The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [63]
Even a determined president proved unable to decouple the United States from the high-stakes military standoff on the Korean peninsula. The major impact of Carter's unsuccessful effort was to intensify the concern among his Asian allies that had been generated by the American withdrawal from Vietnam. In Seoul, Carter's conflict with Park inadvertently diminished the standing of the South Korean president. The consequences were soon to come.
5
ASSASSINATION AND AFTERMATH
n the evening of October 26, 1979, President Park Chung Hee dined with KCIA director Kim Jae Kyu, with whom he was increasingly at odds, in a KCIA safe house, or clandestine operations building, on the grounds of the Blue House. The president was accompanied by the powerful chief of presidential security, Cha Chi Chol, and the chief of the Blue House secretariat, Kim Kye Won. Like the president, all three of the other men were former military officers. Sitting on the floor on either side of Park at a traditional Korean low dining table and pouring liberally from a bottle of Chivas Regal were two young women, a model and a well-known singer.
As the dinner proceeded, Park criticized KCIA director Kim for failing to keep abreast of the massive domestic disorders that had erupted over political and economic issues. Security Chief Cha, who was advocating a harsher crackdown on students and strikers, also berated the KCIA director for contributing to the unrest by espousing policies that were too conciliatory. After a few minutes of abuse, the intelligence chief left the dining room and went to his office on the second floor of the building, where he picked up his .38 Smith & Wesson pistol and hid it in his pocket. He instructed his own guards to shoot the presidential bodyguards, who were waiting outside the dining room, if shots were fired inside.
After checking to make sure his aides were ready, Kim pulled out his pistol and demanded of Park, "How can you have such a miserable worm as your adviser?" Then he opened fire at point-blank range, first at Cha, then at Park, severely wounding them both. When his gun jammed, he borrowed another .38 pistol from a KCIA guard and finished the two men off. KCIA aides took the shooting as their signal to attack and kill five presidential bodyguards. Within minutes, the turbulent and historic eighteen-year reign of Park Chung Hee ended in a blaze of gunfire.
The assassination of Park opened a new era of transition and uncertainty, during which the United States sought unsuccessfully to nudge South Korean leaders toward a more democratic and participatory system to replace the authoritarianism of the past. U.S. influence had some small successes, but as American officials had learned in previous crises, their power to affect Korean politics was limited when the stakes were high for the domestic actors involved. At the end of the 1970s, the United States was still at the center of South Korea's external world, but the balance of power between the two countries had shifted dramatically.
South Korea was no longer an economic-aid client of the United States but had emerged as a rising middle power with a large and complex economy. The United States was still expected to deter the North by providing troops that would guarantee automatic U.S. involvement in case of war, but nearly all the Americans had been pulled back to reserve positions, leaving South Korean troops to defend most of the DMZ front line. Reflecting these changes, Ambassador Gleysteen reported to Washington in one of his first dispatches after the killing, "We should keep in mind that the Korea of 1979 is not the Korea of the early '60s when we were able to bully the early Park regime into constitutional reforms."