"The Appetite of All"

THE ALLIES "The Appetite of All" "Greedy officials are rampant everywhere," complained wizened Lee Si Yung, Vice President of the Republic of South Korea. "They are destroying the prestige of our government . . . Alas, my heart is almost breaking."

Old (82), ailing Lee--who has to be carried to Assembly sessions--resigned his office in protest. Corruption last week had become a major issue in war-torn South Korea: the National Assembly, like Lee, was sick of President Syngman Rhee's dishonest underlings. Latest scandal: embezzlement of some $800,000 in National Defense Corps funds.

Formed from 200,000 youths who were marched south before Seoul fell last winter, the corps was supposed to be a manpower pool for the R.O.K army. But ugly reports drifted back from the camps: the young people were sick and ill-fed, their food was being stolen, rosters were padded.

Meeting in a bedraggled movie theater in Pusan, the Assembly last week heard specific charges: the corps had carried some 70,000 "ghost" recruits on its rolls, had bought 8,000 tons of rice for nonexistent troops. Merchants, charged one Assemblyman, had been forced to hand over blank receipts for corps purchases, which "presumably were padded to suit the appetite of all concerned . . . They purchased 4,000 bales of dried fish, of which only 1,000 bales have been located."

Rhee moved swiftly to calm the storm. He signed a law, already passed by the Assembly, abolishing the corps, ordered the arrest of the corps commander, a hulking ex-wrestler named Kim Yong Keun. The Assembly was not pacified. It refused to elect a Rhee man as Lee's successor, instead chose Kim Sung Soo, 60, wealthy head of the anti-Rhee Democratic Nationalist Party and respected member of Seoul's Rotary Club.

Although the Vice President has no power under the Korean constitution, Kim's election was a sharp warning to Rhee, who often highhandedly disregards Assembly resolutions. Assemblymen were talking about amending the constitution to transfer administrative power from the President to the cabinet.

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