Syngman Rhee
The US-educated, fiercely anti-Communist first president of South Korea, whose authoritarian twelve-year rule ended in the student-led April Revolution of 1960.
Syngman Rhee spent three decades abroad demanding a free Korea, then ruled the southern half of it for twelve years in a way that was fiercely anti-Communist but rarely democratic. He is the founding president South Koreans have never quite known how to remember: the man who built the state, and the man students overthrew.
The exile who came home
Rhee was born in 1875 under a dying Korean monarchy and jailed young for agitating against it. He left for the United States, earned a doctorate from Princeton in 1910, the first Korean to hold an American doctorate, and spent most of the next thirty years in Hawaii and Washington lobbying for Korean independence while Japan ruled the peninsula. When Japan surrendered in 1945 and Korea was split at the 38th parallel, the Americans occupying the South needed an anti-Communist figurehead who spoke fluent English and hated Moscow. Rhee, elderly and uncompromising, fit. In 1948 the National Assembly elected him the first president of the Republic of Korea.
Two years later, North Korea invaded. Rhee led the South through three years of war that killed millions and flattened the country, and he did it as an absolutist: he opposed the 1953 armistice so bitterly that he tried to wreck it by releasing some 27,000 anti-Communist prisoners without American consent.
Power without limits
Peace exposed what the war had masked. Rhee treated the young republic as personal property. In 1952 he forced through a change to allow direct election of the president, and in 1954 his party rammed through an amendment, passed on a rigged vote count, lifting term limits for him alone. Opponents were jailed or worse, the press was muzzled, and police and paramilitary thugs did the rest.
The end came over an election. In March 1960 Rhee won a fourth term uncontested after his rival died, but his machine also stole the vice-presidency through blatant fraud. When a student killed by a police tear-gas shell washed up in the port of Masan, protest exploded into the April Revolution. On 19 April, police fired on crowds in Seoul and killed scores. Within a week the army refused to save him. Rhee resigned on 26 April 1960 and flew into exile in Hawaii, where he died in 1965, never returning home.
Rhee left South Korea a fixed identity and an unfinished argument. The identity stuck: staunchly pro-American, implacably anti-North, welded to the alliance that still defends it. The unfinished argument was democracy. His fall did not deliver it, a military coup swallowed the republic within a year, and Koreans would not vote in a genuinely free presidential election until 1987. The old exile had won a country and lost its trust, and the students who chased him out proved that anti-Communism alone would never be enough to make a people obey.