The sum of a man's life is always difficult to truly calculate and that is certainly the case with Kim Dae-jung, who was the first opposition figure to hold the presidency of South Korea from 1998 to 2003. As president, Kim won a Nobel Peace Prize for opening up contacts with the greatly vilified North Korea. He managed to implement what was called the “Sunshine Policy”, which allowed the two Koreas to connect roads and railways, build a joint industrial park and allow two million South Koreans to visit a North Korean mountain resort. In the process, Korean families who had been separated by the 50+ years of division of the two countries were allowed tearful reunions that were broadcast worldwide. None of this could have been imagined by the military dictator Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee who exercised an iron-fisted control of South Korea for 18 years after a coup d'etat one year after Kim first won election to national office in 1961. In Kim's first attempt to become elected president in 1971, he garnered 45 percent of the vote, which struck a cold fear into Park. In 1973, he was kidnapped by Park's notorious spy agency, the KCIA, from a Tokyo hotel room where he was leading an exile movement for democracy in South Korea. At one point, he was sentenced to death and at another he survived an assassination attempt by the country's military rulers. His ascension to the presidency and the policies he implemented were, indeed, monumental feats but in his later years he saw political realities overturn some of his efforts. South Koreans eventually became tired of making overtures and sending money to North Korea with virtually nothing coming back in return. And with the initiation of North Korea's nuclear program, good will became more and more difficult to maintain. Nevertheless, Kim helped bring South Korea into the modern world and shirk off the yoke of the Cold War that made the two Koreas pawns in the hands of the East and the West. The obstacles that now present themselves can at least be confronted as opposed to accepted as intractable. Without Kim, such thinking would be impossible. __
