Korea’s nation-building in War Time: President Rhee’s US Congress Speech and Its Political Significance

Abstract

As Robert Oliver estimates, it was a great speech and passionate. Rhee was speaking of his mind. But “it was distinctly not the kind of speech for delivery by a head of a state to the legislature of another nation.” Oliver, 1978: 450. President Rhee confessed later to Oliver that the speech was “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.” The failure was partly due to his assumption of a patron rather than that of a clientele, even while he was asking for financial and military aids. However, at that time most of the Korean mass media just covered the story of Rhee’s speech in the Congress without much comments and evaluations, emphasizing in bold letters on the front page such headlines as “Support for Counter Attack on the Communists Asked,” “Increase of the Korean Army in Double Asked,” and “American Resolution Demanded.” Most Korean newspapers took more interest in the amount of the US economic aids to Korea than Rhee’s policy of unification by marching north with Korean forces alone. The Han-Kuk Ilbo[Korean Daily] expressed in its editorial its skepticism about the possibility of realization of Rhee’s pronounced slogan, “Let’s march north for unification with Korean armies alone,” without the positive cooperation of the allied forces, especially the US forces. The Han-Kuk Ilbo, July 20, 1954. However, Rhee took war as a violent form of politics, and in his pursuit of unification-at –any-cost policy, put politics and security of his regime before the safety of individual lives. Rhee’s speech before the US congress is quite important in that it shows the beginning of his political collapse. He called in the speech upon the US leaders and public to announce the end of the Korean Armistice and to commence an immediate buildup of the ROK armed forces for a counterattack against the communists. The Korean Republic called the Truce of Panmunjom “the key to the disaster that has overtaken the Free World since the signing.” The Korean Republic, July 27, 1954. Ironically it was a great disaster to Rhee because his government from the beginning was founded upon national dissention and conflict and his unstableness was consolidated by the easy expediency of the war. The war-time state violence justified President Rhee’s terroristic rule and disregard of the constitution. The more he emphasized the national unity and advance north for unification, the more evident was the internal division and opposition to his unification-at-any-cost policy. The myth of marching north and unification was a kind of a thick curtain to cover up the oncoming dawn of light and appearance into light of the hidden gap between illusion and reality of Korean politics. The peacetime after the armistice demanded another myth and politics adapted to the changed situation, but Rhee still insisted on his dogmatism and lingered anachronistically on the comfortable way of militarism and on the self-made patriarchal myth of a hero worship. Rhee’s US Congress speech shows his senility, mental inertia, and his self-justification simple enough not to meet the complicated international political reality in his self-styled logic and belief. His political failure was mainly due to his mythic configurations. However, his unification myth was slow to die, alive to the April Student Revolution in 1960.