#johnwickham — Public Fediverse posts

... While the arrogance of his statement was stunning (how can mass murder be dismissed as not measuring up to "our standards"?) so was Carter's reasoning: the uprising and anguish in Kwangju had been reduced to another global Communist plot, one more nagging dilemma for American diplomats fighting in the trenches of the Cold War. The national security mentality was personified by Holbrooke, who had worked his way up the State Department ladder by dutifully serving United States interests in Vietnam and the Philippines before being named Assistant Secretary for East Asia and the Pacific by Carter. As Bruce Cumings reminds us in his penetrating introduction to this book, Holbrooke suggested to Congress during the crisis that Americans were paying far too much "attention to Kwangjoo" without proper consideration of the "broad questions" of Korean and U.S. security inter- ests. General John Wickham, the U.S. military commander in Korea who signaled U.S. support for Chun in an infamous interview with the Associated Press in August 1980, later suggested that Koreans were "lemmings" who would follow anybody with a military uniform. And who can forget that, eight months later, Chun Doo Hwan, the man responsible for the carnage in Kwangju, was walking the corridors of the White House as an honored guest of President Reagan?