I have no stake whatever in the WTF/KKW vs. ITF wars; my TKD lineage, Song Moo Kwan, a nearly literal Korean translation of `Shoto Kan', is probably closer to Tang Soo Do, or even Shotkan karate, than it is to any other variant of TKD, and my take on all this is that of the completely detached, happy outsider looking in through the window. From that point of view, the following facts seem to be of some importance:
(i) Gen. Choi earned a second dan in Shotokan karate in the era before Liberation, and was determined in the early 1950s to create a Korean martial art that was a kind of super-karate, a linear striking art based on Funakoshi's individual interpretation of what he had in turn learned from Itosu and Azato but still more powerful and battlefield-ready than Shotokan karate. As Simon O'Neil has discussed in some detail in his Combat TKD newsletter and forthcoming book on bunkai for TKD hyungs (both KKW and ITF), the military combative system that Choi and his close associate, Tae Hi Nam—who was probably by far the more proficient martial artist—came up with was a simple, quickly learned, extremely brutal and devastatingly effective tool that seriously distressed both the RoK's North Korean enemy in the Korean War and their North Vietnamese enemy a decade and a half later; there is abundant documentation for these statements. And this joint Choi/Nam vision of TKD as a superior combat system was fundamental to the identity of the version of TKD that the General promoted.
(ii) Later institutional embodiments of TKD in the RoK shifted the emphasis of the art decisively from military effectiveness to competitive athletic success. The street application of TKD moved to the bottom of the KKW's list of technical desiderata, or fell off it completely, might be more like it; and the essential role of TKD was seen not as providing a crucial military survival skill set that could save a soldier's life in the even that he lost access to his weapons, but rather the promotion of South Korea on the world stage as a major sports power and, eventually, leader in the Olympic movement as the national patron of one of its official events.
(iii) There is currently a strong resurgence of interest in TKD as a hard, linear striking-based system of unarmed combat, in which what is important is the combat content of TKD is the main player, and the various individuals who shaped its strictly institutional history are of only minor interest. This movement seems to be centered largely in the UK, but I see some evidence of it emerging in the US. I have not heard anything about any corresponding movement in Korea, though I certainly wouldn't want to say anything very definite about what's going on over there!
What I do think can be said is that relatively few American dojang owners or instructors have very strong opinions one way or another about Gen. Choi: for ITF schools, he's respected as the founder of the style, and for WTF schools, he may or may not arise as an issue, but my impression is, few dojangs of any stripe hold, or propagate, any particular opinion of the General. His emotional impact, so to speak, is primarily in Korea, I think, where the WTF does promote an official version of TKD history which accords him a very different place in the history of the art than ITF histories do. In this country, though, it's a different story. My instructor holds a KKW fifth dan certification (and an independent Song Moo Kwan fifth-dan certification through Joon Pye Choi, which is far more important to him), and has a vague awareness of Gen. Choi as an important player in the formation of `official' TKD in the '50s and '60s, but no strong opinions, views, prejudices or value judgments so far as the General is concerned. The consensus seems to be, he's an important part of the story, but certainly not the whole story, and right now we're concerned with very different things than this or that individual's place in TKD history—the last bit being the most strongly felt, probably!
