• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

As a show of American disapproval of Kim Young Sam's ouster from the National Assembly, Ambassador Gleysteen was briefly but publicly recalled to Washington. But on October 18, Gleysteen was back in Korea to accompany Secretary of Defense Brown, who was in Seoul for the annual high-level military consultations, to an intimate meeting with Park. There they presented a personal letter from Carter expressing concern about the political developments. Brown warned Park that Washington's security ties with Seoul could be affected if he did not return to a more liberal path. In this period, Gleysteen reported to Washington, "I was struck by the pervasiveness within the establishment of worry about where the government's hardline policies were leading Korea. People in almost all sectors and all levels told us of their anxiety and were becoming increasingly bold in identifying President Park as the man making the wrong decisions, listening to advisors who were telling him what they thought he wanted to hear." Gleysteen sensed that Park was losing his way, seeming to be uncertain about the wisdom of his own decisions.

In the last years of his life, especially after the assassin's bullets in 1974 that narrowly missed him and killed his wife, Park was the subject of extraordinary security measures imposed to protect him from outside threats. A half mile from the presidential mansion, windows in hotels had been taped or shaded to obstruct outsiders from getting a view of the Blue House. When Park appeared in public, guests were required to be in their places an hour before he appeared. Becasue of these draconian measures, Park was increasingly cut off from normal human contacts. But as it turned out, not even these measures could provide absolute security for a chief executive who had outlived his welcome.

By the time of his death, Park's regime was held together by fear and force-and undergirded by the remarkable economic growth he had fostered. But with his popularity waning and the economy temporarily faltering, Park was in trouble even in his own entourage. Seemingly immune to all external pressures to step aside, Park was removed by a privileged insider across the dinner table in his own presidential compound. When American officials, headed by Vance, flew into Seoul for Park's funeral, which was attended by huge crowds, they initially found surprisingly little sincere grief in the general public or among the officials who had served the late president. "His time had come," a senior ROK official told Assistant Secretary of State Holbrooke privately. "There wasn't a wet eye in Seoul," Holbrooke observed.

The motives of Kim Jae Kyu, Park's assassin, have never been fully established. Kim, a classmate of Park's in the second postwar ROK officers training course, had been considered a close friend of the president. His selection in 1976 to head the KCIA, the most sensitive instrument of Park's personal control, testifies to their intimate relationship. Like a number of other senior officers and officials, however, Kim felt increasingly alienated from Park's policies. At his trial, he told the court he had decided to kill Park years earlier in order to end the dictatorial yushin system, and he claimed that his objective was "a revolution for the restoration of democracy." On the basis of conversations with Kim, his lawyer, Kang Sin Ok, told me that Kim had decided a few weeks earlier to kill Park at his first opportunity.

On the other hand, there were signs that Kim's plot was hastily improvised. The first pistol he used had not been fired for a long time, and it misfired when he was killing Cha and Park. More telling, Kim had not devised a serious plan or set in motion an organization for taking over the government, although he had made arrangements before the dinner to meet Army Chief of Staff Chung Seung Hwa, a close friend, who was dining nearby in another Blue House facility. There had been rumors beforehand that Kim would soon be ousted from his job by the dissatisfied