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South Korea THE DEMOCRATIC INTERLUDE
Rhee's resignation left a political void subsequently filled
by Ho Chong, whom Rhee had appointed foreign minister the day
before he resigned. Although Ho was a lifelong friend of Rhee, he
had maintained amicable relations with Democratic Party leaders
and thus was acceptable to all concerned. Between April and July
1960, Ho's transitional government maintained order, exiled Rhee
and his wife to Hawaii, and prepared for a new general election
of the National Assembly in July. That body revised the
constitution on June 15, instituting a parliamentary form of
government with a bicameral legislature. In the July election,
the Democratic Party won 175 of the 233 seats in the lower house
of the National Assembly. The second largest group, the
independents, won forty-nine seats. The Liberal Party won only
two seats. In the upper house, the Democratic Party won
thirty-one of the fifty-eight seats.
The Democratic Party had been a coalition of two divergent
elements that had merged in 1955 to oppose Rhee. When the common
enemy--Rhee and his Liberal Party--had been removed from the
scene and opportunities for power were presented, each group
sought to obtain the spoils for itself.
The Democratic Party candidate for the presidency in the
March 1960 election, Cho Pyong-ok, died of illness shortly before
the election, just as his predecessor, Sin Ik-hui, had in 1956.
The two groups openly struggled against each other during the
July elections for the National Assembly. Although they agreed on
Yun Po-son as presidential candidate and Chang Myon as their
choice for premier, neither had strong leadership qualities nor
commanded the respect of the majority of the party elite. Yun and
Chang could not agree on the composition of the cabinet. Chang
attempted to hold the coalition together by reshuffling cabinet
positions three times within a five-month period. In November
1960, the group led by Yun left the Democratic Party and formed
the New Democratic Party (Simmindang).
In the meantime, the tasks confronting the new government
were daunting. The economy suffered from mismanagement and
corruption. The army and police needed to be purged of the
political appointees who had buttressed the dictatorship. The
students, to whom the Democratic Party owed its power, filled the
streets almost daily, making numerous wide-ranging demands for
political and economic reforms, but the Democratic Party had no
ready-made programs. Law and order could not be maintained
because the police, long an instrument of the Rhee government,
were demoralized and totally discredited by the public. Continued
factional wrangling caused the public to turn away from the
party.
This situation provided a fertile ground for a military coup.
Whereas Rhee had been able to control the military because of his
personal prestige, his skill in manipulating the generals, and
the control mechanisms he had instituted, Chang lacked all these
advantages. When the demands of the young army officers under
Major General Park Chung Hee were rebuffed, and as political
power appeared to be increasingly hanging in the balance with no
one clearly in charge, the army carried out a coup d'état on May
16, 1961. Chang's own army chief of staff, Chang To-yong, joined
the junta and Chang's fragile government was toppled. (The junta
subsequently tried and convicted General Chang for attempting to
take over the junta.) The young officers' initial complaint had
been that Chang Myon had not kept a campaign pledge to weed out
corrupt generals from the South Korean army, and some Korean
sources attributed this failure to the intervention of highranking United States military officers, who feared the weakening
of South Korea's national security.
Yun Po-son sided with the junta and persuaded the United
States Eighth Army and the commanders of various South Korean
army units not to interfere with the new rulers. Yun stayed on as
president for ten months after the military junta took over
power, thereby legitimizing the coup. A small number of young
officers commanding 3,600 men had succeeded in toppling a
government with authority over an army of 600,000.
Data as of June 1990
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