The right of the press to scrutinize government is a foundational element of American democracy. Yet, from the very first days of the American Republic, there have been major tensions over the freedom of the press to criticize government, especially in its conduct of foreign affairs.1 As the United States has become more interventionist overseas, these tensions have become both more visible and more controversial. During the Vietnam War , the role of the press became a highly politicized issue, with critics, including President Richard Nixon , accusing journalists of losing the war on the home front.2 In the wake of subsequent interventions in the Middle East and elsewhere, the question of whether the press has been too supportive or critical of US foreign policy continues to inspire much public and academic debate.3
This book sits within a subset of this literature which explores how the press has dealt with one of the most controversial aspects of US foreign policy: its history of close relations with authoritarian allies . From the very beginning of the Cold War era, the United States supported repressive anti-communist governments across the world as part of the strategy of containment against global communism.4 Amongst the most significant and controversial of these alliances was the United States’ pivotal role in establishing and supporting the Republic of Korea (ROK). Between 1945 and 1948, the United States occupied the southern half of the Korean peninsula and paved the way to its becoming an independent state under the leadership of President Syngman Rhee. An ardent anti-communist and Korean nationalist who had spent over 30 years in exile in the United States, Rhee used his control of Korean security forces to repress virtually all dissenting political voices and to progressively undermine the power of the elected National Assembly. During and after the Korean War, the authoritarianism of the South Korean government continued to grow, even as it became the beneficiary of one of the largest foreign aid programs in US history.5
This book provides an account of how the American press reported on these developments. Rather than focusing on just the Korean War, the volume follows the trend of recent scholarship to look at the roots of authoritarianism in the occupation period. Historians such as Bruce Cumings and Allan Millett have compellingly argued that the United States made major errors in the development and implementation of policy in Korea, and that the negative consequences of these errors were quite visible in the often savage political, social and economic climate of the occupation.6 Could the press have done more to bring these mistakes to light? Did the press fail to act as an adequate check on US government power in Korea?
These are questions that have rarely been asked by historians. This project is the first archive-based account of how American journalism responded to one of the most significant stories in the history of American foreign relations. It explores not only why no major controversy ever erupted over American involvement in South Korea during this period, but also how journalists conceived of the problem of authoritarianism within the larger frameworks of the occupation and the Korean War.
The American Press and Rhee-era South Korea
This book is the first scholarly study of press coverage of South Korea during the Rhee era.7 It also the first study to examine any aspect of coverage of Korea in the years between the start of the occupation in 1945 and the onset of the Korean War in 1950. While the literature examining press coverage of the Korean War is relatively sizeable, it has generally focused on how journalists covered US combat operations and other US-centric aspects of the war.8 Very little attention has been paid to the way the press wrote about South Korea or its government.
To an extent, this dearth of scholarship simply reflects the limitations of coverage of South Korea during the wartime period. In the most comprehensive study of the relationship between the US government and the press during the war, Steven Casey concluded that journalists showed a remarkable lack of interest in probing South Korean politics.9 In his view, both US authorities and American journalists played a role in suppressing coverage that exposed uncomfortable truths about the regime the United States was fighting to save. In part, this was because the US government, and most journalists, interpreted the war as a Cold War struggle, and not a civil conflict. Moreover, the US military’s public relations programs encouraged journalists to ignore problems with the ROK and focus on more positive stories about the US–ROK relationship. As a result, the press chose to overlook allegations of South Korean atrocities and President Syngman Rhee’s repression of the ROK’s National Assembly until these issues became impossible to ignore.
Similar conclusions were reached by other notable scholars of the Korean War. In his seminal, albeit flawed, history of the origins of the Korean War, Bruce Cumings argued that most correspondents in Korea shared the military’s “nauseating stew of racial stereotypes” which perceived little virtue in the Koreans and their affairs.10 He also contended that American reporters, unlike some of their British counterparts, were simply “afraid to print what they witnessed in Korea.”11 Philip Knightley argued, in his celebrated history of war journalism, that the anti-communist patriotism of most American reporters in Korea drove them to ignore the horrendous impact of the war on the Korean population.12
While the South Korean people were often given short shrift by the press during the war, the same was not true of their leader, Syngman Rhee . In the 1950s, Rhee became a heroic figure for the American Right and received adoring profiles in popular magazines such as Time and Reader’s Digest . Robert E. Herzstein has shown how Rhee benefitted from a friendly, albeit mercurial, relationship with Time publisher and China lobbyist Henry Luce .13 In a study of American perceptions of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem , Seth Jacobs argued that both Rhee and Diem , as well as nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-Shek , embodied exactly the kind of Christian, pro-American and anti-communist strongman that many on the Right believed the United States needed as a bulwark against Soviet and Chinese expansionism.14 Yet, Rhee was in some ways quite distinct from his fellow East Asian autocrats. When it was founded in 1948, the ROK was a constitutional democracy with a political system loosely modelled on that of France. Although Rhee had considerable power as president, he depended on the independent-minded National Assembly to pass legislation and, at least in theory, to re-elect him as president after the end of his four-year term. While Rhee progressively undermined these democratic elements of the political system over the course of his presidency, his pro-democracy rhetoric and credentials were key parts of his appeal in the United States.
The literature’s focus on Rhee’s right-wing supporters has obscured both the scale and the vehemence of criticism of Syngman Rhee from other voices in the United States. Even before he became president of the ROK, Rhee was a major figure of hate for both liberals and the Left. Magazines such as the Nation persistently attacked Rhee for his reactionary anti-communist ideology and his role in polarizing Korean society. Reporters for mainstream newspapers with a liberal internationalist point of view, such as the Chicago Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor, often described Rhee as an extremist and a brutally repressive autocrat. During the years of the American occupation, an influential group of American journalists fiercely opposed Rhee’s rise to power under American auspices. Amongst a significant proportion of the American intellectual elite, Rhee was regarded as a dictator.15
Despite his significance within the history of US foreign relations, Rhee’s relationship with the United States has been neglected in the existing English language literature. Although studies of US relations with authoritarian allies in this period have recently begun to appear in significant number, the Rhee regime has so far failed to attract much interest from historians.16 No full English-language biography of Rhee has been published since 1960.17 In histories of the Korean War and its origins, the Rhee regime’s controversial status is often alluded to without elaboration.18 Few scholars have drawn attention to Rhee’s obsession with public relations; indeed, Rhee probably dedicated more attention to his image in the United States than any foreign leader in American history. South Korea’s entire diplomatic strategy throughout much of the late 1940s and 1950s was fixated on gaining the support of the American public. As Stephen Jin-Woo Kim observed in a study of South Korean foreign policy in the late 1950s: “In place of soldiers, weapons and dollars, Korean officials employed press conferences, lobbying, demonstrations, and the threat of national collapse to implement their singular strategy of miring the United States in Korea.”19 Although this strategy was first deployed by Rhee in the years of occupation, Rhee’s public lobbying efforts have received only passing mention in scholarly accounts of US–Korean relations between 1945 and 1954.20
Much of what is known about Rhee’s public relations strategy comes from the memoir of former Rhee lobbyist Robert T. Oliver . A professor of rhetoric and speech studies at a series of colleges in the northeast of the United States, Oliver spent 18 years, from 1942 to 1960, moonlighting as Rhee’s director of public relations activities in the United States. As part of this work, he published a series of books on the history of the ROK, and a biography of Rhee, for the popular press. Almost two decades after the fall of the Rhee regime, he published a memoir of his time working for Rhee.21 Oliver claimed that both American policy-makers and the press reduced the issues in Korea to “oversimplified clichés,” with Rhee portrayed as an “extreme rightist” in spite of his supposedly liberal socio-economic views.22 After taking power in 1948, Oliver wrote that Rhee faced a crippling and unjustified barrage of savage criticism for his allegedly totalitarian treatment of the Korean people. Oliver thus portrayed Rhee as a perennial underdog without any major constituency of support in the United States.
Former Tokyo-based reporter Hugh Deane offered a very different interpretation in his memoir published in 1999. A correspondent for the Nation and several other left-wing newspapers, Deane recalled that the media portrayed the “Rhee quasi-dictatorship” as a “praiseworthy young democracy valiantly confronting a despotic Soviet puppet in the north.”23 He put the blame for this misrepresentation, at least in part, on the “frigidly Cold War” atmosphere in Korea, with journalists expected to write in support of the fervently anti-communist stance of the American authorities.24 Deane claimed that only a handful of reporters wrote honestly about what they saw—although Deane neither explored the question of how or why their reporting was distinct, nor the methods the authorities used to control the rest of the press. The stark differences in Oliver and Deane’s accounts of the same events reflect th...