The big thing I learned from Kwangju was the tremendous constraint within which we operated, as the foreign press in the field. Basically, this was nothing to do with censorship, however troublesome, and not really to do with budgetary limitations, not then. The essential limitation was the modus operandi of the foreign press on the loose. We were all showing up for a few days in Kwangju at a time, if at all. Just a very few days. Sixteen dozen things were happening behind our backs, over the years, and we never had the faintest clue. Consider the situation in Kwangju itself, within the city limits. This was, at the time of the uprising, a city of several hundred thousand people. How much of that city could be covered, in all honesty, at any given time, by the likes of Norman Thorpe of The Asian Wall Street Journal, or Gebhard Hielscher of the Suddeutsche Zeitung on a bicycle or Henry S. S. of The New York Times on foot? Stuff was going on all around us – literally within yards – that we could not pin down, and might most likely not notice. Two possible strategies were possible. One, and the most common one, was to cluster together, and exchange information, however sparse. The other strategy – for those seeking exclusives – was to play the lone ranger. Neither was very practical. Even at the best of times it was hard to get one’s story into the paper, once the heat was off, and students were no longer being dragged off to their fates. I cannot remember ever doing a story on that topic which is considered so fundamental now – the question of interrogation and torture.

What made Kwangju so special? To me, it was the intimate involvement of the U.S., honestly. There are and there have been situations in Asia, where truly spectacular, world-shaking events were happening, and the whole world was agog and to be there, on the spot, was very special, if one was in the news business. Tiananmen, for example. But Tiananmen, coming a decade after Kwangju, was in no way the responsibility of the U.S.; Kwangju was. The U.S. commanders in the country and the people responsible in Washington were up to their elbows in moral responsibility. All of our coverage at the NYT was geared toward making that obvious. I think we did more damage in the eyes of the U.S. individuals in the firing line than any other publication. One of them was Ambassador William H. Gleysteen. Even years after Kwangju, he was complaining to my colleagues at the NYT, so they told me, that I had ruined his career as a diplomat. I was left in no doubt that my existence was sorely regretted. At a gathering in Seoul one day, I saw Gen. John A. Wickham nudge his wife in the ribs, and point to the notorious me. Both Gleysteen and Wickham wrote short books on their experiences in Korea that I have not read. Nothing they could write could change my mind as to their culpability.

This matter of the American responsibility for Kwangju – so blatant, so under-reported in the U.S. press – has long been considered a taboo subject in writing about Korea. But I was there. I put my career and my life on the line for this. The point is not complicated. The American and South Korean governments worked hand in glove on everything. The U.S. officials responsible should have ground it into that infernal bastard Gen. Chun Doo Hwan the moment he seized power on Dec. 18, 1979, in a couple of firefights in Seoul – shoving other more senior generals to one side – he was out of line. As it was, the U.S. officials responsible let events trickle on into the spring of 1980 – in a climate when everyone was waiting for Chun to strike again and seize control of the country, as he did – and they did not tie Chun to his office chair, and gag the man. Which is what they should have done.

The man was absolutely blatant. I had good contacts in the military and I could see Chun. I called on him with Shim Jae Hoon. He was cordial. He was friendly. He was also extremely stupid. There was talk that if you stood Chun up against a wall, the whole of the back of his head would have touched that wall.

Silly, abusive stuff, no doubt. I think it is because we Western correspondents – forget the Japanese media, they never lifted a finger – in effect went along with the mood that Chun was inevitable as the new leader (and as the successor to Park Chung Hee, his mentor) that we feel so awkward about it still. You see, all of this was happening just after Vietnam had come to an end. The official nightmare in the Carter White House and at State, where my friend Dick Holbrooke was responsible for Korea, was that “another Vietnam” would pop up on their plates. Vietnam had hurt the U.S. military that badly. For a few hours on the night of Dec.18, 1979, it felt as if Korea was coming unstitched, as Chun launched his bid for power in Seoul. Had it not been the dead of winter, and deadly cold, and had the firefights in the heart of Seoul not erupted so suddenly, perhaps, just possibly, the North would have struck. These days, if we are wise, we do not have the same old fears of North Korea, because China is there, as a revived force in world politics and will never allow Kim Jong Il one inch of space (if you ask me). But at the end of the 1970s, with China only just starting up on the path set by Deng toward reforms and industrial expansion and best relations with the West, that was not yet a time when Beijing controlled Pyongyang. In any event, the American officials responsible gave Chun all the rope possible … and then did not pull hard on it, going into the spring of 1980, and indeed instead launched their little move in Kwangju. Maybe what Chun and his colonels were really after was showing the U.S. who was in charge. If so, they accomplished exactly that goal, sharing the burden of the bloodshed in May 1980.

As we all know, the story ended happily – for officialdom in Seoul and Washington. That is to say, the Reagan transition team, produced a master stroke in the fall of 1980, when they struck a deal with Chun’s lot. This was to promise to Chun that he would be the first official guest of the Reagan White House in early 1981, provided that Chun did not hang Kim Dae Jung first. That was the secret deal, well, secret at the time, that launched the Reagan administration. Meanwhile, what was done by U.S. officials to address the issue of Kwangju? That is still the same issue: Who was responsible? I have no doubt who they were: Chun and the Americans.

Tell me, it wasn’t so. ❶