TWO NO. 2's

The jury of South Korea's voters pivoted around two men, one the Vice President and the other Vice President-elect. As personalities, neither could be characterized as a strong man. But as symbols of what is right and wrong in South Korea, they could not have been better chosen.

John M. Chang, 60, whose Korean name is Chang Myun, is Korea's leading Catholic layman and the most articulate spokesman for the opposition Democratic Party. Broad-shouldered and sil ver-haired, he looks like the dean of a divinity school, is actually a for mer Seoul high school principal who studied law at New York's Manhattan College (1925). Of his seven children, six are U.S. -educated, two are studying for the priesthood. Once Rhee's Prime Minister and trusted lieutenant, Chang rebelled in 1950 when Rhee proposed to alter the constitution to make himself independent of the Assembly; when Rhee's police threatened to ar rest defiant Assemblymen, Chang pru dently took refuge in the American hospital in Pusan.

But two years later he openly opposed Rhee's re-election to the presidency, and in 1956 earned Rhee's abid ing hatred by getting himself elected Vice President on the Democratic ticket. Rhee isolated him by excluding him from all participation in govern ment, did not even speak to him except on ceremonial occasions. Then an assassin took a potshot at him, hit ting him in the hand; Chang was so shaken that he retired to his home, surrounded himself with hand-picked bodyguards, and rarely ventured forth. And though he courageously continued to denounce the corruption and brutality of the Rhee regime, many mem bers of Chang's own party were disappointed by the defeatist line ("I stand before you a lone duck in the autumn sky") that he took during his unsuccessful bid for re-election earlier this year. Last week, as Koreans asked why Chang had stayed silent and at home during the Seoul riots, his friends explained: "He would have liked to have been out in the streets to lead the students, but his presence might have been the spark that touched off an even bigger conflagration." It was an explanation characteristic of moderate, high-minded John Chang -- and one that stirred doubts as to his capacity for leadership in the murderous rough-and-tumble of Korean politics.

Lee Ki Pcong, 63, is a slight, indecisive-seeming ex-schoolteacher who suffers from a progressive, wasting disease. Its effect has become so severe that he now cannot stand alone and his speech is slow and slurred. But his detractors charge that this unimpressive man with the nervous simper controls some of the more unattractive operations of Rhee's high-handed administration. They point to his post as honorary chairman of the green-shirted, blackjack-toting Anti-Communist Youth Corps whose members act as the Liberal Party's strong-arm boys. Critics also charge that Lee has long served as the party's go-between for businessmen attempting to obtain government loans.

Son of an impoverished Seoul family that traces its ancestry back to Korea's ancient Yi dynasty. Lee had devoted most of his adult life to serving Syngman Rhee. Lee first met Rhee in the U.S. soon after graduating from Iowa's now-defunct Tabor College in 1924. When Rhee returned to newly independent Korea in 1945, Lee became his private secretary, grew so close to his idol that three years ago Rhee adopted one of Lee's two sons. He became, successively, mayor of Seoul, Defense Minister and, in 1954, Speaker of the Assembly. Defeated by John Chang in the 1956 vice-presidential race by 200,000 votes. Lee ran again at Rhee's orders this year and won with an incredible overall majority of 8,300,000 to Chang's 1,800,000. An unswerving apologist for Rhee's policies--he defended the election-day massacre in Masan with the cold comment: "The police were given guns to shoot with, not as toys"--Lee has willingly served as whipping boy for all Rhee's political excesses. In Rhee's eyes, this has more than offset the fact that Lee has appeared in South Korea's National Assembly only a handful of times since he became its Speaker, recently admitted that he did not know when he could discharge his official duties "because the doctors do not tell me."

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