Word: rhee
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...prison Rhee got the treatment considered fitting for top-rank political offenders. He was subjected to daily torture -finger mashing, beating with three-cornered rods, burning of oil paper around the arms. He wore a 20-lb. weight around his neck, was kept handcuffed and locked in stocks...
...imprisonment and that improved his lot considerably. The torture stopped. He was transferred to another prison, found that he could smuggle out editorials for his newspaper. In the long prison years he also wrote The Spirit of Independence, a book which seized the imagination of Korean patriots, helped establish Rhee as spiritual leader of the nationalist movement. By this time Rhee had become a Methodist-like China's Chiang Kaishek...
Harvard & Hunting Dogs. In 1904, after Rhee had been behind bars for seven years, the Russo-Japanese War began and in the confusion which gripped Korea a nationalist group temporarily seized control of the Korean government. Rhee was released from prison, headed for the U.S. as a special envoy of the new government. He tried to persuade President Theodore Roosevelt that Korea should not be handed over to Japan in the Russo-Japanese peace conference which Roosevelt had arranged. Roosevelt, Rhee remembers, "received me cordially" at Oyster Bay; but Rhee's request to attend the peace conference was refused...
After his mission failed, Rhee stayed in the U.S., went on with his Western education. He got an A.B. from George Washington University and an M.A. from Harvard, then went to Princeton to get his Ph.D. When the dean of Princeton's Graduate School questioned his academic qualifications, Rhee stated that he had studied Latin for one year, which seemed to him to be enough, asked to be excused from the usually required study of German and Greek. Wrote Rhee with ill-concealed annoyance, "Beside my own tongue, in which I am known to be a good writer...
...year that Japan deposed the Korean Emperor and openly annexed his kingdom, Syngman Rhee returned to Korea as a Y.M.C.A. worker, doing a bit of political agitation on the side. The Japanese, who distrusted all Christians, were doubly distrustful of Syngman Rhee. They assigned as his permanent shadow a police agent named Yoon Piung-hi, one of the most notorious of the "hunting dogs," i.e., Koreans in the Japanese secret service. A specialist in a kind of primitive psychological warfare, Yoon Piung-hi assiduously spread rumors about Rhee. On one occasion Rhee spent the night away from home, sleeping...