The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [103]
Roh Tae Woo, meanwhile, enjoyed the advantages of leading the incumbent party, including massive funding and extensive coverage on television, which was heavily controlled by the government, and in newspapers, which were partly controlled. At the same time, he sought to separate himself from Chun in the public mind. Although the U.S. Embassy was under orders to remain strictly neutral, Roh managed to meet President Reagan at the White House in a mid-September trip to Washington to burnish his image as an internationally respected figure. This seemed to many Koreans to be a virtual endorsement by the United States. Neither of the opposition competitors sought to test that by arranging his own trip to the American capital.
On December 16, election day, Roh won the presidency with 36 percent of the popular vote, as Kim Young Sam (28 percent) and Kim Dae Jung (27 percent) split the opposition majority in half. Manwoo Lee, a Korean-American professor who made an intensive study of the election, wrote that "each candidate was like a Chinese warlord occupying his own solid territory" based on his region of origin. Lee also expressed doubt that either Kim Young Sam or Kim Dae Jung could have won even if running alone, due to the deep regional antagonism that had characterized the electioneering.
Roh's victory in a hotly contested direct election gave him the political legitimacy that Chun had lacked. It made it possible for him to permit a greater degree of free speech and free press than his predecessors had and to reduce government control of business. Roh's victory also permitted him to ease South Korea's hard anticommunist stance and to bid successfully for amicable ties and eventual diplomatic relations with Eastern European communist countries, the Soviet Union, and China, thereby undercutting North Korea's alliances and drastically changing the strategic situation in Northeast Asia.
8
THE GREAT OLYMPIC
COMING-OUT PARTY
-or most of the world, the 1988 Olympic games at Seoul were a great sporting festival. Global television brought the opening ceremonies on September 17 to the eyes of more than a billion people, the largest television audience in history for any event until that time. But for Koreans, the games were much more. As the government and people in the South saw it, the Twenty-fourth Olympiad was their international coming-out party, an opportunity to show the world that South Korea was no longer a poverty-stricken Asian war victim but a strong, modern, increasingly prosperous country with a vibrant society. The South hoped the 1988 Olympics would enhance its economic growth and global stature as the 1964 Tokyo Olympics had famously done for Japan. Moreover, the universality of the games provided a golden opportunity for South Korea to play host to the Soviet Union, China, and the communist-led countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which were North Korea's allies and which, at the North's insistence, had shunned the South. For much the same reasons, North Korea loathed and feared the coming of the Seoul Olympics, seeing the games as an essentially political enterprise that would permit the South to improve its image in the world arena and move toward relations with Pyongyang's communist allies. North Korea waged a strenuous battle, month by month, to halt or downgrade the games. But its effort failed. The Olympics marked major strides in South Korea's drive to win recognition and accommodation from the communist world.
THE COMING OF THE OLYMPICS
From the very first, South Korea recognized the political possibilities. President Park Chung Hee, who had approved the plan to bid for the 1988