Shim Jae-hoon. Veteran foreign correspondent
Shim Jae-hoon’s career in international journalism spanned several decades and continents. He started covering local news for the Korea Times before moving on to the New York Times and the Hong Kong-based Far Eastern Economic Review, one of the most important periodicals in Asia during the 20th century.
Shim covered South Korea’s strongman era along with the rise of Korean democracy. He covered other countries with authoritarian rulers and occasionally found himself in the crosshairs of dictators. In the 2006 book Korea Witness, an anthology of correspondents’ descriptions of their experiences covering Korea, Shim wrote a chapter on covering the news during Park Chung Hee’s iron-fisted rule.
Korea JoongAng Daily Chief Editor Anthony Spaeth and contributing writer Mike Kim speak to Shim about his experiences covering news in Korea during the Park Chung Hee regime.
Kim: What made you decide to cover the news in English?
Shim: Journalism was always my ambition. I was an early reader of newspapers. I kept reading newspapers – English language, Korean language – and I eventually became proficient in English.
Back in the 1960s, when Korea was a very poor and backward country, young people really wanted to go into journalism. It was half ambition, half activism – trying to fight things like poverty and corruption and all that political backwardness.
Kim: What was your beat at the Korea Times?
Shim: I did the society page. Not like in American newspapers: Society pages in American newspapers meant marriages and things like that. I covered traffic accidents and fires. It was like a city page in English papers.
Kim: Then you moved to a Korean paper.
Shim: I moved to Kyunghyang Shinmun. Although I began at the Korea Times, I wanted to see if I could work at a Korean language newspaper. I took up international news.
Kim: What brought you back into English-language journalism?
Shim: I decided that I didn’t want to spend my whole life working on wire agency copy instead of writing my own stories. I thought I needed to invest some time to get myself exposed to the west. I hadn’t gone to an American university or anything like that.
There was an opportunity at the Kyunghyang Shinmun that I could use to acquire some European languages like French and German. I used it to improve my French and German. German was my second foreign language. I decided to go to Europe to get myself exposed to what the West was really like.
When I came back to Korea, I couldn’t go back to local journalism. I’m sorry to say this, but it was really bad at that time. I couldn’t go back to what I had been doing several years earlier. I was on the lookout for a job in the foreign media and there was a chance opening of a local correspondent’s job at the New York Times. This was in 1974, when South Korea was locked in a military dictatorship. If I had known how tough the assignment was going to be, I’d have had second thoughts, to tell you the truth.
Kim: What responsibilities did you have?
Shim: I was just a stringer. The big stories were usually done by staffers based in Tokyo. They’d come here and write the big stories. I would do interpretation, memo-writing, make appointments. I was a fixer. But when they weren’t here, I would have to report and send dispatches. It was good. I learned a lot. It was hazardous, but it was very valuable.
Kim: How did you go from being a stringer to a full-fledged reporter?
Shim: I saw how Tokyo-based correspondents were operating. Believe it or not, they knew much more than I did about Korea.
I had just returned from four glorious years in Europe and I had no idea how tough the political situation in Korea had become. The Tokyo-based correspondents knew a whole lot.
It was a time when the entire South Korean media was under iron rule. They couldn’t report anything independently. Basically, they were printing handouts.
I remember once, when I’d started working for the New York Times, I had to find out where some secret military trials were being held.
Former President Yun Bo-seon was being arraigned before a military court on sedition charges. And I had no idea where this hearing was being held.
But these Tokyo-based correspondents knew exactly where and when, and it was clear they were relying on underground networks of sources: Underground information networks that were very active. Some based in New York. Some here in Seoul.
Kim: You said that the Park regime tightly controlled the Korean media. How did they limit the foreign press?
Spaeth: Don’t forget: There was no circulation of foreign press in Korea except for Time and Newsweek.
Shim: And wire services.
Spaeth: They could control that. Dictatorships could censor that.
Kim: But how did they keep the stories from getting out?
Spaeth: They prevented them from getting in.
Shim: It was very difficult to stop correspondents from flying in because South Korea was in a very peculiar situation. Even though it was under military rule, South Korea had a very unique situation because we had U.S. ground troops here and we were dependent on the U.S. for National Security.
Spaeth: It wasn’t a unique situation. The Philippines had it too.
Shim: Ah, yes! Anyway, this tied the hands of the Korea government because the media could make a lot of noise. Nearly 37,000 American soldiers died protecting Korea’s freedom during the Korean War.
For Korea to try and stop American reporters from getting in and write nasty stories – well, it was a tough business because the Pentagon wouldn’t stay silent, the State Department wouldn’t stay silent. It was a very peculiar situation.
So that partially tied the hands of the military government. Reporters could come in freely and even report freely, but the government made sure that what they reported wouldn’t get into the Korean media. That was what the government focused on: Write whatever you want but don’t let any of that get to Korean readers.
Kim: I understand that because of your coverage you were on the government’s radar. What sort of surveillance were you under?
Shim: To say that I was on the government’s radar would be an understatement. They couldn’t do anything to the American correspondents but they could control Koreans working for the American press. People like me were under absolute surveillance, which meant our office and home telephones were all tapped. Sometimes we were followed to see who we talked to and what we wrote.
If you had an uncle working for the government it would be very tough for you, but luckily I had no one in the government in my family. You had to have your tax records straight so you wouldn’t get into trouble. It was tough.
We’d get telephone calls saying, “The government would be displeased if you wrote about the anti-government demonstration you were at thirty minutes ago”.
Kim: You mentioned in your piece in Korea Witness that had Park Chung Hee not been killed in October 1979 you would have been arrested. What happened at that point?
Shim: Late 1979 was a period in which the government was really nervous. President Park considered the media to be one of the greatest dangers to his regime. Democracy had no place in his philosophy.
A lot of Korean reporters were going to jail. We had to write about Korean reporters going to jail or being kicked out of their jobs. Once I counted around 90 Korean reporters ousted from their jobs. The Dong-A Ilbo spearheaded a free press movement. The Chosun Ilbo would join later.
Christian churches were a major driving force behind dissent. The entire judicial system was cowed. The parliamentary system was broken. Press freedom was frozen. South Korea was one big cemetery. We had to cover this and, in 1979, the New York Times interviewed Kim Young-sam, whose political constituency at the time was Busan. In the interview he said that the United States must choose between the military dictatorship of Park or his democracy movement. That angered President Park.
He thought Kim was using U.S. influence to try and overthrow his government. So the National Assembly, which was controlled by Park, expelled Kim Young-sam. Busan rose up in rebellion. And I was in the middle of all this because it was a New York Times article that triggered the whole thing.
Within a few days, I was summoned by the prosecution and was asked to give my account of whether I or the New York Times conspired to intentionally trigger this protest or not. Of course I said no.
It was not the first time we’d interviewed opposition leaders of that stature. I found out after Park was killed, from a government source, that the KCIA had a plot to have me and Kim Young-sam arrested on sedition charges.
Spaeth: And how close was this to Park’s assassination?
Shim: I think I was called in a week before Park’s assassination.
I had unfortunately acquired a reputation of closely following dissidents’ movements and so American correspondents from Tokyo would come to say hello and swap notes. They’d drop into my office, which was observed by the intelligence people. One guy working for a government agency in charge of minding foreign correspondents, had a very biased picture of me. He thought I was the instigator of negative reporting. Some thought I was an agent of the two Kims the pro-democracy advocates, which I wasn’t.
Spaeth: That’s how they’d look at things. It had to be one side or the other.
Shim: Yeah, that’s how they looked at things. I thought I’d be locked up with Kim Young-sam. Except that Kim Young-sam, being such a big guy, could expect to get out eventually. But for a small fry like me .?.?. I’d be very easy to forget!
Spaeth: What impact did the death of Park Chung Hee make on Korea?
Shim: We all know what happened following his death: A new army group rose to take power in a political vacuum. Also, the people of Gwangju rose up in a bloody, gigantic uprising. Henry Scott-Stokes and I covered that story, dodging bullets and angry mobs, often beating our competitors with first stories out of the city and then with the first interview with then-General Chun Doo Hwan, who was coming to power in a new putsch. Those were my last stories for the New York Times.
The political turmoil following the collapse of the Park government kept South Korea in world headlines.
BY MIKE KIM contributing writer
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