The news in the first half of 2011 has been consumed with the "Arab spring." As protesters, predominantly young ones, brought down regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, and have fought for democracy in Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and even Saudi Arabia (if only a handful of demonstrators, quickly suppressed), Koreans would naturally think of the decades-long struggle for democracy in Korea, culminating in the June 1987 uprising that signaled the end of military dictatorship. And, of course, they would remember the first president since 1945 truly to come from a serious opposition, Kim Dae Jung. The democratic transition that culminated in his election in 1997 and the reforms that he achieved during his presidency resulted in the stable, broad-based, vibrant democracy of the Republic of Korea (ROK) today. When combined with the severe punishment handed out in 1995 to dictator Chun Doo Hwan and his protégé Roh Tae Woo, and the various deep inquiries into modern Korean history that ensued (especially the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission), it is fair to say that there has been no more successful transition from dictatorship to democracy in the world in the past three decades.

In the United States, however, news coverage and commentary regarding the Arab Spring has hardly ever mentioned the Korean experience.₁₎ Even though the end of dictatorship in Korea was almost coterminous with the rise of democratic regimes after the Berlin Wall fell, it is almost always the Eastern European cases that serve as the historical precedent for the Arab spring. Part of the reason for this is that many American pundits and policy-makers from both the Republican and the Democratic sides distrusted President Kim and his successor, Roh Moo Hyun, and often seem to prefer the old dictators and their current heir, President Lee Myung Bak. This is surprising, because Kim Dae Jung was always very pro-American, went into exile here, and always looked for help for his cause among concerned Americans. President Roh was a more home-grown democrat, and his experience as a lawyer defending dissidents in the 1980s, when the streets of Korean cities were rife with anti-Americanism, perhaps inclined him to a more distant relationship with Americans. But, it remains strange that the U.S., which always claimed to be championing and defending democracy in Korea since 1945, should appear ambivalent when real democrats won election.

In this essay I want to discuss the relationship between Korean and American democracy, to dwell on two of President Kim's most important achievements, and to take this opportunity also to discuss my modest relationship with President Kim.

Rambunctous Koreans, Querulous Americans

One of the curiosities of Korea, which I noticed almost immediately while sitting in tabangs in Seoul more than 40 years ago, is an overweeningly critical political culture. In the late 1960s it was still possible to say what an idiot Park Chung Hee was without being trundled off to jail—if you said it quietly. Yun Posŏn—here's another idiot, people would say, a big fat landlord, likes to hear himself talk. Paek Tu-chin—what a swine, corrupt as they come, look at that mansion of his on the way up to Walker Hill. I could go on with this political gossip, but I must say Koreans seem to follow their politicians with the same fervor that Americans follow their favorite movie stars. All through the 1990s "the three Kims" were on the cover of newspapers as often as Angelina Jolie's face appears on American supermarket magazines. When you combine a single five-year presidential term with this hyperactive political culture, it is inevitable that a president becomes unpopular almost as soon as he walks through the Blue House door.

Meanwhile the United States has had a stable democratic system for two centuries, and a politics that often seems irrelevant to the average American. On average in the past 50 years, just over half of the eligible voters bother to cast ballots in presidential elections. The rise of the blogosphere in the last decade may make it appear that lively debate animates American politics, but much of the debate is centered around issues fought along narrow margins—Republicans want lower taxes, Democrats want more government regulation and spending. Meanwhile, since Barack Obama was elected much of our politics seems dominated by crackpots and know-nothings, people who claim he was really born in Kenya, or presidential candidates like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin who think Obama is leading the U.S. to "socialism." People in the "Tea Party" movement, mostly white and late middle-aged, have no qualms about displaying their ignorance, even taking pride in it; the rest of the world is an unknown abstraction to them, but they are sure that the United Nations has a secret plot to foster world government.

Americans in the official entourage in Korea (embassy, military, etc.) are of course more knowledgeable, but my indelible impression from when I first lived in Korea as a member of the Peace Corps in 1967, was how little they expected from Koreans, how often they said Koreans weren't ready for democracy, and how ready with praise they were for Park Chung Hee. "He's tough, really tough," Ambassador Richard Sneider once told me, while saying how much he enjoyed playing golf with President Park.₂₎ I really have never quite gotten over my first encounters with the American official presence in Seoul. These Americans ranged from gruff military officers to nervous Embassy officials to members of the A.I.D mission, and ranged from hard-nosed anti-communists always warning of a North Korean attack, to civilian liberals who deplored the authoritarianism of the Park regime. But nearly all of them lived in compounds in Yongsan or nearby Itaewon, and they all—including the liberals—expressed attitudes toward Koreans that ranged from querulous condescension to crude racism to outright shock that people like me lived with Koreans and ate their food. Hardly any of them believed that Koreans could do anything right (except under American tutelage), and hardly any of them ventured out into "the economy"—and when they did they took an official car, or a "kimchi cab" (Korean taxicab), the driver of which would have to show identification at the gate before being allowed in to pick them up. But Seoul was a much more pleasant place then, politically, then in became a few years later.

Many Americans involved in Korea policy are old enough to have experienced the 1980s, when Seoul was a complete armed camp, with hundreds of wicket-windowed buses filled with riot police, and tank-like black Mariahs ready to spew teargas through massive portholes in the side (for years the biggest taxpayer in Korea was the woman who held the monopoly on making teargas). Chun Doo Hwan undertook a vast expansion of paramilitary riot police, numbering around l50,000 by the mid-1980s. They bore the main brunt of demonstrations, wearing a strange protective armor: black helmets, tight screens over the face, leather scabbard protecting the back of their neck, padded clothing, thick elbow, knee and shin guards, heavy combat boots, long metal shield in the left hand and riot batons in the right and with their wire-mesh masks, body padding and scabbards to protect their necks. On any give day they could be seen sitting in their armored buses all over downtown Seoul, awaiting the next encounter.

During the Roh Moo Hyun administration the main thing policy-makers were worried about was his assumed "anti-Americanism." They denounced his demands to move the Yongsan military base out of Seoul, and to return operational control of the ROK army to Korean commanders. But were Koreans at that time more critical of Americans than they were in the 1980s, or were they simply more free to express their views in the raucous, bumptious atmosphere of a democracy that also subjects its own leaders to withering criticism? Also, until the decades of military dictatorship ended, you could go straight to jail for publicly advocating the withdrawal of U.S. troops; but after 1997 all kinds of chickens came home to roost from an unfortunate and repressed past. So it might be that, as Americans, we merely experienced what Korean presidents, chaebôl leaders, university administrators, and the dictatorial generals themselves experienced in recent decades.

Kim Dae Jung returned home in the midst of all this, in February 1985, and I was fortunate to be part of an American delegation that accompanied him back to Seoul from exile in the U.S., in hopes that our presence would prevent another airport murder like that which cut down Benigno Aquino on the Manila tarmac two years earlier. The Chun regime was smarter than to do that, but still stupid enough to cause a huge fracas at Kimp'o Airport; a phalanx of KCIA thugs in brown windbreakers pummeled and threw prominent Americans to the floor (two Congressmen were on the delegation), while roughly snatching Kim and his wife into a waiting car and took off. When we got to the bus that would take us into Seoul, hundreds of Chôlla people in tattered winter clothing milled around us, exclaiming that Kim was their "great leader." On the left side of the road leading into Seoul were thousands of riot police. On the right side of the road were enormous numbers of Seoul's common people—workers in denims, students in black uniform, mothers in long skirts, little kids wrapped tightly against the wind, old men and women in traditional dress--with placards hailing Kim's return. It seemed as if the whole population had divided between the riot police and the demonstrators.

Soon we went to a briefing at the U.S. Embassy, where Amb. Richard "Dixie" Walker pulled a briefing sheet from his pocket, his hands shaking, and read to us a paean of praise for the rapid growth of the Korean economy. After ten minutes he had said nothing about Kim Dae Jung or the fracas at the airport, so former Amb. Robert White, part of our delegation, interrupted and began peppering Walker with questions. Walker got deeply flustered, but still managed to give the impression that Kim's return was unimportant, and if anything actually happened at the airport, it was probably our fault. (In fact a Korean-speaking Embassy staffer, Kenneth Quinones, had met us at the airport and apologized for the behavior of the Chun regime, and knew everything that had happened there.) During his tenure Walker never invited Kim Dae Jung to the Embassy. Meanwhile he had total contempt for me—I don't know why, but can guess—and refused to shake my hand. (I was amazed that an American ambassador could be simultaneously so inept and so rude.)

During our first day in Seoul we had no idea what had happened to Kim Dae Jung after he was captured by the security people. The next day we learned that he was under something euphemistically called "house arrest:" riot police surrounded Kim's neighborhood and occupied the homes of his next-door neighbors, surveilling his every movement and anyone who wanted to see him, and refusing to allow him to speak publicly. After being led through this dragnet-like cordon of security, our delegation gathered for dinner at his home. Soon Mr. Kim rose for a toast, and gave such a moving speech in thanks for our delegation and our visit, that many of us were in tears. He remained under this suffocating house arrest for two more years.

After our delegation departed, I returned by myself a month later, and had a private dinner with Kim Dae Jung at his home. He had lived in this neighborhood a long time, Tonggyodong; I had lived very close by in Soggyodong (tong means east, so means west) when I was a Peace Corps teacher. I was very surprised to see that his modest home was little different and not much bigger than the middle school teacher's family with whom I had lived. We talked for hours, just the two of us, and I learned many things: he was sure he would be president of the ROK one day; he really did not like Kim Young Sam, and spent much of our time criticizing him; and he had read at least some of my first book, which was amazing to me.

We also talked about the the Kwangju Rebellion, the touchstone of protests in the 1980s. Kwangju was South Korea's Tiananmen crisis, deeply shaping the broad resistance to the dictatorship in the 1980s and paving the way for democratization in the 1990s, and for the conviction on charges of treason and sedition of the perpetrators who massacred innocent citizens in Kwangju. As scholars like Na Kan-ch'ae of Chŏnnam University have argued, the trials of Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo and Kim Dae Jung's election in 1997 represented a distinct victory for the people of Kwangju and South Chŏlla, even if they came more than fifteen years later and after great suffering. All you have to do to see how much this means to the people of the region is to tour the carefully-tended graves of the victims, or the fine new museum in Kwangju, opened during Roh Moo Hyun's administration dedicated to exploring the truth of what happened in 1980.

The American response to the Kwangju Rebellion represented, to me, the most nauseating display of hypocrisy, opportunism, racism, and betrayal of American democratic ideals between the Korean War and the present. Americans, and especially China experts, are capable of going on forever about the perfidy of Beijing's leaders in crushing the Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989—where Americans had no responsibility at all for what happened. But where Americans were directly implicated in the suppression of the rebellion in Kwangju, the response is mostly silence.

Declassified documents that Tim Shorrock, a reporter for the <Journal of Commerce>, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, make clear that the U.S. as a matter of the highest policy determined to support Chun Doo Hwan and his clique in the interests of "security and stability" on the peninsula, and to do nothing serious to challenge them on behalf of human rights and democracy. Indeed, reading through the materials makes it clear that leading liberals--like President Jimmy Carter and his Ambassador in Seoul, William Gleysteen, his National Security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, and especially Richard Holbrooke (then Under-Secretary of State for East Asia) have blood on their hands from 1980: the blood of hundreds of murdered or tortured young people in Kwangju.

At a critical White House meeting on May 22, Brzezinski summed up the conclusions of a Policy Review Committee: "in the short term support [of the dictators], in the long term pressure for political evolution." The Committee's posture on Kwangju was this: "We have counseled moderation, but we have not ruled out the use of force, should the Koreans need to deploy it to restore order." If the suppression of the Kwangju citizenry "involves large loss of life," the Committee would meet again to discuss what to do. But then when this very "large loss of life" came to pass, Holbrooke and Brzezinski again counseled patience with the dictators and concern about North Korea: within days a naval task force led by the carrier Midway steamed for Korean waters, and Holbrooke told reporters that there was far too much "attention to Kwangjoo [sic]" without proper consideration of the "broader questions" of Korean security.₄₎

It is important for Koreans to understand that these elites, not the American people, control our Korea policy. Operating on a bipartisan basis through one presidential administration after another, they focus almost exclusively on containing North Korea and constraining any difficult people who may come along in South Korea, and do not respect the will of Koreans outside the circle of Korean elites whom they know and work with. Their common mindset and their permanent, year-in, year-out influence in Washington can be seen most clearly in the American response to the North Korean nuclear program in the past two decades (where, for example, both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush have seriously considered preemptive strikes on North Korea), but it also explains the distrust of Kim Dae Jung and the general distaste for Roh Moo Hyun in Washington. Events after the Kwangju Rebellion was crushed also make this pattern clear.

About a week after the rebellion ended, human rights paragon Jimmy Carter sent the U.S. Export-Import Bank chairman to Seoul to assure the junta of American economic support, including a $600 million loan that Carter had just approved; the President told the <New York Times> that "the Koreans are not ready for democracy … according to their own judgment."₅₎ But Jimmy Carter had plenty of help. After Tiananmen, critics of China and the first Bush administration made a big issue of official and unofficial visits to Beijing by Brent Skowcroft, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and others. After the slaughter in Korea there were many more such contacts, with everyone intoning the mantra that internal turmoil would only hearten the North Koreans and hurt Korea's security (and of course its business environment)—and hardly any Americans complained about these visits.

The first private American into the Blue House to chat with the new dictator and assure him of American support after Kwangju was "Dixie" Walker (on June 6, 1980), who also denounced the citizens of Kwangju for their "urban terrorism and insurgency;" the press said he was the probable Ambassador to Korea should Ronald Reagan be elected (a supposition that proved accurate). He was followed by T. Jefferson Coolidge, Jr. (June 10), a businessman who negotiated Harvard University's original grant for Korean studies from Seoul in the mid-1970s; rightwing national security pundit Frank N. Trager arrived on August 5, and, somewhat later, world-class banker David Rockefeller (September 18). Berkeley professor Robert Scalapino was earlier than any of the others, arriving in April to warn everyone (for the umpteenth time) that the Soviets had "vigorously endorsed" Kim Il Sung's policy of armed reunification, then arriving again in October to say the same thing.₆₎ Richard Stilwell, an important former CIA official, lifelong "Korea hand" and all-out advocate of the dictators since 1961, flew into Seoul just before Kwangju to assure Chun of Republican support, whatever the Democrats might think of him.₇₎ In short, a seamless web of Democratic and Republican elites backed Chun's usurpation of power, beginning with Carter, Holbrooke and Brzezinski and ending with a newly inaugurated Ronald Reagan feting Chun at the White House in February 1981 for the "new era" he had created. By that time at least 15,000 dissidents were newly detained in "reeducation" camps.

Some of the prominent Americans who supported Chun's rise to power were later handsomely rewarded for their efforts. In 1984 Korean newspapers reported that Mr. Scalapino was an advisor to the Daewoo Corporation in Seoul, with a consulting fee estimated at $50,000 per year. Others included high-level corporate consultants like disgraced former Vice-President Spiro Agnew, Richard Holbrooke (consultant to Hyundai) and Alexander Haig, Reagan's Secretary of State at the time of Chun's White House visit.₈₎ Richard Stilwell signed on as a consultant to the Hanil chaebŏl in 1986, for an undisclosed fee.₉₎ Kwangju convinced a new generation of young people that the democratic movement had developed not with the support of Washington, as an older generation of more conservative Koreans thought, but in the face of daily American support for any dictator who could quell the political aspirations of the Korean people.

In the next decade, however, the Korean people took matters into their own hands and elected two former dissidents, Kim Dae Jung and Roh Tae Woo, finally ending the long period of dictatorship and militarism that began in 1945. In August 1998 Kim Dae Jung became the first Korean president to visit and pay his respects at the graves of the victims of the Kwangju massacre, where he met with aggrieved relatives and told reporters that the Kwangju rebellion "was behind the birth of his democratic government" and a key element in his own courage in resisting the dictators: "I never gave in to their death threats because I was unable to betray Kwangju citizens and the souls of the May 18 victims."₁₀₎ It is a matter of considerable shame to me that another lesson of the Kwangju Uprising was this: the Korean students were right, you cannot trust American leaders to support democracy in Korea, instead you have to build democracy yourself.

The Blessing of Deft and Peaceful Reform

Americans who never liked Kim Dae Jung and distrusted him, should get down on their knees and thank heaven that he came into office in early 1998. Remember first that he inherited a bankrupt economy and second that he faced a Clinton administration that had done almost nothing since October 1994 to advance the engagement strategy that had achieved a general freeze on North Korea's plutonium program. When I visited Seoul for Kim's inauguration in February 1998, I was amazed. Hardly any cars ran in the streets, let alone traffic jams on the way in from Kimp'o Airport. Noodle shops offered "IMF lunch" for less than a dollar. Great banners ran down the side of tall buildings: "Down with IMF Trusteeship!" Salary men and woman marched through the streets with headbands also denouncing the IMF. Industrial magnate Kim U-jung, head of the huge Daewoo conglomerate, was looking for the next plane to Paris. What had happened to the "Korean miracle"?

Nor had such a mass of people (numbered above 50,000) heretofore gathered under that sky for an inaugural ceremony, but he made sure there was room for a few tens of thousands of the common people who elected him. Kim captured the nation's mood, if not the sunny weather, with a somber, serious and moving address. He vowed to make himself "the president of the people," one who would "wipe the tears of the alienated and encourage those in despair." He called for a "revolution of mind," which meant, he said, "respect for each person and adherence to justice as the highest value." He looked the economic crisis square in the face and pronounced it "stupefying" (which indeed it is—an industrial economy lauded by every U.S. president since Kennedy mutated overnight into a nightmare of "crony capitalism," in the wink of the IMF's eye). "I cannot help but feel limitless pain and anger," Kim said, "when I think of you, the innocent citizens, who are bearing the brunt of the [economic] suffering."

Toward the end of 1997 the worst economic crisis since the Korean War hit the ROK. Beginning with a run on Thailand's currency in the early summer, the contagion spread through one Asian economy after another, until it hit Korea like a force-10 typhoon in November. With the economy essentially bankrupt by early December, the International Monetary Fund stepped in with a $57 billion bailout—but before doing so it signaled that this bailout, unlike earlier ones, would come at a high price: a thorough restructuring of Korea's political economy. By the time the crisis had run its course, the ROK currency had depreciated to one-half of its former value, and its GNP ranking among the world's developed economies had dropped from eleventh place all the way back to seventeenth. It was a cruel blow coming after nearly four decades of sustained growth, but the cruelest cut of all was the role played by prominent American officials in attacking the Korean economic model, and in working closely with IMF officials to try to reform basic elements of Korean political economy.

After the IMF bailout, influential analysts inveighed against a model of development that had been the apple of Washington's eye during the decades of authoritarianism in Korea. Deputy IMF Director Stanley Fischer said true restructuring would not be possible "within the Korean model or the Japan Inc. model." "Korean leaders are wedded to economic ideals born in a 1960s dictatorship," an editorial in <The Wall Street Journal> said, leading to "hands-on government regulation, ceaseless corporate expansion, distrust of foreign capital and competition;" the thirty largest chaebŏls, accounting for a third of the country's wealth, were "big monsters" who "gobbled up available credit" and relied on "outdated notions of vertical integration for strength." The chief economist at Deutsche Morgan Grenfell, Ed Yardeni, heaped scorn on Seoul: "the truth of the matter is that Korea, Inc. is already bankrupt…. All that's left is to file the papers. This is a zombie economy."₁₁₎

The supreme irony of the 1997-98 financial crisis was that it should come just as the Korean people were electing dissident Kim Dae Jung, who had suffered abuse from the previous dictators as much as any comparable political leader in the world. But it wasn't an accident, because Kim embodied the courageous and resilient resistance to decades of dictatorship that marked Korea as much as its high-growth economy. Paradoxically, this maturing civil society became a key enabling mechanism for Washington and the IMF to get their way in Korea. Why? Because Kim's election brought to power people who had long criticized the state-bank-conglomerate tie-up and who, like the new president, had long been its victims. The irony grows in that the global managers feared Kim's election (he might be a radical or a "populist") and Washington had long backed the dictators who tormented him. Insiders in Washington and Wall Street openly suggested that Kim was the wrong leader at the wrong time in the wrong place: a US diplomat told a reporter,₁₂₎

We could be in a position in which Kim Dae Jung takes office in the midst of a financial emergency that is going to require a lot of pain and downsizing of South Korean businesses…. Almost no one thinks he will command the authority to pull it off."

In fact no other conceivable political leader was better positioned than Kim to truly change the Korean system; he had called for reforms analogous to those of the IMF throughout his long career.₁₃₎

While foreigners worried about Korea's strong labor unions disrupting the reforms, President Kim assuaged labor interests with a master stroke in January 1997, one that promised a far-reaching political transformation: under his direction, for the first time in Korean history labor leaders met with leaders of business and government to work out fair and equitable policies to deal with the IMF crisis, a kind of "peak bargaining" arrangement that represented labor's biggest political gain ever. After tough negotiations Kim got labor to agree to large layoffs, which would triple the pre-crisis unemployment rate, albeit from two to six per cent (not a high rate by Western standards); eventually the unemployment rate reached eight per cent, but by 2001 had returned to less than four percent. In return labor unions got the right to exist legally and to participate in politics and field candidates for elections.

The key to the reform process was a fair and across-the-board sharing of the IMF pain and not just more layoffs of workers (which is what American business leaders specialize in)—meaning serious reform of Korea's octopus-like conglomerates. In an interview shortly after he was elected, Kim blamed the financial crisis on military dictatorships who lied to the people and concentrated only on economic development to the detriment of democracy, leading to a "collusive intimacy between business and government." He said the way out of the crisis was to reform the government-business nexus, induce foreign investment, and then to increase exports.₁₄₎ The depth of the economic crisis also ended up doing Kim's work for him: even the best of the conglomerates had such a towering level of bad debt that Daewoo went bankrupt, with its founder, Kim U-jung, fleeing abroad in fear of prosecution; Hyundai continued to have massive troubles in returning to profitability and accommodating to strong unions; and only Samsung seemed to emerge from the crisis relatively unscathed.

Kim Dae Jung's presidency thus achieved historic changes in Korea's political economy, and within two years high growth rates had returned (over 11% in 1999 and 9% in 2000). Korea's civil society and democracy were both strong and vibrant, and no longer threatened by the military. Labor chose to condition the IMF reforms, rather than destroy them. It therefore turned out that a curious confluence of liquidity crisis, IMF reform, Washington's desire to rein in the Northeast Asian model of development, and Korean democratization combined to put the ROK on a much better footing, both politically and economically, than it had been at any point before 1997.

The Sunshine Policy: Reconciliation Before Reunification

A final blessing of democratization since 1987 was to open the way to the grandest Korean value, the reunification of the peninsula. As long as the dictators ruled, the only principle of unification was kill or be killed. No leader of South Korea before 1987 imagined unification as anything other than the extension of the southern system to the north. By inaugurating a long period of reconciliation, peaceful coexistence, economic exchange and people-to-people contacts, Kim Dae Jung set in motion the only strategy that might actually change, open, and eventually democratize the North, if slowly. The gains from this have been tremendous compared to what went before, in my view, but maybe the gains in the South have been greater, because people have completely transformed their image of their northern brethren from menacing devils to estranged brothers, sisters and cousins. This could never have happened without a genuine democratic breakthrough in the Republic of Korea. Kim Dae Jung's far-reaching changes involving North Korea culminated in the P'yŏngyang Summit of June 2000, where the two Korean heads of state shook hands for the first time since the country's division in 1945.

I was amazed on that warm and sunny day in February 1998 (a good day for a "sunshine policy") when President Kim mounted the podium and completely transformed the ROK's strategy toward the North. At his inauguration he pledged to "actively pursue reconciliation and cooperation" with North Korea, seek peaceful coexistence, and declared his support for P'yŏngyang's attempts to better relations with Washington and Tokyo—in complete contrast with his predecessors, who feared any hint of such rapprochement. He soon underlined his pledges by approving large shipments of food aid to the North, lifting limits on business deals between the North and southern firms, and calling for an end to the American economic embargos against the North in June 1998, during a visit to Washington. Kim explicitly rejected "unification by absorption" (which was the de facto policy of his predecessors), and in effect committed Seoul to a prolonged period of peaceful coexistence, with reunification put off for twenty or thirty more years. That in itself was a courageous stance, since the "German model" had such an overwhelming influence on the South in the 1990s, leading so many Koreans to expect that unification would come quickly, with the North being absorbed into the South.

President Kim also inaugurated a sweeping effort at reconciliation with the North and with the rebellious southwest of his native land, which had lived very uncomfortably from the 1890s into the 1990s with the Japanese, the Americans, and successive Korean military dictators. At his inauguration he pardoned two previous militarists, Chun Doo Hwan and Roh Tae Woo, who had been sentenced to death or life imprisonment in 1996. As scholars like Na Kan-chae of Chonnam University have argued, the trials of Chun and Roh and Kim's election in 1997 represented a distinct victory for the people of Kwangju and South Cholla, even if they came many years later and after great suffering.

One of Kim's projects was "A History that Opens the Future," dedicated to fresh and honest examination of any number of difficult issues in modern Korean history, and between Korea and its neighbors. After his term in office and his successor's, it is fair to say that South Korea is finally one unified nation, all orthodox and heterodox "points of view" are aired, and enormous progress was made in reconciling with Pyongyang. Most people have transformed their image of the North, from evil communist devils to brothers and cousins led by nutty uncles. In an important speech in April 2007, Kim's successor, Roh Moo-hyun, criticized Japanese leaders for seeking to justify the actions of their forebears in the 1930s and 40s, instead of finding common understanding with their neighbors: "true reconciliation, whether domestic or international, is possible only on a foundation of historical truth."₁₅₎

The purpose of the various South Korean official historical inquiries has not been to sow blame or refight Cold War battles, but to seek reconciliation between North and South and to establish an understanding and an orientation that produces verstehen of one's former enemy—not sympathy, perhaps not even empathy, but an understanding of the principles that guide one's adversary, even if one finds those principles abhorrent or deeply wounding to one's own knowledge of what happened historically with this same enemy. After all, to blame one side (as most Americans do) for all the blood and agony of the past century since Japan seized Korea, is to fit an extraordinarily complex, merciless and implacably brutal history through the eye of an ideological needle. But through techniques of requiem under a fair system of justice—investigation, trial, testimony, adjudication, apology, purge, reparations—people can finally reconcile, propitiate, and put their ghosts to rest. Once the enemy's core principles are understood without blinking, once we view our history with this adversary from all sides, appeals can be made to the adversary's world view. And, of course, full recognition of what one side (the South) did might lead to a better understanding of all the grievances husbanded by the other side. But perhaps the greatest gain is self-knowledge, for if you do not know yourself and what others think of you, rightly or wrongly, it is difficult to navigate a complicated world.

When Kim Dae Jung came to Washington in March 2001 as the first foreign head of state to greet President Bush in the oval office, fresh from winning the Noel Peace Prize, Bush treated him with contempt and lectured him about how you couldn't trust Kim Jong Il and how the North wasn't likely to keep its agreements. Kim Dae Jung's prize was not awarded to him for trusting in Kim Jong Il, or for being unaware of agreements that North Korea may not have kept in the past. But this was a distinct harbinger of what was to come in the next six years: blanket hostility toward North Korea and open threats of preemptive strikes, and so the North went back to building missiles and nuclear weapons, testing both of them last year—and with no serious penalty coming from the U.S., because the catastrophe in Iraq has completely overwhelmed American foreign policy and left President Bush hunkered down in near-total isolation in the same office where he met Kim Dae Jung (he couldn't even throw out the first baseball when the season started in April 2006, a favorite custom of his presidency, for fear of being booed loudly).

Along comes President Lee Myung Bak, who came into office blaming his predecessors for coddling the North over "ten lost years," and he gets rewarded by President Bush with a weekend visit to Camp David in April 2008, in total contrast to the rude reception Bush gave to Kim Dae Jung seven years earlier. Washington pundits fell all over themselves to applaud Lee's sagacity: finally the "adults" were running Korea again.₁₆₎ During this period I went to a number of conferences on Korea at the State Department, the Brookings Institution, and other Washington think-tanks; I was amazed to hear former diplomatic and military figures praising Lee Myung Bak and talking about how the Korean-American relationship was now "the best it's ever been."

Politicians and Historians

I had a modest personal relationship with President Kim over several decades, and as a result, when I arrived in my hotel room at the time of his inauguration, I found a message from a <Chosun Ilbo> reporter, saying he wanted to interview me "about your friend Kim Dae Jung." (I didn't return the call.) Shortly after Kim was elected in 1998, an elder Korean friend told me, "Oh well, now you have become a political scholar, like all the rest." My elder friend was wrong: I am not a political scholar, except in the sense that modern Korean history forces political choices on any scholar; a "value-free" narrative of this history would be an absurdity. I had known Kim Dae Jung for decades, but he had never asked me to do anything but what I do as a university professor, nor did I ever ask a favor of him, other than to meet and talk with him from time to time.

I first met President Kim in July 1973, when he came to speak at the University of Washington, a few weeks before he was kidnapped in Tokyo by KCIA agents and nearly murdered. Historian James B. Palais had invited me to offer a couple of summer courses while I was still a graduate student, and had invited President Kim because of Palais' long-term concern for human rights and democracy in Korea. Kim Dae Jung spoke in a classroom with no more than fifteen people present. Seven years later when he was indicted for "treason," and his criticism of the Park government at the University of Washington was included in the indictment, drawn from a tape of his remarks that one of the fifteen people in that room turned over to the KCIA. Meanwhile at the time one American university after another was accepting large grants from the "Korean Trader's Foundation," a front for KCIA attempts to influence scholarly studies of Korea in the U.S. (as the Congressional investigation by the Fraser Committee later proved).

I met Kim Dae Jung again during his exile in the United States, and I particularly remember a gathering at the home of a Korean-American human rights activist in Seattle, where President Kim told us at some length about how his Catholic religious beliefs had influenced his political choices and his life. He assured us then, thirty-five years ago, during the height of Park's dictatorship and a few weeks before he was kidnapped, that one day he would lead a democratic Korea—a belief that few others could muster amid the astonishing repressive capacity of the militarists. The only prolonged association that I had with him, however, was when he came back to Seoul from exile in the U.S. in February (discussed above).

An old friend of mine went to work with Kim Dae Jung 's political entourage, and he once shook his head and told me that D. J. could easily give political lessons to Machiavelli. It didn't surprise me: it is hard for a politician to do any good unless he has power, and the quest for power is the essence of political life. I don't know what sins Kim Dae Jung may have committed on the route to power, but I do know that for decades he stood for human rights and democracy against a succession of dictatorships who would have vastly preferred simply to murder him, if they could get away with it. And once he achieved power, he used it for the good of the people, bringing them along to his side with a distinct vision of the future. His twin achievements are manifest in Korea now being a trillion-dollar economy, 111h-ranking in the world, and in opening the path toward reconciliation with the North, which completely transformed the way ordinary South Koreans look at their brethren across the DMZ.

If we think of what courageous Arab protestors are facing today, well, that is what Korean dissidents faced in the1980s. Maybe it's better to count the blessings we have, instead of the ones we might have. For those American detractors of Kim and Roh, what would be their alternative? Were there not real and unquestioned victories after the political blight Koreans lived under, only twenty years ago?—arbitrary dictatorship, preventive detention, routine torture, a CIA spying on everyone, a nonexistent labor movement, a press forced to put Chun Doo Hwan's photo or his brilliant words on its front pages every day. Koreans have taught us not just how to build a modern economy, but that democracy comes from the bottom up through the sacrifices of millions of ordinary people. The masses of Koreans in the street brought Chun down, but the symbol of those masses (and he always knew it), was Kim Dae Jung. His epitaph is this: a stalwart democrat and opponent of dictatorship, the man who rescued and reformed the Korean political economy, the leader who opened the path toward South-North reconciliation—and a politician who could teach Machiavelli a thing or two. Every country moves toward democracy in its own fashion, following its own historical path and essential conditions, but South Korea is a remarkable case because of the relentlessness of the militarists and a sadly inhospitable international setting, where Americans have so much to answer for—and still pay so little attention.

<Notes>

1) An exception would be <New York Times> columnist Nicholas Kristof, who has mentioned Korea's transition several times in his columns about the Arab uprisings, but without going into any detail.

2) This was during Sneider's visit to the University of Washington in the late 1970s.

3) This section relies in part on my introduction to the English edition of Lee Jai-ui's classic narrative, <Kwangju Diary>.

4) <Associated Press>, June 11, 1980; <New York Times>, May 29, 1980 and June 22, 1980.

5) Samsung Lee, "Kwangju and American Perspective," <Asian Perspective, v>. 12, no. 2 (Fall-Winter 1988), pp. 22-23.

6) Walker said nothing could serve Communist purposes better than "internal instability, urban terrorism and insurgency [a reference to Kwangju], and the disruption of orderly processes." (<Korea Herald>, June 7, 1980.) Coolidge wanted to assure foreign investors that Korea was still a good environment (<Korea Herald>, June 11, 1980), while Trager said, "the current purge drive in South Korea is good and fine if it is an anticorruption measure" (<Korea Herald>, August 5, 1980); Rockefeller called the ROK "a worthy model" of development (<Korea Herald>, September 18, 1980). Scalapino turned up during the turmoil in April (<Korea Herald>, April 9, 1980) and then again in October, at a conference attended also by Walker, where he once again stated that the Soviets and North Koreans were exploiting internal instability in the South (<Korea Herald>, October 7, 1980.)

7) Stilwell's visit in early May 1980, and the commotion it caused in the Seoul Embassy (which thought Stilwell was undercutting its efforts to restrain Chun), are discussed in the FOIA documents in possession of Tim Shorrock. On Stilwell more generally, see Cumings, <War and Television: Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf War> (Verso, 1992), pp. 245-48.

8) <Korea Herald>, May 16, 1984. The $50,000 figure is not reported in this article, but a friend of mine who works for Daewoo gave me this figure.

9) <Korea Herald>, Nov. 18, 1986.

10) <Korea Herald>, August 26, 1998.

11) Editorial by Joseph Kahn and Michael Schuman, <The Wall Street Journal>, Nov. 24, 1997; Fischer quoted in <The Wall Street Journal>, Dec. 8, 1997; Yardeni's "zombie" remark was broadcast widely on CNN News; see the full quotation in <The Washington Post>, Dec. 11, 1997.

12) Quoted by David Sanger, <The New York Times>, November 20, 1997.

13) In English, see especially Kim Dae Jung, <Mass Participatory Economy> (Cambridge: Harvard East Asian Center, 1985).

14) Mary Jordan's interview with Kim Dae Jung, <The Washington Post>, Jan. 9, 1998. See also the government white paper, "The New Administration's Directions for State Management," Korean Overseas Culture and Information Service (February 1998), which called for financial transparency, good accounting, improvement of capital adequacy, and no "unrestricted diversification" by the chaebŏl—but made no mention of breaking them up.

15) President Roh Moo-hyun, "On History, Nationalism and a Northeast Asian Community," (Seoul, <Global Asia>, April 16, 2007).

16) This was particularly apparent in <The Nelson Report>, a Washington blog that follows Korean affairs.