In the months after the assassination of South Korean dictator Park Chun Hee in October
1979, this author was working at the Korea Herald, an English-language daily in downtown
Seoul with a circulation of around 80,000 both in country and around the world. It was a
time of upheaval — an interregnum in which many democratic-minded citizens saw both the
first intimations of a democracy obscured by the insinuation of the military’s planned
takeover of the government. At the height of these conflicting vectors, the more democraticminded
students took to the streets in protest for democracy. Each day, on the streets below
the newspaper’s third-floor office windows thousands of university students would march
toward the city center where they would meet thousands of others pouring in from other
universities around Seoul. Waiting them there was the capital building, the Seoul city hall,