hankyoreh

By Song Ho-kyun and Ko Na-mu, Hankyoreh 21 staff reporters

Park Geun-hye, 60, officially threw her hat in the ring for the presidency in an announcement on July 10. It has been fifteen years since she entered politics, but questions still linger about her leadership abilities. Park herself has been quiet. Leadership ability has a major impact on a president’s capacity to run a country. This is why Hankyoreh 21 cautiously ventured to break through the wall of silence and find the real person inside, and to establish a link between Park’s past and present.

Reporters drew on Park’s autobiography and six essays she wrote between her father’s assassination on Oct. 26, 1979, and her own entry into politics in 1997. It was a period that saw citizen Park mixed with Park the prospective politician. Through her words and speech during that time, the Hankyoreh 21 pieced together what she said about politics. These were then compared with her words and deeds since entering the political arena in 1997. Caution was taken against any preconceptions about what Park Chung-hee’s daughter would be like.

Four main themes were identified. Hopefully, they will be keys in unlocking the screen of mystery that covers Park the politician.

Theme 1: Betrayal 　

The first thing that comes into view under the thick shell over Park’s feelings is her sense of betrayal. The roots of this can be found in her experience seeing politicians from her father’s Democratic Republican Party criticize the Yushin government after Park Chung-hee’s 1979 assassination. Her journal entry from Sept. 30, 1981, reads, “The punishment of a betrayer, more than anything else, is the fact that you have destroyed a vital fortress in your own heart. By committing one act of betrayal, your resistance against committing betrayal gradually weakens, and that second and third betrayals become that much easier.”

Park was born on Feb. 2, 1952. She left the Blue House in early November 1979 after a nine-day funeral observance for her father. She went back to the house in Seoul’s Sindang neighborhood where the family had lived before the 1961 coup that put her father in power. The harsh Chun Doo-hwan administration soon came to power in 1980. During the brief interim, however, there had been much debate and criticism over Park Chung-hee and the era he represented.

Some of the critics were members of the old Democratic Republican Party, most prominently former Prime Minister Kim Jong-pil. There was some reason for this. As president, Park had been very alarmed about the clever young officer who had drafted the initial revolutionary pledge and choreographed his own actions in the coup. After he opposed a third-term amendment of Constitution in 1969, then-prime minister Kim was no longer family to Park, but a political rival. Even after Kim reversed his position on the amendment, the Korean Central Intelligence Agency continued monitoring his home over the next decade. Some of the Democratic Republic figures, however, were denouncing the Yushin government in an attempt to stay alive under Chun. To the then-29-year-old Park Geun-hye, the whole controversy came as an affront.

In a piece for the Jan. 1989 edition of the Women’s Dong-A, a monthly magazine for women, she wrote, “If you look at the politicians who previously held important positions in the Yushin era, you’ll often see, and this may be because of the current landscape that views Yushin as a sin, but a number of them are insisting, ‘Oh, I was opposed to it back then. I didn’t have the power then to fight it.’ To those people, I would like to ask why they did not give up their positions, if they really thought it was a bad regime. If someone’s judgment changes and becomes clouded with by contemporary context, then such a person should never again hold public office.”

The sense of betrayal stayed with her. On May 19, 1989, she gave an interview on the MBC show “Current Affairs Discussion with Park Gyeong-jae” where she asked why Kim, former Democratic Justice Party (formerly the Democratic Republican Party) chairman Park Joon-kyu, and former National Assembly speaker Kim Jae-sun were not defending the system. “During the Yushin era, when my father was still alive, they were going around saying, ‘Yushin is the our only path to survival!’ Their refusal to defend Yushin after he died - well, we can turn that around and say that the reason they were advocating Yushin back then is not because they actually believed in it, but because it was the only way they could hold high positions. . . ”

In 2007, Park was already a ten-year veteran of politics. The theme of betrayal surfaced again in her autobiography that year. “It was quite a shock to me,” she wrote, “to see the transformation [after the assassination] even in the people who had been closest to my father, the way they became so cold. It was like a dam bursting: the ‘secret stories’ were all over the newspapers and magazines. So many times they gave these accounts anonymously, as ‘Mr. L,’ ‘Mr. K,’ ‘Mr. P,’ and so on. . . . People without any clear sense of conviction were going back and forth, here and there, in their search for power.“

Astonishingly, the ten-year veteran went on to quote a diary entry from when she was twenty-nine: ”There may be nothing sadder and more awful than one person betraying another. Once you’ve betrayed another’s trust and loyalty, the next betrayal becomes that much easier, until finally you’re living your whole life as someone who is not honorable to themselves.“

The betrayal then gives way to her characteristic strategy in choosing people to work with. Park is not one for close company. Since 2004, she has never had any "second-in-command." Former Environment Minister Yoon Yeo-joon, who took part in that year’s general elections alongside Park, also noted the connection between the sense of betrayal and the personnel strategy. "She seems to be making a lot of visible effort, but the problem is still there," he said. "The Blue House had suddenly found itself in pandemonium. To have the mental stretch to overcome that politically is something fearsome. She also worked to get where she is now. If you consider that process, it’s likely that she put on layers of [psychological] armor. She feels like there’s no one in the world she can trust in. And you can understand why she would think that. But she needs to take the armor off now that she‘s a popular politician, and she still can’t do it."

What kind of effect would that psychological armor have on a President Park Geun-hye? "It affects everything, including the personnel strategy," Yoon said. "What we’re seeing now will only be intensified [if she is elected]. Korea is developing toward social and economic democracy. But what Park has been doing recently bucks that trend. We keep seeing the undemocratic aspects of her leadership. She has been pretty authoritarian, after all. She’s been closed-off and vertically oriented. She doesn’t open up to or communicate with anyone. She’s neither hot nor cold. She’s just cool, all the time. You can’t have that. You need to be hot when the moment calls for it, and cold when that’s appropriate. Leaders in particular need to be like that. It’s the only way you have people warming to you. But Park Geun-hye keeps the same distance from everyone. That’s her hallmark.“

At the same time, Yoon added that if she did shed the psychological armor, she would be a politician of awesome power.

Please direct questions or comments to [englishhani@hani.co.kr]