The poet Ku Sang, a close friend of president Park Chung-hee, wrote a poem in 1973 lamenting a change in his friend. "Your heroic spirit has gone. Quixotic lunacy has taken its place..."
Under the Yushin (revitalizing) constitutional system, Park's political rivals were eliminated one by one. The New Democratic Party's former presidential candidate Kim Dae-jung was put under house arrest after he was kidnapped by Korean Central Intelligence Agency agents from a hotel in Tokyo on Aug. 8, 1973.
Despite the rhetorical embellishment -- "Korean-style democracy" -- the Yushin system was never recognized as democratic. The ruling Democratic Republican Party won a mere 39 percent support in the ninth general election in February 1973. With the Kim Dae-jung kidnapping incident as momentum, opposition parties, students and dissident groups struggled against the Yushin system.
Park suppressed them by proclaiming Presidential Emergency Decree No. 1 based on the Yushin Constitution on Jan. 8, 1974. Emergency Decree No. 4 followed on April 3 the same year, when prosecutors became active in the National Federation of Democratic Youth and Students incident. Prosecutors sought the death penalty for 14 students for subversive activities, including Seoul National University students Lee Chul and Yoo In-tae. Lee and Yoo became lawmakers much later.
North Korea had been watching for such a crisis in the South. Subway Line No. 1 was opened in Seoul on Aug. 15, 1974. To celebrate the national liberation anniversary that morning, Park Chung-hee was delivering a speech suggesting a nonaggression pact to North Korea at the National Theater of Korea in Seoul.
Then a gunshot suddenly rang out in the theater. Chief presidential security guard Park Jong-kyu sprang from behind the podium, gun in hand. The scene turned into pandemonium. The first lady Yuk Young-soo, who had been sitting on the right-hand side of the podium, dropped her head.
About two minutes after the scene was cleared, Park said calmly, "I'll continue what I was saying."
Yuk died that evening. The assassin was Moon Se-kwang, a Korean-Japanese resident. He later testified that he had received instructions from North Korea through the General Association of Korean Residents in Japan, or Chongryon, to kill Park.
The assassination attempt on Park and the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975 pushed the Yushin regime to extremes.
Eight people involved in the People's Revolutionary Party Reconstruction Committee incident, an alleged plot to rebuild an outlawed organization, were sentenced to death on April 8 and executed the following day.
During a visit to China on April 18, North Korean leader Kim Il-sung asked the Chinese leaders for assistance in his bid to "liberate South Korea."
A ship carrying Korean nationals from South Vietnam arrived at Busan Harbor on May 13. The same day, Park proclaimed Emergency Decree No. 9, banning any campaign against the Yushin system and empowering law enforcement authorities to arrest and detain people without warrants. This was the beginning of the last four years of the Yushin regime, the period known both as an era of relative stability and a dark period for democracy.