Over the desk in my study is a large, framed sample of Kim Dae Jung’s calligraphy in Chinese and Korean characters, dedicated to me by name in his hand. Visitors glancing in from the kitchen see his signature and for the most part are impressed. “Wow! Do you know him?” Or, now that he has died, “Did you know him?” Kim, after all, was the outsized public figure among the early democrats in Korea, known to even the most casual follower of Western news reports. He become president and won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to engage North Korea.

By the time Kim took brush to paper that day in 1986 when I visited him in Seoul after taking up my new duties for Newsweek, I did think I knew him pretty well. In between his periods of house arrest, I had seen him quite a few times over the previous decade. On those occasions he’d not only talked the talk of a courageous dissident; he’d also literally walked the walk, limping from an injury that he said resulted from an assassination attempt.

It was often tempting in those pre-democracy times to see Kim as the chief white hat struggling valiantly against a wicked gang of militarists. There were days when I succumbed to that temptation, most emotionally on May 27, 1980, when government troops killed the youthful ringleaders to end an uprising in the city of Kwangju (I have trouble getting used to the new spelling, Gwangju) that had been initially sparked by outrage over the hometown hero’s latest and apparently unjustified arrest.
There is, however, another way to look at the events of those years and Kim’s role in them. To a great extent the always dramatic, sometimes bloody struggle that we Tokyo-based parachute journalists were reporting from the 1970s into the ’90s amounted to one of our generation’s great PR contests, with Kim at the head of one of two opposing bands of spinners.

Was Kim Dae Jung a genius at handling the Western press? Let me count the ways.

Start with the open house at his home, where he – or, in his absence in prison, his wife – was always happy to receive a foreign hack. Other politicians – former President Yun Po Sun, for example, who lived in a traditional Korean palace – could be visited at home on occasion, but DJ made the most of his frequent spells of house arrest, implicitly encouraging us journos to get a first-hand feel for the repression he was experiencing by plowing through the trench-coated agents who surrounded his compound.

So? Kim’s biggest rival among the democrats, Kim Young Sam, himself no slouch at PR, was known to invite groups of foreign correspondents to breakfast (with yogurt on the menu). But in DJ’s case, we didn’t have to go in groups. He was always happy to hold forth to an individual reporter. Once, his wife cooked a meal for the three of us and served it while Kim and I talked. Others got identical treatment, but you would not have known from Kim’s manner that you were not getting a special treat. Aware that he reportedly had made a pile of money as a businessman before entering politics, I’ve wondered whether a correspondent’s arrival at mealtime might have been the signal to replace a more elegant tablecloth, say one of linen or lace, with the regular folks’ down-home plastic patterned spread that we ate on.

Then there was the matter of language. Kim had grown up speaking Korean and Japanese and, early on, some Tokyo-based correspondents, including Sam Jameson, interviewed him in Japanese. But while he was alternately imprisoned and under house arrest in the late ’70s, he studied hard enough to learn pretty decent English. That greatly enhanced DJ’s ability to get his message out not only through interviews with the Western press corps in Seoul, but also on foreign speaking tours such as one he made in 1982 or ’83, when I went to hear him speak at Stanford. His was an investment of time and energy that Y.S. Kim, for example, apparently never made.

Part of the reason DJ was so good at handling us had to be that he was up against a ruling camp that itself – behind the dour and inaccessible military dictators Park Chung Hee and Chun Doo Hwan – boasted sufficient spin capability to make most correspondents think twice before issuing any blanket condemnations of what the government was up to. Kim had to be good to compete. All of us correspondents had friendly sources among the officials and influential supporters of the regime, thoughtful people who believed in the approach they were taking and could defend it with passion and sometimes even humor.

One of the most memorable of those is Park Shinil, a former Vietnam War correspondent for a Korean newspaper who became a consummate PR professional in the government’s Korean Overseas Information Service. As press attaché in South Korea’s Tokyo embassy, Shinil developed close working and drinking relationships with a number of FCCJ members at a time when the two-martini lunch was still fashionable. Eventually he was promoted to run KOIS back in Seoul, becoming the genius behind much of the favorable press coverage accorded to Chun’s successor and former military colleague Roh Tae Woo. For example, it was Shinil who proposed having Roh play tennis with visiting Wall Street Journal editor Karen Elliott House. Karen wrote glowing accounts of Roh as he was about to face off against DJ and YS in the 1987 presidential election.

While I liked Shinil personally (and still count him a good friend long after his retirement), I exercised caution when dealing with him on stories. In the summer of 1990 he asked if I would like to be the sole foreign reporter flying with Roh – who had defeated the two Kims to become president – to San Francisco for an unprecedented meeting with Soviet boss Mikhail Gorbachev. Sure, I said, but what’s the catch? Newsweek has to promise a cover story in its Asian edition, Shinil said. Oh, I replied dismissively, my editors would never make an advance commitment like that. But Shinil had gauged his targets correctly, and they did agree. I was on that plane and Roh got his umpteenth Newsweek cover – justified by the news value of that historic occasion, I’m thankful to note, and not simply by my editors’ deal with Shinil.

Up through that time, Kim Dae Jung maintained his own press-friendly ways. I have on a bookcase in my study another souvenir from 1987 – more of his calligraphy on a china plate picturing a mountain waterfall. Others tried to keep up. I distinctly remember YS, who was to defeat DJ in the 1992 election, wielding his own writing brush on my behalf at some point. But those other tokens may have been less durable or bulky or impressive than DJ’s. In any case, I haven’t seen them for decades among my possessions.

When Kim eventually achieved his goal and got elected president in 1997, the initial signs for us hacks were positive. He notably kept a longstanding promise to give Bernie Krisher the first interview after his election, even though the former longtime Newsweek bureau chief by then represented only his 5,000-circulation Cambodia Daily.
An old friend of mine from KOIS was named to head Kim’s Blue House press office, and I looked forward to continued government cooperation as I worked toward completing a book about North Korea.

Alas, the honeymoon was brief. “The government, as it pursued Kim Dae Jung’s Sunshine policy of reconciliation
with North Korea, became increasingly restive about negative comment,” as Don Kirk, who in those days filed for the International Herald Tribune, related in the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club’s book, Korea Witness. Consequently, it restricted access to officials.

In my case, officials fearful of antagonizing Pyongyang also became unwilling to introduce more of the recent defectors who had been filling in my pictures of life and politics up north.

Perhaps that showed that the press-friendly ways Kim had exhibited all through his pre-presidential career were means to an end, little more. But I’ll say it again this way: He certainly knew the moves. ❶