by Mark Bowden
The inheritance has shaped Arthur Sulzberger’s life, but as he turns fifty-eight, this year, the age of the newspapers may be ending. For the New York Times, the greatest of them, it would mean the collapse of a dynasty and of a national treasure. No one would feel the loss more than Arthur. For him, more than anyone else, everything is at stake.
“What would he do?” asks Penny Abernathy. “What would he do? That’s who he is.”
The Bright Sun of Juche
Published as “Understanding Kim Jong Un, the World’s Most Enigmatic and Unpredictable Dictator,” Vanity Fair, March 2015
Does anybody make an easier target than Kim Jong Un?
He’s Fatboy Kim the Third, the tyrant with a Fred Flintstone haircut; the grinning, chain-smoking owner of his own small nuclear arsenal; brutal warden to about 120,000 political prisoners; and the last true hereditary monarch on the planet. He’s the Supreme Leader, nay, Great Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), Heaven-Sent Brilliant Commander—I am not making these titles up—and Marshal of its military (which includes the fourth largest standing army in the world), general secretary of the Workers Party of Korea (the only outfit in play north of the thirty-eighth Parallel) … a man who at age thirty-two owns the longest list of excessive honorifics anywhere, every one wholly unearned. He is the youngest head of state in the world, and probably the most spoiled. On the great grade-school playground of world affairs, he might as well be wearing across his broad bottom a big “Kick me” sign.
Kim is so easy to kick that even the United Nations, which famously agrees on nothing, voted overwhelmingly in November to recommend that he and the rest of North Korea’s leadership be hauled before the International Criminal Court in The Hague and tried for crimes against humanity.
In the world press, Kim is a bloodthirsty madman and buffoon. He is said to be a drunk; to have become so obese gorging on Swiss cheese that his genitals have shrunk; and, having so far produced no male heir, to use bizarre remedies for impotence—like a distillation of snake venom. He is said to have had his uncle, Jang Song Thaek, and the entire Jang family mowed down with heavy machine guns (or possibly exterminated by mortar rounds, rocket-propelled grenades, or flamethrowers) and then fed to ravenous dogs. He is reported to have a yen for bondage porn and to have ordered all young men in his country to adopt his peculiar hairstyle. According a frenzy of global speculation after he had minor surgery on his ankle last summer, he was at death’s door and had already been ousted by his younger sister, Kim Yo Jong, who is now secretly governing the country, or, no … by the Ministry of Information, which is actually governing and using her as a prop, or … maybe the real power is now the nation’s defense minister, Hyon Yong Chol.
All in the preceding paragraph is untrue, or, perhaps safer to say, unfounded. It is a testimony to media’s timeless talent for making things up. The story that Jang was fed to dogs was actually invented by a Chinese satirical magazine, as a joke, before it began racing around the world as a viral version of truth. In light of this, is it too much of a stretch to consider that our take on Kim is all wrong?
What if, despite the well-documented horrors of the Stalinist regime he inherited in 2011 while still in his twenties, a vast machine into which he was born and which has groomed him every day of his life, Kim is actually a capable young man who is even—within carefully defined limits—well-intentioned? What if he is actually trying to reverse the brutal sixty-eight-year-old regime’s direction? What if, largely unrecognized in the rest of the world, he has already taken tangible domestic strides toward normalcy? What if he is trying hard, unartfully and against terrific odds, to alter North Korea’s relationship with the rest of the world? We know that anyone in his rarefied position would face entrenched and dangerous enemies, perhaps the worst in his own extended family.
Kim is, in fact, playing a deadly game, says Andrei Lankov, a Russian expert on Korea who attended Kim Jung Il University in Pyongyang in 1985, and who now teaches at Seoul University. In his crowded office there, Lankov had this to say about Kim:
“He has had a spoiled, privileged childhood, not that different than the children of some western billionaires, for whom the worst thing that can happen is that they will be arrested while driving under the influence. For [him] the worst that can actually happen is to be tortured to death by a lynch mob. Easily. But he doesn’t understand…. His parents understood it. They may not have had encounters with death, but they knew it was a deadly game. I’m not sure whether [he] fully understands it.”
Kim faces a problem peculiar to dictators. His power is so great in North Korea than not only does no one dare criticize him; no one dares advise him. After all, if you are too closely associated with the king, your head might someday share the same chopping block. Safer to adopt a Yes, Marshal posture. That way, if the king stumbles, you are just one of the legion who were obliged to obey his orders. One way to read the confusing signals from Pyongyang in recent years is that they show Kim, isolated and inexperienced, clumsily pulling at the levers of state.
Whether he fully grasps it or not, Kim has a hard road ahead if he is trying to remake the world’s most rigidly totalitarian regime. Many of the experts I interviewed feel that he deserves, at the very least, time. Many feel that a benevolent dictator in Pyongyang might be the best prospect for the short term—better than dramatic change—not just for North Korea but for the entire peninsula, and the world. Yet the Obama administration’s posture toward North Korea, purposefully aloof and unresponsive, has not changed since Kim Jung Il was alive.
For years, North Korea has engaged in what experts in Washington have called a “provocation cycle.” Its leaders under Kim Jung Il would periodically ramp up provocative rhetoric and behavior, like launching missiles or conducting nuclear tests, followed by charm offensives and offers to begin dialogue. Two steps forward and one step back. The end result was slow and steady progress toward their aims, at least in foreign policy.
“The centerpiece of the Obama administration’s policy has been to try and deincentivize, as it were, that type of approach,” explained Sydney Seiler, who served as the director for Korea on the National Security Council through most of Obama’s terms. I spoke to him in the Old Executive Office Building months before he left the job to become U.S. special envoy to the Six-Party Talks, a diplomatic effort aimed at denuclearizing North Korea. “Traditionally, what North Korea was able to do, particularly in the advancement of this nuclear program, would be to go into this provocation cycle, which would raise tensions and convince all the parties that we just needed to rush back to the table and get quickly back to talks to, in essence, bribe North Korea to behave. And so what we try to do—and we have talked with North Korea, we do talk with North Korea—is to make it clear that we are not going to reward bad behavior. We are not going to run around with our hair on fire and go chasing after Kim Jung Un in a way that just reinforces the previous cycle.”
So in the three years since Kim took over, the United States has not responded significantly to either provocation or charm. The approach makes sense, but what if it ignores a major shift in the game?
There is no shortage of evidence to the contrary, that Kim is just a bad approximation of his canny father. He has continued his father’s military-first policies. There are still the same shrill denunciations and saber rattling from Pyongyang, the same cyberattacks, the same emphasis on nukes and ICBMs, the same stark political oppression. But suppose, if only as a thought experiment, we consider those things about Kim that don’t fit the mold. What if he is not a crackpot belligerent?
“We should realize that he is still in something of a formative period,” said a former CIA analyst who still actively studies North Korea, and who asked not to be named. “He is learning lessons about the world, how it reacts, what is possible with it. And I sense that we are teaching him all of the wrong lessons. We are confirming for him the worst tendencies of the North Koreans to be paranoid with reason. Look,
the United Nations is debating [whether] … to put him on trial for crimes against humanity. He’s only been in power for three years!”
It’s a theory worth exploring, especially if we consider how mysterious and dangerous North Korea is, and that its youthful leader is the least-known head of state on the planet.
1. The Known (A Short Section)
We’re not even sure how old he is. Kim was born on January 8 in either 1982, 1983, or 1984.
To tidy up their historical narrative, Pyonyang’s propagandists have placed his birthday in 1982. The original Kim, the current leader’s grandfather and national founder, Kim Il Sung, for whom universal reverence is mandatory, was born in 1912. As the story goes, in 1942 his son and heir came along, Kim II, Kim Jung Il, for whom a slightly lesser wattage of reverence is mandatory. Actually, Kim II was born in 1941, but in North Korea myth trumps fact to an even greater extent than elsewhere, and numeric symmetry hints at destiny, like a divine wink. This is why 1982 was such an auspicious year for the birth of Kim III. For reasons of their own, South Korean intelligence agencies, which have a long history of being wrong about their northern cousins and about Kim III in particular, have placed his birthday in the Orwellian year 1984, which is a dark horse but is the date I am rooting for. Kim himself, who occasionally shows magisterial disdain for the adulatory slaving of his underlings, has said that he was born in 1983—this according to that notable American statesman, former rebounder, and famous cross-dresser Dennis Rodman, who had been drinking heavily at the time, and shortly afterward reentered rehab.
But for now, 1983 has the edge, at least outside Pyongyang. Whichever date is correct, the Heaven-Sent Brilliant Commander has walked among us for three decades.
What do we know for sure about those years? About enough to fill one long paragraph: We know that Kim is the third and youngest son of his father, and the second-born son of Kim II’s second mistress, Ko Young Hui, who died in 2004. There is a picture of Kim III as a boy, perhaps seven years old, seated alongside his youthful father, with a severe, purse-lipped expression on his distinctively wide round face, wearing a powder blue T-shirt and very large Mickey Mouse ears. In the last half of the 1990s he was sent to two different schools in Switzerland, where his mother was being secretly, and ultimately futilely, treated for breast cancer. The first of these was the International School of Berne, a private school in Gumligen; the second was an upper-level school nearby in Bern, the Leibefeld-Steinholzi School, where he was introduced to his teenage classmates as “Un Pak,” the son of a North Korean diplomat. Kim and his younger sister were housed during these years among workers at the North Korean embassy, and were presented as children of a functionary there. His old classmates remember him on his first day of upper school, a skinny boy dressed in jeans, Nike trainers, and a Chicago Bulls sweatshirt. He understandably struggled in classes taught in German and English. He was shy, undistinguished academically, and apparently unbothered by it. He is remembered as having been fond of video games, soccer, basketball—in which despite his size he was able to hold his own on the court—skiing, and those Bulls. The Bulls were in the process of winning the last three of their six NBA championships behind Michael Jordan, who is reportedly one of Kim’s personal heroes. In 2000 he returned to Pyongyang, where he attended the military academy that bears his grandfather’s name. At some point around 2009 his father decided that his older brothers were unsuitable and selected Kim as his heir. At about this time young Kim began putting on weight—literally and figuratively. Some believe that in order to more closely resemble his grandfather, whom he resembles anyway, he was “encouraged” or ordered to do so—in the upper echelon of North Korea these amount to the same thing. An American intelligence profile of Kim produced that year noted that he was overweight already at 198 pounds—“probably due to lack of exercise.” He assumed power when Kim II died in December 2011, around the same time he was wed, in an arranged marriage, to Ri Sol Ju, a former cheerleader and singer about ten years his junior. He is said to be genuinely in love with his wife. The Kims have a daughter, whose birth is believed to have been induced so that she would be born in 2012. Mrs. Kim is often seen with her husband in public—a clear departure from his father’s practice. Kim II’s women were usually kept offstage. (A notorious womanizer, he was officially married once and kept four known mistresses.) Kim stands five feet, nine inches, taller than most North Koreans, and his bulk is now estimated to be 210 pounds and ascending. He has already showed signs of the heart problems that plagued his father, and of diabetes, and seems to regard modern notions of healthy living as western nonsense. He openly chain-smokes North Korean cigarettes (manufactured at a special plant; his father preferred Marlboros), drinks a lot of beer and hard liquor, enjoys chocolates and cheeses, and evidently approaches mealtimes with gusto. There is no picture of him jogging.
2. A Chip off the Old Block’s Block
And that’s it. Nothing better defines Kim than how little we know about him. Even the most respected outside experts on North Korea in the United States and in South Korea, when asked, invariably refer back to Rodman and a Japanese sushi chef, Kenji Fujimoto, who was employed by the ruling family from 1988 to 2001 and who now peddles trivial details about them (such as how Kim II once sent him to Bejing to pick up some food at McDonald’s). Fittingly, when Time named him one of the hundred most influential people in the world in 2012, to prepare a short bio of him the magazine hired a novelist to write it.
With so little to go on, it is hard to imagine what Kim is like, but here’s a place to start: At age five, we are all the center of the universe. Everything—our parents, family, home, neighborhood, school, country … everything that came before, everything that might come after—revolves around us. For most of us what follows is a long process of dethronement, as his majesty the child confronts the ever more obvious and humbling truth.
Not so for Kim. His world at age five has turned out to be his world at age thirty, or very nearly so. Everyone around him does exist to serve him. The known world really is ordered with him at its center. At some point—perhaps when his family sent him off to Switzerland—he become aware that his kingdom had limits, but within those limits, millions hang on his every word and gesture. The most powerful men in his kingdom have power because he wills it, and they smile and bow and scribble notes on little pads whenever he deigns to speak. He is not just the one and only Kim Jong Un; he’s officially the only Jong Un—all North Koreans with that given name have had to change it. His every word and thought is precious. Multitudes stand and cheer and furiously clap at the mere glimpse of him. Men and women and children weep for joy when he smiles and waves.
Which of us departs dramatically from the path prepared for us by parents, class, society, and culture? And when that path promises so much, which of us would not step boldly into it, and perhaps feel bound to perpetuate it? Which of us would not accept the need for vast gulags to confine those who threaten us, because any threat to us is a threat to … well, everything? And when it comes to that, you might not hesitate to have a rival uncle denounced and shot.
“People need to understand that the [North Korean] system cannot help but produce a person like Kim Jong Un,” said Seiler. “… I think the first thing that we have to remember, as with any leader in any country, is that he is going to reflect the culture and values and worldview of North Koreans themselves.”
And what is that worldview? It is certainly alien to our own. Kim is part—the key part—of a system that is brutal and archaic. In that sense, trying to understand North Korea by studying Kim III in particular may be the wrong way to proceed. To understand him, we need to understand the system that produced him. His role demands complete allegiance to that system, which despite its cruelty and well-documented failings, works for a sizable portion of North Korea’s population. These are people whom the widespread famine of the late 1990s barely touched. In Pyongyang, where the most educated, most able, most attractive, most deserving North K
oreans reside, some people are actually making money these days. Brian Myers, a professor at Dongseo University in South Korea, says that he routinely invites defectors from the north to his graduate school classes, and that in recent years his South Korean students, expecting familiar tales of starvation and woe, have been surprised to hear from some who describe North Korea as a “cool place,” where they wish they could have remained. “My students are always a little disappointed to find this out,” he says.
For the privileged few, things are actually looking up these days. Atop that rigid and hopeful hierarchy sits the Supreme Leader, on the perch he was born to occupy. With his exceptional status; total isolation from the general public or what most of us would consider normal life; the abject devotion (or fear, or both) of those entrusted to educate, nurture, and serve him—how could Kim not become what he is: arrogant, entitled, aggressive, confident, and also, on occasion, flamboyantly immature?
We sort of know other, interesting things about Kim’s life, all of which are secondhand and ought to be regarded skeptically.
He has led an extraordinarily sheltered life … so much so that the word sheltered doesn’t do it justice. Imprisoned is more like it. Even in his years in Switzerland his school was just a short distance from the North Korean embassy, where he spent most of his time, and outside those walls he was always accompanied by a bodyguard. Imagine a small Asian boy who is attending a European school where no one else speaks his language and who is accompanied by an adult who sternly eyeballs anyone who gets close, and you can guess how normal his social interactions were. All western influences came through the mediated world of pop culture—movies, TV, video games. Kim’s tastes are said to remain rooted in the late 1980s and early 1990s—thus his fascination with the Bulls, and, reportedly, with the music of Michael Jackson and Madonna. Back in his home country he lived behind the walls of the ruling family’s vast estates, in dwellings so opulent they wow even visiting dignitaries from the United Arab Emirates, according to the author of the blog “North Korea Leadership Watch,” Michael Madden. Kim’s father once issued an edict that no one was allowed to approach any member of his family without his written permission. Playmates were imported for Kim and his siblings. That said, Kim is likely to have paid surreptitious visits to China, Japan, and possibly Europe. His German and French are thought to be fair, and Rodman reports that Kim made several remarks to him in English.
