The Korean War by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online Page A

financed by the contributions of Korean patriots. If he was despised by some of his fellow-countrymen for his egoism, his ceaseless self-promotion, his absence from the armed struggle that engaged other courageous nationalists, his extraordinary determination could not be denied. Through all his long years in the United States, Rhee learned nothing, and forgot nothing. His iron will was exerted as ruthlessly against rival factions of expatriates as against colonial occupation. He could boast an element of prescience in his own world vision. As early as 1944, when the United States government still cherished all manner of delusions about the post-war prospect of working harmoniously with Stalin, Rhee was telling officials in Washington: ‘The only possibility of avoiding the ultimate conflict between theUnited States and the Soviet Union is to build up all democratic, non-communistic elements wherever possible.’ 13
    Rhee had gained one great advantage by his absence from his own country for so long. Many of his rivals disliked each other as much as the Japanese. But against Rhee, little of substance was known. He was free from the taint of collaboration. While the Americans struggled to come to terms with a culture and a society that were alien to them, Rhee was a comfortingly comprehensible figure: fluent in the small talk of democracy, able to converse about America and American institutions with easy familiarity, above all at home in the English language. Rhee was acerbic, prickly, uncompromising. But to Hodge and his advisers, this obsessive, ruthless nationalist and anti-communist seemed a plausible father-figure for the new Korea. On 20 October, the general was present at an official welcoming ceremony for the Americans in Seoul, stage-managed by the so-called Korean Democratic Party, the KDP – in reality a highly conservative grouping. On the platform stood a large ebony screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl. In a grand moment of theatre, the screen was pulled aside. The bony, venerable figure of Dr Syngman Rhee was revealed to the Korean people. The crowd cheered uproariously. Rhee delivered a rousingly anti-Soviet speech, and disconcerted even his sponsors by denouncing American complicity in the Soviet occupation of the North. The doctor was triumphantly launched upon his career as South Korea’s most celebrated – or notorious – politician.
    Overwhelmingly the strongest card that Rhee possessed was the visible support of the Americans. Roger Makins, a senior official in the British Foreign Office throughout the early Cold War period, remarks upon ‘the American propensity to go for a man, rather than a movement – Giraud among the French in 1942, Chiang Kai Shek in China. Americans have always liked the idea of dealing with a foreign leader who can be identified and perceived as “their man”. They are much less comfortable with movements.’ 14 So it was in Korea with Syngman Rhee.
    In an Asian society, where politics are often dominated by an instinctive desire to fall in behind the strongest force, Rhee’s backing from the military government was a decisive force in his rise to power. When Benninghoff identified Rhee with the Korean ‘Provisional Government’ in Chungking, he blithely ignored the open hostility between the two which had persisted for twenty years, despite Rhee’s continuing claim to be the ‘Provisional Government’s’ representative in Washington. The State Department, with long and close experience of Rhee, regarded him as a dangerous mischief-maker. The return of Rhee to Seoul remains a murky episode. The military government firmly denied not only complicity, but prior knowledge of this. Yet all the evidence now suggests that General Hodge and his staff participated in a carefully orchestrated secret plan to bring back Rhee, despite the refusal of the State Department to grant him a passport. A former Deputy Director of the wartime OSS, one Preston Goodfellow, prevailed upon