The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (93 page)

Finally Peng did. He was by then the minister of defense; as the Sino-Soviet split had become more serious, it was believed that he felt that it had gone too
far. That in itself might have been a problem. But there had been no break with Mao. Peng’s very simplicity, his lack of political instincts, his hard-won old-soldier truths were what involuntarily turned him into a rebel. In 1959, he returned to his boyhood region around Hunan and spoke with the local peasants, who were quite candid with him about their plight, and he discovered that there was a vast Potemkin Village arising in China, that the truth as envisioned by the country’s highest officials and reported to them, and the truth as borne on the shoulders of its ordinary people, were completely different. Then, in the summer of 1959, six years after the end of the war, thinking he was a good member of the Party, almost surely not understanding the full consequences of what he was doing, thinking he would have some political allies because he had such powerful truths on his side, Peng went to a conference of the Party leadership at Lushan and there wrote a cautionary private letter to Mao about what he felt were some of the problems. The letter was filled with the obligatory references to all the successes they had gained, but it did contain a surprising number of cautionary warnings. Mao immediately reprinted it and made it available to everyone at the conference, changing the nature of the letter, and thereby casting Peng as an enemy of the government. With that, Peng had apparently played into Mao’s hands—he asked for his letter back, but did not get it. Mao turned the letter into a frontal political challenge. Though almost everyone at the meeting agreed with him and knew the larger truth of what he had written, no one supported him publicly. As Jonathan Spence noted, “Mao…[treated]…Peng’s well intentioned and confidential comments as tantamount to treason, but then when Mao circulated copies of the letter to the other senior members of the Communist Party, none of them came to Peng’s support, even though most of them knew that the Marshal’s analysis was correct. It was the ultimate act of political corruption. It meant that the Central Committee by then reflected the whims of Mao, no matter how mad, more than it did the needs and realities of China. Historians,” Spence added, “now see this period as a turning point in the collapse of moral courage at the heart of the Party apparatus.” In the next seven years, Spence noted, “more than 20 million Chinese died of famine.” The madness had been not just legitimized, but institutionalized.

With that, the chairman called on Marshal Lin Biao, a longtime rival of Peng’s, and asked him to appear at the conference and attack Peng. It was over for Peng—he was no longer defense minister; he was soon under house arrest; and as the Cultural Revolution eventually took place, starting in 1966, he became a familiar target, placed on stages in show-and-abuse theaters, where he was repeatedly attacked physically and verbally, humiliated as part of a vast national theater where he was supposed to confess his crimes. He was eventually
beaten to death, a bitter payback for so many years of bravery and loyalty. One of the principal charges against him made by the Red Guards was that he had “opposed Chairman Mao all his life.” When the Red Guards attacked and beat him, crushing his ribs and his lungs, often knocking him unconscious, he never bent. “I fear nothing,” he would shout at his investigators. “You can shoot me. Your days are numbered. The more you interrogate, the firmer I’ll become.” By the time he died from his beatings, he had been interrogated 130 times. As Mao destroyed Peng, he destroyed much of what had been the best and most idealistic part of the Chinese revolution, turning his government in the process into one where only his own monomania could flourish.

BY THE BEGINNING
of the twenty-first century, no society seemed more different from the South than North Korea. To the degree that there were successes in North Korea, they had been the very early ones, because it was from the start a completely totalitarian structure, imposed always from the top down, all done with a ruthless efficiency, enforced by a brutal security system imported from Moscow. That was a specialty of the Russians in those years: they might not do agriculture and housing or industrial development well, but they did state security extremely well; they were masters at creating authoritarian societies. Thus in the years immediately after World War II, while the Americans and the government in the South had struggled, often ineptly, displaying incompetence and inefficiency rather than skill and mastery—the Americans being new at the old game of having client states—the Russians in the North had seemed singularly efficient: it was what they did best. What to do in Korea after the war was something Washington had thought very little about, and the government they had installed in the South was corrupt and often inept. By contrast, despite a lack of deeply rooted legitimacy or any great popularity, the North Koreans displayed from the start a sense of purpose and an ability to control their population that was unnervingly efficient. If the Russians had begun the process, then Kim Il Sung continued it; others might mock him, but to the surprise of some of his early handlers, he turned out in time to be a shrewd student of modern totalitarianism, expert in the suppression of other men and their ideas and thoughts.

He was also an almost perfect reflection of a certain kind of Korean paranoia, of what the past, the war, and his country’s colonial status had done to his generation and his country, made all the worse by his adaptation of the Soviet system. It was as if all possibilities for his people—political, economic, and social—were frozen by it. That paranoia would play as important a role in his own stewardship of the nation as any ideology—perhaps it was his true ideology, even though he would become one of Communism’s sole surviving true
believers. That he was so deft a survivor and player in the international Communist world surprised others: as tensions mounted between the Russians and the Chinese in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kim seemed able to promise his hand and his favors alternately to both sides, playing them off against each other while limiting their hold on him (and his own dependence on either).

But those early successes were the rare ones, and they were always imposed downward from the top; the North was a land without debate and discussion, or finally, choice. It was a place where you learned how to salute and to obey; a world without any mechanism for change. As a society, North Korea was like a living organism that simply could not breathe and was always on a respirator; as it could not breathe, it could not grow. For societies to grow, they have to be able to develop both in the right way and sometimes in the wrong way, for there is no perfect journey—you learn as much from your mistakes as from your successes. But in the North there was no criticism, no wrong step; every step, because it had been taken by Kim Il Sung, was always the right one. As such the North soon became a model for a new kind of highly personalized, airless, Asian totalitarianism, a land without oxygen, even more totalitarian than Mao’s China because China was so large that it was harder to control. In time, North Korea became one of the most xenophobic places in the world. As South Korea often seemed to bumble—veering back and forth from totalitarianism to what sometimes seemed like tiny increments of democracy, North Korea never stumbled—and that was its great sin. It remained frozen in a terrible monomania, a land with only one man whose thoughts could be acted on.

No political rivals were allowed to develop. Kim was the equal of Stalin in the art of purging his rivals. The only word that mattered was that of Kim Il Sung, and he was always right, which meant any alternative view of politics, economics, and agriculture was wrong. In the 1980s and 1990s, as both Russia and China began in different ways and in different degrees to adjust to moderating forces, Pyongyang grew ever more distant from them, unable to change and unable to adjust—because any change might mean a fall from power for Kim. As other Communist societies, once exceedingly fraternal to North Korea, began to change and were ventilated by new forces, North Korea if anything became more didactic and more rigid, more a prisoner of one-man rule than ever; the more other Communist nations changed, the more distrusting and self-isolating the North became, and the more convinced its leader was that he was alone and could trust no one.

It was as if he alone had fought every battle, won every victory in the struggle for North Korea’s independence. The Chinese were furious when they visited the museum dedicated to the Korean War in Pyongyang and found what a tiny role they had played in saving their sister state; they were barely worthy of
mention. At the same time, as a means of proving to his own population (and quite possibly himself ) that his way was right and that the citizens of North Korea, despite famine and constant police procedures and an abysmal standard of living, were blessed in their good fortune, the cult of personality grew more profound, leading him past his former tutors, Stalin and Mao. A giant sixty-six-foot bronze statue of him stood in the center of the ninety-two-room Museum of the Revolution. The city also had an Arch of Triumph, even grander than the one in Paris; it celebrated Kim’s return from Japan in 1945. It was a city—and a country—literally never absented by a likeness of him.

He was always referred to as the Great Leader. He had five great palaces, which no one else dared live in or use. All traffic stopped when he drove down one of Pyongyang’s thoroughfares. His photo, and, in time, lest there be any mistake about the succession, that of his son, hung everywhere. Ordinary people somehow managed in their everyday dress to carry a photo of him on their jackets or tunics or dresses. By the later 1980s, according to Don Oberdorfer, who wrote about the two Koreas, there were at least thirty-four thousand monuments to Kim Il Sung in the North, not including park benches where he had once however briefly sat and which were thereafter covered with glass. Once asked by a Soviet official about what appeared to be the cult of personality in his nation, he had answered that it was simply part of the history of the land: “You don’t know our country. Our country is used to paying respect to elders—like China and Japan, we live by Confucian culture.”

His people starved, and the production from his factories was considered pathetic. He was from the start something of an international outlaw, trying to arrange the assassination of rivals in Seoul and kidnapping people from the South he felt could be helpful to his state. He seemed, as he aged, to have two main dreams, first to develop an atomic weapon of his own, and second, to name his son, Kim Jong Il, as his successor. Nothing reflected the growing change between his country and that of the South more than the ability to look at photos taken from above the two Koreas at night by satellite—the land below the thirty-eighth parallel alive with lights and commerce of all kinds, the land above the parallel blacked out, a kind of self-inflicted wasteland.

Kim had in the end created a nation in his own image, one without vitality and hope, taking an existing totalitarian system and, by dint of adding his skills and fears, strangling it. North Korea became more isolated all the time, outside the reach of even its former allies like China and Russia, and still hoping to create an atomic weapon so that then at least it could be a viable outlaw state.

OF THE SUCCESSES
that America was responsible for in the post–World War II/Cold War era, what happened in South Korea was probably the most
impressive and dramatic—ranking even above the success of the Marshall Plan, which had delivered financial aid, materiel, and technical assistance to European societies that had in the past been fully developed powerful societies but had been badly damaged physically by the war. Korea, by contrast, had little in the way of a democratic past and little in the way of a middle-class life or an industrial base. What was created there after the war was politically, economically, and in many ways socially strikingly new. Powerful, more advanced neighbors had systematically colonized and exploited Korea’s people. Their talents had long been dormant. Certainly there had been foreign witnesses in the past, most of them missionaries, who had understood the vast potential of the Korean people, their hunger for a better life, their innate talents, their surpassing work ethic—right up there with that of the Japanese—their Confucian respect for education, and the way they had maximized what limited opportunities were available to them. But the peninsula’s history—that is, its geography—had too often been bleak. There had always been a more powerful regional player, a nation on a power ascent of its own, eager to dominate Korea and to suppress its people. In the period immediately after World War II, the South had appeared to be headed for more of the same, with the Americans now a player, poorly prepared for an old colonial game, bumbling and fumbling, curiously ignorant of modern Korean history, quick to get many things wrong and to underestimate the possibilities of the future for Korea. The Americans hardly seemed an improvement on great powers who had been there in the past, other than that they seemed to know less about Korea’s history than so many of their predecessors and existed at a far greater geographical distance, which might have been a plus. They helped impose on the South Syngman Rhee, a genuine patriot, but a man whose idea of a democratic society was one where he and his closest allies could do what they wanted, and everyone else should be watched.

But whatever else, the Americans were willing (because of their broad anti-Communism) to have their sons die on Korean soil, and they were not there as conquerors or, in the classic sense, imperialists. In time, as the Cold War became less intense, they were willing to adjust to some of the more democratic impulses taking place in the society, impulses often imported back from the United States by Koreans who had gone to America to study and had been affected by the freedoms they discovered there; many who had gone to study engineering had learned about both engineering and democracy.