Kim Young-sam waves after being sworn in as President of the Republic of Korea before the National Assembly in Feburuary 1993. / Korea Times file
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By Michael Breen
When Kim Young-sam became president in 1993 and moved into the presidential Blue House in Seoul, the first person he brought along to see it was his father.
Although in one sense a natural choice as the first visitor in Korea, where presidential relatives have a bad habit of leveraging their role to get rich, leaders normally exercise more discretion in their first choice of visitor.
But for Kim Young-sam, it was a telling moment. A life-long politician who championed democracy and suffered for it at the hands of dictators, Kim’s invitation of his father highlighted the fact that the energy that drove him came not from a vision of how he wished to exercise his power and lead the country, but from more personal motives.
Kim’s father was a widower. If the biographies of male achievers in Korea are accurate, fathers are normally peripheral figures from whom they receive values and direction in life but little by way of affection. That comes from the mother, whose sacrifices for the family, when recalled can reduce even the hardest nuts to tears. Kim Young-sam’s mother was shot and killed in 1960 by North Korean infiltrators who broke into the family house, apparently looking for money.
Kim Young-sam was born in 1927 on Geoje Island off the south coast. He studied philosophy at Seoul National University and graduated in 1952. After a stint in the Army during the Korean War, he set his sights on a political career and was elected to the National Assembly in 1954. In all, he served nine terms as a representative for constituencies in Geoje and Busan.
After the dictator Park Chung-hee tightened his grip on power with a revised constitution in 1972, Kim emerged as a new-generation opposition leader along with Kim Dae-jung (who would succeed him as president) and Lee Chul-seung. As head of the New Democratic Party Kim refused to compromise with the ruling Democratic Republican Party and openly criticized the dictatorship, which was a criminal offense under the new Constitution.
Tensions exploded in August 1979 when Kim allowed protesting women workers at a wig company to use his party’s headquarters for their sit-in. Hundreds of police assaulted the building and arrested the workers, killing one and badly beating several lawmakers. In the process, one female worker died and many lawmakers trying to protect them were severely beaten. The court then ordered Kim to step down as president of the New Democratic Party and he responded by calling on the United States to withdraw its backing of the Korean dictatorship.
In October, Park had Kim expelled from the National Assembly. Washington recalled its ambassador, all lawmakers of Kim’s party resigned from the Assembly, and riots erupted in Kim’s home base of Busan. Thirty police stations were torched and protests spread to the adjacent industrial city of Masan in what became the biggest anti-government protest of Park’s 18-year rule. Then on Oct. 26, during an argument over how to handle the protesters, KCIA Director Kim Jae-kyu shot and killed Park.
After a brief period known as the “Seoul Spring,” when the country was effectively leaderless and protesters voiced their opinions on the streets, Kim Young-sam was the most likely contender as the next president. However, when Gen. Chun Doo-hwan seized power, he placed Kim under house arrest and then banned him and his party from political activity for eight years.
The house arrest was lifted in June 1983 after Kim went on hunger strike. In 1985, he teamed up with the faction of Kim Dae-jung to present a unified opposition force. In the following year, their new political party made a surprising showing in National Assembly elections and then began to push vigorously for constitutional reform to allow for Chun’s successor to be democratically elected in 1987.
The opposition, however, failed in this effort. The country was by this time weary of the endless student protests and opposition antics and sick of the tear gas that wafted over Seoul every day and hung in the underpasses. It was only a call by religious leaders for nationwide protests that brought the middle class out for the first time. Chun then had to take note. Rather than ruin the next year’s Seoul Olympics, he conceded.
Invigorated by this development, the two Kims split and started their own separate campaigns for the presidency. This split ensured a victory for the government candidate, the former general and coup-maker, Roh Tae-woo.
In time for the next election — the new constitution limited the president to a single, five-year term — Kim shocked many supporters by “crossing the floor” and joining Roh’s ruling camp. He merged his Reunification Democratic Party with Roh’s Democratic Justice Party to form the Democratic Liberal Party. As its candidate in the December 1992 election, he won and took office in February the following year.
Kim billed himself as the country’s first democratic president. Although a bit cheeky considering he was the second, his claim was widely accepted by longtime opponents of Korea’s dictators who considered Roh to have been an unwilling democrat.
Kim established firm civilian control over the military and launched reforms to eliminate political corruption and abuse of power. As this process unfolded, he was powerless to prevent his predecessors, Roh Tae-woo and Chun Doo-hwan, and several business leaders, from being prosecuted for their 1979 mutiny and the murderous crackdown on protests in Gwangju in 1980, and for other abuses.
The economy continued to grow rapidly during Kim’s term and the country joined the OECD and saw its standard of living equal the world’s other industrialized nations.
Kim also introduced the notion of globalization — although for much of his term the Korean word (“segyehwa”) was more debated than implemented.
As with his predecessor and his successors, Kim’s popularity plunged as the end of his term approached. Popular disappointment with leaders that people were now free to criticize was fueled by endless corruption scandals, which even saw his own son jailed.
Finally, on the eve of his term in late 1997, Korea was swamped by the financial crisis that swept through Southeast and East Asia. As people went to the polls in December that year, the country was almost bankrupt.
Michael Breen is an author, former foreign correspondent and the chairman of Insight Communications, a public relations consulting company. He can be reached at mike.breen@insightcomms.com.
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