The assassination of Park Chung-hee is arguably the most spectacular non-event in modern Korean history.
Spectacular as the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth President of the Republic of Korea, who has been ruling the country for about two decades, was shot dead by his right-hand man, the head of the notorious intelligence agency whose raison d’être was to perpetuate Park’s iron-fisted rule.
Yet it goes so awry right after its success. Kim Jae-gyu got arrested by military intelligence in five hours.
And this is where the théâtre de l’absurde reaches its apogee. The military intelligence initially hesitated to use its advanced interrogation technique on Kim.
The Director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency simply couldn’t have acted alone in assassinating the President. There might already be some military units in support of Kim on their way to the heart of Seoul.
But as soon as it became clear that he acted alone, the military intelligence went on its usual procedure thus the first reappearance of Kim in public has him with one black eye.
Throughout the chaos following Park’s death, it was the chief of the military intelligence Chun Doo-hwan who finally emerged and took power. Meanwhile, Kim was sentenced to death after the fast-tracked court process which didn’t last more than two weeks.
What a bummer.
So what was in Kim’s mind at the time?
It is well known that Kim himself testified before the judges that his sole motivation of the revolution—he preferred to call the incident this way—was to end Park’s despotism and bring liberal democracy to the people.
Few were convinced at the time but more and more began to see the incident differently as the country becomes democratized and the passing of time let people put things in perspective.
Park Geun-hye’s election as the eighteenth President in 2012 further widened the perception gap. Those who vehemently opposed the daughter of the strongman as the leader of the democratized republic started hailing Kim as a revolutionary and a liberator.1
Recent hit film The Man Standing Next renders the now popular belief in a slightly fictionalized setting.
But it seems that even the director of the film thought portraying Kim as a firm believer of liberal democracy would be a long shot.
After stacking up Kim’s hatred toward Cha Ji-cheol, Park’s chief of security out of competition and his growing frustration towards Park, those which were without a doubt the prime mover of the incident, the film instead pictures Kim felt that Park had long betrayed the great cause of the revolution, or the coup Park and his followers in the military launched in 1961.
Many of the key officials of the Park regime, however, deny that Kim had a cause greater than his hatred.
Kim Jong-pil (aka JP), the chief lieutenant of Park since the 1961 coup throughout the regime’s first decade, even said Kim had an anger management issue and a direct witness of the incident told him that Kim shot Cha and Park out of a paroxysm of anger.
We have ample reason to doubt JP’s veracity.2 Yet this seems to be closest to the truth.
After all, Kim was the head of the notorious intelligence agency, which didn’t mind torturing even lawmakers who dared to stand up against the regime, not to mention the ordinary citizen.3
Furthermore, there are more witnesses to Kim’s anger management issue. One of Kim’s subordinates in the KCIA remembers when Kim pulled out a pistol out of anger and pointed it against Koreagate lobbyist Kim Hancho when he refused to tell the details of his lobbying.4
Just before his execution on May 24th, 1980, Kim said that he now expects the people to enjoy liberal democracy.
Unbeknownst to him was that a few days ago Chun the new one in power ordered one of the cruelest crackdowns of popular protest in history.
At least 165 civilians are recorded to be killed throughout the Gwangju Uprising.
But how it was possible for one man, however powerful, could kill the President and his chief of security at the same time?
The more you delve into the incident the less it makes sense. None could have put this in a way better than a military lawyer who investigated the case firsthand:
Kim’s assassination was too sloppy to be premeditated but too meticulous to be accidental.
Kim Choong-sik, The Directors of Namsan, revised and enlarged edition, 2020, p.691
Most critical in the assassination of Park was that Cha the chief of Presidential security had no firearms in hand at the time.
Kim’s first shooting came to halt as his pistol failed after the second round. Kim managed to finish Cha and Park only after he went back to his subordinates to get a new pistol.
The course of history would have gone a very different path if Cha had something to stop Kim.
Why didn’t Cha have any firearms? It is said that Park didn’t like firearms to be seen when drinking.
Another mystery lies in how Kim was able to persuade his subordinates to join him in assassinating the President with such short notice.
It is well known that they were very loyal to Kim but it would take more than loyalty to join the assassination of the strongman who’s been ruling the country for 18 years.
The President’s Last Bang offers an interpretation by focusing on one of Kim’s subordinates.
Unlike The Man Standing Next, The President’s Last Bang does not try hard to read Kim’s mind. No motivation other than Kim’s hatred towards Cha is given throughout the whole film.
Actually, it doesn’t give a damn about who the big guys really were: Park is portrayed as little more than an old lecher; Cha as a zealot who is obsessed with a Schutzstaffel-style uniform.
The film instead zeroes in on one KCIA officer who is a devoted follower of Kim. He’s in charge of protocols in name alone while he was more of a Presidential pimp in reality.
His frustration over everything starts and ends the film. The sheer shallowness of his duty made him join his boss’s crazy plot without much thought. Being shut out from what’s going on after his boss got arrested, he has nothing else to do than to go back home and join his wife’s prayer to the god he doesn’t believe in.
Another interesting character in the film is the old butler of the safe house where the incident happens. Man of few words, he keeps on his duty while providing the key tips to Kim’s henchmen which lead them to the successful assassination.
As Park’s body leaves the safe house in the Presidential vehicle, he takes off his jacket and throws it behind his back as though he’s never going to wear it again.
In the next morning, while other workers in the safe house are terrified of what would come in the aftermath of the President’s death, he eats his breakfast with no expression, like ordinary people who have to live out another day.
Even though it was Kim who pulled the trigger, the Park regime has been imploding long before then: people began to stand up against the regime as the economy falters with its policy failures.
The massive protest in Busan which occurred ten days before Park’s death was the last sign of the failing regime, only to be confirmed by Kim’s pulling the trigger to Park’s head.
In a way, the inexplicability of the assassination comes from the narrowness of focus.
- A self-styled critical biography of Kim published in 2013 signifies this shift in trend despite its questionable quality. ↩︎
- JP was the closest revolutionary comrade to Park even though the two had a difficult relationship later in the regime’s latter decade, mostly due to Park’s paranoia over JP’s growing influence. It would be hard to expect JP to say anything good of Kim. ↩︎
- JP once recalled that Kim Jae-gyu visited him more than a year ago before the assassination and told him he’s repurposing the KCIA into “focusing its all functions and resources to serve Park as the President-for-life.” ↩︎
- Kim Choong-sik, The Directors of Namsan, revised and enlarged edition, 2020, p.626 ↩︎
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