The Death of a “Diplomatic Legend” Buried Beneath the Regime and Media’s Mythologizing of Lee Hae-chan

[CHoice Times=Eun-Sik Joo, Director, KRIS(Korea Research Institute for Strategy), Retired Army Brigadier General] 

A society’s level of maturity is revealed not by how it treats living power, but by how it remembers the dead. In particular, the language used to record the death of those who served the state, and the standards by which their lives are judged, lay bare that society’s value system.

Recent reports of two deaths in South Korea have once again exposed this uncomfortable truth. One was Lee Hae-chan, a former prime minister who wielded immense influence as a power broker in politics for decades. The other was Gong Ro-myung, a former foreign minister who quietly expanded South Korea’s national interests on the diplomatic front.

The stark contrast in media coverage of their deaths makes it difficult not to conclude that Korean society is deeply unwell. It is unclear what standards the media applies in deciding how to honor and portray the deceased.

Notably absent are in-depth investigations into why former Prime Minister Lee traveled to Vietnam in the first place. Given his reportedly poor health, it would have been the media’s responsibility to explain clearly to the public why he went on an overseas trip and how that led to the circumstances of his death. Instead, such questions were largely ignored.

Lee Hae-chan’s death dominated major media headlines, filled with accolades such as “a symbol of democratization,” “an architect of reform,” and “a strategist of the progressive camp.” Efforts to evaluate his achievements and failures in a balanced manner were rare. Rather than critical reflection, mourning and glorification prevailed. Despite the clear distinction between a “strategist” and a “schemer,” he was almost uniformly praised as the former.

In contrast, the passing of former Foreign Minister Gong Ro-myung went by quietly. The death of a diplomat who helped establish diplomatic relations with China, advanced Northern Policy diplomacy, and broadened South Korea’s diplomatic horizons after the Cold War failed to cross even the threshold of collective social memory.

There is a well-known saying that a diplomat is “an honest person sent abroad to lie for the national interest,” a remark attributed to Sir Henry Wotton, an English diplomat and poet. Yet today, South Korea has left numerous ambassadorial posts vacant for months after recalling ambassadors from major countries last June, with no successors appointed.

Regardless of faction or ideology, it has long been a diplomatic tradition and unwritten rule that envoys serve until their successors arrive. This reflects how a nation understands diplomacy itself and represents the minimum respect owed to professional career diplomats.

This contrast is no coincidence. It symbolically reveals what Korean society has been trained to remember and what it has been trained to forget. Political power survives as narrative, while national interest is buried in administrative records. Within this structure, the Korean media has become not a judge of memory, but an editor of memory.

Lee Hae-chan was undeniably at the core of power during a significant era and played a key role in organizing the progressive camp and creating governing coalitions. The problem is that there has been almost no serious reflection on the direction and consequences of the power he pursued. Headlines proclaiming his rise “from a small bookstore owner in Sillim-dong to the godfather of the democracy movement” tell the story.

The word “democratization” has functioned as a shield that neutralizes all debate surrounding him. But democratization is not an end in itself; it is a process and a value—not a moral immunity card. When democratization hardens into the moral monopoly of a particular group, it mutates into the opposite of democracy. A culture that brands competition as unfair, suspects achievement as privilege, and judges merit based on collective identity cannot be democratic.

In Korean society, the label “the democratization generation” eventually became an unassailable status, functioning almost as political immunity. Rather than scrutinizing this phenomenon, the media amplified and reproduced it. If democratization is enjoyed as a form of privilege by a select group, that is clearly a distorted understanding.

Gong Ro-myung was not a popular political star. Yet he was a central architect of South Korea’s diplomatic transformation—normalizing relations with China, advancing Northern Policy diplomacy with Russia, and navigating the post–Cold War order. He defended national interests not with slogans or gunfire, but with documents and negotiations.

His achievements were never turned into propaganda for any administration, nor consumed as political mythology. And so, he was forgotten. This is the tragedy of Korean society.

Those who expanded the nation’s external reach are forgotten, while those who dominated its internal power are mythologized. When the media remains captive to a power-centered structure of memory, the state grows noisier while its substance empties out. Bridging that gap is precisely the responsibility of journalists and the press.

How the Lee Jae-myung administration chooses to honor these two figures is not merely a matter of protocol. It is a symbolic declaration of the standards by which Korean society will evaluate contribution in the future: political loyalty or national achievement, narrative or results.

A responsible press should investigate why assessments of former Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan are so deeply polarized.

South Korea has come this far not because of political slogans, but thanks to countless unnamed contributors who worked quietly in diplomacy, economics, security, science, and industry. Yet the Korean media has been stingy in recording them, while being excessively generous with stories centered on political power. The same pattern was evident in the government’s response at the time of General Paik Sun-yup’s death.

If we fail to ask these questions now, the next generation will learn history by even more distorted standards—judging not who built the country, but who held power the longest. That is why Korean politics remains third-rate, and why the media is an accomplice in deepening that disease.

A society that cannot be fair even in the face of death cannot be fair to the living. What is needed now is not the language of mourning, but the courage to set the standards of memory right.

#PoliticsOfMemory #MediaBias #DiplomaticLegacy