Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (49 page)

While it is generally thought that Kim Il-sung only began to push his son’s selection as his successor in the 1970s, a former elite official of the regime who knew Kim Jong-il well and had frequent contact with him said systematic preparations actually began a decade earlier—even as the junior Kim was concluding his university studies.
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It certainly does seem that someone had big plans for the youngster—in view of the high-level work he was immediately assigned in the Central Committee of the Workers’ Party, the regime’s nerve center.

In Pyongyang’s account, “it was not by chance that Kim Jong-il began to work at the Central Committee.” That seems a huge understatement, but the official version does not intend an indirect reference to his birthright. Instead, the claim is that the youngster was selected for work in the exalted “general staff of the revolution” purely on merit.
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Indeed, Pyongyang’s version has it that Kim Il-sung “refrained from doing anything that could be viewed as a bid to groom his son as future heir or to impose him on the population as such.” The junior Kim was merely “trained to think and behave as a dedicated servant of the people.
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The first phase of his career saw him advance quickly in Central Committee staff work until he became number two in the party’s propaganda department. His father during that period gave him freedom that would have been unthinkable for any other novice official. Flitting from one issue to another, often ignoring established divisions of authority and responsibility Kim Jong-il got an overview of the regime. In the process he was able to meet many people from all classes of society.

In a subsequent stage, the younger Kim concentrated on remolding the country’s cinema and opera. That was a productive period of learning and personal growth. Indeed, it was a time of triumph as he drew applause for such works as the 1969 movie and 1971 revolutionary opera
Sea of Blood.

There are numerous reports of clashes with other officials. Throughout those early stages of his career, according to a former official who knew him, a testing process was under way to try to identify people Kim Jong-il might be unable to control when it came his turn to take power.
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Note that such tagging of prospective enemies of the younger Kim came as his father felt the regime’s hold on power threatened, to an extent unprecedented since the Korean War. Besides any internal critics who had the temerity to raise their heads, the threat was seen as coming from enemies without. The policy adopted was to vanquish all foes by focusing the loyalty of officials and the masses, even more than before, on the elder Kim’s own person rather than on the country or on some set of abstract principles.

In what may have represented a military-civilian struggle within the regime, Kim Il-sung in 1966 sacked leaders in charge of his economic policy and, the next year, turned around and dumped officials who had criticized that policy. Kim complained that some people had the temerity to suggest that, after a country achieved a certain level of economic development, it could no longer expect to maintain growth rates as high as before. Such “passivist and conservative” notions could not be permitted. A top deputy warned that North Koreans, including party leaders, must show “a revolutionary trait which accepts no other ideas but Comrade Kim Il-sung’s revolutionary ideas … , a trait which makes thinking and action conform to our party’s policy, and which accepts the policy and carries it through unconditionally, without the slightest swerving in any winds and waves.”
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As enforcer of what the regime called its “monolithic” or “unitary” system, Kim Jong-il during the ’60s and ’70s presided over the shift to describing the state dogma as “Kimilsungism.” The term, with its specific connotation of one-man rule, was credited to the junior Kim himself.

While the elder Kim, as we have seen in chapter 7, increased tensions with the United States, his son set out to intensify the personality cult. Kim Jong-il, starting work with the party, was convinced of the need to defend Kim Il-sung’s absolute authority and his revolutionary ideas “in order to tide over this difficult situation.”
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It was during that period that the senior Kim made the transition from mere dictator to official deity.

“North Korean leaders claimed that they opposed China’s Cultural Revolution, but in reality they imitated the Cultural Revolution on a smaller scale,” former party ideology chief Hwang Jang-yop observed later. “They created an even more intense personality cult for Kim Il-sung and launched an ultra-left campaign to rid society of all capitalistic elements.” Since there was no “visible political force opposing Kim Il-sung,” said Hwang, “the campaign in Pyongyang “was a simple affair that accomplished its goal with the purging of a few intellectuals. But that simple affair was the turning point in the Kim Il-sung personality cult, which went from strength to strength.
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A complicating factor was a struggle between Kim Jong-il and his uncle, Kim Yong-ju, that began to develop after the younger man graduated from college and started work in the party. As we saw in chapter 10, Yong-ju seemingly was positioned to become Kim Il-sung’s successor. He had backers in
high places, including Kim Il-sung’s wife Song-ae. Many people in leading roles in the party assumed he would be the successor.
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But Kim Jong-il went after the job. “The two men’s rivalry was based on who could put Kim Il-sung on a higher pedestal,” Hwang Jang-yop recalled. “Thanks to this competition, the Kim Il-sung personality cult went beyond the Soviet-style dictatorship” and became what Hwang called “absolutism of the Great Leader.”

Unofficial accounts agree with the official version that the junior Kim from very early in his working career focused his efforts on promoting loyalty toward the revolution and, especially its leader. Koreans traditionally value “purity.” Both in Pyongyang and in Seoul, the ruling regime denigrated suspected agents of the other side as “impure elements.” In a typically Korean Confucian behavior pattern that Karl Marx surely never envisioned as a component of communist rule, Kim Jong-il liked to ascribe merit to himself on account of his descent from the pure revolutionary line. And he insisted that others acknowledge his superiority in that regard. After all, Kim Il-sung had demonstrated his own purity by refusing to deviate even slightly from opposition to the Japanese colonialists.

According to one account, the young man displayed open contempt toward any Korean of his father’s generation who had shown any weakness toward the enemy and thus failed to meet Kim Il-sung’s high standard. “Comrade, how much did you devote yourself to the revolution at the time of the Japanese colonial rule?” he would ask one of his elders. “Did you ever commit anti-revolutionary acts?” (I encountered a similar attitude in a great many
South
Korean youngsters, of his and subsequent generations, who had little direct knowledge of the pressures and complexities of life under Japanese rule. They-were eager to reject and despise any authority figures—from parents right up to the late South Korean President Park Chung-hee, a former Japanese soldier—on the ground of insufficient patriotism.)

One of Kim Jong-il’s early targets for contempt was his uncle, Kim Yong-ju. As director of the Central Committee’s Organization and Guidance Bureau, the uncle was officially the young graduate’s first boss. But according to a South Korean account, he soon learned that the little prince was not easily bossed.

Over the years various reports appeared in South Korea to the effect that Kim Yong-ju had been captured by the Japanese in the late 1930s and had turned collaborator.
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It is not clear whether Kim Jong-il while working for his uncle got wind of such stories, true or false. Even if he did not, however, it would have been simple enough to punch holes in Kim Yong-ju’s own war stories and show him up for an un-heroic sort at best whose pre-liberation experiences would not bear much scrutiny. Yong-ju made the preposterous claim, for example, that he had been a member of the political
committee of the New Fourth Army of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army. The actual members of that committee were such Chinese Communist luminaries as Liu Shao-qi and Chen Yi.
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The South Korean account says that clashes with the uncle led Kim Il-sung to transfer the young man from the party Central Committee to the party chapter in North Hamgyong Province. In the provincial party chapter, young Kim is reported to have worked under Kim Guk-tae, the boss of the local party’s Organization Department. Although Kim Guk-tae was several years older and an army veteran, this was a more salubrious match-up as both men were second-generation communist nobility. Both could boast “pure revolutionary” descent. A graduate of Mangyongdae School, Kim Guk-tae was the son of Kim Chaek. An anti-Japanese guerrilla general, the equal of Kim Il-sung in Manchuria, Kim Chaek had died during the Korean War after commanding the frontline troops of the People’s Army. The two young men had known each other as boys.
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Around 1966 Kim is believed to have returned to Pyongyang to work in his father’s military bodyguard organization. One account says he took the rank of major, and clashed frequently with the chief of the Bodyguard Bureau, O Baek-ryong, a former anti-Japanese guerrilla comrade of Kim Il-sung’s. There is a report that O finally became so irritated by Kim Jong-il’s presumption that he asked the younger man: “Am Iyour adjutant?”
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Young Kim as a bodyguard officer continued accompanying his father on guidance tours and giving some guidance of his own. Sometimes he seems to have given advice just to hear himself talk. At the workers’ dormitory of a steel mill, for example, he barged unceremoniously into a room—to the surprise of the occupant, who was just getting off his shift and looking forward to his rest. Although the rooms were already so well equipped that the visiting mothers of workers had gushed over their comforts, he demanded that flat pillows be replaced with cylindrical, embroidered, traditionally Korean pillows, and pots of cold water with hot, freshly boiled water. The story does not mention his asking workers whether that was what they wanted, but it praises him for “taking into consideration those points which even their over-anxious mothers did not notice.”

Visiting a furnace at the steel mill and seeing a lot of dust, he behaved like a zealous American Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) inspector. Told that a dust extractor was being built, he insisted “in a low yet grave voice, which expressed his determination,” that factory officials shut down the furnace immediately until the new anti-pollution equipment was ready for installation. They might have ignored another twenty-four-year-old bodyguard who gave such an order, but this was Kim Il-sung’s son. They dutifully shut down the furnace.
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Officially disseminated stories go on and on telling of his tramping through woods and fields and across dangerous steel mill floors, rolling up his sleeves and getting dirty, sometimes actually joining in the work—and thereby deeply impressing his hosts. “Kim Jong-il was working in person!” an official biographer exclaims, relating an instance in which the young Kim husked some corn. An official who was on the scene “bo-wed in spite of himself before the noble and loyal heart of Kim Jong-il.
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It appears that the supposedly egalitarian North Koreans believed—and were not officially discouraged in that belief—that the ordinary requirements should not apply to the son of the country’s ruler. That notion is rooted not in communist doctrine but in the determinedly anti-egalitarian Confucianism represented by the Yi Dynasty’s royalty and
yangban
nobility. For them physical labor was unthinkable; idly reading poetry the most admired pursuit.

Bodyguard duty was the closest young Kim ever came to serving in the military. He had a uniform then, but photos generally show him in civilian garb. The regime had to scrounge to find a single, rather pathetic anecdote from that period indicating interest in military matters. In July of 1967, near the height of military tension with South Korea and the United States, he visited a coastal defense headquarters on the Sea of Japan. Earlier that year a North Korean coastal battery had sunk a South Korean patrol escort craft in those waters. The following January would see the capture of the
Pueblo.

The coastal defense unit, of course, specialized in big guns. But Kim Jong-il himself-was known as a crack shot with small arms—perhaps the result of many hunting trips with his father. Discussing the soldiers’ training program, he complained that they had focused on artillery at the expense of rifle practice. After all, they might have to defend their positions with rifles if the big guns failed. He had the men demonstrate their shooting, but they were not very good. Then he “stepped down an emplacement and, giving an example of the right way to shoot, he taught them how to achieve first-rate marksmanship. Looking at Kim Jong-il, who was drenched in sweat, the commanders felt tremendously guilty about their neglect of small arms training.” Or did one or two of them, perhaps, silently entertain dark thoughts about a privileged, twenty-five-year-old draft-dodger who had unerringly picked for discussion and demonstration the only skill in which he could show their men up?
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After his bodyguard duty Kim Jong-il went back to the party Central Committee, taking posts in the propaganda and agitation department.
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There he became such a bloodhound in rooting out disloyal elements that an official version reads like a history of the Spanish Inquisition: “Kim Jong-il, who had obtained concrete information on the internal conditions of the party in a short time, found that there was a serious problem in it.”