Word: seoul
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Within sight of two tanks hidden discreetly behind the trees, thousands of mourners flocked in front of the capitol in Seoul last week, in a mass wake for South Korea's slain President Park Chung Hee. Day after day, uniformed schoolchildren, silk-clad housewives and bearded village elders disembarked from rickety country buses and surged through a choking cloud of incense past the dozen black-draped altars. There, Buddhist priests murmured their sutras while mourners prostrated themselves in grief. With a shrug, a government worker whispered the prevailing mood of sorrowful but stoical resignation: "Gone is gone...
...surface, at least, there was a semblance of stability and normality in Seoul. The 10 p.m. curfew ordered under martial law closed down the city's busy neon nightlife. Still wary that North Korea might use Park's death as a pretext for invasion, South Korea's own 600,000-man armed force, as well as the 39,000 U.S. troops stationed in the country, remained on alert. Stepped-up intelligence surveillance, however, detected no threatening military movements across the Demilitarized Zone. Most of all, South Korea's interim emergency government seemed to be functioning smoothly...
Last week Seoul government circles quietly leaked a third, more elaborate version of the murder story, this one involving General Chung. According to this widely circulated, "semiofficial" account, Kim tried to persuade Chung to join the conspiracy, declare martial law and mobilize certain military forces, presumably for the purpose of taking over the country. According to these reports, Chung refused and ordered the arrest of Kim and his coconspirators...
...Always austere and humorless, he grew even more introspective when his wife Yook Young Soo was killed during an assassination attempt on his own life in 1974. After the nine-day period of national mourning in South Korea, his body will probably be buried next to her grave, in Seoul's National Cemetery...
DIED. Park Chung Hee, 61, since 1961 the autocratic, anti-Communist leader of South Korea; from a gunshot "accidentally" fired by the chief of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency; in Seoul. (See WORLD...