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at age eighty-two, he had outlived Joseph Stalin by four decades and Mao Tse-tung by almost two decades, and he had remained in power throughout the terms of office of six South Korean presidents, nine US presidents, and twenty-one Japanese prime ministers.
    The future founder and leader of North Korea was born in Pyongyang on April 15, 1912, the day the Titanic sank. His parents were both Christians. His mother was the devout, churchgoing daughter of a Presbyterian elder, and his father had attended a missionary school.
    Kim had only eight years of formal education, the last two in Chinese schools in Manchuria, where his father moved to operate an herb pharmacy. When he was seventeen years old, he was expelled from school for revolutionary activities and never returned to the classroom. After being jailed briefly, in the early 1930s he joined guerrilla bands fighting the Japanese who, after turning Korea into a Japanese colony in 1910, had invaded and occupied Manchuria. The Korean guerrillas were organized by and attached to an army led by the Chinese Communist Party.
    Although Kim’s activities fell short of the brilliant, war-winning exploits later concocted by North Korean propagandists, he was successfulenough that the Japanese put a price on his head. By 1941 Kim’s unit and other parts of the Chinese guerrilla army were forced to retreat across the Manchurian border to Soviet army training camps, where they spent the next four years. During these years Kim married a Korean partisan and fathered two sons, the elder of whom was Kim Jong Il, his eventual political heir and successor.
    It is still unclear how Kim was selected to lead North Korea. Having spent years in a Soviet training camp, Kim was well known to the Soviet officers who occupied the area north of the thirty-eighth parallel in 1945, and he had a reputation for being reliable and courageous. He appeared in Pyongyang immediately after the war in the uniform of a Soviet army captain, according to a Soviet general who served in the occupation force. Some accounts suggest that Joseph Stalin himself made the final choice of Kim from several candidates. Stalin is reported to have said, “Korea is a young country, and it needs a young leader.”
    As a leader, Kim was cordial to and comfortable with ordinary people. He emerged from a family of hardworking ordinary people and described himself in his memoirs as “an ordinary man.” Vadim Medvedev, a Gorbachev aide who was Kim’s escort for several days in Moscow in 1986, wrote later that he was “greatly surprised” to find in him “an absolutely normal person, with whom you could talk not only about politics but also weather, exchange opinions on events happening around and impressions on what we saw.”
    Yet at the same time, Kim came to live in luxury and exclusiveness beyond the dreams of kings. He inhabited at least five sumptuous palaces in North Korea and innumerable guesthouses built for his comfort and amusement, all completely cut off from anyone except servants, bodyguards, and carefully screened guests. Uninvited people were barred from even setting foot on the wide and well-tended road leading to his Pyongyang residence. Like Stalin and Mao, whose cults of personality he emulated but far outdistanced, his automobile used special lanes, and other traffic was banished when he moved through the streets of his capital. When he went to the Soviet Union by train in 1984, all rail traffic was stopped along his route at the demand of the North Koreans, so that his luxurious special train could travel unimpeded by any competing or oncoming trains. (This caused massive tie-ups in the Soviet rail system.) When his train stopped to take on supplies or to give Kim a breath of air along the way, the station platforms were cleared of their normal throngs, left vacant except for specially authorized people, some of whom had been recruited to applaud and cheer him.
    In deference to his health, a special