the exhilaration of these relatively spoiled young people driving fast down a deserted highway at night—with no fear of getting caught for speeding.” The younger Kim gained a reputation not only for recklessness, cruelty, and womanizing but also for political savvy and bureaucratic acumen. He honed these skills in the competition for his father’s affection and favor, especially given his stepmother’s ambition to elevate herself, her sons (in particular the older of the two half-brothers, Pyong Il), and her branch of the family ahead of his own. Despite Jong Il’s complaints about his loneliness and the fraught relationship with his stepmother, his father was highly invested in his eldest son’s education; teachers were ordered to give him extra lessons and special attention.
Jong Il lacked not only the gravitas, affability, and avuncular nature of his famous father but also the Great Leader’s physical stature: At five foot two or three, he was about six inches shorter than Kim Il Sung. But Jong Il possessed a skill that outweighed his disadvantages: his ability to satisfy his father’s craving for adulation. For those surrounding the country’s founder, including his son, “feeding [Kim Il Sung’s] enormous appetites and ego provided full-time and never-ending work.” Even as a teenager, Jong Il sought to demonstrate his devotion and filial loyalty. Hwang recalled that young Kim accompanied his father on a trip to the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, where he took care of the Great Leader’s itinerary, took notes of the day’s events, and polished his shoes, leading a touched Kim Il Sung to remark, “My son is truly the best! I can trust no one else but him.”
As North Korea’s leader faced his mortality and began to consider who might replace him, he kept mum on publicly naming a successor until 1980. However, he had started grooming his eldest son as early as the 1970s, as noted in a declassified 1978 CIA document. Jong Il was then the leader of the influential Organization and Guidance Department of the Korean Workers’ Party Central Committee, which meant he had the power to “coordinate sensitive personnel matters, including promotions, transfers, and demotions for party functionaries from the national to the local level.” The CIA assessment also claimed that “perhaps the most potent political weapon” for the younger Kim was “his evident role as chief interpreter, protector, and propagandizer” of his father’s thoughts.
Jong Il sought to use all the tools of repression to solidify his primacy in the succession struggle. The 1978 CIA assessment stressed these efforts: “By guiding the movement to indoctrinate all of society with [his father’s] thoughts, the younger Kim is in a position to evaluate the ideological rectitude of party officials and, more important, to censure or demote those who are found lacking.” And as the “keeper of the faith and as the secretary in charge of organizational affairs,” Kim used his unique position as the eldest son and his growing bureaucratic power to build his base. He exiled his half-brother Pyong Il to faraway posts and discredited his uncle and the Kim Song Ae side of the family.
It was an unending project. “In order to show his father that he was the most loyal, he singled out people near Kim Il Sung,” Hwang said. “Arguing that these people were not loyal and citing doubts about their ideology or competency, he would relentlessly attack and remove them.” He adopted his father’s example of doling out privileges and positions to ensure loyalty and unabashedly using nepotism to guarantee that the Kim family would remain the ruling dynasty by installing his family members in the regime’s top positions. At the same time, he gave plum assignments to the adult children of the guerrillas in his father’s circle to further legitimize the hereditary transfer of power and provide continuity from the founding generation to the next. This had the effect of deepening the investment that the younger generation had in perpetuating the Kim dynasty, with Jong Il as the unquestioned leader. Still, in a 1982 paper titled “The Dynasty Takes Shape,” the CIA assessed that Kim Jong Il “will not be able to replace his father in image, role, or charisma.”
Perhaps all too aware that he lacked his father’s star quality, Kim made up for it in visible gifts. To remind the people of their loyalty to the Sun, the Great Leader, their Father, Kim Jong Il doubled down on the cult of personality, blanketing North Korea with tens of thousands of pieces of art,