(14) Roh Tae-woo: president who followed his script

Roh Tae-woo, presidential candidate of the Democratic Justice Party, waves as he pledges to follow his June 29 announcement during a campaign in Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, on Nov. 14, 1987. He won the election the next month and was sworn in as president in February, 1988. / Korea Times file

By Michael Breen

Halfway through his five-year term as president, Roh Tae-woo invited the Seoul-based foreign press corps to Cheong Wa Dae (Blue House).

Before he entered the room where correspondents were seated at circular banquet-type tables, his spokesman described the S-shaped route the president would take to reach the top table. (Although an initial “r” in Korean is pronounced as an “n,” Roh’s spokespeople would emphasize the “r” to pre-empt foreign press headlines playing on the English word “no”).

Roh came in, followed the route exactly, and took his seat at the top table, whereupon an aide placed a sheet of paper in front of him.

He looked at it and said, “It must be hard being the president of the foreign correspondents club.” He was addressing your reporter, who was the president of the Seoul Foreign Correspondents Club at the time.

“No, they don’t take me seriously. It’s not as hard as your job, Mr. President.” He appeared to miss this masterful witticism as he was already consulting his piece of paper again. He then made a similar remark to the only lady at our table, Kelly Tunney, who was the bureau chief for AP. And so on for the other four reporters.

It was a revealing moment. The piece of paper was not simply a reminder of who he was sitting with. It included the banter.

If ever there was a scripted president, it was Roh Tae-woo. It would be better for the national narrative if the first democratically elected president had been a visionary champion for democracy — he was actually the number two man in the previous military dictatorship.

But Roh was so uncomfortable with some parts of his job that he also conducted Cabinet meetings according to a pre-prepared script. Once his ministers caught on, they had their aides find out from the Blue House secretaries what the president was going to say to them and prepare accordingly.

This is not to say that Roh lacked intelligence. He had an impressive military background. But he knew what he didn’t know and one thing was how to do all the civilian protocol stuff that goes with being a president.

Roh was born on Dec. 4, 1932, in Dalseong near Daegu in North Gyeongsang Province. When he was seven, his father, a district official, was killed in an auto accident. According to his school record he was a “gentle and hard-working student with a strong sense of responsibility.” As a young man, Roh played rugby which remains today a little known sport in Korea.

At school, he became friends with a boy named Chun Doo-hwan. Roh served as an enlisted man in the Korean War and later joined the Korea Military Academy at the same time as his friend Chun. Both graduated in 1955. Theirs was the famed 11th class, the first group to go through what is now the full four-year program. Roh served in the Vietnam War in 1968 as a lieutenant colonel and later as unit commander. He was a member of Hanahoe, a secret fraternity of senior officers led by 11th class graduates. In 1979, he was promoted to major general.

Later that year, after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee, Roh and members of Hanahoe provided crucial backing for the mutiny led by Chun Doo-hwan, who headed the powerful Defense Security Command, the military intelligence body. Chun was investigating Park’s murder but military chiefs though he was becoming too powerful and planned to reassign him. Chun then had the top brass arrested, he claimed, to “save the nation from chaos.”

Roh ordered units of his division from the DMZ to Seoul to back the coup, a move his opponents later described, somewhat exaggeratedly, as leaving a gaping hole in the country’s defenses that the North Korean army could have marched through unopposed.

Roh’s army posts included a stint as commander of the Capital Security Command and commander of the Defense Security Command in 1980. After his retirement from the military in July 1981, Chun appointed him minister of state for national security and foreign affairs. He went on to head the ministry of sports and, later, home affairs. He was appointed president of the Seoul Olympic Organizing Committee, and, in 1985, chairman of Chun’s ruling Democratic Justice Party.

Once out of uniform, Roh recognized the deep unpopularity of the military, a consequence of the coup and also of the bloody suppression in 1980 in Gwangju when citizens rebelled and took control of the city after special forces, assigned to policing duties, had overreacted and killed a number of student protestors.

He tried to distance himself from Chun and position himself as a democrat. His great contribution to Korea’s first ever peaceful transition of power was his agreement on June 29, 1987, after three weeks of street protests, to meet the popular demands for democratic reforms. The irony is that the protests started in reaction to Roh’s anointing as the ruling party’s candidate for the presidential election later that year.

Billing himself as the “ordinary man” and with campaign posters featuring a little girl whispering into one of his rather large ears, a feature used to his benefit, Roh won the election with just 36.6 percent of the popular vote. Some credit for his victory should go to the three opposition Kims (Young-sam, Dae-jung and Jong-pil) who ran separate campaigns and split the electorate. He was inaugurated in February 1988.

The ruling Democratic Justice Party failed to win a majority in the April 1988 National Assembly elections, winning less than half the 299 seats. This setback hindered Roh’s effectiveness to some extent.

Roh’s themes as president were further democratization, continued economic growth, and progress toward reunification. He opened the Olympic Games in Seoul in 1988, a national achievement that led, along with the disintegration of Soviet communism, to ties with most of North Korea’s allies.

In July 1988, Roh announced his “Nordpolitik” approach to North Korea, one feature of which was the removal of penalties for overseas Koreans who had dealings with the rival state.

In 1990 his ruling party merged with the parties of two of the three Kims — Kim Young-sam’s Reunification and Democracy Party and Kim Jong-pil’s New Democratic Republican Party — to form the Democratic Liberal Party.

Although Roh’s rule started the democracy reforms that subsequent presidents built on, his rule is forever overshadowed by his conviction in 1996, during the term of Kim Young-sam, to a 17-year prison term. At the “trial of the century,” as it was billed, his friend Chun was sentenced to life.

The two ex-presidents were convicted of masterminding a staged coup that started with the mutiny in 1979 and ended with the Gwangju massacre. Roh admitted to having amassed a $650 political fund during his time in the Blue House. As indication of the moral confusion that typifies leadership even today, Roh tried to explain this away: “I have never, ever intended to accept any bribes,” he told the court. “I have received only donations. I have never swapped them for favors.”

Chun and Roh were pardoned in 1997 at the request of the incoming president, Kim Dae-jung. Roh lives quietly in Seoul, turning up with other ex-presidents as each new successor is inaugurated.

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.