A South Korean lawmaker and longtime ally of former President Park Geun-hye on Friday released a handwritten letter that her father, President Park Chung-hee, wrote to her two days after her mother was shot to death in 1974, pressing a dispute over a new film that hints at official involvement in the killing.
The lawmaker, Yoo Young-ha of the People Power Party, displayed a copy of the letter at a morning news conference at the National Assembly in Yeouido, Seoul. Ms. Park had kept the letter, which is dated Aug. 17, 1974. According to Mr. Yoo, she received it at Tokyo’s airport from her younger sister, Park Geun-ryung, while flying home from her studies in France after learning of her mother’s death.
“The bullet meant for your father struck your mother instead and took her,” the president wrote. “Over and over I have thought how good it would have been if I had been hit and your mother had lived.”
“But your mother was hit in my place, and she went leaving me with every responsibility for you children and for this nation,” he continued. “Now you must stand in your mother’s place.”
Mr. Park told his daughter that the sky had seemed to fall at first and that he could not steady himself, but that he had decided a father must find courage first and had resolved to bear everything from then on. “You too must steel your heart,” he wrote, “and endure as far as you can endure.”
Of his wife, Yuk Young-soo, he wrote that she had been “the finest mother in this world,” great “not only as a wife and a homemaker but as a leader of this nation’s women,” a mother who would not easily be found again.
The letter ends hours before her arrival: “When I think that in 10 hours Geun-hye will be home, a moment drags like three autumns, yet when I think of greeting you alone at the front door, everything goes dark before me.”
Mr. Yoo demanded that the makers of Assassin(s) stop screenings and apologize publicly. “Do not hide behind talk of creation and freedom of expression,” he said. “Clearly separate historical fact grounded in actual records from the parts you claim to have invented, and explain it before the people.” He called on the filmmakers to atone for damaging Mr. Park’s honor and to apologize to the bereaved family and the public.
The film, which opened Sept. 23, depicts the events of Aug. 15, 1974, when Mun Se-gwang, a Korean resident of Japan acting on orders from the pro-North Korean association Chongryon, tried to shoot President Park and killed Ms. Yuk instead. The controversy stems from the film’s suggestion that Mr. Park himself or the Korean Central Intelligence Agency may have been involved in the attack.
The reckoning with that era is not finished. Five years after the shooting, the intelligence agency’s own director, Kim Jae-kyu, assassinated President Park, and a Seoul court is now weighing his retrial, with a final ruling set for Dec. 16.