Former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung Dies at 85

Former South Korean President Kim Dae Jung Dies at 85
By BILL POWELL AND STEPHEN KIM Bill Powell And Stephen Kim Tue Aug 18, 11:30 am ET
Kim Dae Jung, who died on Aug. 18 of heart failure in Seoul at age 85, was not the father of democracy in South Korea, but he was its consolidator. Throughout the era when South Korea was effectively ruled by the military, Kim was its most active and prominent dissident. He came within 1 million votes of upsetting then President Park Chung Hee in an election in 1971, after which Park amended the constitution and turned South Korea into a one-party police state. In 1973 government agents - with Park's assent - kidnapped and apparently planned to kill Kim. The U.S. government intervened, strongly warning their Cold War–era ally to back off. Park complied, and in that moment the history of the Republic of Korea was altered.


In 1980, citizens in the southern city of Gwangju, the capital of Kim's home province of Jeolla, took to the streets to demonstrate against the military dictatorship of Chun Doo Hwan, who had taken power in a coup following the assassination of Park in 1979. Kim, a leading dissident, was arrested the day before the demonstration. The government crackdown was brutal, resulting in the death of 165 citizens. Kim would use the massacre to attack the ruling party for the rest of his days in opposition. (See pictures of modern-day Seoul.)


Those days came to an end in December 1997, when on his fourth try for the presidency he was elected - the first leader to be elected from an opposition party in South Korea's history. (A fellow dissident and political rival, Kim Young Sam, had thrown in with the ruling party when he was elected in 1992.) Kim's election, more than anything, showed that democracy had come to South Korea to stay. (See pictures of brawling legislators in Seoul.)


Still, for the country it was a tumultuous time. The Asian financial crisis had devastated what had once been one of East Asia's fastest-growing economies. Kim privatized state-owned companies and jump-started South Korea's IT sector. After getting $60 billion in loans from the IMF in 1997, South Korea became the first East Asian country to, in effect, graduate from its oversight, paying its IMF loans back faster than any other East Asian country, in 2000. (See lessons from Asia's financial crisis.)



That same year, Kim made a historic mark diplomatically. He traveled to Pyongyang for a summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il - the first meeting between North and South Korean leaders since the end of the war. The meetings came as part of Kim's so-called Sunshine Policy, which sought economic and diplomatic engagement with Pyongyang. His hope was that a more dovish stance toward the North would convince Pyongyang to rid itself of its nuclear-weapons program. He explicitly stated that reunification of the Korean peninsula would come only after a long period of "peaceful coexistence" with the North. The stance infuriated conservatives in South Korea, who thought Kim's hope for change in the North was naive.


Kim's policy also clashed with that of then incoming U.S. President George W. Bush, who famously told a journalist that he "loathed" Kim Jong Il. A summit meeting between the two ostensible allies went poorly. At one point in a 2001 summit, Bush publicly called the South Korean head of state "this man," instead of President Kim. Kim's supporters in Seoul were furious. Both sides would later acknowledge that the two Presidents had very differing views on how to deal with Pyongyang. (Read about Kim Jong Il's secret family.)


In 2000, Kim was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pursuit of the Sunshine Policy. Its fruits, it turned out, would not be particularly evident when Kim passed away on Tuesday. But he went to his death believing that engagement was the only option when it came to North Korea, and in the Oval Office in Washington now, a new President shares the same belief.


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