It would be hard to argue that there is a person of greater influence—and controversy—over Korea’s first six decades of the twentieth century than Syngman Rhee. It comes as little surprise that historians continue to grapple with his appropriate place in the country’s modern development: Is he to be remembered as an architect of the Republic of Korea (ROK) or as a divider of the Korean peninsula? The contribution of Foreign Friends to this history sees Rhee as an inadvertent divider. The book, chronologically organized, offers the ROK’s first president a generous narrative, from his experiences in a mission school to his rise to power in the immediate postliberation period of Korean history. It touches briefly on Rhee’s activities that led him to assuming the ROK presidency from 1948, but it avoids his controversial twelve-year period in office. David Fields defines his purpose as “tell[ing] the story of how Rhee and the Korean independence movement used the ideology of the American mission, in its many forms, as an entrée into American foreign policy debates and as a means to shift American perceptions and policy toward Korea” (3). He further argues that the Korean independence movement “invoked [the American] mission to influence American policy prior to the division of Korea in 1945” (7). It was Rhee’s influence, he explains, that convinced the United States of its responsibility to Korea’s future and impressed on its decision makers the need to occupy Korea, even if but a portion of the peninsula (169–74). Fields’ study assumed two fundamental goals: (1) to highlight the complex nature of American exceptionalism, and (2) to argue the success of the Korean independence movement in the United States (9–10).Foreign Friends begins with a short description of the US mission in Korea from its earliest days, along with the connections that Syngman Rhee formed with its members in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. One of the first accomplishments of this mission was the Pai Chai Mission School that the missionary Henry Appenzeller founded in 1886. Rhee was first attracted to this school—whose name translates as “school for rearing useful men” in Appenzeller’s mind for “nation-building” purposes—by his urge to learn English rather than for the Christian foundation on which the school had been founded. It was here that he met one of the first great influences of his life in the Korean independence leader Phillip Jaisohn (Seo Jae-pil), who taught there. Rhee also benefited from the school’s extraterritorial status when he took refuge in the school to escape detention by police for his activities in the Independence Club after King Kojong ordered the group’s disbandment in 1898. He finally accepted prison over remaining under the school’s protection, a period that transformed him from “a rash young man . . . [to a] wiser, tempered individual, still bent on reform, but better prepared for it” (34).Upon release Rhee was appointed principal of the Methodist Sangdong Youth Institute (Sangdong Cheongnyeon Hagwon), a position he would hold for fewer than three weeks before he chose to go into exile. He set sail for Hawaii in November 1904, three months after his release from prison (34). Fields notes that it was a fear for his personal safety in a Korea under increasing Japanese control that forced him into exile. This is ironic as it was the Japanese, who had just recently assumed control over Korea’s Police Ministry, that helped secure his release (34). Also curious is his return to Korea in October 1910, a time when Japanese control peaked after its annexation of the peninsula one month previous.Rhee’s appointments to head of political parties and positions in independence movements no doubt drew from his past involvement in reform movements (such as the Independence Club), his publications (such as The Spirit of Independence, which he wrote while in prison),1 as well as his academic achievements at prestigious Ivy League schools—Harvard and Princeton, which most certainly helped spread his name among his fellow Korean exiles. This impressive resume along with his endearing charisma attracted the many people who gravitated toward him during the years leading up to, and continuing through, Korea’s liberation. These included national leaders and, more importantly, contacts with political, professional, and religious figures. Many of these people helped fund his education and later travels, joined his crusade to instruct the American public, and influenced decision makers over the injustice of Korea’s occupation. They also assisted him (often pro bono) in the legal and publishing aspects of his mission. These contacts became organized under the League of Friends of Korea, which “publicized the Korean situation and formed new branches by holding mass meetings in communities around the nation” to disseminate information and attract sympathy for Korea’s plight (62).Two contacts most important in different ways to Rhee were Dr. Robert T. Oliver and Millard Preston Goodfellow; Fields affords the former broad attention but the latter less attention. Oliver, who served as Rhee’s biographer and ghostwriter, was introduced to Rhee in 1942 by the Reverend Edward Jenkins, a man who had spent his early years in Korea and who remained active in the US-based Korean independence movement. Rhee’s success in convincing Oliver of his mission’s importance in a roughly one-hour conversation (137) developed into a lifelong partnership. Goodfellow, a publisher turned military officer, helped Rhee in a different capacity. The two collaborated in developing a plan to enlist Koreans in the wartime effort as participants in Office of Strategic Services (OSS) unconventional (sabotage) operations. Goodfellow was also instrumental in gaining Rhee’s early return to Korea after Japan’s surrender, thus putting him in a position of advantage toward securing political power.Rhee’s inability to convince his former professor at Princeton, Woodrow Wilson, to apply the now-US president’s idealistic words of “self-determination” on Korea’s behalf left Rhee with a feeling of “bitter betrayal.” Fields explains this critical moment in Korea’s independence efforts that resulted in the biggest display of anti-Japanese sentiment during the three-plus decades of colonial subjugation as Wilson choosing pragmatics over idealism: the formation of the broader League of Nations remained his priority over the plight of oppressed peoples. Upon his return to the United States, Wilson found his adversaries turning his idealist statements against him as the treaty forged at Versailles allowed injustices to stand that the president had originally preached against (89). Here Fields presents an interesting discussion on how the debate in Congress over the League of Nations came down—for a number of participants—to a choice between supporting Korea or Ireland (95).That the United States had reneged on responsibilities to which it had pledged in the 1882 Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation that it negotiated with Korea remained a staple in Korean interwar and wartime correspondence with US officials. Article One of this treaty committed parties to “exert their good offices on being informed [of other powers dealing unjustly or oppressively with either Government] to bring about an amicable arrangement” (35). Rhee was hardly alone in demanding that this article required the United States to have employed its “good offices” to block Japanese intervention in Korea over the first decade of the twentieth century, which of course it did not. Rhee and others, bringing this “moral failure” to the attention of US officials and ordinary citizens, Fields argues, forced the United States to assume responsibility for a Korea that the War Department calculated as having little or no strategic value to US national interests (169–70). Prominent American citizens, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who addressed the topic in her highly popular “My Day” column to commemorate the sixty-second anniversary of the treaty—and the prolific author Pearl Buck, whose The Living Reed (1948) told of Korea’s troubling years prior to and after colonization, spoke out on Korea’s behalf (163–64). The vague wording of the pledge, though, has led some to question the legitimacy of these claims by the Koreans and their supporters: What action did the article require of the United States at this time?2 Part of the reason for US nonaction may have resulted more from the influence that the Japanese had gained by dispatching then-President Theodore Roosevelt’s college classmate, Kaneko Kentarō, to Washington to lobby the Japanese perspective and its progress during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).3The question of whether the efforts by Rhee and the Korean independence movement people were successful during this period remains, however, worthy of further exploration. Fields does show convincingly that Rhee’s actions did succeed in disseminating the Korean message widely throughout the United States. That Koreans were able to convince as many as seventeen congressmen to pen letters in support for the Korean cause is indicative of their success (157). Rhee’s efforts toward this result, as well as his success in drawing people to support his mission, are certainly to be recognized. However, his ultimate goal—securing diplomatic recognition for the Korean Provisional Government and immediate independence for Korea during or after Japan’s defeat—remained beyond his or other Koreans’ capacity. Part of the reason for this failure was Rhee’s own doing: the divisions evident between him and his fellow Koreans in exile, be it in Shanghai, Honolulu, or Washington, DC. These divisions violated one criterion that the Allies had placed in making diplomatic recognition judgements: the exiled groups’ ability to unite in their cause and methods. This, plus their ability to demonstrate support on their homeland, were the two fundamental, albeit impractical, demands that the Allies placed on all exiled political groups that sought such recognition. Rhee’s conflicts with Koreans go beyond that with Ahn Chang-ho (110); his most damaging dispute was perhaps with Kilsoo Haan [Han Kilsu], who represented the interests of the rival Sino-Korean People’s League in Washington, DC. This darker side—at least from the perspective of his rivals, which no doubt fueled the movement to drive him from the KPG presidency in 1925—represents a critical side of Rhee’s efforts that deserves attention in any account of Rhee’s preliberation efforts. Such problems in dealing with his Korean opposition, of course, haunted him after his repatriation to Korea in October 1945 and throughout his time as ROK president.Also of concern is Fields’ argument that “Rhee and his followers never suggested or approved division. They were appalled by it” (169). If Rhee did not mention the possibility of division during the wartime period, he certainly came to be one of its leading advocates in the postliberation years. Was this merely over his concern about the Soviet Union, firmly entrenched in the North, making unification a pipe dream, or a continuation of thoughts that he had entertained previously, or a manifestation of more personal interests? His and other extreme rightists’ opposition to the period of trusteeship established in the 1945 Moscow Decision perhaps could be justified as opposing an insult to the proud Korean people, but what benefit did it serve for Korea’s future? Rather, it served as a primary reason why the US-USSR Joint Commission, established to form a united Korean government, never came close to completing its mission and only pushed Korea further down the road to permanent division. Later, Rhee surely did not offer Kim Ku and Kim Kyu-sik his blessing when the two attended a conference in Pyongyang to negotiate a plan for national unification just before the May 1948 elections.4Foreign Friends does, however, provide an informative treatment of Rhee’s US connections during the critical interwar period. It highlights the impressive gains he was able to make against the odds of greater success perhaps beyond his reach. This was no small accomplishment seeing that first, the United States was at war with Japan, not Korea, and that Americans were far more familiar with the Japanese than with the Korean people. At the same time, the ability of Rhee and others to argue the Japanese as repressive meshed comfortably with the generally negative US impression of Japanese from even before Pearl Harbor and certainly opened doors for their cause. Fields is convincing in making his lucid argument that Korea, no more than an early twentieth-century footnote in the American mind, rose to a position of significance by the early 1940s thanks in large part to Rhee’s aggressive efforts. Foreign Friends thus offers an important angle to questions concerning Korea’s efforts to shed colonial subjugation and gain national liberty.