Introduction to the supplement

Abstract

Today the American press focuses on what might be called the domestic consequences of United States policy toward Korea. We read about the troop withdrawal issue, the unfolding Korea Lobby scandal, and, perhaps, Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) activities within the U.S. The following supplement, however, reminds us of the far worse consequences of American and Korean policies for those who remain within Korea. It was the U.S. CIA which helped to set up the KCIA, thereby providing to the diffuse authoritarianism of the Rhee regime period (1948–1960) an organizational weapon which has kept Park in power through sixteen years of Korean dissent and upheaval: it is the south Korean people who continue to suffer the consequences. It was the Johnson and Nixon administrations which sanctioned what amounted to bribery, first to get the south Koreans to commit troops in the Vietnam War, and then to keep them there as Nixon and Kissinger prolonged the war. It was the Nixon administration which kept a conspicuous silence when Park in 1972 ripped up the old constitution, did away with even the fiction of procedural democracy, and instituted a frankly authoritarian regime.