Park Chung Hee Era

by Byung-kook Kim

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  Treaty Organization (SEATO). On top of that, the South Korean military situation at home was itself precarious, depriving Park of the luxury of worrying about other countries’ security problems. Given the North Korean military threat, South Korea was not a likely candidate to provide the most significant support out of all other nations for the U.S. military campaign in South Vietnam. Yet it participated in the Vietnam War with the second-largest number of military troops after the United States.

  Chapter 14 argues that despite the huge economic benefits, Park’s most compelling reason to intervene militarily in the Vietnam War was political: to prevent the United States from redeploying its troops from South Korea to South Vietnam; to acquire a modern armed forces with combat experience; and to make himself an indispensable strategic ally of the United States in its cold war campaigns, with an eye to discouraging U.S. political forces from joining South Korean opposition politicians and chaeya activists in an anti-Park transnational coalition. Park hoped to make South Korea an anchor in his ally’s Asia policy by helping the United States where it most needed help. The U.S. good will Park secured by coming to the rescue of Lyndon B. Johnson in the Vietnam War and, by extension, by helping to counter some of the U.S. domestic political turmoil over war efforts in South Vietnam (by showing that the United States was not alone in its stance there), was intended to influence U.S. policy in the direction of strengthening South Korean national security and ensuring regime stability. Economic motives were secondary for Park.

  The primacy of politics in Park’s decision to dispatch combat troops to South Vietnam owed to South Korea’s deeply ingrained fear of abandonment. Ever since secretary of state Dean Acheson had placed South Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter in January 1950,3 thus inadvertently luring Kim Il Sung into a miscalculated military invasion of the South the following June, the South Korean ruling political elite always remained fearful that the United States would abandon the South if put under political pressure. To be sure, Harry S. Truman brushed aside his secretary of state’s “Acheson Line” to militarily intervene in the defense of the South in the Korean War, thus ensuring that U.S. credibility would become entangled in and U.S. interests coincide with the survival of South Korea as a sovereign state. In spite of Truman’s policy reversal, however, South Korea was never able to overcome the shock of the Acheson Line. When added to the lack of a sense of common values, shared destiny, and similar history in the way that the United States had with Western Europe, the seeming ambiguity of South Korea’s geopolitical value, which its political elite thought caused the United States’ policy zigzags in 1950, made Park and his people worry that the United States might revert back to Acheson’s position if the

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  regional security situation or domestic U.S. public opinion altered dramatically.

  South Korea’s fear of abandonment was kept alive, moreover, by the fact that the Mutual Defense Treaty promulgated in October 1953 did not have a provision for “automatic response” that would have obliged the United States to immediately intervene militarily in the event of armed attack by a third party. South Korea thought the lack of such a provision deprived it of protection against the volatile opinion of U.S. public, which typically looked at South Korea as an ally of limited strategic value, not worthy of a strong security commitment. A precipitous decline in U.S. military aid, from an annual average of $232 million during the 1956–1961

  period to $154 million for the 1962–1965 period,4 was also seen as signaling a decline in U.S. military commitment, although the reduction was actually made by the United States as part of an effort to cope with its rising balance-of-payments problems.

  Undergirding South Korea’s fear of U.S. abandonment was its fear of North Korea. At that time, it looked as if the North had beaten the politically unstable, economically stagnant, and internationally isolated South in the competition to become the sole legitimate state on the Korean Peninsula. The P’yôngyang leadership had created a monolithic party-state that had mobilized popular forces into a stable pillar of political order, pursued heavy and chemical industrialization as an engine of economic growth, built up a powerful military force out of the ashes of the Korean War, and developed the indigeneous ideology of Chuch’e to strengthen its nationalist credentials. While Park struggled just to survive in 1961, Kim Il Sung wrapped up his consolidation of political power, visiting Moscow and Beijing in July of 1961 to establish formal alliance relations. The following year, Kim Il Sung adopted the “Four Military Principles” (sadae kunsa rosôn) 5 with the goal of transforming North Korea into a thoroughly militarized garrison state. To test Park’s resolve and demoralize his people, Kim Il Sung increased the North’s aggression against the South, violating the Armistice Agreement on 736 occasions in 1961 alone. Military provocations had averaged less than 200 instances annually before 1960.

  It was against this backdrop of military insecurity that Park decided to dispatch combat troops to South Vietnam in support of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s war efforts. For Park, the military intervention looked like a rare opportunity to redress—however temporarily—the imbalance in the existing bilateral alliance relations that put South Korea’s destiny in U.S.

  hands. For the first time in the volatile and fragile alliance relationship, South Korea was to have leverage over U.S. security policy by joining the United States’ war in a distant place. In return for helping Johnson where

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  he was most vulnerable in U.S. domestic politics, Park expected to secure his cold war partner’s firm assurance that the United States was committed to the defense of South Korea. Believing that the U.S.–South Korean alliance lacked the kind of geopolitical, ideological, and historical interests required for a strong partnership, Park chose to create such an interest by committing combat troops to South Vietnam. The military campaign, pursued in tandem with a political overture toward Japan, would also appeal to American planners’ regional strategy of forging a trilateral cold war network of deterrence among Seoul, Tokyo, and Washington against the trilateral alliance network among Beijing, Moscow, and P’yôngyang.

  The primacy of politics in Park’s decision to join U.S. war efforts in South Vietnam owed much to his domestic political interests as well. By becoming an indispensable partner of the United States in its military campaign, Park hoped to deter the patron-state from meddling in South Korean domestic politics on the side of the opposition. As we saw in Chapters 1 and 2, Park struggled to win U.S. recognition of his coup as a fait accompli during the junta years (1961–1963), eventually conceding to reinstate a system of competitive elections. Once he won a presidential election in 1963, Park knew he had to secure new policy instruments that could transform the guarded, conditional support of the United States into the more proactive political backing required for the launching of his modernization project. Those instruments were his two-track strategy of cold war alliance building: military intervention in the Vietnam War and normalization of relations with Japan. By accommodating the United States’ vital security interests, Park thought he could secure U.S. endorsement of his rule and prevent domestic political critics and opponents from building a broad anti-Park coalition with U.S. support. As the model of democratic rule upheld by the opposition political parties and even the chaeya dissidents (Chapter 13), the United States profoundly reshaped the parameters of South Korea’s opposition political movements.

  Politically delinking the domestic opposition from the United States was critical for Park because his modernization project challenged U.S.

  values in basic ways. Park dreamed of building a “security state” that championed national security over democracy, “planned rationalism” over laissez-faire market principles, and state control over civil society empowerment. To build such a state, Park thought he needed U.S. acquiescence to his authoritarian rule. And he succeeded in acquiring it so as long a
s he maintained a sizable troop presence in South Vietnam. When university students rushed into the streets to demonstrate against his policy of diplomatic normalization with Japan in June 1964, the U.S. ambassador Samuel D. Berger and the United States Forces in Korea (USFK) commander

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  Hamilton H. Howze visited Park to recommend the declaration of martial law. When Park sought a third presidential term through a constitutional revision in 1969, the United States stayed out of the domestic political turbulence, thus tacitly supporting Park’s political move. More fundamentally, the United States helped Park to become the paramount political leader when it withdrew its traditional policy recommendation of financial stabilization and fiscal balance and instead joined in the process of debt-financed economic hypergrowth on Park’s terms in 1964 and 1965 (see Chapter 7)—the two years that saw the signing of a treaty to normalize relations with Japan as well as the dispatch of military troops to South Vietnam. For Park, the decision to intervene in the Vietnam War also aimed to bury any lingering doubts the United States and the South Korean conservatives had about his ideological beliefs on the basis of his 1945–1948 leftist activities. From the outset of his political rule in May 1961, Park consciously built up an image of a cold war warrior against the North, lest the opposition accuse him of being a communist sympathizer. As the leader of the military junta, Park warned, “the international communist conspiracy” was an imminent threat to the “free world.” The dispatch of combat troops to South Vietnam was an integral part of his effort to demonstrate his ideological conversion. In his eyes, the Vietnam conflict occurred as part of global communist expansionism. When the Soviet Union resumed the testing of nuclear weapons on August 30, 1961, he warned that “[t]he more the Western world seeks peace, the deeper the Communists’ penetration into the Free World will be. The Communists are immoral in their exploration of nuclear weapons . . . They will continue to seek countries to infiltrate.”

  Emphasizing the primacy of politics does not mean that economic motives mattered little. Once Park chose to enter the Vietnam War in a massive way because of military-security and domestic-political interests, he concentrated on extracting as much economic aid from the United States as possible. At the time of Park’s ascent to power in 1961, U.S. aid constituted a lifeline for South Korea, supplying over 73 percent of its annual imports and sharing about 12 percent of its gross national product. Unfortunately for Park, his rule coincided with a sharp decline in annual U.S.

  economic aid from $230 million during the 1959–1963 period to $110

  million in the 1964–1968 period. The drop compelled Park to pursue a quick settlement with Japan on the terms of diplomatic normalization, including on the size and conditions of reparation funds (see Chapter 15).

  The decision to intervene in the Vietnam War followed a similar logic.

  To slow down the trend of aid reduction by winning the hearts of U.S.

  policymakers with the dispatch of South Korean troops, as well as to

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  secure an export market for South Korean goods and services with U.S.

  support in South Vietnam, Park plunged into his Vietnam venture. The Vietnam War turned out to be an economic godsend, especially with the special procurement arrangements Park negotiated with the United States.

  Buildup to Involvement

  Interestingly, talk of South Korea’s participation in the Vietnam War began well before the advent of Park in 1961. In February and May 1954, then-president Syngman Rhee proposed to the United States that South Korea was ready to send its troops to South Vietnam for the containment of communist expansion.6 In return for dispatching troops, Rhee demanded that the United States provide assistance for the establishment of five new South Korean combat divisions. President Dwight D. Eisenhower turned down Rhee’s offer on the grounds that “U.S. public opinion would not support the maintenance of U.S. Forces in Korea if [South] Korean forces were withdrawn from [the Korean Peninsula] for actions elsewhere.”7

  Rhee had made his proposal to offset the possible weakening of the United States’ security commitment to South Korea. After the armistice was signed in July 1953 to end the Korean War, the U.S. Department of Defense began drawing up a plan to reduce the level of its USFK troops.

  The plan, completed in January 1954 and put into effect two months later, aimed to reduce the U.S. military presence in South Korea from eight divisions to two. For Rhee, getting involved in the Vietnam War was a way to slow down the U.S. plan for troop reduction and to ensure continued security guarantees from the United States after the withdrawal of six divisions.

  To tie down the United States and limit its options, Rhee even threatened to “march north at the earliest possible time to save [the] North Korean brethren from the sure death they [are] facing.”8 The specter of another war on the Korean Peninsula—this time, through South Korea’s initiative—was thought to pressure the United States into a position more supportive of South Korean security concerns. Like Park a decade later, Rhee also believed that he needed to appeal to the United States’ cold war project of building a strong anticommunist front in Asia. In June 1954, he took the initiative to establish an Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, a regionwide network of rightist parastatal organizations, with South Vietnam as a member-state. In 1957 and 1958, Rhee held a summit meeting with Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam to forge common ground in their fight against communism.

  When Park seized power in 1961, he too tried to use the Vietnam War to

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  win U.S. support for his fragile military junta. In his state visit to Washington in November 1961, Park told President John F. Kennedy that South Korea was ready to dispatch troops to South Vietnam “if requested.” He argued that South Vietnam could survive only with outside help.9 Kennedy’s reply must have disappointed him. The president simply said that he would keep Park informed of future developments, hoping that the situation in South Vietnam would not deteriorate to the point that South Korean assistance would be needed. Contrary to later critics of Park, the South Korean decision to participate in the Vietnam War was made voluntarily, not under U.S. pressure. Kennedy had not yet decided the extent to which the United States would get militarily involved in South Vietnam.

  The beginning of the U.S. change in posture—and with it, the leverage South Korea gained over its large ally—came in February 1962, when Kennedy set up a Military Assistance Command in Vietnam (MACV) within the South Vietnamese command structure, which led to the deployment of 12,000 U.S. troops within a year. In April 1962, Park received an official request from Ngo Dinh Diem for South Korean military assistance.

  In the next month, Park sent a military mission led by Major General Sim H¤ng-sôn to South Vietnam to examine ways to assist it militarily. After two months of fact-finding efforts, the mission reported that it would be advisable to assist in the areas of infrastructure building and medical care, rather than providing direct military assistance in the form of combat troops.10

  Park drew a vastly different conclusion. In August 1963, only two months before his presidential election, Park shared his inner thoughts with close confidants, including his minister of internal affairs Pak Kyông-wôn and minister of national defense Kim Sông-¤n, along with the chiefs-of-staff of the army (Min Ki-sik), navy (Yi Myông-gi), and air force (Chang Sông-hwan), and the commander of the marine corps (Kim Tu-ch’an). “In case the United States requests the dispatch of troops to South Vietnam,” Park declared, he was “obliged [to accommodate it] out of both economic and security considerations.”11 Here, too, Park was thinking of the possibility of being involved in the Vietnam War well in advance of an official request from the United States.

  The United States made a formal request for South Korean troops on May 1, 1964, when President Johnson prepared for a massive escalation in his country’s military engagement. Park promptly ordered his cabinet to plan
for the dispatch of troops. The intervention began with a dispatch of 140 noncombat troops, including a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) and 10 martial arts instructors, which was unanimously approved by the National Assembly. The opposition parties, which held 37

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  percent of the National Assembly seats, did not object because the scale of troop dispatch was small and limited to noncombat missions. On September 22, these noncombat troops arrived in South Vietnam, the first of what eventually became a major deployment.

  In December of the same year, South Korea received the second American request for help. Park responded by sending some 2,000 noncombat medics and military engineers. This time, getting the legislature’s approval proved to be more difficult, as conflicting opinions began to surface. Although supporters of the second dispatch emphasized the moral obligation of South Korea as an ally of the United States to intervene in the Vietnam War, opponents criticized it as fighting a proxy war on behalf of a superpower patron.12 The critics included a number of opposition party politicians as well as a few junior DRP assemblymen, including Ch’a Chi-ch’ôl, one of Park’s most trusted confidants, who had served Park as a bodyguard during the uncertain days of the 1961 coup.13 Others called upon the United States to increase economic and military assistance to South Korea in return for the second troop dispatch. The voices of opposition, however, were mostly scattered, weak, and ill-articulated.

  For its part, the United States also did not hesitate from using its USFK

  troops as direct leverage to get Park involved militarily, once Johnson decided to enter the Vietnam War in a massive way. In 1964, U.S. ambassador Winthrop Brown hinted that some of the USFK troops might have to be withdrawn if Park decided not to dispatch troops to South Vietnam.14