The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [17]
Kim Il Sung saw the North-South dialogue as a way to wean the South Korean regime away from the United States and Japan and to bring about the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Shortly after the July 4, 1972, joint statement, Kim's ambassador in Berlin, Lee Chang Su, in a confidential presentation to the East German Politburo, said that "the [communist] party and government of North Korea will concentrate on forcing South Korean leaders into agreement, to free them from U.S. and Japanese influence and to allow no U.S. intervention." He revealed that a North Korean peace offensive had been authorized in meetings of the Workers Party in November 1971 and July 1972, and he said the effort had "undermined the attempts of the U.S. imperialism to retain its troops in Korea, as well as the attempts of the Japanese imperialists to invade Korea again.... The Park Chung Hee clique will capitulate to this peace offensive. The tactical measures we adopted proved successful with the holding of talks with the enemy."
President Park, according to his longtime aide, Kim Seong Jin, saw the dialogue as a helpful tactic in a harsh environment in which North Korean military power was a serious threat. "As long as you can touch an opponent with at least one hand," said Park, "you can tell whether he will attack." Park had no belief or interest in unification in his lifetime, his aide said, and little interest in making compromises to bring fruits from the North-South contacts. Unlike his successors, Park also expressed no interest in meeting Kim 11 Sung. "He told me directly, I have no intention at all [to meet Kim Il Sung]," said his aide. "Why should I meet that fellow?"
Most of the world, however, greeted the surprising news of the conciliatory joint statement with soaring optimism about the chances for a rapprochement between the two bitter enemies. Among those most fascinated were the veteran correspondents who had covered the Korean War and were still following events on the divided peninsula. Keyes Beech, Tokyo correspondent of the Chicago Daily News, was among the most eminent of these. At the outset of the war in 1950, Beech had telephoned NBC correspondent John Rich in the Japanese capital to tell him that hostilities had broken out at the thirty-eighth parallel. "We'd better get over to Korea, there's a war on," said Beech. Twenty-two years later, after hearing the dramatic news of the North-South joint statement, Beech again telephoned Rich and reminded him of their 1950 discussion. This time it had a different twist. "We'd better get over to Korea," said Beech, "there's a peace on." Both men were in Seoul within days.
2
THE END OF THE BEGINNING
The fifty-four members of the North Korean Red Cross delegation, each wearing a Kim 11 Sung badge and some dressed in the highnecked cadre suits typical of the Chinese communists, walked across the dividing line at Panmunjom a few minutes before ten A.M. on September 13, 1972. As they stepped into the South for the first time since the bloody war that had left millions dead, the northerners were greeted with embraces, handshakes, and laughter from their southern counterparts and bouquets of flowers from pigtailed schoolgirls. For one emotional moment the two delegations seemed to transcend the bitter ideological and political conflict that had plagued the peninsula for decades. Suddenly they showed themselves to be brothers, sisters, and cousins-all Koreans.
The first visit of North Koreans to the South, openly and in peace, since the Korean War, came two months after the July 4 joint statement, which had surprised Koreans on both sides and the rest of the world. Although their leaders were more skeptical, for the ordinary people of the two Koreas this was among the most hopeful moments in the second half of the twentieth century. There was widespread popular anticipation that the beginning of the North-South dialogue could mean the dawning of an era of peace and the reuniting of divided families and