U.S.-Korea summits: Things were sometimes interesting

The first meeting between U.S. and Korean leaders was in December 1952, although Dwight D. Eisenhower was still president-elect. Honoring his campaign promise to “go to Korea,” Mr. Eisenhower visited Korea from Dec. 2 to Dec. 5. The visit itself was not announced or publicized ― the front lines were not far north of Seoul ― and Mr. Eisenhower and Mr. Rhee met for only about an hour on the first full day of the visit. The two men watched a military training exercise together on Dec. 4. Mr. Eisenhower spent the bulk of his time in Korea talking with military commanders and visiting combat units near the front lines north of Seoul. The meeting was preordained to be tense; Mr. Eisenhower had won the presidency on his pledge to end the war, and Mr. Rhee was still full of zeal to reunify Korea by force.
Those tensions became a theme of the U.S. relationship with Korea during the rest of Mr. Rhee’s administration; they were highlighted in the mutual defense treaty between the two countries signed in 1953, to which the U.S. Senate attached a proviso that said essentially that the American commitment to Korea’s defense would not apply if the South invaded the North. There was a second Eisenhower-Rhee meeting in July 1954, but no more during the rest of Mr. Rhee’s time in office as Koreans grew increasingly restive under his authoritarian rule.
The next summit was in 1961, the year after Mr. Rhee was overthrown and died in exile in Hawaii. Park Chung Hee, then the chairman of the Supreme Council for National Reconstruction, met President John F. Kennedy in the United States in November. Mr. Park traveled again to Washington in May 1965, and Lyndon B. Johnson met Mr. Park in Korea in late October 1966. The two men met again in Honolulu in April 1968, a time of rising tension triggered by the January 1968 North Korean attack on the Blue House and its capture of the USS Pueblo, an American spy ship, a few days later. The two leaders agreed to hold annual meetings of their senior defense officials, the Security Consultative Meetings that continue to this day. Mr. Park met Richard Nixon in San Francisco in August 1969 and Gerald Ford in Seoul in November 1974.
William Gleysteen, the U.S. ambassador to Korea in 1979, described at some length the meeting between Park Chung Hee and Jimmy Carter in June of that year. President Carter’s agenda was to reduce U.S. troop levels in Korea and press Mr. Park to improve his human-rights practices. Mr. Gleysteen, in his book “Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence,” described the poisonous meeting and the successful efforts of Korean and U.S. aides to cobble together a workable ― even constructive ― communique. Mr. Park was assassinated less than four months later by his intelligence chief.
Perhaps the most fascinating of the U.S.-Korea summits came in January-February 1981, when Chun Doo Hwan, who had seized power in a rolling coup after Mr. Park’s death, visited Washington to meet with President Ronald Reagan. Kim Dae-jung, then an opposition leader, had been arrested and sentenced to death by Mr. Chun; before his election, Mr. Reagan had already voiced his opposition to Mr. Carter’s plans for further U.S. troop reductions in Korea, and Mr. Chun expected a much more sympathetic ear from the conservative Mr. Reagan.
It is still not clear whether Mr. Chun’s threats to execute “Korea’s most dangerous man,” as he called Mr. Kim, were real or a bargaining card to secure an early summit and more normal ties with the new administration. But a deal was struck: On the day after Mr. Reagan’s inauguration, the White House announced that Mr. Chun would be the first foreign leader to meet Mr. Reagan in Washington; a few days later, Mr. Chun lifted martial law and commuted Mr. Kim’s sentence. Mr. Reagan visited Seoul in November 1983 and Mr. Chun was in Washington a second time in April 1985.
Roh Tae-woo, Mr. Chun’s successor and the first directly-elected Korean president, met Mr. Reagan and his successor, George Bush, on seven occasions; Kim Young-sam met Mr. Clinton six times. By this time, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forums provided an annual occasion for top-level diplomacy.
President Kim Dae-jung met Bill Clinton on five occasions in Seoul, Washington and elsewhere; his first meeting with the newly-inaugurated George W. Bush in March 2001 was marked by the skepticism Mr. Bush displayed publicly about Mr. Kim’s policies of reconciliation with North Korea. The two met twice more; in Shanghai at an APEC leaders’ meeting and in Seoul in February 2002.

by John Hoog