The Exile

Under cover of a passion for justice, many South Koreans are busier working off old grudges and personal vendettas than in reconstructing their disrupted state. Fortnight ago a cabal of personal enemies and ambitious junior officers forced the resignation of Army Chief of Staff General Song Yo Chan, the man primarily responsible for pressuring ex-President Syngman Rhee out of office without a nationwide blood bath. This week the vengeance-seekers caught up with Rhee himself.

Late last week South Korea's Acting President Huh Chung turned up at the U.S. embassy in Seoul for an hour's secret talk with Ambassador Walter P. McConaughy. Nervous!)', Huh insisted that Rhee's presence in Seoul was defeating the government's efforts to re-establish stability. With mounting support, militant students and left-wing politicians were demanding that Rhee be put on trial on charges ranging from the "murder" of political opponents to the alleged misappropriation of $20 million in foreign exchange during his twelve years in office.

When he left the embassy, Huh Chung took with him the promise of U.S. diplomatic visitors' visas for Rhee and his Austrian wife Francesca. Early next morning, the Rhees slipped aboard a heavily guarded chartered DC-4 at Kimpo Airport. Apart from four suitcases and two small overnight bags, they left behind all their possessions, even abandoned one of their Pekingese dogs which had been refusing to eat.

Twenty-four hours later, the plane set down at Honolulu, and the 85-year-old Rhee slowly clambered out to be draped with leis by Korean residents of Hawaii. Back in Seoul, the South Korean government announced that Rhee had decided to get "a few months' rest" in Hawaii, where he had lived for 25 years before World War II. To newsmen's questions, Madame Rhee firmly declared: "We expect to go back."

But barring an unpredictable turn of fortune's wheel, the man who had spent 35 years of weary exile fighting for Korean independence seemed doomed to end his life in banishment from the country he had fathered.

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