‘Great Successor’ paints portrait of Kim Jong-un
Both inherited a family business and are surrounded by sycophants.
Both make endless false claims, blame others for their mistakes and have been lampooned — and vastly underestimated — by their critics.
One boasts he is a “super genius,” the other a “genius among geniuses.” One blasts the other as a “total nut job” and is called “an old lunatic” in return. One is “beloved and respected leader,” the other “your favorite president, me!”
Is it any wonder that President Trump and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un get along so well?
Anna Fifield’s “The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong Un” is required reading to fully appreciate Trump’s bizarre bromance with the young tyrant. The leaders have met three times, and while Kim shows no sign of giving up his nuclear weapons, Trump seemed smitten by what he calls “love letters” from the dictator.
Admittedly, the first serious English-language biography of Kim is less playful than its title suggests.
The veteran Washington Post correspondent has produced a macabre portrait of a ruling dynasty that has inexplicably survived for seven decades — nearly as long as the Soviet Union before it imploded. If the prose sometimes lags, the reporting is groundbreaking because of Fifield’s dozen or so visits to North Korea and her dogged ability to track down Kim’s childhood playmates, relatives and others around the globe. Kim was only 27 when he assumed power in December 2011 after the death of his father, Kim Jung Il. Wailing crowds lined the streets for the stage-managed funeral, but few mourned a cruel leader who was the “world’s largest buyer of Hennessy Paradise cognac” at the height of a terrible famine in the mid-1990s, Fifield writes.
Little was known about the pudgy young heir, even by the South Korean intelligence agencies that obsessively track their northern neighbor.
Fifield reveals that Kim was sent at age 12 to study under a fake name and a Brazilian passport at an elite private school in Bern, Switzerland. He became obsessed with action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and the Chicago Bulls. Guarded by an aunt and uncle — whom Fifield interviewed in exile — he swam on the French Riviera, skied in the Alps and visited Euro Disney in Paris.
The idyll ended when he was ordered home to attend Kim Il Sung Military University, named for his grandfather and founder of the totalitarian state. Needless to say, he graduated as the top student. In 2009, when he was 25, his ailing father named him successor, and propaganda organs quickly spun a personality cult around him. It was the first time most North Koreans knew he existed.
They were told Kim could drive a car and hit a light bulb with a rifle at 100 yards, all by age 3. An official biography claimed “he had perfect pitch, that he could ride the wildest horses at age six, and [at age 9] had twice beaten a visiting European powerboat-racing champion.”
The official humbug helped hide that Kim had no political or military experience when he took over. U.S. officials hoped the country’s first Western-educated leader would finally reform the Stalinist state and join the outside world. Other experts predicted mass instability or a military coup. No one knew.
Foreigners mocked his ballooning girth, high-fade haircut and attire “fashionable only in Communist holdover states,” as Fifield puts it. In China, North Korea’s closest ally, he was ridiculed as “Kim Fatty the Third” despite Chinese censors’ efforts to erase the nickname from the internet. He gave himself a slew of obsequious titles, including my favorite: “best incarnation of love.”
But Kim proved far more adept that his skeptics and foes expected. His father had spoken only once in public — and only a single phrase — during 17 years in absolute power. Kim addressed a bank of microphones months after taking office. He also launched the North Korean version of a charm offensive — visiting schools, hospitals and farms, hugging children and smiling for the cameras.
More important, he allowed ad hoc private markets to open for the first time, a move that has raised living standards and eased the country’s desperate poverty. North Korea now has a vibrant entrepreneurial class, and by most estimates the economy is growing steadily despite international sanctions.
(Tribune News Service / LA Times)