S. Korea's new chief: blunt talk, clean hand

Both are smart, self-made men. Both cut their teeth as reformers with a heavy dose of human rights. Both are champions of the little guy and the downtrodden.

Most strikingly, both became president of South Korea as total outsiders - almost anti-elites - in a country where power is synonymous with pedigree, family rank, and education. Neither man graduated from college, let alone the "right" college.

Today, Kim Dae Jung is former president, leaving a large legacy on a divided peninsula that is confronting a nuclear crisis. Roh Moo-hyun is the new occupant of Blue House, a blunt, "clean hands" guy who does not owe the fat cats or the old guard, and who is given to populist gestures like one last week, when he bought his wife of 30 years a new wedding ring - the original one having been pawned long ago to help a social cause.

The comparisons have limits, of course. Mr. Kim is a statesman, famous since the 1960s as a pro-democracy dissident in a then-military dictatorship, who was saved from execution by US officials. He is a grand and now slightly tragic figure whose last year in office has been marred by scandals as well as by questions about the unification policy for which he won a Nobel Prize.

President Roh, until tapped by Kim for office last spring, was an unknown with little standing in Korea, let alone the world.

He doesn't speak English, and appealed to Korean nationalist emotions in the under-40 crowd. He ran for office on a tacit anti-US tenor, proudly saying that he had never visited America. Mr. Roh confided to friends he hadn't even expected to win the election, but was running to make his name known.

Now the labor lawyer from Pusan, who has little economic and security experience and whose orientation is well left of center, is taking over the third largest economy in Asia at a time when Kim Jong Il of the nuclear North is busy escalating threats.

The main theme of the two months since Roh's Dec. 19 victory has been "adjustment," sources say. One of Roh's strengths is his reputation as a quick study - he passed the Korean bar exam by teaching himself, and he has come to high office from a farming family, no mean feat. At the same time, critics here point to a president-elect whose unclear positions on economic reform and security matters still make him something of an unknown.

"I give him the benefit of the doubt," says a senior US official. "He could work wonders. His heart is in the right place, and he doesn't have the baggage of cronyism that we've seen with Kim. He doesn't owe anybody."

Two major unanswered questions hover over Roh: Who will guide the new president as he formulates a response to the nuclear crisis? And how will Roh, who seemed to favor anti-US sentiment last fall, work with a White House that early on showed little regard for the Sunshine Policy of embracing the North that Roh advocates?

Roh, like Kim, feels that peace and cooperation are the only ways to deal with North Korea, and that the regime of Kim Jong Il can be persuaded to change by a steady policy of talk and dialogue.

Yet so far, the North has wanted to talk only with the US, which takes the position that the North's nuclear program requires more than words in response.

"We have yet to formulate a system for dealing with the nuclear crisis on North Korea," says Kim Tae-hyo of the Institute for Foreign Affairs in Seoul. "Any initiative must be discussed and coordinated with the US. That's reality. Roh must listen to bureaucrats and intellectuals, including the conservative intellectuals, before forming a national policy."

Roh's chief foreign-policy adviser appears to be Ban Ki-moon, a highly respected career diplomat with extensive US-South Korea experience. His national security adviser is Ra Jong-yil, a moderate who once served as deputy director of Korean intelligence. Both appointments drew sighs of relief among the establishment here. Less certain is who will be foreign minister.

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