee back into the presidency by an overwhelming majority. Thus his claim to sovereignty was justified.

Democracy’s Price. In conversation Rhee defends his attitude by saying: “The Assembly can be bought by anyone—by anyone.” So far, the internal Communist threat in South Korea, except for guerrillas, has been confined to minor sabotage and espionage. But, with a huge Chinese Communist army still in North Korea, the threat is real.

The great strength of Syngman Rhee is his single-minded devotion to his country and its independence. This leaves him with no illusions whatever about Communism. Says Rhee: “It is perfectly clear to me that Communism can be defeated only by war . . . What we must bring about is the one event that the Soviet system cannot survive—a setback, a defeat. It must be a defeat that cannot be concealed from the people of Russia and the satellite countries. If we ever manage that, the system will fall. The people of Russia and the satellites will rise and throw off Communism; of that I am convinced. But they will never do it unless the fears and weaknesses of the Communist regime are exposed, and this can only be done by a military defeat, not by a political defeat. Our only chance of escaping a third world war is to inflict such a defeat in one of the little wars, perhaps this war.”

When the peace talks began in Kaesong nearly two years ago, Rhee denounced them as another Communist trick, and added, blusteringly, that if the U.N. were to sign a truce, the South Korean army would advance to the Yalu itself. Rhee’s truculence is echoed by many Koreans, and for understandable reasons: without the power resources, the fertilizer factories and the iron mines of North Korea, the republic is doomed to economic mendicancy. When President Eisenhower visited Korea last December, Syngman Rhee insisted that the condition of any settlement must be unification of Korea.

Oral Opposition. Before the Communists’ invasion of South Korea in 1950, and again during the period when North Korean Reds occupied Seoul, South Korean intellectuals flocked north to the Communists like magpies to a ripe ricefield. For some the change was permanent: they are now entrenched with the Communist government in the north. But a few doubters elected to remain with Rhee’s government and see what time would bring. During the past 18 months, those who remained have lost their doubts. In Pusan this week, in a coffee shop lighted by one feebly glowing electric light bulb, a reporter talked with a South Korean newspaperman who had planned originally to defect to the Communists, but who at the last minute had changed his mind. Critical of Rhee, protesting that the old man’s stubbornness has cost his nation dearly, he, nevertheless, is a staunch Rhee supporter on the straightforward ground that Rhee is the strongest political force in Korea today.

Stocky, sharp-faced Journalist Paik Chung Muk, 38, is foreign-educated (Japan and Germany) and possessor of a biting intellectual intensity. Said he: “I read every work Harold Laski wrote. I worshiped him for years. Then I realized I was wrong. Now I am back on more solid ground.” What had wrought the change? Paik downed the equivalent of half a jigger of Four Roses whisky from a cracked porcelain cup, chased it with a handful of warm pine nuts, and went on: “Many of my former friends are now with the Communists in the north. I almost went with them. Now I know why they—and very nearly myself—were wrong. It is the same reason so many of you, the Americans, are wrong about us. You want, and we wanted, too much too quickly. Now I know and my friends know that our crime was impatience. Some people turn this around and call it a lack of trust. But it was not that. It was impatience, a grinding desire to achieve our hearts’ desires overnight.”

“Enough to Start With.” Paik brushed away a strand of black hair from his forehead. He said: “I have talked with more Americans in the last two years than I thought I would see in my lifetime. Now I know that your greatest crime, in terms of political expectations from us, is impatience. You want too much too quickly.

“Every time I meet a foreigner, the first question I am usually asked is something about freedom of speech, or freedom of the press. At first I used to try and explain that, compared with some of my friends who went north, the answer was definitely yes. Now, when I hear these questions, I would like to slap these people’s stupid faces . . . Freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of this, freedom of that. Here in Korea, now, such questions are idiotic. Freedom, my friend, is a very relative thing. Now we have a little—more than the Communists, but still not much. But we have enough to start with. Meantime, don’t push us too hard, don’t ask too much too soon.” Paik added: “You will be here for a long time. You will see.”

In the Long Run. Forty years of Japanese occupation left Korea with few people trained in government. Thus, the Rhee administration rests upon 80,000 fulltime, government-paid national police and some 120,000 volunteer provincial police who are paid by the towns and villages where they work, i.e., about one cop to every 100 population. In many parts of Korea, particularly in the country, police rule constitutes the government. Thus, Rhee is cautious about who controls the police organization, prefers to have two or three factions contending with one another. In the same way, he has never publicly nominated his successor, and one of the severest criticisms of this proud old man is that he has let no one else around him gain power or prominence. In the election last August, Rhee named 52-year-old Lee Bum Suk to run as Vice President, but suddenly dropped this tough, whisky-drinking ex-Chinese Nationalist general from his ticket, when Lee seemed to be developing a popularity of his own. Syngman Rhee substituted an 83-year-old crony.

Although his health is regarded as basically sound for so old a man, Rhee is ailing. One afternoon last week, while posing for a photographer, he suddenly broke out into a sweat, clutched his side and swayed slightly. Aides helped him to his bedroom, called an army surgeon. The diagnosis: gastritis. A graver impairment of his energy is his chronic insomnia, which often allows him only two or three hours sleep at night.

March North. Last week devastated Seoul celebrated Sam Il Day, the anniversary of the Korean Declaration of Independence drawn 34 years ago in Seoul. On the night before, tramcars festooned with hundreds of electric light bulbs rocked along the main streets. From City Hall thousands of students in Japanese-style student uniforms marched singing and chanting in a torchlight parade down the main thoroughfares to the pavilion in Pagoda Park, where Korean patriots had defiantly proclaimed their demands to the Japanese occupiers. The student columns, marched in good order and high spirits.

Their smoky, orange-red torches of bamboo and pitch balls reflected off the somber, jagged ruins, dusty brick and grimy concrete of windowless, crumbling buildings along the line of march. It said much for a stouthearted people, the pride they had found in their new, battle-tested armies and the unity they had found in their common peril, that they could celebrate amidst such desolation.

Next morning 20,000 citizens crowded into Capitol Plaza to hear the Sam Il Day speeches. Armed national police, on the watch for assassins, faced alternately towards and away from the crowd, while plainclothesmen peeped out from behind the pillars of the Capitol building. Illness kept President Syngman Rhee confined to his house. But over the speaker’s platform a huge muslin banner proclaimed his defiant message:

MARCH NORTH—UNIFY THE COUNTRY WITH THE SPIRIT OF SAM IL.

Marching north over the bleak, desolate, road to Munsan that night, in the true spirit of independence, but with no designs of conquest, was the widow Ahn Nam-chang and her little family. It was the first full moon of the lunar new year and, in accordance with age-old custom, peasant folk were cracking open the hard little Korean walnuts to foretell the future. No matter that Korea lay devastated by war, there was still a future. If the kernels came out whole, that was a good omen. On the other hand, if they came out broken, that was bad, but not hopeless.

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