The end of the Pueblo crisis was one of the few positive moments in a year, 1968, marked by domestic and global upheavals. First and foremost among American domestic issues was the failing situation in Vietnam, where hundreds of young Americans were dying each week with no indication of progress in the war. American cities were wracked by racial riots. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy symbolized a loss of hope for a better future. The rest of the world was hardly doing better. Social and political unrest and anti–Vietnam War riots paralyzed major cities in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. The Czechoslovakian attempt to rise up for democracy and to escape the grip of the Soviet Union was violently crushed by Soviet forces in August 1968. Through it all, the Pueblo drama played in the background. “When news first came of the Pueblo’s seizure,” went a New York Times editorial, “fear swept the nation that the incident would lead to a new war on the Asian continent. Fortunately, good sense in Washington prevented that tragedy.”1 The Chicago Tribune shared in the nation’s relief that the crew had finally come home: “Despite the unprincipled manner in which the release was affected, we are sure everybody in the country will feel a warm glow that the men are finally free.”2 The agreement also received favorable international reactions. Most nations dismissed the apology as meaningless. The Times of London described the outcome “as a triumph of patience and diplomacy.” The Berliner Morgenpost editorialized, “Only a malicious observer could maintain that the American confession had any truth.”3
The South Korean reaction, however, was different. The failure to forcefully respond to North Korean provocations, and the bizarre conclusion of the Pueblo affair, led many South Koreans to begin to question America’s commitment to their security. Their fears were first aroused by Washington’s lackluster response to the attempted assassination of President Park. “The incursion into the very heart of the city was what shocked South Koreans the most: it brought the North Korean menace very close.” Coming just two days later, the seizure of the Pueblo had similarly galvanized the South Korean public, which staged daily demonstrations against the North Koreans.”4 Some of the protests were also directed toward the American government. General Charles Bonesteel reported on January 27 that there was “an expression of strong feeling at all levels of the republic, that US at our governmental level had taken no adequately drastic action following attempted attack on President and Blue House. However, seizure Pueblo we had reacted drastically.” Park was personally offended and angry. “The depth of feeling over this is very deep,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Cyrus Vance told President Johnson after Vance visited Seoul in early February to placate Park. “It was considered a personal affront and a loss of face,” because “the raiders got within 300 yards of Blue House,” adding “Park wanted to react violently against North Korea.” These feelings were compounded by Washington’s unprecedented decision to engage in closed negotiations with North Korea without a South Korean presence. On February 7, demonstrators near P’anmunjŏm were turned back by American soldiers who “fired shots in the air,” and the next day, a thousand high school students, with posters demanding “Away with Boot-licking Conferences,” staged demonstrations in front of the U.S. Information Service Centers at Taegu and Kwangju.5
The chairman of the National Assembly’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Pak Chŏn-kyu, charged that his nation “was being cut off from discussion of vital interest to its welfare.” William Porter, U.S. ambassador to South Korea, reported, “Much ill-feeling had been created by division of the country years ago and current [secret] US talks with NK touching on sovereignty of the country make it impossible to predict how ROK people will react … If there is another incident, however, ROK will have to act. They are preparing limited retaliation measures.” President Park believed that Johnson did not comprehend or appreciate the magnitude of the threat that South Korea faced. “Indefinite efforts for peaceful solutions will only bring advantages to them rather than to us,” he wrote to Johnson on February 5. “I can say through our own experiences that the Communists should be taught a lesson that any aggressive action cannot escape due punitive action.”6
Park’s call for retaliatory action might have been given a more sympathetic ear in Washington a decade earlier. Growing difficulties in Vietnam, however, made it impossible for the Johnson administration to risk another confrontation in Asia. Washington’s passive reaction to the Blue House raid had thus opened up a rift. When Johnson decided to reject Park’s call for military action following the Pueblo’s seizure, American officials in Seoul began to wonder whether U.S.–South Korean relations had reached a crisis point. “I have been deeply disturbed over last several days at growing irrationality in certain areas ROKG [South Korean government] most especially in President Park himself,” reported General Bonesteel on February 9. “Inputs in last day have confirmed that Park is almost irrationally obsessed with need to strike now at North Koreans, with sort of ‘après moi le deluge’ philosophy accentuated by our secret talks with NK at Panmunjom.” Bonesteel thought Park might order unilateral air strikes without consulting or informing the United States. “We are taking all feasible preventive measures, which cannot be 100 percent … and I feel, or at least hope, ROK Chiefs of Staff would disobey such orders.”7
The sudden tension also complicated the war in Vietnam. Only a few weeks earlier Park had agreed to send another ten thousand men to Vietnam. He not only withdrew his commitment in the wake of the Blue House raid and the Pueblo seizure, but also hinted that he might consider a withdrawal of South Korean troops from Vietnam to shore up defenses at home. To make matters far worse, the Vietcong launched the Tet Offensive in the early morning hours of January 30, 1968, a week after the Pueblo was seized, which demonstrated that far from being on the verge of defeat, the communist insurgency was stronger than ever and put in jeopardy any assessment that the Americans were winning or that the war was even winnable. The prospect of losing fifty thousand men in the aftermath of the offensive left Johnson and his staff “aghast.”8 A South Korean retaliatory attack would severely complicate American foreign policy. “We certainly did not want them [the South Koreans] to start another Korean War by launching an attack,” recalled Dean Rusk. “After all, we were heavily involved in Vietnam.”9 Ironically, Johnson and Brezhnev found themselves in almost exactly the same position as Truman and Stalin had just before June 1950: two belligerent Korean regimes intent on war. The Korean War risked going global all over again.
But Brezhnev had no intention of repeating Stalin’s mistake. And Park ruled over a country very different from the impoverished and backward nation governed by Rhee. “We have tended to be pleased about economic progress in South Korea over the past few years,” Ambassador Porter wrote to William Bundy on February 27, 1968, “and our satisfaction at this has to some degree obscured the fact that we have concurrently been nourishing a tiger, which is becoming difficult to restrain and confine.”10 This “tiger” could not be appeased by mere soothing words. Park demanded increased military assistance to improve his defensive capabilities at home if South Korean troops were to remain in Vietnam. In early February, Johnson asked Congress to pledge $100 million in special military aid to South Korea. “We need to give whatever aid is necessary to South Korea,” he told congressional leaders. “They are among our best allies.”11
Johnson sent Vance, the president’s “soft-spoken troubleshooter,” as a special emissary in mid-February to prevent Park from taking action against the North while convincing him to keep his troops in Vietnam. The situation was extremely tense. Vance found Park to be “moody, volatile and … drinking heavily.” Park was still fuming over the fact that Washington “did not permit any retaliatory action on the attack on Blue House.” The raid on the Blue House “had an unfortunate psychological effect on him,” Vance continued. “He felt that both he and his country had lost face and his fears for his own safety and that of his family were markedly increased.”12 During the four-and-a-half-hour meeting on the morning of February 12, an angry Park immediately put Vance on the defensive. “These incidents are clearly preparatory steps for an invasion,” Park declared. He believed it was necessary to “threaten the North with retaliatory action” in order to make the North Koreans “recognize and apologize for their illegal behavior and obtain their guarantee never to repeat such actions.”
Vance responded that he duly “understood the point” of forcing the North to apologize. But, he added, “a warning of retaliation can only be given when one is ready to follow through with it.”
“Are you saying there is a difference in severity between an attempt to assassinate a nation’s president and his family in Seoul and the bombing of P’yŏngyang?” Park retorted.
President Johnson’s personal representative, Cyrus Vance, visits Seoul for talks with Park Chung Hee, February 12, 1968. (U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION)
“Of course, the killing of the president and his family is an unthinkable act,” Vance responded. “But from the world’s perspective they will not think of that act as equivalent to the bombing of a city and from that point of view there is a difference.”
“They came to assault the presidential residence armed with antitank guns and mines!” Park exclaimed. “This cannot be interpreted as anything but an attempt to bring down our country. What would the U.S. do if this happened in the United States?”
“An air attack is a clear attack of aggression,” Vance responded calmly. “The UN will recognize it as such. A guerrilla attack is I believe something quite different. I believe these things must be dealt with case by case.”
“What is the American government’s policy toward the present crisis?” a furious Park shot back. “Don’t retaliate, don’t give warning, are we to wait to consult each other for every other incident before we decide to do anything!”13
Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed when Vance again met with Prime Minister Chŏng Il-kwŏn two days later. Vance told Chŏng that any unilateral South Korean military action would necessitate the immediate withdrawal of American forces because it was “not our interest, or in the interest of the Republic of Korea, to have another all-out war in Korea.” But he also warned that “if we fail to reach agreement on the issues before us, there would be serious US domestic reactions in respect to Korea.” After some “gasps and sputtering,” an agreement between the two sides was finally reached. The South Koreans agreed there would be “no reprisals for the Blue House or Pueblo.” There would also “be no reprisals in the future without consulting” the Americans. They would “stand by during the closed door sessions with North Korea.” In addition, Vance secured “an understanding that they would keep their troops in South Vietnam.” The price for restraint and continued support in Vietnam, however, was, as expected, very high. “Park has a large shopping list,” Vance reported. It included six Phantom fighter-bomber squadrons and small arms and equipment for one million men in the newly created homeland defense force; four new airfields; expansion of existing airfields; and no reduction in military aid. These measures would require over one hundred million dollars in new funds.14
Johnson was prepared to pay the cost. He urged Congress to follow as closely as possible the ROK requests, despite the concerns of some of his military advisors that such a large military procurement might actually embolden Park to take future unilateral actions against the North. The president, however, believed that the overall goal of the wish list was not “to improve combat effectiveness but to maximize the political and psychological impact on South Korea.”15 It was, in effect, an expensive way to give Park and the South Korean people an assurance that the United States was not going to abandon them. On July 8, 1968, Congress approved the wish list with some minor adjustments, for a total aid package of $220 million.16 The administration also promised to increase business opportunities in South Vietnam for South Korean firms. Park was thus able to reap tremendous benefits from the Pueblo crisis despite what he deemed the “ignoble” conclusion of the affair. Kim Il Sung had come away with a worthless piece of propaganda while Park Chung Hee had secured hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid.
Ultimately, Kim’s gamble failed. The Blue House raid and the Pueblo crisis further strengthened the Park regime, not weakened it. The crisis also made clear that neither the Soviet Union nor the United States was willing to back their respective Korean allies in restarting the Korean War. China, embroiled in the Cultural Revolution, also had no appetite for another war on the Korean peninsula, especially if the fighting involved a regime friendly to the Soviet Union. The war that had ushered in the global cold war in June 1950 had thus evolved, by the end of the 1960s, into a series of localized “guerilla” conflicts, mostly along the DMZ.
Park Chung Hee and Richard Nixon, who was on a private visit, in Seoul, 1966. Nixon’s decision to visit Seoul and meet with Park Chung Hee in the run-up to his bid for the presidency in 1968 was indicative of the new status and prestige that South Korea enjoyed as a close ally of the United States. Following years of political reorganization after his narrow defeat to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon won the presidency in 1968 promising to end the Vietnam War. (U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION)
“It is not often that one can recapture as an adult the quality that in one’s youth made time seem to stand still; that gave every event the mystery of novelty; that enabled each experience to be relished because of its singularity.”17 So wrote Henry Kissinger about his first meeting with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. On July 9, 1971, Kissinger, President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, secretly arrived in Beijing for a historic meeting that would change the world and pave the way for the normalization of Sino-American relations. Even before his presidency, Nixon had contemplated the possibility of establishing relations with China. In an October 1967 Foreign Affairs article titled “Asia after Viet Nam,” the arch anticommunist who had established his career during the McCarthy era made a startling proposal to bring China into the folds of the international community. “Taking the long view, we simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors,” Nixon wrote. “There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation.”18
Shortly after assuming the presidency in 1969, Nixon set out to implement his China policy. The idea was not to improve relations with China at the expense of the Soviet Union, but rather to create a more stable balance of powers by establishing a triangular relationship among the three greatest powers. “We moved toward China,” Kissinger later wrote, “to shape a global equilibrium. It was not to collude against the Soviet Union, but to give us a balancing position to use for constructive ends—to give each Communist power a stake in better relations with us.”19 More immediately, Nixon believed a Beijing amicable to Washington could pressure Hanoi to negotiate an end to the Vietnam War.
By 1969, a significant shift in China’s security strategy had also begun to occur. The 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the outbreak of clashes along the Sino-Soviet border the following year, had led Mao to seriously consider the possibility of a Soviet invasion. It was one reason why Mao approved high-level secret contacts with the United States. He did not encounter internal opposition to his radical new approach toward the United States, but he was nevertheless mindful of the need to prepare the public and the CCP for dramatic changes. In response to a Time interview with Nixon in September 1970, which revealed that the president hoped to visit China one day, Mao related through a trusted American intermediary, the journalist Edgar Snow, that he “would be happy to talk to him, either as a tourist or as a president.”20 In April 1971, the pace of change picked up dramatically when Mao invited the American Ping-Pong team to Beijing. The event was a tremendous success. “You have opened up a new chapter in the relations of the American and Chinese people,” Zhou Enlai told the players.21 For the Chinese leadership, the United States was increasingly thought of as a strategic partner to deter the Soviet Union. In this, Mao shared with Nixon a similar approach to triangular diplomacy: “My enemy’s enemy is my friend.”22
Kim Il Sung’s reaction to China’s sudden shift was at first one of bewilderment. By the time the Pueblo affair had run its course, Kim had decided to mend his relations with China. A high-level North Korean delegation was, in fact, in Beijing during Kissinger’s secret trip, although the North Koreans were unaware of it at the time.23 Zhou Enlai flew to P’yŏngyang on July 14, 1971, to personally brief Kim on Nixon’s upcoming visit. Kim rationalized the extraordinary development by interpreting Nixon’s visit as evidence of America’s “accelerating decline” in the face of Chinese power and as representative of a triumph for China and for all small nations fighting against foreign imperialism. “The United States had attempted to isolate China,” Kim declared triumphantly at a mass rally, “but China developed into a mighty anti-imperialist revolutionary power in Asia, and the American blockade came to a shameful end.” Nixon’s visit “proved the bankruptcy of America’s anti-Chinese policy.” It also represented a “march of the defeated to Beijing.”24
President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai at a state dinner in the Great Hall of the People, Beijing, February 28, 1972. (U.S. NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION)
While gloating over America’s “defeat,” Kim announced his willingness to establish contact with Washington and Seoul.25 This was an abrupt change in North Korean policy, but after the Pueblo incident Kim believed that Nixon’s China trip might have gains for North Korea. He now thought the Chinese could assist in securing the withdrawal of American troops from South Korea. A Soviet diplomat in P’yŏngyang observed in early 1972 that North Korean anti-Americanism “solely rests on the U.S. presence in South Korea.” If the Americans were to withdraw, “the position of the DPRK vis-à-vis the United States would change as well.”26 Kim could ride on the coattails of “America’s humiliation.”
In Seoul, Park was deeply dismayed and distressed by the news. The Nixon administration had not notified the Koreans (or the Japanese for that matter) of Nixon’s upcoming visit before it was made public. The Sino-American rapprochement was part of a pattern of perceived American betrayals that began with the lackluster response to the 1968 Blue House raid and continued with the establishment of the Nixon Doctrine in 1969, which essentially stated that nations must rely on their own capacity to secure defense rather than on American power. It was also clear by this time that Nixon was ready to do anything to pull U.S. forces out of Vietnam, especially in order to win reelection in 1972. South Vietnam could be betrayed. And establishing ties with China required cutting ties with Taiwan, and so Taiwan would also be betrayed. Park was convinced that the United States was now in the process of abandoning South Korea. Many South Koreans shared these sentiments, as summed up in this editorial in the Kangwŏn ilbo:
For twenty-seven years since World War II, the issue of who has legitimate claim over mainland China, the Nationalists of the Republic of China or the Communists, has been a global issue. Until last year, the Nationalists were recognized as having that legitimacy, but this was shattered by Nixon’s visit. Under the power and influence of the U.S., the USSR and Japan, Communist Chinese legitimacy over mainland China has now become a reality in international politics. It is the realization of the “strong eats the weak” principle at work.27
The withdrawal in early 1971 of twenty thousand of the sixty-two thousand American troops from South Korea over Park’s objections had already intensified the feelings that South Korea would be the next country to be “eaten.” Such foreboding was further intensified during Park’s conversation with Ambassador Lam Pham Dang on November 3, 1972. Lam, chief of South Vietnam’s Observation Delegation to the Paris Peace Accord talks that began in 1968, had been sent to South Korea by South Vietnamese President Nguy
n Văn Thiệu to convey his country’s concerns regarding the terms of the peace accord that was about to be signed by the United States and North Vietnam (it was signed on January 23, 1973, in Paris). Of utmost concern was that the accord did not require the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. “An agreement that doesn’t require North Vietnam to withdraw north of the 17th parallel is meaningless,” Park told Lam. He also told Lam that Philip Habib, U.S. ambassador to the ROK, had conveyed to him that the Americans were forced to accept this agreement because the peace accord would collapse without it. “I told him [Habib] that if an accord is reached without North Vietnamese troops withdrawing from the south then all of South Vietnam will eventually be taken over by the enemy.” Lam shared Park’s dismay. Both men wondered whether the U.S. position was constrained by the upcoming presidential elections (on November 7) and whether the U.S. government would change its position after Nixon was reelected. Park was also vexed by Lam’s account that the Americans seemed to be prepared to sign the accord only with the North Vietnamese, effectively leaving South Vietnam out in the cold.
“If the U.S. and North Vietnam sign the agreement without South Vietnam’s signature, do you see it as being valid?” Park asked.
“I believe the U.S. will stop all military actions based on such an agreement,” Lam told Park. “But it will not be able to explain why 40,000 Americans died in Vietnam.”
To add to the uncertainty of the situation, Lam confided that before his departure from Saigon, “Dr. Kissinger strongly warned me not to reveal that the U.S. negotiated the terms of the accord without prior consultation with the South Vietnamese during my trip.”28 Apparently, South Koreans were supposed to be kept out in the cold as well. Park was left to make sense of this betrayal and what it might mean for South Korea.
Responding to these events, Park decided that he needed to buy time to strengthen his nation, and in 1971 he quickly moved to approve secret visits between emissaries of Kim Il Sung and himself. Yi Tong-bok, a former member of the ROK National Assembly (1996–2000) who had served in key government positions dealing with North Korea, recalled that the decision to accept the offer for dialogue “had very much to do with a reduced confidence in the United States … many officials in the South Korean government as well as the private sector became very worried about the possibility of some kind of political deal between Washington and Beijing about Korea, struck across our shoulders.”29 An inter-Korean dialogue was seen as a temporary measure for Park to build up the country, thus “forestalling the reckless acts of Kim Il Sung.”30 For Kim, believing that the time of U.S. withdrawal from the Korean peninsula was near, talk of peaceful reunification was intended merely as a ploy to oust Park from power. “There are many people in South Korea who want peaceful reunification,” confided one North Korean official to the Romanian leader Nicolae Ceauşescu in September 1972. “If we extend our talks, it is likely that at the next presidential elections, Park Chung Hee is eliminated and the position of the president is occupied by the New Democratic Party … It is only then that we will be able to create a democratic unified government, through free general elections in both North and South Korea.”31 Kim’s plan, in other words, was to lay the foundations for the gradual communization of the South. From the onset, it was clear that neither leader had any illusions that inter-Korean dialogue would lead to peaceful reconciliation.
To no one’s surprise, the talks led nowhere and were suspended after only one year. Nixon’s historic visit to China took place in February 1972, and three months later he visited Moscow, securing his triangular diplomacy. Kim quickly comprehended that Sino-American rapprochement would not open the path to Korean reunification under his terms as he had hoped. Mao had no interest in jeopardizing his new relationship with the United States by backing the possibility of renewed fighting on the peninsula. Kim had deceived himself with his simplistic assessment of Nixon’s visit as simply a “knee-fall before the grand Chinese power.” He had, instead, given Park the breathing room he needed to respond to the changing global situation. Even the Bulgarians complained about North Korea’s parochial foreign policy perspectives. “The Nixon visit was interpreted as forced upon the American president [and in this way] the Korean leadership attempts to hide from its people the parallel interests of China and the United States,” observed one Bulgarian official. “It is pursuing its nationalistic course and fails to notice the anti-Soviet aspect of rapprochement between the Chinese leadership and the United States.”32 Kim, it appeared, did not grasp the full significance of Nixon’s “triangular diplomacy” even though he played it so well himself.
Meanwhile, Park tightened his grip on power while pushing forward with his modernization plans. Riding the nationwide wave of fear and apprehension, Park declared martial law. On October 17, 1972, he dissolved the National Assembly and promulgated a new constitution that effectively made him president for life. Inspired by Japan’s 1868 revolution, the Meiji Ishin (restoration), which ushered in Japan’s modernization, Park called his new system Yusin, the Korean pronunciation of Ishin, thus evoking “restoration” and “revitalizing reforms.”33 While most histories of the period focus on elite Seoul-centered intellectual and student criticism of Yusin, in the countryside there appears to have been an overwhelming feeling that Yusin was, in fact, an appropriate response to the threats and crises then facing the nation. Although there are no hard numbers to back this claim, a cursory overview of many of the local Korean newspapers published at the time does provide a good feel for what the ordinary Koreans, mostly farmers and fishermen, thought about Yusin. Editorials and letters that appear in the Kangwŏn ilbo from 1972 to 1974, for example, are almost all overwhelmingly positive. A poem written by a ninth grader in Kangwŏn-do about Yusin is indicative of the kind of heart-felt response that frequently appeared in this local paper:
Oh October Yusin
You have come to do a great deed
While we flounder against the storm winds.
You will heal the wounds
Made by the devil’s nails.
The days go by silently
But our thirty million souls suffer from insecurity and anxiety
Oh, October Yusin
You’ve come to sooth us with a new law.
We will face the future firmly united
At this historical moment
Oh October Yusin
You will secure for us
Great benefit, glory and peace.34
Park justified his actions on the grounds that South Korea must be united and strong to deter or survive another North Korean attack. The Yusin system also sought to achieve political, socioeconomic, and security reforms to maintain South Korea’s independence in a changing international environment.35 Park saw the ultimate aim of Yusin as restoration of “the prestige and strength of the Korean nation” that had been lost when Korea lost its sovereignty to Japan in 1910.36 With an ambitious plan for developing an economy based on heavy industries with the capacity to indigenously produce armaments, Park sought to promote his nation’s self-reliance and independence. In 1974, Park authorized a program to develop nuclear weapons technology, but he suspended it in July 1976 under intense U.S. pressure.37 Ultimately, Park recognized that maintaining a strong alliance with the United States was the most effective deterrent to war, so he would continue to pursue greater self-reliance, but under the protection of the United States.
In the meantime, with hopes for North-South reconciliation now dead—along with Kim’s dream of riding the wave of Sino-American rapprochement to achieve his own unification dreams—both Park Chung Hee and Kim Il Sung began concentrating their efforts on developing their nations at home. At the same time, they resorted to fighting the war abroad, through active diplomacy. For Kim, this meant weakening the Park regime through propaganda and diplomatic means and rejecting any action that might confer legitimacy on the ROK, including vigorously opposing South Korea’s efforts to gain admission to the United Nations, either independently or under a two-Korea policy. In 1973 alone, Kim Il Sung sent delegations to over eighty countries, and by the mid-1970s ninety member states worldwide recognized the DPRK, almost equaling the number that maintained diplomatic relations with the ROK.38 In response, Park found it necessary to develop ties with nonaligned member states, since they played a key political force in the UN. But these efforts proved difficult because of Kim’s aggressive diplomatic maneuverings and the ideological, anti-imperialist worldview that North Korea naturally shared with other Third World nations.39 It was another indication of just how “local” the Korean War had become.