Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader

by Martin, Bradley K.

  94. See, e.g., items 204–209 in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII: Japan and Korea (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1994), pp. 424–432. Also see “Telegram from the Commander in Chief, United Nations Command (Decker) to the Department of State, Seoul, April 4, 1958,” item 220, for a U.S.–South Korean agreement that yields insight into the extent of American attempts to exert budgetary controls over the South Korean military. “Republic of Korea forces construction projects will be limited to essential requirements approved by CINCUNC [commander in chief United Nations Command, an American general],” it states. “The Republic of Korea military budget will be jointly reviewed and analyzed by the Republic of Korea and CINCUNC in order to assure that the military program will produce the most effective forces at minimum cost. … No Republic of Korea Force asset shall be expended for any project which is not clearly and directly a military requirement unless specific concurrence for such diversion shall have been granted by CINCUNC.”

  A formerly top secret memorandum of a meeting of the U.S. National Security Council paraphrases the remark of President Eisenhower that “some of those at the meeting apparently did not know Rhee. Difficulties had been experienced for many years with Rhee, who was so emotional he had once proposed sending ROK forces up to the Yalu River. The situation became worse as Rhee became senile. But we must persuade him or lose prestige” (“Memorandum of Discussion at the 375th .Meeting of the National Security Council, Washington, August 7, 1958,” item 236, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 482).

  It was November of 1958 before the American negotiators finally persuaded Rhee to agree to maintain a maximum eighteen-division army, with total armed forces numbering no more than 630,000 men. See footnote 3, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 507.

  95. See “Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs (Parsons) to the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Jones), Washington, February 8, 1958,” item 213 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 436.

  96. “Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson) to Secretary of State Dulles, Washington, February 28, 1958,” item 215 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, pp. 440–441.

  Another U.S. State Department memorandum of 1958, formerly secret, refers to “the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 1949 and the resultant Communist invasion” (italics are mine). See “Memorandum from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Parsons) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Policy Planning (Smith), Washington, July 11, 1958,” item 231 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 472.

  97. Judging partly on the basis of a rosy evaluation of the May 2, 1958, National Assembly elections, a State Department “Progress Report on Korea” claimed, “Gradual but tangible progress has been made in the development of democratic institutions and political stability in the ROK.” But the report listed a slew of economic problems yet to be solved—and its optimistic prognosis on the political side was to prove premature by decades. See “Memorandum from the Director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs (Parsons) to the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson), Washington, June 4, 1958,” item 225 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 460. Also see item 215 (n. 96)

  98. In a conversation with the South Korean vice-president on June 19, 1958, the American ambassador expressed his personal opinion that “the Communist Chinese would have to follow the Soviet Union’s policy” regarding Korean unification. “Memorandum for the Record, Seoul, June 27, 1958,” item 228, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 464.

  The image of monolithic communism was to prove, for a time, impervious even to the contortions that some communist countries such as North Korea went through once the Sino-Soviet split became apparent. America’s leaders during that period ’were simply unable to understand nationalism’s offsetting power against direction of other communist countries from Moscow or Beijing—as the escalation of involvement in Vietnam showed clearly. Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, in a regretful memoir of his involvement in the Vietnam War writes that “the top East Asian and China experts in the State Department—John Paton Davies Jr., John Stewart Service and John Carter Vincent—had been purged during the McCarthy hysteria of the 1950s. Without men like these to provide sophisticated, nuanced insights, we—certainly I—badly misread China’s objectives and mistook its bellicose rhetoric to imply a drive for regional hegemony. We also totally underestimated the nationalist aspect of Ho Chi Minh’s movement. We saw him first as a Communist and only second as a Vietnamese nationalist.” President Lyndon Johnson was “convinced that the Soviet Union and China ’were bent on achieving hegemony. He saw the takeover of South Vietnam as a step toward that objective” (Robert S. McNamara, “We Were Wrong, Terribly WRONG,” Newsweek, April 17, 1995, pp. 46, 48). (The article is a pre-publication excerpt from McNamara’s book, In Retrospect [New York: Times Books, 1995].)

  99. A once top-secret 1958 U.S. policy statement says, in part, that “U.S. interests are deeply involved in Korea. Unless the United States continues to provide strong political, military and economic support to the Republic of Korea, the Communist bloc probably will ultimately succeed in extending its control over the whole of Korea. Such a development would undermine Free World security in the Northeast Asia area” (“National Security Council Report NSC 5817, Washington, August 11, 1958,” Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 486).

  100. Pyongyang fueled such fears with apocalyptic propaganda. In 1965 North Korea “called upon the Koreans in the South to ‘throw their bodies in front of the frenzied drive of the American imperialists, the Pak Chong-hi puppets and the Japanese reactionaries.’ The treaty between Japan and South Korea was ratified. Japanese investment began to flow into Korea, and this development, along with others, stimulated the first sustained high-level growth in the south. From this point on, North Korean spokesmen were to regard the menace of Japanese militarism’ as second only to ‘the threat of American imperialism.’ ” In an October 1966 major address Kim Il-sung charged that “Japan’s Sato government, with the active support of U.S. imperialism, has not only mapped out the plans of war to invade Korea and other Asian nations but has already started stretching its tentacles of aggression into Korea” (Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 536).

  101. A senior State Department official characterized the Japanese unwillingness to take Beijing’s and Pyongyang’s bait as “a most encouraging development.” See “Memorandum on the Substance of Discussion at a Department of State–Joint Chiefs of Staff Meeting, Washington, February 28, 1958,” item 216 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, pp. 443–444. The memorandum also quotes Adm. Arleigh Burke, chief of naval operations, as mentioning “that the Chinese Communist troops ’were apparently having difficulties with the local population (marriages, food) which may have been one reason ’why it was decided to effect the withdrawal.”

  102. Editorial Note, item 221, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, pp. 455–456.

  103. See “Memorandum from the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs (Robertson) to Secretary of State Dulles, Washington, November 18, 1958,” item 247 in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1958–1960, vol. XVIII, p. 504.

  104. Hwang Jang-yop, The Problems of Human Rights in North Korea (2), trans. Network for North Korean Democracy and Human Rights (Seoul: NKnet, 2002), http://nknet.org/en/keys/lastkeys/2002/8/04.php.

  105. Baik II, p. 449.

  106. Ibid., pp. 457–459.

  107. Ibid., pp. 460–461.

  108. Kim, With the Century, vol. 3, pp. 431–433.
<
br />   7. When He Hugged Us Still Damp from the Sea.

  1. “The same Confucian value system held by the two Koreas has produced two fundamentally different outlooks toward development. Korea, generally speaking, has traditionally emphasized the importance of the Confucian belief in scholarship over commerce and material things. The Korean yangban [nobles, gentry], for example, ’were clearly not commercially minded. Confucian ideology disdains commercial activities, resulting in the economic stagnation of the Yi dynasty. This tradition was easily carried on in North Korea where communism disdained commercial and service activities. People ’were mobilized not by material incentives but by moral exhortation. In a ’way, Korean Confucianism was strengthened by communism in North Korea. This particularly explains the lack of development of the service sector and consumer goods in North Korea. … Pluralistic values help explain the extraordinary commercial bustle, the materialism, and conspicuous consumption of the people in South Korea. Christians are somewhat overrepresented in the entrepreneurial population in South Korea …. This is particularly helped by a Weberian ‘spirit of capitalism’ abetted by aspects of Protestant dogma thought to encourage commercial activities as a means of achieving personal salvation” (Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, Two Koreas in Development [see chap. 1, n. 2], pp. 179–180).

  2. Baik II, p. 528 (see chap. 4, n. 24).

  3. “Central planning was highly effective and capable of developing the North Korean economy at the beginning stage—the first seven or fifteen years—relying on mobilization measures. As the size of the economy grew, the complexity of planning and choice-making multiplied, making the central decision-making process more inefficient and wasteful than in the formative and reconstruction period” (Kim, Two Koreas in Development, p. 123).

  Andrei Lankov (From Stalin to Kim Il Sung [see chap. 4, note 45], p. 135) points additionally to unintended aftereffects of the purge of Soviet-Koreans, who had comprised a large percentage of North Korea’s best-trained officials: “The mass exodus of Soviet Koreans in the late 1950s and early 1960s became one of the factors contributing to the deceleration of the country’s economic development.”

  4. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (1) (see chap. 2, n. 1).

  5. Byoung-Lo Philo Kim, citing a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency report among other sources, observes (Two Koreas in Development, p. 66), “Although a GNP comparison is hard to draw because of the lack of reliable data and differences in measurement, several estimates agree on the suggestion that the North had a higher per capita output than the South at least until the mid-1970s.”

  6. “Mass movements, exhortations, political campaigns, ‘socialistic competition,’ and the like have been widely and consistently relied upon as substitutes for pecuniary incentives. … [T]hese movements tend to create sectoral imbalances, secondary disruptions, overambitious targets, and planning errors. Defaulting of product quality is another consequence. .Moreover, mobilization of the general populace, even if successful, would have economic limitations. Except in the areas of such highly labor-intensive projects as food processing, irrigation facilities, and construction of unpaved roads, continued substitution of labor for capital will produce, after a point, very small or near zero marginal output. Eventually, expansion in labor must be accompanied by an increased supply of capital or other inputs” (Chung, North Korean Economy [see chap. 6, n. 16], p. 155).

  As for the use of titles and medals, “an authoritarian character has been inherent in the national character of the Korean people,” observes Prof. Koh Young-bok of Seoul National University. “The socialist version of authoritarianism is combined with the traditional base to reinforce and intensify their common authoritarianism. The titles of ‘hero’ and many other medals and honors so freely lavished upon the people contribute to breeding and furthering the authoritarian trend in north Korea” (Koh, “The Structure and Nature of North Korean Society,” Vantage Point [December 1979]: p. 10).

  Kim’s “Chongsan-ri method” in agriculture sought to get the bureaucrats from the local level to stop shuffling papers in their offices and go out to guide the farm leaders directly. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea (see chap. 2, n. 28), pp. 562, 575.

  7. Hwang Jang-yop, Problems of Human Rights (2) (see chap. 6, n. 104).

  8. He first used the term in a report whose main purpose was to “slander” several returnees from the Soviet Union, Lim Un alleges. “In this report, there ’were a few points which emphasized national pride, but the basic purpose was to inspire an anti-Soviet and an exclusionism spirit” (Founding of a Dynasty [see chap. 2, n. 59], p. 301).

  9. Suh, Kim Il Sung (see chap. 2, n. 35), p. 144, and Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pp. 624–635.

  10. Baik II, p. 3.

  11. Translated in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 660.

  12. Kim, Two Koreas in Development, p. 66.

  13. “As far as is known, the military spending of North Korea jumped from around 19 percent in the early 1960s to over 30 percent in 1967–71. (In 1968 it hit a high of 32.4 percent.) With the beginning of the south-north dialogue it dropped to below 20 percent” (Cha Byong-gwon, “The Financial Structure of North Korea—Its Characteristics,” Vantage Point [January 1979]: p. 5).

  14. Here is a South Korean explanation of how the South prospered while the North stagnated: “The wide discrepancy in the economies of south and north Korea today resulted from the phenomenal growth of the south Korean economy through successive development plans in the 1960s and 1970s, which have reached the stage of heavy and chemical industries. On the contrary, north Korea failed in its economic planning in the 1960s, lost much of its overseas market in the 1970s, brought in increased foreign capital and equipment in excess of its debt-servicing and managerial capacity and spent too much for military purposes to realize its Four .Major Military Policies. These factors combined to delay the growth of production” (Kim Chang Soon, “North Korea Today,” Vantage Point [March 1979]: p. 11).

  15. In an interview conducted by the author in 1992, Prof. Zhao Fengbin, a North Korea specialist at Jilin University in China, implicitly backed Pyongyang’s version. Zhao said North Korea had overemphasized its heavy industry—and as a result had fallen behind the South economically by the early 1970s—because of concern aroused by American policies in the 1960s in Cuba and Vietnam.

  Hwang Jang-yop, a former Workers’ Party secretary who defected to South Korea in 1997, is quoted as having said that the Cuban Missile Crisis sparked Kim’s policy of simultaneous development of the economy and the military. “Money in your own pocket is better than money in your brother’s, and it is always best to keep one’s wallet full,” Kim said after he heard of the crisis, Hwang is said to have recalled (“Preparations for War in North Korea” in Testimonies of North Korean Defectors: True Picture of North Korea According to a Former Workers Party Secretary [Seoul: National Intelligence Service], an undated summary that was posted on the NIS’s Web site as of May 17, 2002, but is no longer available there).

  16. Hwang Jang-yop, quoted in “Preparations for War.”

  17. See Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, pp. 638–641. By the time he made a key October 1966 speech, “The Present Situation and the Task Confronting Our Party” the authors relate, Kim Il-sung “was dispensing criticism against both major Communist states in almost equal amounts, and in neither case was the criticism trivial. The attitude that one took toward US imperialist aggression in Vietnam,’ proclaimed Kim, showed whether or not one was resolutely opposed to imperialism, and whether or not one actively supported the people’s liberation struggle. … The importance Kim attached to the Vietnamese issue is manifest in the prominence given that issue in his speech, the urgent tone used in discussing it, and such passages as this: ‘If all the socialist countries assist the Vietnamese people in shattering U.S. aggression, U.S. imperialism will be doomed like the sun setting in the west and the revolutionary movements of all countries in Asia and the rest of the world will surge forwar
d greatly. ”

  18. Wen-ko T’ung-hsün (Gwangjou), February 15, 1968, translated and cited in Scalapino and Lee, Communism in Korea, p. 641.

  19. A formerly top-secret 1958 update of the U.S. statement of policy on Korea includes the following three items regarding North Korea:

  “Make clear that the United States does not regard the North Korean regime as a legitimate regime.

  “Encourage the non-Communist states and the UN to continue to refuse to recognize the North Korean regime, and to treat it as a non-legitimate regime condemned for aggression and discourage any non-Communist political or economic intercourse with North Korea.

  “Encourage the people of North Korea to oppose the Communist North Korean regime and to sympathize with the Republic of Korea” (NSC 5817 [see chap. 6, n. 99], p. 491).

  Halliday and Cumings note that the United States “maintains its toughest embargo vis-à-vis any state in the world on North Korea.” They argue, “This long-term attempt at isolation reflects powerful and unresolved psychological and political issues left over from the Korean war” (Korea [see chap. 4, n. 60], p. 216).

  20. One Yi Dynasty ruler in the seventeenth century outlawed the mining of silver and gold to reduce foreigners’ interest in intruding into the country.

  21. Izidor Urian, “The 10 Years I Spent in Pyongyang,” Chosun Ilbo (Seoul), January 1, 1991, translated in Vantage Point (January 1991): pp. 15–18. Urian’s diplomatic duties kept him in Pyongyang intermittently from 1963 until 1983. During that time he rose to the position of chargé d’affairs.