The Two Koreas_ A Contemporary History - Don Oberdorfer [196]
Although passage of power from father to eldest son was traditional in Korean dynasties and Confucian families, it was heretical in a nominal "people's democracy." As recently as 1970, the official Dictionary of Political Terminologies published in Pyongyang defined hereditary succession as "a reactionary custom of exploitive societies." This entry was dropped in the early 1970s, when Kim Il Sung decided to make his son his closest aide and successor.
Kim Jong Il graduated from Kim 11 Sung University in 1964 and went to work in the Central Committee of the Workers Party, with special responsibility for films, theater, and art, which became his lifelong passion. He is credited with the production of six major films and musicals in the early 1970s. Kim became a secretary of the Central Committee of the Workers Party in September 1973 and a member of its Politburo the following year. By then, songs were being sung about him among party cadres, who carried special notebooks to record his instructions.
Despite his prominence in the Workers Party, little was said about him publicly, which suggests that his father felt the need to fully prepare the domestic and external public for the first family succession of the communist world. North Korean media referred instead to a mysterious "party center" who was given credit for wise guidance and great deeds. The veil was lifted at the Sixth Workers Party Congress in October 1980, when the younger Kim was simultaneously awarded senior posts in the Politburo, the Military Commission, and the Party Secretariat and was openly proclaimed to be Kim Il Sung's designated successor. He was given the title of Dear Leader, close to that of the Great Leader. Both father and son were addressed and referred to in special honorific terms that were not used for anyone else.
Stories of Kim Jong Il's high living, hard drinking, and womanizing are legion. Kim was married to his college sweetheart in 1966, but they divorced in 1971. He married his present wife, another Kim Il Sung University graduate who was a typist at Workers Party headquarters, in 1973. He is widely reported to have had other liaisons, including a long-term affair in the early 1970s with a prominent actress who was eventually sent off to live in a villa in Moscow.
For many years the most extensive glimpses of Kim Jong Il in action came from a prominent South Korean actress, Choi Eun Hee, and her former husband, film director Shin Sang Ok, who were kidnapped separately to North Korea from Hong Kong in 1978 on the younger Kim's orders. Without embarrassment, he baldly told the movie couple in a meeting that they surreptitiously tape-recorded that he had ordered their forcible abduction because "I absolutely needed you" to improve Pyongyang's unprofessional film industry. Speaking in matter-of-fact fashion about this bizarre kidnapping, Kim told them, "I just said, `I need these two people, so bring them here,' so my comrades just carried out the operation."
Director Shin spent more than four years in North Korean prisons for trying to escape. After he was released and he and his wife were reunited, they made motion pictures for Kim Jong Il for almost three years. Kim Jong Il treated them as important artists and members of his social circle until their escape in Vienna in 1986. During this period they had extensive personal contact with him and his friends and entourage.
The country was struggling economically and was unable to pay its debts, but the filmmakers reported that Kim Jong II spent money lavishly. He housed Choi and eventually Shin in luxurious surroundings, including