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The Uncrackable. Syngman Rhee is the walnut of Asian politics. Brown, wrinkled, iron-shelled, he calmly resists the tremendous pressure of managing his tragic country.
Seated a few yards from him, the visitor does not notice the marks of strain—the extended eyelids, the twitching right eye, the flaccid skin—but sees only the hard, skeptical eyes, the restless energy of the small frame. Rhee is the last of the old heroes of the Korean struggle for independence, a man with long memories. Just outside Seoul lie the ruins of Westgate prison, where the Emperor Koh-Jong's jailers spliced Rhee's fingers between wooden wands which the jailers twisted until his fingers were almost ripped from the joints; there he was imprisoned for seven years.
As a youth, Rhee had attended the Pai Chai Methodist Mission school, and now the missionaries and their wives visited him in jail. There he became converted to Christianity. When the Japanese took over Korea in 1904, Rhee was released in a general amnesty and immediately went to the U.S. For six years he studied in American universities, got an M.A. from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Princeton. Back in Korea, while heading up a Korean Christian student movement, he began undercover agitation against the Japanese. When the conquerors got his number, he slipped off to Hawaii in 1912. He was to be an exile from his native land for 33 years.
Head Worth $300,000. In Seoul the revolutionaries set up an underground provisional government, named Rhee as first president in absentia. The Japanese began a bloody purge of the nationalists and put a price of $300,000 on Rhee's head. At a conference in Shanghai in 1920 the Korean nationalists laid plans for organized military action against the Japanese. Later, when the Japanese army attacked Manchuria, a 20,000-man Korean national army fought beside Chinese soldiers.
None of these events have, been forgotten by Korean patriots, for whom the national struggle for independence is as much in living memory as the American Revolution was in the minds of Americans in the early 1800s. Thus, to his countrymen, Rhee has something of the stature of George Washington; and if his people have not yet heard of a Korean Thomas Jefferson, it is because the political climate of Korea (and Rhee himself) is against the free development of such a typically democratic figure.
Vigilant Momma. In 1932, while attempting to put Korea's case before an indifferent League of Nations in Geneva, Rhee met Francesca Maria Barbara Donner, 34, the daughter of a family of Viennese iron merchants. Two years later they were married in a Methodist ceremony in New York. The Rhees live in a modest mansion on the rolling hillside behind Seoul, only 30 miles south of the front. In their household Madame Rhee maintains constant vigilance.