The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [10]
After holding his silence about the Sino-American developments for three weeks, Kim finally spoke out on August 6, 1971, at a mass rally in Pyongyang honoring his closest foreign friend, Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk. In a surprise move, Kim announced that "we are ready to establish contact at any time with all political parties, including the [ruling] Democratic Republican Party, and all social organizations and individual personages in South Korea." This was an abrupt reversal of the long-standing position, reiterated by North Korea's foreign minister only four months earlier, that the ouster of the ruling party was an essential condition for negotiations with the South.
In Seoul, President Park Chung Hee was also shaken by the news of Nixon's opening to China. Like the rest of America's allies, Park had had no advance notice from Washington, and he too found it shocking because it raised new doubts about the constancy and reliability of his great power sponsor. To Park, the rapprochement implied U.S. acceptance of a hostile, powerful, and revolutionary country in South Korea's immediate neighborhood, tied by a military alliance to North Korea. Since the announcement of the "Nixon Doctrine" in mid-1969-that Asians should provide the manpower for their own wars-the United States had appeared to be moving steadily toward disengagement. Early in 1971, over Park's vehement objections, Washington had withdrawn 20,000 of the 62,000 American troops stationed in South Korea, at the same time that it was pulling back American forces from South Vietnam. Despite the reassuring words of U.S. political leaders and diplomats, Park took these developments as "a message to the Korean people that we won't rescue you if North Korea invades again," according to his longtime aide, Kim Seong Jin. Now on top of everything else, the White House was suddenly, and without notice to him, consorting with Beijing.
Meeting privately with reporters at the Blue House on the day Kissinger's secret trip to China was announced, the South Korean president was gloomy. "The United States has long been trying to reach a rapprochement with Red China, but China has not changed," Park complained, suggesting that Washington had made all the concessions. In a subsequent off-the-record dinner with Blue House correspondents, Park declared that 90 percent of the Nixon visit to China was a domestic maneuver intended to aid the president's reelection. In view of Nixon's "low-posture diplomacy" toward Beijing, Park told reporters, the pressing question for South Korea was, "How long can we trust the United States?"
Weeks later, Park addressed his concerns directly to Nixon in a letter that was delivered to Secretary of State William Rogers by Foreign Minister Kim Yong Shik. The South Korean president was particularly worried that deals might be made about the Koreas during Nixon's forthcoming trip to Beijing, and he wanted to discuss it with Nixon at a meeting. But in Washington Park's concern was such a low-priority question that it took three months for the State Department and Nixon's National Security Council staff to frame and present a presidential reply. When it finally came, it was a ritual declaration from Nixon that during his Beijing trip he would not seek accommodation with China at the expense of South Korea's national interest. Park was told that a summit meeting was out of the question. Recalling his feelings about the maneuvering surrounding the U.S. rapprochement with China years later, Park wrote that "this series of developments contained an unprecedented peril to our people's survival.... [The situation] almost reminded one of the last days of the Korean Empire a century earlier, when