Two months after Kim Dae-jung was inaugurated as president of South Korea in 1998, he came to London to receive an honorary degree. He told the old Korean hands assembled there that the time had come for reconciliation with the North. Over their drinks afterwards they smiled, shook their heads and said: "If only ..."
Kim, who has died aged 85, knew perfectly well that there was widespread scepticism abroad towards his "sunshine policy", which sought to "lead North Korea down a path towards peace, reform and opening through reconciliation, interaction and co-operation with the South". He knew that many of his own officials in Seoul were sceptical, too – the so-called Ministry for Reunification in Seoul would often complain in the months ahead that it did not understand what the president was up to.
Two years later, however, in June 2000, Kim was at Pyongyang airport, reviewing the North Korean guard of honour with the Great Commander Kim Jong-il at his side. As always, he walked unsteadily – the consequence of an accident thought to be an attempted assassination years before. His awkwardness only added to a supremely dignified and emotional moment.
Suddenly, Kim Jong-il was no longer the sex-crazed film buff as portrayed by Seoul's intelligence propaganda, but a fellow-Korean with whom business could be done. Millions of South Koreans watching on television south of the 38th parallel gladly suspended their disbelief. The foreign diplomats in Seoul continued to smile, and continued to be sceptical. In another two years, as Kim approached the end of his presidential term, the "sunshine policy" was again obscured by clouds. Kim Jong-il prevaricated, the economic reforms that Kim Dae-jung had urged remained on paper at best, while millions of North Koreans remained short of food.
Progress had been blighted further by the election of another president – George W Bush. While Bill Clinton, the outgoing American leader, had contemplated visiting Pyongyang, the new administration made its scorn clear, giving ready ammunition to the hardliners in Pyongyang and making North Korea one of the three countries labelled by Bush in his State of the Union speech in 2003 "an axis of evil".
Dialogue returned, even under Bush, with the six-party talks after 2005, which included China, Russia, Japan and South Korea. Progress appeared to be made towards a deal to trade off Pyongyang's nuclear ambitions for US recognition and aid. But the momentum had been lost, the negotiations were not pursued consistently by the US, there were internal issues in the North, and Pyongyang became a self-declared nuclear power.
Appropriately it would be Kim Dae-jung, now in retirement, whose advice at a meeting in May 2009 with Clinton encouraged the former US president to make his dramatic "private" visit to Pyongyang earlier this month and open the door once again.
Kim was born on the remote island of Haui-do off the south-west Korean coast. When he was 10, his father, a farmer, moved to the mainland port of Mokpo, where he ran a small inn – apparently so that his son, already showing signs of talent, could go to a good school.
Little is known of Kim's early life under the Japanese rule that had oppressed Korea since 1905. According to some sources, he was born on 3 December 1925, but others suggest that his date of birth was falsified (and that he was really born nearly two years earlier, on 6 January 1924) to avoid conscription into the Japanese Imperial Army. The most daring act mentioned in official biographies is the writing of a short essay criticising the Japanese that led to him being "removed as class captain". After graduation, he got a job at a shipping company and, after the Korean war, ran his own small business.
Kim was not tainted by collaboration, unlike many other postwar Korean leaders. Growing up in the impoverished south-west, he also had a better understanding of ordinary Koreans. He was, as the US journalist Don Oberdorfer has noted, "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."
In 1954 he made his first unsuccessful bid for election to the national assembly, finally succeeding at a byelection in 1961, just days before the assembly was closed down in the military coup led by Park Chung-hee.
In the elections of 1963, held by Park under US pressure, Kim won again and soon became spokesman for the Democratic party – later merged with others to form the New Democratic party (NDP). He denounced Park's plans to revise the constitution to serve a third term, and in 1971 became the NDP's presidential candidate, winning 46% of the votes, despite widespread fraud.
When Park declared the Yushin constitution in 1972, giving himself unlimited power for life, Kim sought support in the US and Japan. In August 1973 he was kidnapped from a hotel in Tokyo by agents of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). The details of this dramatic and near-fatal episode remain obscure. It is possible that the role of the US, which had backed Park's coup but now balked at the murder of his opponent, still requires discretion.
However, it is known that Kim was seized by South Korean agents, dragged out of the hotel, then transferred to a Korean ship that headed out to sea. The ship was intercepted by a plane and/or helicopter – presumed to belong to the US forces – conveying the message that Kim must be kept alive. He was taken to Seoul and dumped in a street a week later. He was then placed under house arrest, remaining there or in prison until the assassination of Park in 1979 – at the hands of Kim Jae-kyu, the KCIA chief.
Kim was soon back in prison after a second military coup in May 1980 put Chun Doo-hwan in power. He began his rule with the bloody suppression of civilian protest in Kwangju city, Kim's home base. This time Kim was threatened with execution after being convicted of treason. But again, US officials intervened. By their account, Chun agreed to spare his life in return for being granted a private meeting with the incoming US president, Ronald Reagan.
Kim spent more than two years in jail before he was allowed to leave for the US. Most of his prison writings, which movingly display both his Christian faith and his love for his family, date from this period.
By the mid-1980s the ruling elite had become less cohesive, society less docile and Korea's new business community impatient with the restrictions of military rule, while student protests dramatised the demand for democracy. Kim returned to Korea and though repeatedly subject to house arrest, finally regained his political rights in 1987. In the presidential elections, the first since 1971, the elite's candidate Roh Tae-woo won easily over a divided opposition. Kim's failure to unite with his rival opposition leader, Kim Young-sam, revealed a weakness for factionalism in the new politics and Kim Young-sam would form an opportunistic coalition with Roh in 1990, winning the next presidency in December 1992. However, Kim Dae-jung's 34% vote, in which he gained 1.8m more votes than in 1987, placed him in a strong position.
Buffeted by party dissent, renewed popular protest and the Asian financial crisis, the ruling elite that had absorbed Kim Young-sam saw its candidate narrowly defeated in December 1997 by Kim Dae-jung, who gained 40.2% – half a percentage point more than his rival. Yet, even to achieve this victory, Kim Dae-jung had been obliged to form an opportunistic alliance with the United Liberals led by Kim Jong-pil – the man who had founded the KCIA that nearly murdered him.
At last in power, Kim faced a familiar set of problems in a system that, although formally democratic, had not yet significantly altered its underlying power structures, based on the big conglomerations and an opportunistic political culture deeply infected by corruption. The high point of his five-year term was the award of the Nobel peace prize, in October 2000, during the afterglow of the North-South summit. Within months his administration was hit by the first of a series of corruption scandals. Though his own probity was beyond reproach, all three of his sons and several aides became involved. The painful reforms needed to tackle the conglomerates meant alienating the blue-collar workers who would lose their jobs. Like previous administrations, Kim reverted to bail-outs, notoriously paying out millions to prop up Daewoo.
In May 2002, he resigned from the ruling Millennium Democratic party, hoping that by distancing himself and his family, it would improve its prospects. Within weeks, it had lost important parliamentary elections, and only South Korea's unexpected progress to the World Cup semi-finals offered Kim temporary comfort.
On the day before the sensational quarter-final when the national team beat Spain, the president went on television to make a personal apology, begging for forgiveness for failing to fulfil his election promise that no one in his family would be involved in corruption.
He left office in 2003, to be replaced by Roh Moo-hyun, who was to commit suicide after the end of his own five-year term, in May 2009.
Kim is not the first leader to have triumphed over dictatorship only to fumble the chance when he achieved a democratic mandate. There was a strong desire for more radical reform, but a political system based on co-option, deformed by partisanship, backed by a persistent elite, proved too strong.
Kim's concept of democracy was grounded, as he often explained, in the ancient philosophy of China's Mengzi (Mencius) and the example of Abraham Lincoln, somewhat remote models for the 21st century. Once in the presidential Blue House, he was accused of himself becoming too remote.
His narrow power base in the south-west, and reliance on the Korean disease of faction-building, thwarted any real transformation of the political culture. Yet Kim's story remains one of unusual persistence and bravery in the face of death, and he will be remembered as a moral hero of modern Korea.
He is survived by his second wife, Lee Hee-ho, and three sons.
