Kim Dae Jung certainly had a flair for flattering journalists.

Until I read Bradley Martin’s article in the October issue of Number 1 Shimbun (“DJ was master of the media”), I fondly thought I was unique among FCCJ members in having “a framed sample of Kim Dae Jung’s calligraphy in Chinese and Korean, dedicated to me by name in his hand.” I can hardly wait to compare mine with Bradley’s.

Another shattered illusion of special privilege was sharing breakfast with Kim Dae Jung at his home in Seoul, served by his wife, Lee Hee Ho. Little did I guess that Bradley would soon be arriving for lunch.

Since Bradley and Henry Scott Stokes have written so admirably on DJ’s life, I can only fill in a few gaps. These concern his epic rivalry with Kim Young Sam for leadership of the opposition to South Korea’s military regime.

We used to snigger at its trivial manifestations. As DJ’s skill as a calligrapher spread, Kim Young Sam took to sending out Christmas cards bearing his own spindly strokes, more like those of a junior high school pupil than a member of the literati. First to dye his hair, as I recall, was Kim Young Sam.

In truth, they had little in common besides a surname.

When DJ received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2000, the presentation speech ranked him beside Nelson Mandela, Andrei Sakharov and Mahatma Gandhi. This was not a stretch. Having nearly beaten Park Chung Hee in the presidential election of 1971, DJ spent many years in prison, house arrest, and exile in Japan and the United States. A probable assassination attempt in South Korea left him with a lifelong limp. Kidnapped from Tokyo by the KCIA, he narrowly escaped being drowned at sea. In the wake of Chun Doo Hwan’s coup d’etat of December 1979 and the massacre at Kwangju five months later, it took the combined intervention of Pope John Paul II and the U.S. and Japanese governments to reprieve him from a death sentence for subversion.

Enduring such persecution, yet forgiving his tormentors, gave him immense moral authority in South Korea. In 1997, on the cusp of fulfilling his life’s ambition to become president, DJ pardoned Chun and his close collaborator Roh Tae Woo, after they had spent barely two years behind bars.

Next to this beacon, Kim Young Sam’s sputtering candle was barely visible. DJ’s own life was itself a never-ending story, plus he never left journalists empty-handed for a quote. With Kim Young Sam, who as Bradley points out, never learned English, the challenge in an interview was often to stay awake. For the military dictatorship that feared him, DJ was the radical firebrand, the rabble-rouser, the dangerous demagogue. Kim Young Sam, in spite of a well-publicized hunger strike, was the more moderate, accommodating and respectable.

Underneath their political difference lay another one of regional antagonism and discrimination. Park Chun Hee, Chun Doo Hwan, Roh Tae Woo and Kim Young Sam all hailed from the Kyongsang region in the southeast, while DJ came from Cholla in the southwest. Most of the plum jobs in South Korea went to the sons (very rarely the daughters) of Kyongsang, which duly received the lion’s share of government spoils. Much of the anger that spilled over at Kwangju, the capital of impoverished South Cholla, had its roots in regional bitterness.

In the 1980s, when I started visiting Seoul for The Observer, I often heard Western diplomats voice support for the military government as a bastion against the communist North. When Margaret Thatcher visited Seoul as British prime minister in May 1986, she avoided any criticism of Chun’s dictatorship; instead, she praised Chun for standing firm against North Korean aggression. The next day we were all flown by military helicopter to Panmunjom on the DMZ, the perfect photo and TV opportunity for the Iron Lady to demonstrate her stout defense of freedom. Meanwhile Kim Dae Jung was under house arrest in Seoul. An invitation was sent to Kim Young Sam to meet Thatcher at a British Embassy reception, but none went to DJ, South Korea’s most famous political prisoner. It also struck me that none of the British journalists from London seemed to know or care.

I shall never forget the circumstances of either of my two interviews with Kim Young Sam. For the first, I hired an interpreter from the business center at the Chosun Hotel. It used to be an open secret that the KCIA made copies of faxes and telexes sent by foreign correspondents at the major hotels, as well as their incoming messages. Even so, I was not expecting the gentleman who presented himself in the lobby as my interpreter. His erect bearing, smartly cut grey woollen overcoat and black leather kid gloves all proclaimed officer class, and it came as no great surprise when he said his main employment was as a “trainer” for the South Korean Air Force. He was from Pusan, near Kim Young Sam’s hometown, and at the beginning and end of my interview at Kim’s house, they engaged in lengthy exchanges in Korean.

His interpreting was terrible, undoubtedly the worst The Observer ever paid for. It wasn’t all “Mr. Kim, he say democracy very important,” but that was the gist of what I wrote down. Perhaps he meant it as a summary. Later, he took me to celebrate, at a nightclub in Seoul’s Myong-dong, behind the Catholic Cathedral. Over copious amounts of bottled beer and dried squid, with a young waitress clad in scraps of black polyester squeezed between us, he confided to me his true feelings: “I hate the opposition.” Fearing I might become the victim of a suspicious accident, I merely winced in response.

The second interview was on a Saturday morning at Kim Young Sam’s campaign office near Seoul City Hall. He and DJ had split the opposition by campaigning on separate tickets against Roh Tae Woo – Chun’s co-conspirator in the December coup and Kwangju bloodbath, and his designated successor. Roh easily won the election, and went on to open the Seoul Olympics in 1988, but not before huge demonstrations in Seoul and other cities.

I was with Jasper Becker of The Guardian. As the interpreter droned on, we nearly succumbed to drowsiness, but sat up with a jolt when tear-gas canisters exploded in the street outside. It was a common enough sound, but had an electrifying effect on Kim Young Sam, who hit the floor and cowered under a large table. We felt it only polite to join him. Only when the riot police stopped firing tear gas did we all stand up and resume the interview.

Years later, Kim Young Sam came to Tokyo and spoke at the FCCJ. To my amazement, his interpreter was the same one whom I had introduced, who hated viscerally the opposition, and was guilty of serious crimes against the English language. His interpreting had not improved.

This odd pairing was no more peculiar than Kim Young Sam’s decision to merge his own party with that of Roh Tae Woo in 1990, which to many in the opposition was like sleeping with the enemy. To be fair, after Kim Young Sam defeated DJ in the 1992 election and became president, he pushed through several reforms. But besides the arrest, prosecution and conviction of Chun and Roh for their roles in the 1979 coup and 1980 Kwangju massacre, and for accepting millions of dollars in bribes, the act for which his presidency will best be remembered was one of destruction.

Perhaps because his popularity had begun to sag, Kim Young Sam decided to rush through the demolition of the former Japanese Governor General’s Office. A hated symbol of subjugation to Japanese colonial rule, it was built directly in front of the Kyongbok Palace, which from Sejong-no, the main boulevard of Seoul, was totally obscured. Seen from the air, the building was shaped in the character for nichi or sun. After liberation, it had served as U.S. military headquarters, the site of the Constitutional Assembly, the prime minister’s office, and most recently, the Korea National Museum.

On a sweltering day in the middle of August 1995, 50 years after Korea’s liberation, I stood in a crowd in the middle of Sejong-no with Jack Burton, Seoul correspondent of the Financial Times. After traditional Korean dancing and solemn music, detonators unfastened the giant cupola, which was lifted off the building by crane and removed for exhibition elsewhere. The carcass of the building then seemed to explode in fireworks. Kim Young Sam was in such a hurry to see the whole building demolished before his term ended that for years all the treasures from the National Museum were stored in an annex.

What of DJ’s presidency? Like Nelson Mandela, he pardoned his former enemies, including one who had wanted him killed. He took over in the midst of an economic crisis, and deserves credit for restoring growth. He had long criticized the stranglehold of the chaebol, and tried hard to curtail their power and nurture entrepreneurship; hardly the actions of a collectivizing communist.

His legacy was tarnished by revelations that his government funnelled $500 million to North Korea in business deals, shortly before his 2000 summit in Pyongyang with Kim Jong Il. He apologized for the scandal, but it was manna to his many enemies, in Korea and abroad. ❶