Bungling in Korea

There is a widespread impression in the U.S. that South Korea's experiment with democratic government has gone poorly mainly because of the autocratic personality of President Syngman Rhee. Published this week is a vigorous dissent from this view: The Korea Story (Henry Regnery; $3), by John C. Caldwell, a China missionary's son and a veteran of the U.S. foreign service in the Far East. His conclusion: the U.S. State Department, possessed by "some of the same naive notions that . . . lost us China," messed up the chance to promote democracy in Korea.

For a while in 1946, Caldwell was a top officer of the State Department's Information Service and Voice of America in China. He gives a rare inside view of U.S. diplomacy's bias in the period of the ill-starred Marshall mission. Caldwell was directed to prepare a confidential report on Communist propaganda in China. He found it viciously anti-American, and said so ("I was very naive"), whereupon a Washington cable rebuked him for maliciously disturbing U.S.-Russian relations.

In the winter of 1948, he was assigned to Korea. Caldwell and his Korean-speaking wife, a missionary's daughter, were stationed at Chunchon just below the 38th parallel. They set up a library, prepared films, staged puppet shows with messages that got across to illiterate Koreans. Caldwell is sure the 1948 election was "an enormous success," was shocked to find that in the U.S. it was widely criticized as undemocratic.

Among Caldwell's observations:

P:"Nine out of ten of my [State Department] colleagues . . . were either so anti-Chiang or so pro-Communist that I ... heard little but praise of Far Eastern Communism."

P:"A shocking lack of proper screening [of State's personnel in Korea] . . . the number of misfits, security risks, and incompetents, not to mention alcoholics and homosexuals, was something to write home about."

P:Too many U.S. diplomats "lived in isolation" from the people among whom they were posted; "thereby we cut ourselves off from the essential knowledge . . ."

P:"Far from being representative of American democracy in action, the [State] Department is a honeycomb of bureaucratic regimentation and protocol."

P:ECA's work was fine, but State failed to explain it to the Koreans; the U.S. thereby lost much of the credit.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.