The First Communist Hereditary Succession: Kim Il-Sung to Kim Jong-Il

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The First Communist Hereditary Succession: Kim Il-Sung to Kim Jong-Il

 

By: Bradley K. MartinDate:December20 , 2011

 

When I asked what the country would do after the death of the president, a party member replied: “If he dies—I mean, when he dies—we’ll find another leader.” Kim Il-sung’s choice for the job was his son, Kim Jong-il, then a chubby thirty-seven and running the secretariat of the Workers’ Party. The younger Kim had disappeared from the public view in the late 1970s. Rumors had said he was dead, or had been injured in an automobile collision and was a “vegetable.” By 1979, it was known that he was alive and healthy, but still his name was hardly mentioned publicly. Rather, he was referred to by the code term “the Party Center” or, often, “the Glorious Party Center.”

 

Many Pyongyang-watchers figured that his curious anonymity had to do with efforts to buy time in which to get rid of elements opposed to such a reactionary phenomenon as a hereditary succession, unknown elsewhere in the communist world. A Soviet newsman stationed in Pyongyang told me the opponents included military men. But the Russian added that Kim Jong-il “has power in the party. He’s a strong man, groomed for power and pushing to take over.”

 

Indeed, the younger Kim’s days in the political wilderness, if such they had been, appeared to be ending. In September 1978, he had made one highly visible appearance, at the celebration of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the North Korean republic, where he had met foreign guests. By 1979, a visitor could see his likeness alongside that of his father in a few of the portraits of the Great Leader that decorated entrances to buildings.