Quick to Wrath

Isolated from his people by barbed wire, prowling tanks and stern-faced troops, proud old Syngman Rhee sat in his presidential palace early last week stubbornly clinging to power. He had ordered ailing Vice President-elect Lee Ki Poong to "apologize to the nation.'' But to the swelling demand for his own resignation. Rhee turned a deaf ear. "This time of trouble." he insisted, "strengthens my determination to serve the nation."

Rhee might still be there if it had not been for one man: General Song Yo Chan (see box), South Korea's hard-driving army chief of staff, whom Rhee had entrusted with the task of enforcing martial law in Seoul and four other restless Korean cities. "I myself believed the students' demands were just." admitted Song late last week. Song was also convinced that unless Rhee gave way, the only way the Korean army could save Rhee's government would be by shooting down students in droves.

Deliberate Man. To avert such a blood bath, Song deliberately set out to jolt Rhee out of the presidency. In three successive interviews, the general hammered at Rhee with heavy hints that if the students rioted again, the Korean army would probably refuse to shoot or even to quell them, and the two U.S. divisions manning the border with North Korea might well be withdrawn from the peninsula. Rhee listened, but temporized.

Song recognized that he needed a more dramatic argument. His chance came when 300 Seoul National University professors gathered nervously on the steps of Seoul's National Assembly building to orate against the Rhee regime. Most were sure that they would all be dead by nightfall. But Song made no attempt to disturb them. The demonstrators cringed visibly when the first army tank rolled up. But it rumbled by as if nothing untoward were happening.

Slowly, the recognition dawned that Song's army was not going to hurt them. By the time the 7 p.m. curfew hour came, the crowd had swelled to monster proportions. Suddenly, some of the bolder demonstrators clambered onto passing tanks shouting: "Long live our soldiers." Doffing their helmets, the young tank crewmen joined the crowd in tribute to the students killed in earlier rioting by singing a Korean war song that begins:

Sleep well, my comrades,

We advance to victory

Over your dead bodies.

Song's loudspeaker Jeeps began to prowl the area, blaring: "Dear students, dear citizens, please go home now: and rest ..." Good-humoredly, the crowd shouted back: "But why can't we be promised new elections?" From Song's Jeeps came the reply: "We know that your demands are justified."

Saving the Flag. At that, pandemonium broke. Secure in the knowledge the army was with them, a million citizens of Seoul swung into a half riot, half parade that lasted all night and far into the next day. The crowd broke into the home of the hated Lee Ki Poong, hauled its contents into the street and vengefully burned them; one of the few things spared was an American flag, which the demonstrators carefully folded and turned over to a U.S. reporter "for safekeeping." Amid the crackle of gunfire from panicky cops, the rioters burned down a police station and the houses of two members of Rhee's graft-ridden Liberal Party. With chaos threatening, U.S. Ambassador Walter McConaughy issued a stiff public statement warning Rhee that "this is no time for temporizing."

Song sent a loudspeaker Jeep into the streets with a suggestion: let student leaders come forward to form a delegation to see Rhee. Fourteen responded. Song chose five and personally escorted them to the presidential mansion. There, as Song stood by beaming paternally, the students told Rhee: "The only way to solve the problem is to hold new elections--and also for you to offer to resign."

Rhee hesitated, then replied: "If the people wish it, I will resign." At that moment, twelve years of Korean history --years when the words "Syngman Rhee" and "South Korea" had been virtually synonymous--came to an end, and the students burst into tears.

Kids at the Controls. The student delegation emerged from the presidential palace shouting, "We have won!" Seoul's streets erupted into a spontaneous expression of joy. Song's tank drivers were all but submerged under swarms of Seoul moppets, good-naturedly let the kids try out the controls. A small regiment of kindergartners marched up to the U.S. embassy chanting: "Thank you, America." A jubilant crowd decorated a statue of General Douglas MacArthur with a scroll that read: "Long life to him who saved us from Communism."

Suddenly finding themselves the victors, Seoul's students showed extraordinary discipline. With virtually all the city's police force in frightened hiding, students ran the police stations, directed traffic, even commandeered city trash trucks and laboriously cleaned up the riot debris. When a group of rowdy schoolboys knocked a statue of Rhee off its pedestal and started to drag it away, older students restored it to place with the reproving reminder: "After all, he is part of our history."

So complete was the students' domination that when the National Assembly finally met in emergency session, Assembly guards were under orders to admit "only students and Assemblymen." Only 105 of Korea's 231 Assemblymen dared to show up. Under the stern eyes of hundreds of youngsters, they unanimously passed a resolution calling for new elections, a new constitution and Rhee's "immediate" resignation.

With Rhee's reply formally accepting the Assembly's demands, control of the government passed to the senior member of his Cabinet: unassuming, incorruptible Huh Chung, 64 (see box), who only two days earlier, had accepted Rhee's invitation to become Foreign Minister.

The Departures. In his first 24 hours in office, Huh commanded less public attention in Korea than the final, tragic act of Rhee's fall from power. Early in the week, fearful of the mob fury that kept their Seoul home under constant siege, Lee Ki Poong and his family had taken refuge in the heavily guarded presidential compound. There, crammed into a single room with his wife and two sons, Lee sought vainly for a way of escaping the net that was closing in on him. To a close friend Lee confided: "Rhee has ordered me to resign my post. If I do so, my enemies will crush me to earth, and my family will find themselves living on rice crumbs and water." His younger son, Lee Kong Wook, 18, urged that the men of the family meet their enemies in the streets and die fighting. To his elder son, Army Lieut. Lee Kang Suk, 23, who had become Rhee's adopted heir three years before, Lee talked in classic Oriental fashion of the shame of "being looked down on by people." Suk savagely reminded him: "I told you that if you and your gang won the elections, the country would be ruined, and if by some chance you lost, the family would be ruined."

On the day of his resignation, Syngman Rhee himself came to the Lees' room for a private chat with his old friend. When it was over, Lee sent away all but one of his bodyguards. Lee Kang Suk told the guard: "Be around when I do what has to be done, and in case of need, finish me." At 5:40 the next morning, the guard heard shots from Lee's room. When police broke in, they found Lee, his wife and younger son sitting hand in hand on a couch, their heads thrown back by the shock of death. Lying across their bodies was that of Lee Kang Suk, his Army .45 still in his hand.

The Private Citizen. That afternoon Syngman Rhee left the presidential palace for Pear Blossom House, his private residence in Seoul. As his bulletproof Cadillac moved along the two-mile route--at first he had insisted that he wanted to walk, "so as not to use government transportation''--his countrymen once again recalled that, for all his political sins. Syngman Rhee. 85, was nonetheless the father of South Korea's independence. The crowds that two days earlier had been calling for his death began to applaud him. And when he reached Pear Blossom House, where he placidly settled down to trimming his hedges under the eyes of a respectful throng, he was greeted by a hastily improvised sign: "Grandfather, be at peace in the sunshine and live a long time."

While Rhee did his belated pruning, Huh Chung energetically set about repairing the wrecked machinery of Korean government. Former Home Minister Choi In Kyu was arrested for his flagrant falsifying of the March 15 election, confessed that in accordance with a Cabinet decision, he had collected the written resignations of all Korea's mayors and police chiefs before the elections, and told them their resignations would be accepted unless "they secured victory for Rhee and Lee Ki Poong." But he credited the national police director with the plan for "stuffing ballot boxes beforehand with 40% Liberal votes." Then he burst into tears as he told his interrogators: "I never thought the world would change so quickly."

Time for Repairs. If not the world, at least Korea was changing. Huh fired all nine of Korea's provincial governors, genially announced that, if necessary, he was prepared "to purge every policeman down to the village level" to wipe out police terror. He also made it clear that his own hastily appointed Cabinet of nonpolitical experts would be only a short-lived caretaker government and would have as one of its chief functions the elimination of "inefficiency, waste and corruption" in the use of U.S. aid funds.

For the future, Huh favored constitutional changes that would reduce the presidency to a figurehead job and give the real power to a Premier responsible to the National Assembly. But Democratic Party Leader John Chang, whose dream is to succeed Rhee as a U.S.-style president, demanded that Huh Chung hold new Assembly elections before any revision of the constitution.

With North Korea's Communists poised across the 38th parallel, South Korea could not afford prolonged instability. But instability would be hard to avoid if Rhee's successors were foolish enough to adopt his habit of regarding Korea's government as a personal prize. Asked what would happen if Rhee's promise of fair elections was not scrupulously honored, a Seoul student offhandedly replied: "Why, we shall rise again."

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