The Kwangju Resistance Movement, May, 1980:

Some American Perspectives

Mark Peterson

I'm honored to be asked to participate in this conference, but I am not a political scientist. I do history, yet, the topic is important, and you have invited me to attend. If you promise to apply your theories and your models and to quote the names of people I don't know only after my presentation is long over, I will agree to present this paper. It is certainly not good political science, and its not very good history either, but it is something I care deeply about and I hope what I have to say is useful to you and helps us all get closer to an understanding of the truth about Kwangju, about Americans, and about the relationship of the two.

I was asked to write a paper sub-titled, "An American Perspective". I'm not sure which American perspective the conference planners were thinking of, mine, or perhaps an official American perspective. The problem is that there is not one, single, unified perspective of Kwangju. In this paper I will find it useful to outline several major perspectives on Kwangju.

Two perspectives that many people are interested in are the perspectives of Ambassador William Gleysteen and General John Wickham, the ranking officials in Korea at the time. I understand that they are each working on books now, a major part of which for each is the Kwangju period in Korea.

They both went on record in an interview with me ten years ago, in the spring of 1987. I asked each of them for an interview for a paper I was preparing for the Association for Asian Studies meetings to be in April in 1987.

The decision to prepare a panel on Kwangju was actually made at the AAS meetings of 1986 when Linda Lewis, Donald Clark, David McCann, and I decided to put Kwangju on the national agenda of American academics. We thought it was a courageous move at the time; the decision was made and the papers were presented at the height of the Chun administration. We thought of our action as a taunt to the political scientists who should have addressed the topic, but had not. We feared retaliation from the Chun regime; each of us knew Americans who had been deported from Korea, or denied visas to enter Korea, or who had been harassed or followed by the KCIA when visiting Korea. We thought there would be an impact on our careers and on our programs at our respective universities; we knew we could not expect to get any research money from Korean organizations, yet we all thought that Kwangju needed to be discussed openly in America, even if it could not be openly discussed in Korea. The political scientists were not doing it; we thought, at some degree of peril, we should.

I have had plans of doing a second set of interviews with the two key former American officials, but have not yet. I have, however, interviewed Ambassador Dixie Walker and Ambassador Donald Gregg, but have not yet seen Ambassador James Lilley. I did, however, participate in a second AAS panel on Kwangju in April of 1996. The attendance and interest in Kwangju is much much lower now. At the conference in 1987, the room crowded with a standing-room only crowd; in 1996, there were plenty of empty seats.

Yi Sam-s|ng wrote a critique of my paper when it was later published in Korea. His critique together with an unauthorized translation of my paper did not appear until May of 1989 in Society and Thought , well after the political and free press reforms of June '87 and after Roh Tae Woo's regime began.

Yi's criticism assumes that the press reports of my paper were accurate when in many ways the press report was not accurate. The Yonhap story released in the spring of '89 after a reporter found the article in the book, Kwangju Uprising: Shadows over the Regime in South Korea, on the shelves of a bookstore in Los Angeles. The book which came out in the late fall of '87 grew out of the AAS presentations in the spring of 1987. The dates are important because the paper was presented before, not after, the June '87 liberalizations that marked the beginning of freedom of the press and the end of the Chun regime. This was also more than a year before the National Assembly hearings on Kwangju. Yi, therefore, had advantages of freedom of expression and benefit of National Assembly hearings on his side when he criticized my paper; I had neither of those advantages.

Yi's critique of my article was loaded assumptions of guilt on the part of America and Americans, both official and unofficial. His questions were of the variety of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" You answer "no", you answer "yes"; either way you are guilty. My paper concluded that there were errors on the part of the American officials, but that there was greater fault, the far, far greater fault that lie with the Korean military group the perpetrated the mutiny, the coup, and the massacre. Yi, rather, saw my paper as an apology for American official behavior, when it was not. It criticized both American officials and Korean military coup leaders.

To spend time blaming American officials who certainly made their mistakes, but who might have made mistakes even if they had chosen to react differently, is like blaming the watchdog when the burglar got away with the jewels. It wasn't the dog that stole the jewels, but sometimes we feel better, when we can't do anything else, if we can go out and yell at the dog. Still it was the thief that broke in and stole the valuables.

It is valid to look at the role of the watchdog, and teach the dog to bark next time, and reinforce the gate and the windows, and look at what else can be done to prevent another burglar from breaking in. But still, it was the burglar, not the dog, that committed the crime.

Yi claimed that I did not blame the Americans at all, and that I hold the Korean military solely responsible for Kwangju. He is partly right and partly wrong. No, I was severely disappointed in the official Americans. In retrospect I can see actions that would have been possible, most of which would have distanced the United States from Chun, although I see little that the U.S. could have done to undo the coup once it happened. I think the US could have done more after 12.12, and before May, 1980. And yes, Yi is correct that I hold the Korean military solely responsible for what happened in Kwangju.

Yi criticizes the US claim that it did not know of Chun's plans because Gleysteen admitted that they had heard rumors of coup plans. Yi simply assumes that all rumors of coup plans were indications of Chun's plans. I had the impression that the rumor Gleysteen spoke of was not of Chun, but of another military man with ambitions. Yi's assumption is that since Chun carried out the coup, he was the only one who planned a coup, when in reality there could have been many others who wanted to take over the military and the government.

Yi claims that with American intelligence gathering apparatus all over Korea, they had to have known that troops were moving both on Dec 12 an May 17; and therefore they knew what was happening and therefore they must have agreed with it or else they would have stopped it. I have one comment for that: sadaejuui! Another explanation that makes more sense from the level of logic, regardless of what Wickham and Gleysteen have said is that if men plan a coup, they do it secretively and suddenly. To fail is death, period. To succeed is to have it all; to fail, is to die. There is nothing in between.

That is the most basic reason to judge government by coup as the worst possible government. Monarchies are better than military takeovers. It just doesn't make sense for the Americans, burned badly in Iran, critical of Park to the end, scornful of military dictatorships all over the world, to suddenly support a highly risky miliary takeover in Korea, or all places. Even if the military and the American Defense Department wanted a military dictatorship in Korea, they could not get that past the State Department or the White House. To assume that a rogue operation existed in the Army to help a disliked Korean general to take over the government just does not make sense. No sense at all.

On the other hand, given the situation in Korea: years of press controls by Park, suspicions of secret deals and secret maneuverings, a tradition of governmental "truth speak" and then the underlying feeling of sadaejuui, it would only be natural for many Koreans to blame America for what Chun did. And with Chun controlling the press and making implications left, right, and center, that he indeed had the blessings of the United States, when he did not, it makes all the sense in the world to see the real culprit here is not anyone but Chun.

Yi then goes on to blame the US for lying and gives evidence including Kennedy's Bay of Pigs and Reagan's Iran-Contra - Oliver North case. When one is stuck to the concept of sadaejuui, then finding the problem in not in Korea, but in America; and not in the Carter administration but in Kennedy's and Reagan's.

This is not to say that there were not things the United States could have done. And this is not to say that Carter period politics and policy did not have their problems. But it is unfortunate that the one administration that spoke the clearest for human rights and democratic policies was plagued with the worst happenings in Korea.

Much of the rest of Yi's critique, I can agree with. The difficulty in criticizing Gleysteen and Wickham is that (1) it takes our focus off of where it should be, the real criminals in the mutiny, coup, and massacre; and (2) Gleysteen and Wickham were decent men, more so than most of their predecessors and successors. Both were Carter administration appointments, men who subscribed to Carter's human rights agenda. Gleysteen on a personal level, was the son-in-law of a man who had been unjustly labeled a communist by Senator Joe McCarthy during the red scare hearings of the early '50's.

Still, one of the more pressing criticism is of Gleysteen's choice of reluctant cooperation to avoid "the United States looking foolish" as it did in 1961. Unfortunately for Gleysteen, it is turning out that he looks foolish for making that choice. His concerns included North Korea and possible adventurism on their part; and at the time of Kwangju, we cannot forget that the Carter administration was suffering one of the worst diplomatic embarrassments in the history of the diplomacy, the holding of American diplomats as hostages in Iran. The limitations imposed on a bureaucracy, and nothing is inherently more conservative than a government bureaucracy, were absolutely stifling. Certainly the Americans were sensitive to possible copycat opportunities in other countries and security was extremely high. In Seoul, the first phase of the reinforcement of the Embassy compound and front gate took effect during the Iran hostage crisis. Iran had control of American foreign policy and had the Carter administration paralyzed.

One aspect of Wickham's mistakes include a linguistic, or cross-cultural communications issue. This point centers on the word "lemming". Wickham used the term to describe his surprise at the speed with which the Korean military fell in line behind Chun. In American English one uses the word "sheep" to show a kind of blind following of someone; but then one uses the word "lemming" to indicate a foolishly blind following of someone or thing, implying that the follower is, or will be, harmed by his following. Lemmings are part of American and Northern European cultural imagery. The lemming is a rabbit-like rodent that lives in Scandinavia; from time to time, when their populations climb to unsustainable numbers, they follow a leader and rush off the cliffs and fall into the sea to drown. Wickham, linguistically speaking, was critical of the Korean military for following Chun. He implied, by use of that term that the Korean military was following a leader to their own destruction.

The translation by the Korean press of the word "lemming" as "field rat" conveys quite a different meaning. Most Korean native speakers that I've asked about the term assume that Wickham was equating Koreans to beggars, to filthy, sneaky, thieving beggars. They assumed Wickham was just denigrating Koreans in general. In reality, from a linguistic point of view, Wickham was saying, "Don't go; don't follow Chun. You'll end up going over a cliff."

In my view, one of the villains of the American embassy in 1980 has not received any attention. He was the head of the political section, William Clark. At a meeting with several American scholars, teachers, and missionaries, Clark responded negatively to honest concerns presented by the teachers. Clark responded to me at one point, well we can't dissociate ourselves from Chun just because Mark Peterson doesn't like him; in other words he personalized and deflected our legitimate concerns and acted very much like he supported the Chun group. At that point I remember Horace G. Underwood warning Clark that, "Chun is wrapping himself in the American flag. If the United States doesn't do something about it, it will have 'hell to pay' in the future." Underwood's statement has been prophetic. Anti-Americanism grew gradually to a peak around the time of the Olympics. Fortunately, now with the arrest and trial of Chun and Roh, most Koreans have come back to a more balanced view of the American role in Korea.

One issue that still is not resolved in my mind may also point to Clark. I remember clearly the night of Monday, May 26. I was in Seoul and returning from my weekly Monday night basketball game at Seoul Foreign School in Y|nh¡i-dong when the 10 o'clock AFKN news at the top of the hour led off with the story that the citizens committee in Kwangju had asked for the Americans, and specifically Ambassador Gleysteen, to help mediate a settlement between the citizens and the military, to avoid a bloody retaking of the city by force. I got to my home in Sajik-tong about five minutes later and called the political section at the embassy. I can't remember if is was David Straub or Spencer Richardson who answered the call. I told them about the AP news story and asked if they had heard it. He said, no they did not know about the request and that he would pass it on, meaning, I assumed they would let the Ambassador know about it.

I listened for the news again at 11, but was surprised that the story was not carried at all. Usually, a lead story one hour is at least the second or third item if it is still not the lead story. I called the embassy again to see what they were doing about the opportunity. I was shocked to get the response, "Oh, yah, we took care of that." I said, "What do you mean?" The embassy official said, "Yeah, we called "AFKN and told them to lift the story."

At that point, the embassy knew that the Korean military was going back into the city. Gleysteen has said he was successful in getting the military to postpone their operation by two days. In fact, at the point of the AFKN broadcast, the soldiers were poised and ready to move. I understand the operation moved into Kwangju in the pre-dawn darkness the next morning.

When I asked Gleysteen about the opportunity of mediating, he responded that such would be difficult for the United States since it was not a two foreign governments at odds, but rather it was a domestic issue, an internal matter for Koreans to settle. He also said he had no knowledge of an appeal from the citizens committee, particularly of the appeal aired by AP news radio. I've have wondered whether Clark even passed the word on to Gleysteen or whether he ordered AFKN to cancel the story without discussing it with Gleysteen.

Two anecdotes from the Americans in Seoul in May 1980 will illustrate the point that there is not a single view of Kwangju. Just after the city was retaken, one colleague of mine, a graduate student and former Peace Corps volunteer, said, "I was proud of them." An Air Force colonel who came to our basketball group only a few times, most on the basketball group were businessmen and bankers, but when I introduced myself to the colonel and found that he was a senior intelligence officer, I commented on Kwangju in general terms. He must have thought that I and others in Korea shared his own military view of the case. He said, "Yeah, I think we'll be okay after a while, if we Kennedy and that bunch don't get involved." I asked if he really thought they could make a difference; to which he replied, "Well, things are pretty fragile still, but I think they've got a good hold on things." Fortunately I know that not all military officers were as fascist as the Air Force colonel, but still he represents a group that sees Korea in mostly military, and somewhat racist, terms.

In chronological terms, little happened after the Chun regime tightened its grip on power and on Korean society. I left Korea in 1983 and participated with colleagues Linda Lewis, who was in Kwangju on a Fulbright grant in the spring of 1980, Donald Clark and David McCann in the AAS meetings of 1987. We revisited the issue in the AAS meetings of 1996 at which time I was going to re-interview Gleysteen and Wickham, but, did not. I did, however, interview Ambassador Walker and Ambassador Gregg.

I interviewed Ambassador Walker in the spring of 1995. When I asked him about Kwangju, he quoted a friend who was a businessman in Seoul who said, "Kwangju won't go away." Walker went on to explain that he slowly came to understand the significance of Kwangju in modern Korean history. Walker also said that "Chun Doo Hwan pinned it on America" and that NK picked it up and blamed America.

I had already interviewed Ambassador Gregg who spoke of the difficulty of the decision to go to visit Kwangju. I asked Walker if he felt it important to visit Kwangju; he replied he had gone to Kwangju several times and that it was not an issue. He showed me the program of an American Studies symposium held in Kwangju in 1984; he was in attendance as were several others that I recognized on the program. The fire bombings and attacks on the American Culture Centers in Kwangju did not become intense until the late '80's.

I asked about any influence the United States had on Chun. Walker responded that he thought he was successful at getting Chun to abandon the student re-education centers he had announced. "Chun had announced his plans for Nazi style education camps for dissident students.

I would meet with Chun clandestinely; I would go to a hotel as if for a luncheon meeting; then go out a back door, enter another car with curtained windows and go to the Blue House; I was able to tell him how counter-productive and anti-democratic such a step would be."

"The reason for secret meetings with Chun was that one set of critics would say I was his lackey and another set of critics would say that he was mine and that I was going to the Blue House to give the next set of orders."

I asked what were high points of his term. Walker responded that getting students out of the American Cultural Center in Seoul in 1985. The students had occupied the center and the Korean military wanted to go in and take them out by force. Walker prevailed to get them to wait, arguing the diplomatic site was not to be ignored. Walker agreed to meet with student leaders. I pointed out that the students had later complained that they had been tricked; that the US said the Ambassador would meet with them, but thereafter the Ambassador met with other student leaders, not those that had occupied the USIS building. Walker said, no, that some of the student leaders were some of those that had occupied the building. He also said that they also imposed conditions that were unacceptable. I asked what they were. He said, "They wanted the meeting to be public, but we couldn't allow it to be turned into a circus. They demanded apologies for the US role in Kwangju, but there was no role for which to apologize."

I asked what he thought of Chun, and was it not hard to work with a man who had come to power in such an immoral and illegal way. Walker responded that Chun was shrewd, smart, and a determined person. He said he first met him in June, of 1980, when Walker stopped off in Seoul on a return trip from China. It was the day after Chun had stepped down as CIA director. Walker thought it interesting that Chun could have cared less about What the Chinese thought. Walker talked about the accomplishments of Park Chung Hee and how he would "go down in history."

Walker asked Chun what would he want history to write about him? "I would like to be the first one to turn over power legitimately within a constitutional framework." Walker also said he had made the same statements to Reagan and to Bush. Walker thought "Koreans were so done in by Park" and subsequently reminded Chun of his statement in June of 1980, about stepping down. "And he did."

Walker thought it was "funny to watch this Korean general going through rituals of attending concerts that he didn't understand. He was out of it and insecure. He had political smarts, not as bright as others in his military class, but had political savvy."

I have not yet interviewed James Lilley. Lilley was the Ambassador during the critical time of June 1987 when Chun agreed to step down and Roh Tae Woo agreed to run against others in a direct election campaign. We know that Reagan sent one of his most important advisors, Gaston Sigur, to Seoul in the days prior to the announcement and that Sigur made it clear that if Chun declared marshall law again or in other ways did not keep his promise, there would be dire consequences in Korean-American relations. Why did such diplomacy work at that point when it did not in 1980? Or was it not the diplomacy but other factors that motivated Chun and Roh?

Ambassador Gregg was extremely concerned and positive about Kwangju. When I asked Gregg what his greatest accomplishments were, he said, "Two things: I got the nuclear weapons off the peninsula, and I visited Kwangju. In fact, I visited Kwangju four times."

I had the chance to meet Gregg early in his term; I had returned to Korea and was living in Pusan. He visited Pusan and invited American citizens to a reception. He asked my opinion on whether he should visit Kwangju or not; that many of his advisors, security people, said he should not go to the city. It was too dangerous. My advice was to go. He said he thought he could do something to start to heal the wounds.

Now, in the last year, the most important aspect of American perspectives on Kwangju has been the release of the "Cherokee documents" due to the efforts of a reporter named Tim Shorrock. Shorrock was raised in Korea and Japan and attended Seoul Foreign School. He was able to get the Cherokee documents through a "freedom of information" request. The Cherokee documents were a special channel of messages sent from Gleysteen to Washington and limited to only Richard Holbrook, Cyrus Vance, President Carter and few others.

Shorrock claims to have found the "smoking gun" -- the evidence that the US was in league with Chun Doo Hwan and the coup in Korea. Others are not convinced that he has even found a gun, let alone a smoking gun. Shorrock's first article was published where he works, The Journal of Commerce, a weekly (?); but a much more detailed article was published in three parts by the Sisa Journal in Korea. That is available here in Korea.

In spite of the magnitude of Shorrock's contribution, it is not without it critics. When his work appeared on the internet it was criticized by a Greg Sherwood, who wrote, "Shorrock has not presented one shred of evidence that the U.S. statements and policies regarding the use of the ROK military had ANY effect, one way or the other, on Chun."

Most recently, at a conference of graduate students in Korean Studies in America held at Harvard, a Cornell graduate student, Donald Sohn, presented a paper titled "Chun's Manipulation of the Carter Administration". Sohn is a second generation Korean-American and an army officer working on a masters degree at Cornell. He disagrees strongly with Shorrock. He says, "It is preposterous to suggest this report holds the "smoking gun" showing the US had prior knowledge of the deployment of Korean Special Forces troops to Kwangju." As an intelligence officer, he argues that one cannot accept all forms of intelligence with the same degree of importance, and that raw intelligence, that is to say, first-hand reports, are not as valid as analytical reports that have the advantage of looking at numerous pieces of raw data.

Sohn concludes with a somewhat tentative note. "In conclusion, given the dismal America track record with Korea, which includes the Taft-Katsura agreement of 1905, and the division of Korea in 1945 and the alignment of U.S. Military Government with former Japanese collaborators, it should not be a surprise that the people of Korea suspect the US of having taken part in the Kwangju massacre and of having "allowed" or "encourage" Chun to take power. Despite the eagerness of many scholars and reporters to address the "Han" (smoldering bitterness about past wrongs) of the Korean people, question of whether the US was thoroughly manipulated by Chun or whether the US intentionally let itself be manipulated requires further investigation. Objective studies conducted with all classified documents pertaining to Kwangju [we only have some of the "secret" documents so far, none of the "top secret" or other documents have come out yet] including those related to Park Chung Hee's assassination are necessary in order to reveal fully the true history of the Kwangju incident."

The Cherokee documents will soon be on net so that any and all can read them and make their on studies and conclusions.

And the controversy continues. On one side, the United States is guilty; on the other side it is innocent, or at least honest in its efforts. I wish it were innocent. It's my government and I want it to stand for the ideals it says it stands for -- democracy, human rights, free expression, due process, and other rights. Yet, I have been disappointed in its behavior in Korea. I try to be understanding of the potential threat to peace on the peninsula, at the same time realizing the Park Chung Hee's best friend was Kim Il Sung, and abuse of that scare tactic has been played by every president of the ROK. With more information available, even though there will be differences in interpretation as there always is in the writing of history, we will eventually get to know who knew what and when they knew it. One point seems more sure to me, that regardless of what the Americans knew and when they knew it, those responsible for the deaths in Kwangju are those currently in jail, and justice is that much closer to being served.

As for me, as a historian, not a political scientist, I am working on a set of documents to be used as a resource book for students interested in the Kwangju resistance movement. It will include a detailed timeline, based on a translation of the indictment of Chun and Roh, with extensive testimonies of the citizens of Kwangju. Whatever is said and done in Seoul, or in America, the victims were those who suffered through those days in May in 1980 in Kwangju.