Rhee, Syngman (Yu Sung-man; 1875-1965), the Republic of Korea's first president (1948-1960) and stubborn lifelong fighter for Korea's cause. Syngman Rhee was born in Hwanghae Province of central Korea and died in Honolulu, Hawaii.

A distant relative of the Korean royal family, Rhee studied the Confucian classics, but then entered the American missionary Paejae High School in 1894. His activity in the reformist Independence Club led to imprisonment in 1897. Tortured at first, he later could write a somewhat prosaic political testament, "The Spirit of Independence," which was subsequently published in the United States. He was converted to Christianity while in prison.

Released in 1904, Rhee went to the United States to plead unsuccessfully for American support against Japanese hegemony. With missionary support, he studied successively at George Washington, Harvard, and Princeton universities, earning his doctoral degree. In 1911 Rhee returned to Korea – now a Japanese colony – as a YMCA teacher-evangelist, but Japanese suspicions soon drove him back to the United States. From 1913 to 1940 he based his activities in Hawaii, where he was principal of a Korean school and leader of a Korean expatriate faction called Tongjihoe (Comrades' Society). He continued his vigorous campaigning for Korean independence. His work was plagued then and subsequently, however, by dissension with Korean political and church leaders.

Rhee's stature as a fighter and spokesman for Korea's cause was such that after the Korean national independence uprising of 1 March 1919, he was named president of the Korean Provisional Government in Exile at Shanghai. His relations with the leaders at Shanghai, however, were strained. In 1925 the Provisional Government impeached him and replaced him as president with Kim Ku, but Rhee refused to recognize the action.

In his youth, Rhee had a traditional arranged marriage; his wife gave birth to one son, who died. In 1933, while trying to present the Korean case to the League of Nations in Geneva, he met and later married Francesca Donner, an Austrian, who became Korea's first lady.

In 1940 Rhee moved to Washington, published a book called Japan inside Out, and sought recognition for Korea in the coming conflict. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl harbor, he sought American recognition for the Korean Provisional Government, but the Department of State, weary of importunities from rival Korean factions and leery of expatriates, largely ignored his overtures. By 1943 Rhee was suggesting that the Soviet Union was responsible for failure to recognize the Provisional Government. His adamant anti-Soviet and anticommunist stand won him many American admirers.

Rhee returned to Korea on 16 October 1945 with the encouragement of his own group of conservative American supporters and of the American military occupation authorities, whose commander, General John Hodge, personally introduced him to a press conference at the capital. Rhee assumed a suprapartisan stand over the many competing political factions, organized his own National Society for the Rapid Realization of Korean Independence, and sought a national coalition. For many reasons, including Rhee's own uncompromising personality and doctrinaire anticommunism, the effort failed.

In December 1946, in defiance of the American authorities, Rhee campaigned in the United States for the establishment of a separate state in South Korea, continuing to work for it upon his return. In the end, he had his way. US-Soviet negotiations for unification of the two occupation zones failed, and Rhee was elected president of the Republic of Korea following UN-observed elections in the South in May 1948. Thereafter, he never ceased to call for a "march north" to unify the country by force.

Rhee was reelected president in 1952, 1956, and 1960. His control involved a skillful blend of political strategy and coercion. The Korean public respected his age, status, and nationalist credentials. They also admired his manipulation of Americans, such as his unauthorized release of twenty-eight thousand prisoners of war in June 1953 to frustrate negotiations for an armistice in the Korean War, and his successful bargaining for massive American economic and military support as his price for acquiescence in the truce.

Rhee's inability to work with others and his lack of concern or understanding for economics, however, retarded the progress that the people expected; opposition grew and public support diminished. Rhee's supporters resorted increasingly to coercion and fraud to keep him in power, thus losing for him much of his deserved place in history. In April 1960 blatant election fraud, popular demonstrations, and police violence led to his resignation. Rhee, by now verging on senility, went into exile in Honolulu where he died five years later.