Academic Exit

SOUTH KOREA

There are various ways of dealing with politicians who have become embarrassing to their countries. Bao Dai, former Emperor of Viet Nam, was exiled to his Riviera villa. Korea's old Syngman Rhee was dispatched to tend a garden in Honolulu. Russia's Georgy Malenkov was placed in charge of a power plant in Kazakhstan. Now a far more original idea has appeared in South Korea. Kim Chong Pil, Seoul's widely hated behind-the-scenes strongman, is being sent to Harvard.

Kim, 38, who was head of the ruling Democratic-Republican Party as well as boss of South Korea's CIA, hastened his own downfall when in a government reshuffle last month he continued to get his supporters into key jobs. This open power grab made him the principal target of violent student rioting, which ended only after President Chung Hee Park proclaimed martial law and fired Kim, his nephew by marriage. Park repeated the familiar promises to ferret out corruption, banned the use of government limousines to take the families of officials on outings and their children to school, and ordered a stop to all nonessential building. The government also launched a "help-your-neighbor" charity drive to raise money for the poor. But none of this silenced the clamor of the opposition for Kim's expulsion from Korea.

At this point, U.S. Ambassador Samuel Berger (University of Wisconsin '33) produced a convenient face-saving device in the form of an invitation for Kim to attend a seven-week Harvard seminar on politics and economics conducted by Professor Henry (Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy) Kissinger. Promptly, Kim and his pretty wife were escorted aboard a jetliner that took them to Japan on the first lap of their journey to the Charles River.

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