Wiki I'm afraid, but the assassination of Park Chung-hee by his close friend, KCIA director KIm Jae-kyu reads like a revengers tragedy. Here's the climax: Km, Park and eminense grise and chief bodyguard Cha Ji-chul are all sat at dinner together. The discussion turns to recent protests in Busan:
Park: I was going to have Kim Young Sam arrested before the U.S. Secretary [of Defense Harold] Brown's visit but Yu Hyuk-in talked me out of it. This won't do. We are enforcing the law, so what is the problem? Doesn't the U.S. punish its lawbreakers?
Kim (Jae-kyu): Although Young Sam was not punished with any legal actions, people believe that the expulsion itself is a punishment. It looks like we're punishing him twice for one thing.
Park: The KCIA should be fearsome. All you do is hold onto misconduct reports on NDP lawmakers. Arrest them.
Kim: Yes, sir. But one must take a broad approach in politics and give something to the other side, too. They won't come out otherwise.
Cha: Mr. President. I know all about NDP lawmakers. Not one of them really wants to resign his seat. Demonstrations were instigated by anti-government wretches using the media. They are no problem at all. The sons of bitches, NDP and students, I'll mow them down clean with tanks. In Cambodia, it was no big deal to kill millions. A trifling 100,000 or 200,000, mow them down with tanks.
Kim (nudging Chief Secretary Kim Gye-won with his right hand, who was sitting on right): Serve Mr. President correctly! (Looking at Cha) Mr. President, how could politics be done right with scum like this at your side? (Kim fired at Cha. Cha was shot in the arm as he raised his hand) Mr. President, govern with broad outlook! (Kim shot Park in left chest.)
Then he shot him in the head, which further inhibited Park's ability to govern with a broad outlook.
The Parks and the Northern Kims go way back: to the days when Kim was an anti-Japanese guerilla and Park was a soldier in the Japanese controlled Manchukuo army. Kim was eventually forced into the Soviet Union and returnedto take power in the North on Soviet bayonets. Park laundered his role as a Japanese puppet first by joining a pro-Communist group in the postwar South, then by betraying its members and finally, when President, by blaming the Japanese takeover on the British Empire.
Kim Intelligence (I'm taking the liberty of giving the chap a Welsh type name/occupation binary here) grew disillusioned with Park after the declaration of the Yushin Constitution in 1972, which combined a standard development-above-all policy orientation with an effective President for life role for Park. Interestingly, this was declared in fairly close co-ordination with the North, which hints that Park rather admired the way that the Kim family ran their fiefdom and wanted to institute something similar in his own context.
There's no evidence that Ms Park has any such ambitions, though she reportedly got on well with KJI on her sole trip to the North. This may be part of the reason why she won.
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