Word: rhee
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Embarrassed Korean army officers identified the would-be assassin as Major Kim Ki Ok, 34, a wounded veteran of the early Korean war days, and said that he was mentally upset and perhaps insane. But President Syngman Rhee's nimble propaganda office saw an opportunity to make a little hay. "Major Kim had served in the front during the fighting and was sent to the rear with wounds," the government explained. "It is believed that the shock which came with his disappointment at the armistice and failure to achieve the unification of Korea affected his mind. He confessed that...
...army announced that it would court-martial Major Kim, but General Taylor made a personal appeal to Rhee, urging clemency...
Back in Seoul, Methodist Rhee discovered that some 5,000 Korean Buddhist monks are married. This, he decided, was another example of the sinister influence that the Japanese exerted during their occupation of Korea (some Japanese sects of Buddhism allow monks to marry). Rhee promptly issued a statement of policy, "to restore the old Korean traditions" and the celibate priesthood...
...about 700 of the 1,800 Buddhist monks and nuns in Korea who have stayed single, Rhee's stand opened vistas of power, prestige and the best priestly accommodations instead of the worst. Some 500 of them trudged down Seoul's main street to Rhee's mansion behind a taxicab with a loudspeaker blaring: "We will fight to the last man for the purification of Korean Buddhism, even if we may die from cold and hunger...
Last week Korea's Ministries of Home and Education distributed a new Rhee ukase demanding that "married monks should repent their past and become laymen." The badly frightened family men, who claim that Buddhist priests have been marrying for 300 years, met with representatives of the protesting faction of celibates and offered to cede them the top temple priesthoods and move their families out of the priestly residences and into village quarters. At week's end the unmarried 700 were still insisting on out-and-out expulsion...