The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (16 page)

__________

*
On this point, as with the other aspects of Kim’s travels in the spring of 1975, the evidence is contradictory. According to a Hungarian Embassy cable to Budapest in July 1975, Kim had wanted to visit Moscow after his trip to Beijing, but “the date he proposed did not suit the Soviet leaders.” Of course, the explanation that the dates were inconvenient might simply have been Moscow’s way of telling Kim not to come. “North Korea’s Efforts to Acquire Nuclear Technology and Nuclear Weapons: Evidence from Russian and Hungarian Archives,” Wilson Center Working Paper 53, Document no. 26, 52.

*
In a long cable to Berlin at the end of August, the GDR Embassy in Pyongyang concluded that the clash was not calculated but an “‘over-reaction’ by the DPRK personnel involved in the incident, whose background probably lies in fanatical feelings of hate.” See
http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/114291
(quotations in the original).

4

THE CARTER CHILL

A
MERICA’S REACTION AGAINST MILITARY
commitments abroad in the wake of the Vietnam disaster found its voice in its first post-Vietnam president, Jimmy Carter. As early as January 1975, in the first days of his candidacy for president, Carter advocated the withdrawal of US troops from South Korea, which after the pullout from Vietnam were the only remaining US military deployment on the mainland of Asia and a trip wire that guaranteed immediate US involvement in case of a North Korean attack. After the little-known former governor of Georgia surprisingly won the nomination of his party and then the presidential election, he ordered that his idea be put into practice, despite the absence of serious consideration within the government and despite the opposition of South Korea, which was alarmed, and Japan, which was gravely concerned. He also made little effort to negotiate with China and the Soviet Union, the other major powers involved, or with North Korea, to facilitate the American withdrawal.

For two and a half years, as opposition mounted inside and outside his administration, Carter stubbornly fought to sustain his plan with the same dogged persistence he deployed in successfully pursuing the Camp David agreements on the Middle East and the Panama Canal Treaty. In the end, he was forced to give it up, even though in theory he had the power to order the troops home from Korea with the stroke of his pen as commander in chief.

Carter’s ill-fated withdrawal effort is a case study in the hidden limitations on presidential power in the American system. It is also a study in unintended consequences, which in this case included the fatal weakening of a South Korean president and the inoculation of the US body politic for years to come against further attempts to withdraw forces from Korea.

Nobody, including Carter himself, seems to know precisely how and when he developed his unyielding determination that American forces should be withdrawn from Korea. “The origin of my position is not clear to me,” the former president wrote me while I was preparing this book.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s White House national security adviser and his closest collaborator on the withdrawal plan, called its origin “a mystery not yet unraveled.” Cyrus Vance and Harold Brown, who grappled with the proposal and its author as secretary of state and secretary of defense, respectively, were equally uninformed about the roots of Carter’s resolve, as were many others I interviewed from the Carter campaign staff and administration. Apparently, nobody had the temerity to ask Carter at the time why he had concluded that US troops were no longer needed.

Even before his policy ran into trouble, Carter was reluctant to discuss its substance or consider alternatives; he knew what he wanted to do, and his mind was made up. During the transition between his election and his inauguration, he turned down an offer of a CIA briefing on Korea, and he rarely attended any of the National Security Council discussions of Korea in the course of his administration. In
Keeping Faith
, Carter’s memoir of his presidency, he devoted much space to foreign affairs but never mentioned the Korean withdrawal issue.

CARTER’S WITHDRAWAL: ORIGINS AND IMPLEMENTATION

As it happened, I was among the earliest to learn firsthand of Carter’s determination. In late-May 1975, Carter visited Tokyo while I was serving as the
Washington Post
correspondent for Northeast Asia, based in the Japanese capital. Over drinks with me and
New York Times
correspondent Richard Halloran and in a speech the following day, Carter said he favored withdrawing all US troops, both ground and air forces, from Korea over a period of perhaps five years. To accomplish this, he advocated a major buildup of South Korea’s own air force. When Halloran observed that the ROK air force had deliberately been kept weak so that it would not be used to attack North Korea and start another war, Carter began having second thoughts. Within days he limited his withdrawal proposal to ground troops only, proposing to leave the US Air Force in place or even build it up.

My story on Carter’s statements in Tokyo was reduced by
Post
editors from eight paragraphs to two sentences. This was typical of the short shrift that would be given his views on Korea during the campaign, during which it never became a high-profile issue.

In itself, the idea of reducing or even completely withdrawing US ground troops from Korea was hardly novel. In 1971 President Nixon had withdrawn the Seventh Infantry Division, which constituted roughly one-third of the sixty thousand US troops then in Korea, despite passionate opposition from the Seoul government. Later Nixon’s secretary of defense from 1969 to 1972, Melvin R. Laird, signed off on a plan within
the Pentagon to reduce the remaining US ground combat unit, the Second Infantry Division, to a single brigade, but implementation was blocked by Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger, who feared the political effects in Asia after the American opening to China. By coincidence, the very day I met Carter in Tokyo, May 27, 1975, the Ford White House launched a secret study of American policy toward Korea, specifically including the question of reducing the American military presence. No decisions were reached.

In 1977 Carter’s White House press secretary, Jody Powell, in seeking to explain the roots of the policy, told me that Carter had been familiar with the discussions in Washington surrounding Laird’s withdrawal plan. Powell added that Carter’s views arose from “his basic inclination to question the stationing of American troops overseas.” Carter, in his 1994 letter to me, said, “Contrary to the opinion of many U.S. leaders, then and now, it was not a goal of mine just to deploy as many of our forces around the globe as host countries would accommodate.”

While Carter was running for the presidency, the post-Vietnam aversion to military involvement abroad was at a high point. In the month that Saigon fell, April 1975, only 14 percent of Americans responding to a Louis Harris public opinion poll favored US involvement if North Korea attacked the South, while 65 percent said they would oppose it. This made a strong impression on Carter, who still recalled these results in his letter to me two decades later.

Two weeks before Inauguration Day, in the first informal meeting of the Carter administration’s National Security Council team, policy toward Korea was one of fifteen items Carter selected for priority review and decision making. Presidential Review Memorandum/NSC 13 (PRM-13)—issued January 26, 1977, six days after the inauguration, and sent to the heads of key national security departments and agencies—ordered “a broad review of our policies toward the Korean peninsula,” including “reductions in U.S. conventional force levels.” Despite the neutral-sounding words, officials of the new administration were shocked to discover that the basic decision had already been cast in concrete. The new secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, returned from the White House with instructions that the review should not consider
whether
to withdraw American ground troops from Korea, but only
how
.

The “review” was hardly under way before Carter sent Vice President Walter Mondale to Tokyo, at the end of January, to inform the Japanese of his determination to withdraw American ground troops from Korea over a period of years. Publicly the Japanese were understanding, but privately they were deeply worried how a general American pullback might affect their own security. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Morton Abramowitz, a career holdover from previous administrations who
accompanied Mondale on the trip, argued it was a serious mistake to move so quickly and especially not to fly on to Seoul to inform South Korean leaders in person of the decision, which was bound to be deeply upsetting. Summing up his strong belief, Abramowitz, who later loyally defended in public the policy he opposed in private, told Mondale, “We
can’t
withdraw.” The new vice president retorted breezily, “Hey, Mort, there’s been an election.”

On February 15, Carter sent a letter to South Korean president Park Chung Hee affirming the US commitment to ROK security but broaching the issue of troop withdrawals and urging him to take steps to improve his human rights posture. The letter was presented to Park by Ambassador Richard Sneider and General John Vessey, the US military commander in Seoul. Vessey, who had met Carter in the White House a few days before, said no decision had been made about withdrawing troops. Moreover, Vessey said Carter asked him to convey that he “would make no changes in the troop deployments until after careful consultations with President Park.” Park, citing many press stories about withdrawal plans, asked that quiet consultations begin very soon.

In early March, when ROK foreign minister Park Tong Chin came to Washington to begin the consultations, however, he found a US president whose mind was made up. In a handwritten memo to Brzezinski and Vance on March 5, shortly before meeting the Korean minister, Carter said bluntly that Park must understand:

       
A
) American forces will be withdrawn. Air cover will be continued.

       
B
) US-Korean relations as determined by Congress and American people are at an all time low ebb.

       
C
) Present military aid support and my reticence on human rights issue will be temporary unless Park voluntarily adopts some open change re political prisoners.

Talking points for the meeting Brzezinski sent to Carter suggested that Carter justify his decision by saying, “In view of the expansion in South Korea’s economy and military strength as well as the apparent desire of all the great powers to avoid war on the peninsula, our ground forces will be withdrawn.” Minister Park, however, recalled that Carter’s main justification was that “troop withdrawal is my campaign pledge.” The meeting made it crystal clear that Carter was determined to go ahead with the withdrawal, though the president also said that the withdrawal would be gradual and that Washington would support the strengthening of South Korean defense capabilities to compensate for the American troop cutbacks.

Before he took office, Carter said he would seek guarantees of South Korea’s security from China and the Soviet Union before making a decision to withdraw troops. In fact, he did not. As late as mid-June 1977, well after the withdrawal plan had been announced, the administration still had not provided even an authoritative briefing for the Chinese and Soviets on what the United States had in mind.

In July 1977, Vance wrote in a memorandum to Carter that a diplomatic initiative involving the two Koreas with possible Chinese participation was “the missing dimension in our troop withdrawal policy.” Carter responded favorably, and the State Department was authorized to begin consultations initially with Seoul and then with Beijing on a possible four-power conference to seek a political settlement on the peninsula. Vance took up the proposal with Foreign Minister Huang Hua on a trip to Beijing in late August, but the Chinese were unenthusiastic. There the idea seems to have been dropped for nearly two years.

Carter had declared during the presidential campaign, “We’ve got 700 atomic weapons in Korea. I see no reason for a single one.” (According to government documents, there were actually 683 warheads in South Korea at the time, remarkably close to Carter’s statement.) His plan had been to order their removal as the first order of business. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a physicist and nuclear expert, spearheaded a successful drive to persuade Carter to consider the removal of nuclear weapons along with, rather than ahead of, withdrawal of US troops, lest sudden action in this sensitive area destabilize the situation on the Korean peninsula.

Carter’s iron-willed resolve to move ahead posed a professional dilemma for many officials of his government, who believed in loyalty to presidential decisions yet who increasingly believed Carter’s policy courted unnecessary and possibly unacceptable political and military risks. Unlike the classic Washington struggle of contending forces within the executive branch engaged in “a battle for the president’s mind,” this came to be “a battle against the president’s mind.” There were increasingly explicit private conversations among the conspirators, who might have been fired if their conniving had come to light. According to Richard Holbrooke, who was assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and in the middle of the battle, it was “a full-scale rebellion against the president.” Somehow, news correspondents covering the administration, including me, never grasped the full extent of the guerrilla war within the administration, or how high it reached.

Facing fundamental questions of loyalty and responsibility, Brown’s guideline was to “obey direct orders, but otherwise try to turn the president around.” The most difficult thing for Brown was defending a policy in public that he opposed in private. Vance, who resigned on principle in 1980 in opposition to the hostage-rescue mission in Iran, was able to
maneuver within the limits of his conscience on the Korea withdrawal, keeping his misgivings to himself while vowing that he had to “find a way to change the president’s mind.” Brzezinski, who knew better than anyone else that Carter’s view on the Korean issue was “strongly held, almost emotional,” stuck with the president in high-level meetings until the bitter end, although he did nothing to stop the maneuvering of others to thwart Carter’s idea.