Word: kim
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...created by these rumors and suspicions--North Korea's Dear Leader was unpredictable and goofy, and because he was thought to control a nuclear weapons program on one side of the world's most fortified border, he was dangerous. Fast forward to last week's summit in Pyongyang. When Kim Jong Il, still pudgy, and still wearing a poufy black hairdo, reached out with both hands to welcome South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the makeover of the madman image was complete. The 58-year-old leader of the world's most mysterious country had been transformed into a fellow...
...there was one thing that most Korea watchers felt they knew for sure, it was that the comfort of a South Korean President was not on the list of things Kim Jong Il cared about. But that was the old Kim. The new one is a masterwork of political repositioning. Part spin, part smarts and all opportunism, Kim 2.0 is an impressive creation, an example of a 180-degree image shift that was achieved in near Internet time--hardly something anyone would have expected from Pyongyang, where cell phones are as uncommon as Cokes...
...that's precisely what the world got--much to the astonishment of the White House, which just weeks ago had been using Kim as Example A of a "rogue dictator" while trying to convince Russia of the value of a missile-defense shield. It's too early to be sure that the new Kim is for real. The makeover, though, does seem to have legs. It's not really that Kim is such a different guy--his charmingly opportunistic streak once helped him extort billions from foreign governments in exchange for capping his nukes program. It's that his interests...
...Kim's history is a pastiche of fact, rumor and not a little romance. He was born, it is believed, in Siberia, while his father was being trained as a technocrat under Stalin. But his official biography transposes his birth to the slopes of Mount Paektu on the North Korean-Chinese border--for many, the mythical birthplace of the ancestor of the Korean people. Kim's mother died when he was a schoolboy. When the Korean War broke out during his father's rule, he was spirited off to the safety of Manchuria. In the 1960s Kim is believed...
...also evidently learned at the old man's side. His father was a masterly manipulator. The key to Kim senior's success was an iron will and a sense of who his friends were: China and Russia. But with those allies weakened by the end of the cold war, Kim junior has had to look elsewhere. At times since taking over the helm, he has seemed to live up to the worst Western images of him--such as when he "test- fired" a missile over Japan in 1998. In the past year, however, he has begun to open his doors...