Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. xxv, 444 pp. (Figures.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3168-4.
When South Korean President Syngman Rhee left office to begin a life of exile in 1960, it brought an abrupt close to his storied career as a political and public figure in modern Korea, one spanning the late Chosŏn, the colonial period, and the formation of an independent nation-state, albeit one marked by contestation and division. Little did he suspect, however, that his legacy would continue to be debated by historians and scholars well into the early twenty-first century, with a recent historiography just now beginning to explore the complex economic and social circumstances dating to his period of rule (1948–1960), especially given sufficient time to reflect and re-evaluate. Park Tae-gyun of Seoul National University, for example, has sought to outline the careful economic planning and bureaucratic work done by a small group of Korean social scientists and intellectuals from the late 1950s, and into the early 1960s. If Park’s intent is clearly not to exonerate Rhee, the effect of such a gesture suggests at least a more nuanced reading, especially in contrast to an earlier caricature in which the president simply waited on stage for Park Chung Hee to emerge with his ambitious visions for the future.
In keeping with this theme, Young Ick Lew’s timely study, The Making of the First Korean President (2014), offers a rich biographical portrait of the first ROK president in his multiple guises, beginning as a “Christian reformer,” and spanning the last quarter of the nineteenth century until the beginning of his presidency (1876–1948). Well-known as a senior figure and in particular, as a scholar of the Korean independence movement at the end of the nineteenth century, Lew offers here a deeply researched vision of Rhee as a flawed, complex individual capable of great achievement and ambition, as well as someone equally skilled at becoming mired in controversy, engaging with factions and intrigue. Drawing on a wide range of sources across several different languages, and holding access to Rhee’s personal documents, Lew presents his newest and perhaps most vital insights when he covers the period between Rhee’s departure from Korea in the early twentieth century and his re-emergence nearly four decades later, following liberation in 1945. While the broad contours of this career may be familiar to some readers—the time he spent in Hawaii, and his engagement with the Shanghai provisional government—the details provided here offer a potentially greater depth, and an argument actively promoting Rhee’s long-term motivation as a major figure behind the ideals of Korean independence, even characterizing him as a “freedom fighter” (281).
With his chosen periodization, Lew offers numerous links between the late Chosŏn and the early Republic of Korea, a choice that might remind some of the Cold War narrative conflict between the two Koreas, with both nations struggling to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the external world. Still, Lew’s version of events takes place less at the scale of the nation-state than via an individual, and he seeks to explain that individual over the long-term, countering the facile dismissal typical of some of the previous English-language scholarship. Equally interesting, Lew acknowledges his engagement with Robert Oliver’s famous (and deeply problematic) biography, a hagiographic account composed with access only to the English-language portion of Rhee’s personal papers. In this sense, the task that Lew sets for himself is extremely difficult from the outset, calling for an account drawing upon Rhee’s composition abilities in several languages; and moreover, one that must be far more critical than its predecessors. To a great extent, Lew succeeds in his chosen task of defamiliarizing this prominent figure, and equally, seeks to engage Rhee’s personal conflicts and failed efforts at diplomacy, actions earning him criticism from any number of quarters.
If in the end Lew’s major task is to convince the reader of the value of re-engaging with Rhee as a serious figure worthy of attention, he succeeds, providing shades of gray sufficient to complicate the existing picture. His careful documentation of Rhee’s travels and diplomatic work in a variety of contexts adds to his own previous work on the president, and makes extensive use of the papers obtained in the late 1990s, and now housed at Yonsei Unversity. In brief, the book works well as a vehicle designed to showcase a specific set of emerging sources, and in this respect, meets the terms it has set for itself. At the same time, his contention that Rhee was the individual best suited for the presidency as of the mid-1940s is bound to cause some controversy (281–293), particularly among those sympathetic to exploring alternative or counterfactual possibilities. Still, much like the major biography of Kim Il-Sung offered by Dae Sook Suh in the mid-1990s, the present work takes up a deeply familiar subject, or at least apparently so, before presenting it in revised form, asking new questions of a contentious, complicated figure.
John P. DiMoia
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 717-718