“Anything’s possible, Mr. President. But our analysis rates that as the least likely outcome.” Blake started to pace.
“Basically, the South Korean government rests on a very narrow knife’s edge between two small, but powerful, factions. On one side they’ve got a hard-line element in their military. The current Seoul government had its origins in a military coup, so they know what can happen if the armed forces aren’t happy with what’s going on.” He turned and walked back past the President’s desk.
“Now on the other side of the equation, you’ve got a small hard-core group of radical students. Most of them aren’t communists, but they are socialists and they want things that the military and South Korea’s industrial conglomerates would find intolerable — virtual unilateral disarmament and reunification with North Korea.”
The President nodded his understanding. “So they’ve got no maneuvering room. The token reforms that the hard-liners in the military would accept won’t be enough to placate Congress or their students. And the reforms demanded by Congress won’t be acceptable to the military.”
“Yes, sir, exactly. What’s worse, they probably wouldn’t even keep the students out of the streets anyway.”
“Shit.”
“In a nutshell, Mr. President.” Blake started another circuit past the President’s desk. “The odds, then, are that South Korea’s booming economy is going to come to a crashing halt over the next couple of months as their exports dry up. That’s going to polarize the apolitical middle portion of the South Korean population. Some are going to side with the military hardliners, and some are going to break over to the left-wing students.”
He shrugged. “Where South Korea’s internal balance of power will wind up is anybody’s guess.”
“And we can’t do a damn thing to stop any of this?” The President’s question was almost plaintive.
“Not this year. Not without a special session of Congress.” Blake came to a halt. “The best we can hope for is that South Korea will muddle through until sometime next year. Then you might be able to make a good case for lifting the sanctions on humanitarian grounds. By then, people here will have seen a lot of TV pictures of unemployment lines in Seoul, and they’ll have started missing Hyundai cars and Samsung televisions.”
The President nodded slowly. “Yes. We’d still face an uphill legislative fight in Congress, but at least I’d hold the moral high ground.”
Blake glanced at Admiral Simpson.
The admiral took his cue. “There’s one thing wrong with that scenario, Mr. President.”
The President looked at Simpson. “What’s that, Phil?”
“It assumes that there will still be a South Korea left to concern ourselves with next spring.”
Simpson paused and the President arched an eyebrow. “Go ahead, Admiral. You’ve got my attention.”
“Yes, sir. You see, while all of this is going on in the South, we’ve got to worry about what’s going on up in North Korea. Kim Il-Sung and his generals are going to be rubbing their hands over the prospect of a badly weakened South Korea. And they’ve been piling up the hardware to do something about it.” The admiral handed McLaren’s latest intelligence assessment to the President and waited while he skimmed through it.
“Jesus, these people aren’t fooling around, are they.”
“No, sir, they’re not. Without our forces along the DMZ as a trip-wire deterrent, they just might be tempted to use some of those brand-new tanks, planes, and artillery pieces.”
The President kept paging through the assessment of North Korea’s order of battle. “I don’t see what we can do about it. The Barnes bill is damned specific there, too. No political reforms, no American troops. We’re going to have to pull them out.”
Blake tensed. This was the crucial moment. He spoke softly, “Not necessarily, Mr. President. At least not until you’ve had a chance to reverse the sanctions in the next Congress.”
The President’s head snapped up. He stared straight into Blake’s eyes. “Just what are you proposing, Dr. Fowler?”
Blake chose his words with great care. “Simply this, sir. Unlike the trade provisions in the bill, there is a small opening in the legislative language requiring us to pull our forces out of South Korea. An opening that you might be able to exploit to keep our protective umbrella up long enough to try convincing Congress to find alternatives.”
He stopped for a moment. The President’s eyes didn’t move away from his face. “The bill doesn’t set a specific timetable for our withdrawal, Mr. President. Instead, the language calls for a pull-out to be carried out, quote, as expeditiously as possible, unquote.”
This was it. The President leaned forward in his chair. “So how does that language give me the leeway I need, Dr. Fowler?”
“I suggest that you interpret that demand as loosely as possible, sir. After all, withdrawing more than forty thousand combat troops, support personnel, and all their equipment is going to be a logistical nightmare. It’s bound to take time — several months at the very least.”
Blake paused again and then pressed ahead. “And a discreet suggestion from you to the commander responsible for carrying out the move, General McLaren, could ensure that those months were stretched to at least a year. A lot can happen in a year, Mr. President. At the very least we’ll have bought time for the South Koreans to adjust to a very different strategic equation.”
Blake finished speaking and sat back down in his chair, surprised to find that his hands were trembling slightly. He looked up to see the President studying him closely.
“You are aware, Dr. Fowler, that you’ve just proposed that I twist the wording of a law beyond all recognition. That I tell a senior military officer to ignore its clear meaning?” the President said in a low, even tone.
“Yes, sir. I know that.”
The President turned to Admiral Simpson. “Phil, what do you think of this young man’s plan? You know that there are people in Congress who’d love the chance to crucify me if this thing leaks out.”
Blake could see the admiral weighing his answer. “Mr. President, both of us have sworn to uphold the Constitution. And both of us have sworn to defend the United States against all enemies, both foreign and domestic. What Dr. Fowler proposes seems to me to fall into a gray area between those two responsibilities.”
The admiral continued, “I can’t make this decision for you, sir. But I believe that it’s a risk worth taking.”
The President sat quietly for several minutes after the admiral had finished speaking. Then, suddenly, he looked over at Blake.
“Did you vote for me in the last election, Dr. Fowler?” he asked.
Startled, Blake never even considered lying. “No, sir, I didn’t.”
The President smiled thinly. “Hell. If you can be that honest, I guess I can trust you on this.”
He slapped a hand down on his desk. “Very well, gentlemen. I’ll take your advice. Somebody gave me bad advice, worse than bad, and I made a mistake. We’ll delay our pull-out from South Korea as long as we possibly can, and use that time to try and correct the error.”
He stared hard at them. “But I don’t want a single goddamned thing about this on paper. You understand? No memos. Nothing on disk. Got it?”
They nodded.
“Great.”
Simpson looked curiously at the President. “What about Putnam? If you take any action against the lying bastard, his congressional patrons may guess that we’re up to something they’d want to know about.”
The President smiled grimly. “Don’t worry about Mr. Putnam, gentlemen. We’ll keep him on in his old job — at least as far as he and the outside world are concerned. But I’ll be goddamned if I ever believe a word that man says from now on. He’ll attend every national security meeting, but when he speaks, I’m not listening. If I want to know something about this Korean situation, I’ll arrange a little private get-together for just the three of us. Clear?”