Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (45 page)

Before finishing high school, he did accompany his father to the Soviet Union, one of the few known instances of his traveling abroad. Indeed, the politically precocious seventeen-year-old actually involved himself in planning Kim Il-sung’s itinerary for the trip, according to Hwang Jang-yop, who traveled with them as party secretary for ideology. “When Kim Il-sung left the hotel in the mornings to attend to official functions, he would help his father to the door, bring out his shoes and personally put them on his feet. Back then Kim Il-sung was only forty-seven, enjoying robust health that was the envy of much younger men. However, he was still pleased by his son’s act of taking his arm and putting his shoes on for him.” During that trip the younger Kim took a supervisory role over his father’s doctors, nurses and assistants. In the evening he would assemble them and “ask them how they had served Kim Il-sung during the day and what they should do the next day.” Jong-il “was particularly interested in me, and asked me a lot of questions,” Hwang said. “I felt that he was much too politically sensitive for a seventeen-year-old.”
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Hwang “had the premonition that Kim Jong-il would one day chase his uncle out and take over or climb even higher. Anything higher would have been inheritance of Kim Il-sung’s power, but back then I did not dream that things would come to that.”
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Hwang took the opportunity of that Moscow trip to suggest that the youth enroll in the party secretary’s alma mater, Moscow University, but Kim Jong-il rejected the idea. “He said that politics should be learned from his father, and that he could not assist his father while studying abroad.”
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He returned to Pyongyang to enroll at Kim Il-sung University. The official version has it that his decision was based on his “yM
c
i>
e
-consciousness”: He realized that “his real learning and his textbooks were found in the reality of Korea and not in any other country”
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Perhaps that’s not far from the real reason. For most of his life he had been known as Yura, but shortly before his high school graduation he is reported to have told classmates to call him Jong-il.
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It may be that he wished to present a more Korean image so his father would not look ridiculous attacking flunkeyists for aping things foreign. But Hwang came to believe that the youngster had developed ambition for his own career: “Considering his words and deeds from this time onwards, I believe that Kim Jong-il was more aggressive than his father in the process of power inheritance.”

Kim Jong-il “grew up in the royal family headed by an absolute dictator, and faced no obstacles in his path,” Hwang wrote. “Since his mother Kim Jong-suk’s death in 1949 no one had any control over him.” The lad “behaved like a prince,” and was “a conceited child who flaunted his status as the son of the highest ruler among his friends. This tendency to do whatever
he liked worsened as he grew and turned into the overvaulting ambition to make his father’s power his own.
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As befits its illustrious name, Kim Il-sung University was the country’s most prestigious institution of higher learning. It employed about six thousand faculty and staff members. Compare that number with a student body of ten thousand “and you’ll see it’s a very prominent school,” one former student said. Known as the place where the country grew “pure particles for Kimil-sungism,” KISU emphasized ideological studies even more than other universities did.

The official accounts describe Kim Jong-il’s university career as brilliant. He took top academic honors. He led fellow students, both on campus and in the off-campus physical labor that was required of all North Korean students. And he “published some 1,200 works including treatises, talks, speeches, answers, conclusions and letters as a student”—publications that “concern matters of philosophy, political economy, history, pedagogy, literature and art, linguistics, law military science and natural science.”
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In fact, his purported undergraduate writings, on topics such as “The Characteristics of Modern Imperialism and Its Aggressive Nature,” did not draw official praise and start appearing in print until he had been picked to succeed his father in the 1970s. By then he commanded an enormous corps of writers, some of whom just might have had something to do, even retrospectively, with his prolific output.

Kim Jong-il majored in political economy. Largely as a result of his choice, economics later became the most prominent of the university’s departments. “A lot of people who graduated in economics have been promoted quite well,” said a former math major at KISU who took the basic political economy course. “They learn socialist economics and a touch of capitalist economics. What you learn about capitalist economics is just what Marx said in
Das Kapital
. In other words, you get a critique of capitalism.”
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On his first day at KISU young Kim humbly greeted professors and fellow students, taking off his cap and saying, “I hope I will learn a great deal from you.” Within days, however, he is said to have begun criticizing the curriculum and the textbooks—and professors and deans, of course, had begun changing them according to his instructions.

For one thing, he did not see why it was necessary to include study of computation using the slide rule and abacus in the university economics curriculum. After all, students were supposed to have learned one of those tools, the abacus, before they got there; at the university level they would do their computation on adding machines. “Surprised at the keen insight” of that complaint, the dean not only revised the curriculum but took to having a private chat with Kim Jong-il after each of his lectures to see if his words had
met with the very special freshman’s approval.
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In rescuing North Korea’s future economic managers from the drudgery of studying computation so they could concentrate on what he considered the really important parts of the curriculum, Kim Jong-il was following in the footsteps of his father and his father’s mentor, Stalin. Both were known for their suspicion of mathematical and scientific evaluation of policies.
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Mean-while Kim Jong-il saw to it that his KISU classmates were “afire with unquenchable ardor” for reading. Official accounts credit him with having started a movement in which every student was to read ten thousand pages a year—from books by and about Kim Il-sung. The younger Kim’s rationale: “In order to make the Great Leader’s revolutionary thought your own conviction, you must read his works ten or even twenty times until you grasp their essence, thinking deeply over the ideas conveyed by each phrase of his works.” Soon—like Chinese with the little red book of Mao’s quotations—they are reported to have been studying Kim Il-sung’s works “no matter when and where, in libraries, while walking in parks and in their spare minutes in dining halls.
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Kim Jong-il joined the Workers’ Party while a university student. He was not the leader of his party cell—or of the campus Democratic Youth League. Indeed, an authorized biography has it that the party cell chairman was so “greatly honored by mere registration of the distinguished name” that he told young Kim he could “do as he pleased regarding his life in the party.” However, the account goes on, Kim rejected the offer, and throughout his university career he provided “a brilliant example” of the conscientious party member.

For example, he intervened to revise the cell’s work plan when he saw that it had strayed from the main target into minutiae. Ashamed of their mistake, the committee members “dropped their heads.” (The gesture evidently was becoming reflexive among North Koreans as the junior Kim more often deigned to offer his guidance to lesser mortals.) Kim also realized that “party-life review”—the criticism session so central to communist practice— was held too seldom. He proposed making it a weekly or even daily routine. “If we have it frequently, we will not have to keep our deficiencies for a long time before they are criticized as we do now,” he explained. “We will be able to rectify them before they grow too serious.” Oddly, there is no mention of any criticism of him uttered in such sessions, no listing of deficiencies he might have had.
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One story full of unintended ambiguity tells of news reporters who went to the campus in early 1963 to write up an award—“Double Chollima”— won by Kim’s class. Already, “Kim Jong-il was widely known as a young leader,” says an official biography. “Various anecdotes about this were told widely. So the people desired eagerly to see him.” The reporters asked to interview him, “because they had thought that the class owed all its success to
his energetic guidance.” Kim Jong-il refused, however, explaining that it would be enough for them to “meet the comrades who have done good jobs.” Finally he submitted to a brief interview, but was not very forthcoming. When they asked about his experience in guiding the class’s work to win the award, he answered that he had “nothing to say.” After thinking a bit, he broke his silence only to the point of delivering a homily of a few words on the mission of youth to carry forward the revolution.

When the journalists suggested he pose for a photograph, he refused, asking: “Why should I have my picture published in the paper?” Instead he sent them away, “asking them to write a fine article and show it to him when it had been written.” They complied—this was North Korea, remember, where reporters were mere mouthpieces for the regime. After he received their draft, he returned it to them—having marked for excision all references to him.

Although they failed to photograph him alone, the journalists did get a chance to take a picture of the whole class. On that occasion they are reported to have asked Kim Jong-il to stand front and center. The story is that he refused, saying the places of honor belonged to the party cell chairman, the Democratic Youth League chairman and the class monitor, who had “done a great deal of-work.” The journalists insisted that having him stand in the middle was “the wish of the readers of our newspaper, the unanimous wish of all our people.” Fellow students chimed in, urging him to stand in the middle. He refused, and the cameraman finally snapped the picture showing Kim Jong-il in “an obscure corner,” second from the left in the central row.

The reporters were “deeply impressed with his infinite modesty,” says his biographer. “On honorable occasions he always took the back seat, giving all honors to the ordinary students. In him they saw the great personality of a true leader who bears the brunt of all difficulties for the well-being of the people.” That photograph, published in February of 1963, was the first one picturing Kim Jong-il to appear in the North Korean media. “This was how the dear leader whom the Korean people had craved to see so eagerly made a public appearance so unseemingly and so obscurely among fellow students. The people saw the image of their dear leader in this very humble picture.
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Right. Well, it sounds as if the regime, by the time the biography carrying that account was published, might have had to make a virtue of necessity. As we have seen, most of the stories officially told about him from the 1980s showed Kim Jong-il as the leader of his mates since his elementary school days. But here was his first published photograph and it showed him taking a back seat. What to do? Tell a story about his modesty, true or concocted.

Kim Jong-il may well have had ample cause for modesty that day. He was not the class leader (although presumably he could have held whatever post he wanted—if higher-ups and he himself had thought at the time that he was destined to rule the country, and had realized it would look good on his résumé for him to get his college-leadership ticket punched on the way up).

It may have been true that real credit for the achievements in question belonged to others, whether he actually said so or not. Kim Jong-il was just growing out of adolescence, while a great many of his male classmates— more than likely including the leaders who did the real organizational work—-were army veterans senior to him by several years, who had shown their mettle in the military and in party work before matriculating. I do not recall having seen the photograph in question, but other photos of him with fellow KISU students show a cherub-faced boy among lantern-jawed men.
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In the extraordinarily faction-prone and education-worshipping Korean culture, after the family there is no group as important throughout one’s working career as classmates. However shamelessly Kim Jong-il might have played the big shot among ordinary strangers, taking public credit for efforts that others in the class actually had exerted would not have endeared him to the Kim Il-sung University Class of 1964. The class was destined to be an important source of support for him. Perhaps he understood that much.

But there are other factors to consider in evaluating this story. First, the photographers were asking him to stand in the middle of the front row. Kim Jong-il was very short—perhaps five feet two inches (1.58 meters) when fully grown—and extremely self-conscious about it. In later years he would exert himself mightily to appear taller, wearing shoes with three-inch heels
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and teasing his hair up into a bouffant pompadour to add a few more inches. (The glorious career of China’s even more diminutive Deng Xiaoping evidently provided him little if any consolation.) If Kim had stood where he supposedly was asked to stand that day in 1963, he might have been seen to be the shortest male in his class. Photographers might not yet have gotten the word that they must routinely pose him standing slightly in front of others so that perspective would give an illusion of extra height.

Additionally, there are hints that young Kim had been going through a rebellious period. If his father—as seems likely—or someone else in the regime had decided it was a good idea to start publicizing him as a “young leader,” perhaps he himself had not come to terms with the requirements of the public role being thrust upon him. And finally, his reluctance to be interviewed and to bask in public praise was not temporary. For decades to come he remained largely inaccessible to journalists, and repeatedly stayed out of the public eye for such long periods as to suggest an almost Howard Hughes–like aversion to the limelight.