Son Yong-nam (December 13, 1933 - December 19, 1979) was the third President of Korea, serving a brief term from his election to the Presidency in a controversial election in 1978 until his assassination in December of 1979. His 21 months as President remain the shortest of any Korean head of state and he remains, as of 2020, the youngest person elected to the Presidency, ascending to Gyeongbok Palace.
Son was part of an ambitious younger group of members of the KNP ascendant in the mid-to-late 1970s who, during the turbulent Baek Du-jin years, eventually managed to push the old guard of the party out at the 1977 Party Conference, with Son becoming the Presidential nominee, the other "Young Yong-nam," Kim, becoming the head of the KNP's National Assembly bloc, and Choe Yong-rim rising to be Party Secretary. Together, this "triumvirate" was expected to see Korea into the 1980s, with many younger Koreans hoping it would lead to an expedited liberalizing of human rights similar to the late Pak era. However, Son and his fellows wound up overturning much of the progress of the Pak and Baek years prior to mass discontent due to the 1979 global economic downturn. Son also angered key elements of the military and security services, a crucial bedrock of support to the KNP regime, when he slashed the pensions of retired officers and fired the entire general staff and heads of the Korean Ministries of Internal and External Security, and precipitated a crisis in late 1979 when he threatened to dissolve the National Assembly and assume emergency powers. While he backed down from his threat when Kim Yong-nam and the legislative bloc threatened to impeach him, Son's erratic behavior throughout the autumn lead to mass protests in which he ordered peaceful protestors he fired upon and opposition leaders fled the country. He was assassinated, along with several staff members, when a bomb went off in his office on December 19, 1979. He was succeeded by Prime Minister Choi Kyu-hah, who had been in that office less than a month.
Assassination and Aftermath[]
Son was killed, along with several of his senior staff members and the Minister of Labor Choi Min-woo, at 10:17 AM on December 19 when holding a brief impromptu meeting in the Presidential office at Gyeongbok. Forensic evidence suggests the bomb was inside a briefcase left under a meeting table. The informal meeting was the first of the day and was to last forty-five minutes, before a larger 11:00 AM meeting with the Prime Minister and several other Ministers and the Army Chief of Staff - it is widely believed that this meeting was the real target and would have decapitated the government entirely. Security at Gyeongbok, lax during the Pak years, had been tightened considerably in 1979 due to fears by Son of potential assassination, yet the briefcase was left unattended under his desk, suggesting that the Presidential Guard may have been complicit in its placing. Son was killed immediately, along with six others sitting around the table; Minister Choi died the next day of his injuries.
Prime Minister Choi Kyu-hah was inaugurated as Acting President at 2:00 PM in the afternoon and immediately called for national unity and mourning. Within hours, however, infighting had begun again within the KNP and Ministry of Internal Security chief Chun Doo-hwan pressured President Choi to force out the Army's leadership by the end of the year in a sudden and effective military coup, after which he served in both roles. The snap elections scheduled for February of 1980 were won by Choi by a healthy margin, but the weak President was further boxed out by Chun until he was forced to resign in September of 1980 and Chun formed a "unity government" that eventually wound up with him as President. An estimated 3,000 people were killed in various street violence and from being fired upon by government forces throughout 1980, as the crisis triggered by Son's authoritarian turn deepened.
Despite Chun's rapid rise to the Presidency in 1980, commentators have generally speculated that he opportunistically took advantage of the chaos along with his influential "Hanahoe" club of officers who had graduated with him from the Korean Military Academy in 1955, and that Chun - who had been a Son loyalist installed in office mere months before the bombing - was uninvolved in the assassination itself. Perpetrators have been speculated to be disgruntled military members as well as potentially ousted KNP officials such as Kim Yong-nam, who had been pushed aside for the pliant Choi as Prime Minister. Chun prosecuted a number of military officials in the 1980s for a "conspiracy," though independent observers doubt the complicity of any of them and considered the verdicts the results of show trials meant to speedily imprison or execute Chun's rivals in the military establishment.