Tongsun Park: The Man Behind the Smile
HOWE, RUSSELL WARREN
SOUTH KOREA'S SECRET WEAPON Tongsun Park: The Man Behind the Smile BY RUSSELL WARREN HOWE Washington The South Koreans certainly get around, the average U.S. citizen must be thinking these days....
...But most of the political alliances the young student began to make were with Rightwingers south Carolina's Senator Strom Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, the Buckley brothers...
...He had always refused to give interviews...
...Malatesta said: "TS' word is his bond...
...He spoke with the assumption that Park would be put off, finding the whole process too hard...
...Intentionally adhering to Korean rules, I did not come to the point until he appeared perfectly at ease...
...He lied with regal aplomb: "I am just not interested in politics...
...I remember when he took --PLS SCAN ALL TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS IN ALL TXTS up tennis to try to reduce his weight...
...and Washington realtor Leo Bernstein once repossessed the George Town Qub because TS was behind payments on the land...
...Within a day or so TS was in London, where he remains...
...A clearer signal came in 1973...
...In 1975, another beacon flashed...
...the ceilings are heavy with ornate carved beams imported from Britain...
...Since no Korean government funds would be involved, he technically would not be a lobbyist under the U.S...
...Replacing the receiver, he glanced at the two-dial wrist watch that told him the time in Washington and Seoul...
...He's driven by a desire to compete with his smarter brother and be 'somebody.' " There's another problem toothe third force in his life...
...First there was Sun Myung Moon, organizing a whole church, campaigning for Richard Nixon, marrying 600 couples at a time and all the while manufacturing the M-16, the U.S...
...More specifically, Park appears to be propelled by three forces...
...but it is also because he is an "Oriental," the Occident's archetypically faceless man...
...He roomed in the same house as a young Hoosier liberal, John Brademas, still a friend and today House majority whip...
...In addition, they have subpoenaed the financial records of several past and present congressmen...
...His chief fault is his love of the limelight, which he pretends is simply his enjoyment of being liked...
...He seemed embarrassed, and subsidized his American fellow students to take her out on dates...
...It all looks like a studio seta miniaturized version of, say, Boodle's Club in London...
...He needs to be pampered and to pamper himself the baby...
...Both the family friend and the former Georgetown classmate think Seoul set up TS to lobby with his own money so that he could be arrested at the Anchorage airport for smuggling gifts for his Washington friends into the U.S...
...Park put all his Washington properties up for sale...
...He went back to Seoul to work under his brother, Kun-sak, who took over Miryung Sonsa...
...More alarmingly, four incriminating documents-including a three-page list of congressmen, with dollar figures attached were seized...
...While Park generally preferred the House to the Senate, because it was more conservative, he had to have friends in the senior chamber, too...
...He returned to Washington by the mid-60s...
...He's very generous, at least to his friends, and even generous to a fault...
...TS himself should not have been too shocked either, for he had several warning signals that he was playing a dangerous game...
...government's giveaway "Food for Peace" program...
...Perhaps he thought that here was something Kunsak couldn't do, something that would make Kunsak look up to him...
...Despite his regular party going and giving in the capital, TS is no better known to Americans than the papally remote Moon...
...The first is anti-Communism...
...James Howe, husband of Betty Ford's assistant Nancy Howe, committed suicide when it was revealed that the Howes had taken an Easter vacation in the Dominican Republic at disowned if he were ever exposed...
...He disappeared to Seoul in late October, but found he was an embarrassment there...
...The friend said he didn't really know, but he gave the Korean a few ideas about how legislation is generated, stopped, amended...
...He received me sitting carefully on a Louis XV chair...
...Of course, not everyone agreed...
...Park was soon back in "business," though...
...Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, as amended in 1966...
...Second, as a benjamin he is the youngest child of his father's second marriage park is a compulsive achiever, and is further afflicted with a harder-driving, cleverer elder brother...
...When they were students, he recalls, Park's father sent over a beautiful Korean film star to keep TS company...
...Park, overseas at the time, delayed his return...
...intelligence wiretaps, there was discussion about the merits of having arms-manufacturer Moon found a tax-exempt church in the United States to which the faithful could give tax-deductible donations...
...and like all South Koreans born north of the 38th Parallel, his feelings on this score are genuine...
...now he hardly emerged from his embassy-sized house that looked out on the magnificent Iranian Embassy and the elegant residence of the British ambassador...
...Questioned on this, TS says that Korean custom requires that his elder brother, also a bachelor, marry first...
...Before," says the friend, "it looked perfectly all right to me...
...one frequent senatorial beneficiary of Park's hospitality was Hubert Humphrey...
...Malatesta believes some of Park's "friends" have turned evidence against him to save their skins...
...After he'd finished, it was a work of art...
...the woman he has most often been seen with in recent years says if he made a mistake, it was because "he loves power too obviously...
...There was not a crease in his immaculate clothes that had not been put there by his tailor...
...Later, he saw TS at the Dorchester and apparently turned down a transaction...
...Partly this is because TS is currently holed up in a London hotel...
...All were afraid to proposition her because she "belonged" to TS...
...Then the story hit the newspapers, and he behaved as recent grand-jury evidence shows he did in Alaska three years before: He panicked...
...But shortly before the Howe suicide, Park broke his ban on interviews and I called on him for what was to have been the first of a series of talks...
...It was not an ingenuous query: TS needed to know how Capitol Hill worked, and he would have been about as inconspicuous there as House Speaker Thomas P7*\Tip" O'Neill in a Pusan monastery...
...One expected to see not the top Congressional figures quietly getting together with TS to reinstate some Korean military aid, but C. Aubrey Smith and Sir Cedric Hard-wicke downing stingers and rehashing the pigsticking of yesteryear in the Khyber Pass...
...Round glasses emphasized the smallness of his gimlet eyes, and an Oriental smile seemed painted into place...
...Now there is the fuss about this fellow Tongsun Park, or Park Tong Sun as he's called in Korea, or "TS" as he was known when he traveled the Washington cocktail circuitbuying the Congress, buying rice, buying a chunk of the society pages...
...Former Senator and Attorney General William Saxbe, for whom Park had given a lavish going-away party on the eve of Saxbe's departure as ambassador to India, described him in equally warm terms...
...He agreed...
...When that moment was reached, and the question of his lobbying was broached, the smile broadened a little...
...Last April, an American arms dealer living in Europe told me that he had received a telephone call from Park requesting a meeting...
...Opinion is obviously divided as to why Park went wrong...
...Park went on for another hour or more, talking graciously, if stiltedly, about people and art, about living between two cultures...
...He had been sent to Washington by his tycoon father to learn the American ship of state how to steer it for the advantage of the family company, Miryung Sonsa...
...Graceful ancient Korean ceramics line one wall while knights in armor guard the corners...
...But as time went on, and he became immensely richer, his lobbying for Seoul became more blatant...
...In the States, as newspaper readers now know, TS was to amass a fortune of his own, trading rice and other cereals from the U.S...
...That led him to establish the George Town Club at the site of the 19th-century Suters Tavern...
...Although friends say he paid an exorbitant price for the then dilapidated house and land plus a reputed $750,000 more to a genial ex-convict called Paul Anton, for restoration work the club proved a profitable political investment for as long as the going was good: that is, for about a decade...
...He travels frequently to Abu Dhabi, an oil-rich state in the Persian Gulf that wants to set up its own tanker line...
...The most frightening one came in 1970 when he seems to have been picked up on the streets of Seoul by the KCIA and accused (correctly, according to one American eyewitness) of telling people that he was related to President Park Chung Hee...
...After he did come back to Washington, he ceased going to parties where the press might be present...
...Russell Warren Howe, a frequent NL contributor, is coauthor of the recently published The Power Peddlers...
...TS is a snob, of course, yet he was not merely collecting names...
...He would be made the exclusive broker for American rice exported to Korea and would use some of the bonanza thereby acquired to buy influence in Washington...
...As for Park, at first he cooperated with Justice officials...
...In the midst of his telling me about the two centers of his life the bustling matchbox city of Seoul and the leisurely brick-and-cobblestone world of Georgetown the gilt telephone rang...
...And his friends still spoke well of him...
...If Park's superficial friends usually found him so enigmatic as to defy portrayal, in the club he had at least designed a decidedly unenigmatic frame for himself...
...There was an invitation to lunch at the George Town Club the following month, but with the Howe suicide it became impossible even to get Park on the phone...
...The bar there is full of timber scrollwork...
...Indeed, most of the news generated by the "Korean investigation" on Capitol Hill has been about nervous congressmen bickering with the legal counsel who upstage them, which last month resulted in Leon Jaworski being appointed special counsel of the House Ethics Committee...
...If you talk to his friends (loyal and fairweather), his longtime family acquaintances, his college classmates, and his favorite blondes, you get a picture of a driven man, a person whose fate seems almost as preordained as his Buddhist compatriots would have us believe it was...
...But the trouble," says the classmate, "is that TS cannot have an adequate relationship with women at all...
...He still had an impressive pile of political chits with congressional delegations from a passel of agricultural states: He had earned millions of dollars worth of favors by selling their constituents' rice and wheat...
...O'Neill who consistently opposed cutting Korean aid, even when outvoted 2-1 by his Democratic troops said he was "a broth of a boy...
...It was Anna Chennault of the Taiwan lobby, chirruping a soprano request to TS to escort her to a private party the following day (it turned out to be a birthday party for TS himself...
...It was a comfortable seclusion: The mansion (like another he bought near the Shoreham Hotel later that year, for $480,000) was a museum of priceless Korean art, some of it more than 2,000 years old, and of opulent furniture including a $32,000 stereo system and a brass bed, reserved for his mother, that is said never to have been used...
...But perhaps the most accurate assessment of Tongsun Park has been provided by the family friend: "At heart, he is insecure...
...Park's studies were interrupted by his father's death...
...There is little awareness, though, of what lies behind the plastic smile on the standard Park news agency photos...
...were too big and sophisticated for a private dealer operation, or that their export would not have been approved under the laws of the country producing them...
...It was consistently successful...
...The old family friend tells an anecdote about how Park forced hotel staff one day to reset a table for a banquet...
...Whenever he opened his mouth to speak, he stretched his short, boyish fingers, as if to avoid tensing the soft skin across his knuckles...
...The upstairs restaurant is equally gothic a medieval neon sign but with an Oriental touch: Instead of the usual stiff-backed restaurant chairs, there are armchairs, padded with huge cushions to get members and their guests within striking distance of their plates...
...Finally, TS' problems with women leave him with an added need to "prove" himself...
...Old classmate John Brademas, who has admitted to receiving thousands of dollars in campaign and office slush-fund contributions from Park, assured this reporter that TS was "clean...
...Back home, Kunsak shook his head and crossed his fingers...
...Having the same name as the dead man probably did not help...
...As cameras zoomed in and reporters asked what he would do next, he bowed his head and straightened his slightly mussed hair over and over again until one of the musclemen jumped into the chauffeur's seat and floored the accelerator...
...Army's assault rifle...
...Those who know TS best feel sorry for him...
...They have since been seized by the IRS, which is questioning the Korean's "nonresident," tax-free status...
...He did it secretly, getting up at dawn to play only with a paid partner...
...And Bob Hope's nephew Peter Mala-testa, a former Spiro Agnew aide who is TS' partner in Pisces (a "swinging" Georgetown supper club), says: "Tongsun could be fooled because he isn't greedy...
...And it was TS who kept the membership club alive when it failed to make its mortgage payments in the early years, by simply transferring money from one account to another...
...The little lobbyist was swept off his feet by two enormous bodyguards and hustled with legs dangling into a waiting sedan...
...When the storm broke over TS last year, the Korean government denied any association with him...
...At the same Blue House meeting, according to U.S...
...Tongsun Park first came to Washington in the late '50s, as a graduate student at Georgetown University's School of International Service...
...One day, he invited a former Georgetown classmate to lunch, and when the chatter about old times had loosened the atmosphere, he asked a direct question: "How do you lobby the Congress...
...Park decided that the least difficult lobbying method, for someone with his money, would be to bring .the Congress to him...
...Sources in the Criminal Division of Justice's new Public Integrity Section say they have gained access to Park's records at the Riggs National Bank and the Equitable Bank of Baltimore, and to his numbered account in the Bahamas...
...His classmate cites his sexual problems...
...That a man with the best-placed intimates could fall should have been obvious to him from the then unfolding Watergate story...
...Starting with the Korean Gulf Oil distributorship, the brothers built up other firms-myryung Mool Sam (export-import, representing foreign corporations), Miryung Tong Sam (quarrying, supplying building products) and Miryung Navigation (owning and leasing tankers...
...His former college buddy, to whom he has often turned for advice, notes that although TS was regularly seen with beautiful women, he has never married or lived with one...
...TS' share in the operation, he boasted in 1975, brought him over a million dollars a month...
...some judgments had been given against him, resulting in his bank account being attached...
...On the eve of a birthday party he was to give for then House Majority Leader O'Neill at the George Town Club-with Vice President' Ford, three Cabinet officers, 34 congressmen, and others in attendance - TS was almost Tongsun Park's expense...
...A black Fleetwood Cadillac and an ebony Continental waited in the horseshoe-shaped driveway to whisk him away to quiet business meetings or to carry his housekeeper to the Spring Valley stores...
...In this odd mishmash of Boodle's, Rick's (in Casablanca) and Madame Recamier's French Revolutionary salon, TS lobbiedat first, for his company's interests and only discreetly for his country's...
...Yet Park, who was born in Pyongyan, now the capital of North Korea, did not just happen...
...In London, Tongsun Park makes his home at the Dorchester, but employes of the ritzy, Saudi-owned establishment tell callers they know nobody by that name...
...Next, he materialized at Tokyo's Haneda Airport, where the policy of opening passenger lists to public inspection enabled TV newsmen to set themselves up for his arrival...
...Park had been sued for defaulting on loans and bills...
...A family friend who is close to him says the elder Park was not impressed by his kid brother's exotic empire, and was not surprised when it fell apart...
...He was beaten up, then taken to the Blue House (the Presidential palace), where the dictator himself invited him to become Korea's top lobbyist in America...
...TS was not one to give up that easily, however...
...Given the nature of this man's operation, his refusal probably meant either that the weapons Park sought (for whom...
...only afterward did they surmise that he had wanted them to give her the gratification he could not supply...
...It was TS who made all the management decisions, including a few dubious ones putting the waiters in white gloves, and choosing as the first chef an Italian who had been fired by the Turkish ambassador for several reasons, one of them being bad cooking...
Vol. 60 • August 1977 • No. 17
