Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty Read Online Free PDF Page B

had petered out in 1973. North Korea refused to talk on a government-to-government basis. Instead it insisted on its longstanding formula calling for talks between nongovernmental delegations representing the two Koreas’ political parties and “social organizations.” Nevertheless, its moves to appear responsive seemed to place the diplomatic ball back in the South’s court (especially in the minds of non-Koreans who had yet to suspectthat Kim’s I-win-you-lose philosophy still had no room for a genuine live-and-let-live relationship with the South).
    The South, going through a period of unusually intense domestic political strife, was aware that the Northern formula for talks would provide diverse viewpoints only on the Southern side. The monolithic Northern regime by that time allowed no dissent at home and certainly would allow no real diversity of views among its delegates, whatever their supposed organizational affiliations. Northern delegates, the Southerners believed, would merely exploit political differences among Southerners in a divide-and-conquer pattern.
    Thus, despite wide grins on the North Koreans’ faces and a few points for Pyongyang in its propaganda contest with Seoul, the preliminary talks at Panmunjom in the DMZ fizzled out in mutual distrust, recrimination and nitpicking. So did parallel meetings to consider forming a joint North-and-South Korean table tennis team to compete in the tournament. 14
    Working as a newspaper correspondent covering Korea, I was eager to be included in the press delegation accompanying the American team to Pyongyang. The view among Tokyo-based correspondents was that the only way one could hope to get into North Korea was through a persistent campaign of cables to Pyongyang, to a quasi-diplomatic body that specialized in dealing with the West. Those cables to the Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, I was advised, should be supplemented by appeals to influential members of the pro-Pyongyang Korean community in Japan. I followed this program, emphasizing my open-mindedness. The North Koreans at the time were trying to persuade Washington that they had moderated their approach to South Korea, and I made note of my awareness of that effort.
    The regional paper I worked for,
The Baltimore Sun,
at great expense maintained eight foreign news bureaus as well as a large Washington bureau. Circulating in Maryland and adjacent Washington, it enjoyed a fine reputation among diplomats and other internationalists. As a sales pitch, one of my predecessors as Tokyo bureau chief had taught reporter/news assistant Hideko Takayama that whenever she telephoned someone unfamiliar with the paper to ask for an appointment she should explain that
The Sun
was “read daily by the President of the United States.” That claim had been more or less true at the time the former bureau chief taught Takayama her line, and she had continued to use it up to my time when she called North Korean and other prospective news sources who might lack detailed knowledge of the U.S. media. No one had thought to reexamine the procedure, even though other presidents had taken their turns in the Oval Office and it was possible the incumbent might have failed somehow to develop the same reading habit.
    I myself was not above boasting to Pyongyang’s representatives in Japan that the paper was to political coverage what
The Wall Street Journal
was to economics.
    Anyhow, the campaign worked. Along with correspondents for the
Journal
and a few other news organizations, I received my invitation to appear at the North Korean embassy in Beijing for a visa and thence to travel to Pyongyang.
    Not the first American journalist to reach North Korea, but close enough that I felt a little bit like Neil Armstrong arriving on the moon, I stepped off a Soviet-built plane at Pyongyang’s airport. Peering intently at everything I saw, I was determined to miss nothing. Pyongyang re-warded me by providing much that