• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1971 0

them from his home region of southwest Korea. That area, the current North and South Cholla Provinces, has had a distinctive history, going back at least thirteen hundred years to the time when it was the site of a separate Korean dynasty. Eventually overwhelmed by more powerful neighbors, Cholla was disadvantaged under President Park, who like both Chun and Roh was a native of a rival political center around Taegu. In the mid-1980s Cholla had notably fewer government ministers, generals, and heads of large conglomerates and a lower average income than most other regions. Kim Dae Jung was the hero and standard-bearer of Cholla and other downtrodden people in Korea, but at the same time he was distrusted and even feared by many people from other regions.

Kim Dae Jung was born on January 6, 1924, on a small island off the southwest Korean coast. Unlike his long-standing rival, however, he was not born to wealth or privilege and was an outsider to the mainstream of Korean elite society. To my surprise, I learned in 1987 that despite his fame and his important role in so many historic political developments, many leading Koreans had never met him in person.

After his victory over Kim Young Sam for the opposition party nomination in the 1971 presidential election, he vaulted to the top rank of political leadership by winning 46 percent of the vote against President Park in an election that was heavily rigged for the incumbent. Park hated and feared him. Park's KCIA kidnapped Kim in Tokyo and brought him home to Korea bound and gagged. Park then placed him under house arrest, while his captors went free, and later imprisoned him for sedition. After Park's assassination, Chun continued the vendetta. He had Kim arrested and sentenced to death on trumped-up charges and eventually, in a deal with the Reagan administration, sent him off into exile abroad. After he voluntarily returned home in 1985, Kim was placed under house arrest again.

Shortly before I saw him in 1987, Kim had finally been cleared of all outstanding charges and had his full political rights restored. Until then, he told me, there had been only two months since his kidnapping from Japan fourteen years earlier when he had been free of house arrest, prison, exile, or some other serious official restriction. The years in isolation and adversity had deepened his self-knowledge and political awareness. He had worked out his answers to major questions facing the country and could articulate them clearly.

In the weeks before our meeting, the army chief of staff, General Park Hee Do, had publicly expressed military opposition to Kim Dae Jung's potential candidacy. There was very serious doubt that military leaders would permit Kim to take office if he should be elected, and many supposed they would kill him. As we sat in the family dining room of his house, eating a Western breakfast of eggs and bacon from atop a red-checkered table cloth covered by plastic, Kim declared his refusal to give in to such threats. In contrast to 1979-80, when Chun and Roh seized power, he was sure the Korean people would fight this time rather than submit to continued military rule. "Democratization means neutralization of the military," he said.

I did not visit the fourth serious candidate, Kim Jong Pil, who had created his own minor political party and was thought to have little chance of being elected. (Eventually he won only 8 percent of the vote.) This Kim had been an architect of Park's 1961 military coup, the founder of the KCIA, and, when I knew him best in the early 1970s, Park's prime minister. Later he was temporarily banished from politics by Chun, and the great wealth he had accumulated was confiscated. Now he was seeking restoration of his honor. For most Koreans in 1987, he was a voice from their past.

Several weeks after I saw the two leading opposition figures, Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung pledged publicly that they would not oppose each other, in order not to betray the people's wishes for political change. Nevertheless, a few days after that, Kim Dae Jung appeared