His mother, Kim Jong Sook, died during a pregnancy in the late 1940s, and a younger brother drowned in Pyongyang in 1947, after his father, newly installed by the Soviets, returned to Korea.
The numbers of Kim Il Sung’s and Kim Jong Il’s marriages and children are unverifiable.
Kim Jong Il, North Korea's leader whose nuclear ambitions for his isolated communist nation dominated world security fears for years, has died from an apparent heart attack. (Dec. 18)
The younger Kim is said to have had a long affair with and possible marriage to Sung Hae Rim, a North Korean movie actress who nurtured in him a lifelong fascination with the film industry.
His father forced him into a marriage with Kim Young Sook, the daughter of a high-ranking military officer, and with her he had at least one child. He had several children in the early 1980s with Ko Young Hee, a dancer in a state troupe. Most recently, he was reported to have married his personal secretary, Kim Ok.
After attending elite schools for children of revolutionaries, Kim Jong Il graduated in 1964 from Kim Il Sung University in Pyongyang.
Rapid advance
He advanced rapidly in the ruling party, rising to chief of the Department of Propaganda and Agitation by the early 1970s. Little was heard from him in public until 1992, but Mr. Kim for decades “was the main actor behind the intensification of the Kim Il Sung personality cult,” Breen said, referring to Mr. Kim’s promotion of lavish construction projects to deify his father.
He became a member of the powerful Central Committee in 1980, and at the Party Congress that year, he was clearly designated as his father’s political heir. State media began calling him “the great successor to the revolutionary cause.”
Mr. Kim’s takeover in 1994 marked the first dynastic succession in a communist-ruled country. But unlike his father, the tall and commanding Kim Il Sung, he was without charisma.
Cumings called Mr. Kim a sullen recluse who “doesn’t like to meet people [and is] generally uncomfortable in the role that history dealt him.”
After his father’s death, Mr. Kim took the titles of chairman of the National Defense Committee and general secretary of the Korean Workers’ Party.
Once in control, Mr. Kim justified his inaction in the face of impending famine as in keeping with a three-year mourning period for his father. Breen said Mr. Kim managed to avoid “direct blame while demonstrating his loyalty to his father in a way that resonated with Korean tradition.”
Stagnant economy
Mr. Kim’s greatest struggle was with the North Korean economy, which stagnated after the withdrawal of Soviet aid. He made half-hearted attempts at privatization, including the private sale of grain, but he found those efforts posed too great a risk to his obsessive need for total control.
In 2000, he received South Korean President Kim Dae-jung in what appeared to be an attempt to begin normalizing relations between the two countries. But because of his displeasure with the United States, he delayed negotiations on opening rail lines between the countries and arranging reunions for families with members on opposite sides of the border.
Meanwhile, the North Korean leader constantly provoked his neighbors with aggressive behavior: the missile fired over Japan in 1998, for instance, or the naval battle that erupted in June 2002 between South and North Korean vessels in the Yellow Sea after several defections from North Korea.
Four South Koreans and as many as 30 North Koreans died in the 2002 naval engagement, an incident to which Mr. Kim offered a perplexing response. He issued a tirade about U.S. efforts to “push relations to the brink of war” and a note of congratulations about South Korea’s victory in a World Cup soccer match.
More recently, the North Koreans were blamed in 2010 for shelling South Korean territory called Yeonpyeong Island — which left two South Korean marines dead — and sinking the South Korean warship Cheonan, killing 46 sailors. The North Koreans reportedly acknowledged the shelling but denied the sinking. Some outside experts explained those actions as displays of might that were undertaken while a succession process was unfolding in Pyongyang.
Alexandre Y. Mansourov, who is a North Korea specialist at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies in Honolulu and who has lived and studied in North Korea, once wrote that Kim “is not Satan, but his station in life is to be Devil’s advocate.”
“Now he has to repudiate his lifetime beliefs and achievements, scrap his father’s legacy, and reincarnate as a saint, if he were to reform, let alone to dismantle the North Korean Gulag and Pyongyang’s world of ‘1984,’ ” Mansourov wrote. “Kim Jong Il can adjust at the margins, but he is unlikely to abandon his core. For Kim Jong Il is a survivor, not a martyr.”
Staff writer Chico Harlan in Tokyo contributed to this report.
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