The limousine from the Blue House, South Korea's equivalent of the White House, passed through the heavily guarded, high steel gates and proceeded onto the grounds that I had visited many times before on my way to see South Korean heads of state and other officials. This time, to my surprise, the car kept going past the presidential offices and up a winding hillside road lined with old, gnarled pines. At the top of the hill was the presidential residence, which is rarely used for greeting foreign visitors. I took off my shoes at the entryway and donned slippers, as is the custom in most Korean homes. Inside the spacious living room, sitting stoically in a chair beside a small sofa, was a man I had met many times in the past quarter-century under dramatically different circumstances. This time Kim Dae Jung, who at various times during his long political life had been denounced, kidnapped, imprisoned, sentenced to death, and exiled by South Korea's leaders, was the duly elected president of his country.

Kim came to his feet unsteadily--he suffers from hip joint arthritis as a result of a devastating traffic "accident" after his first presidential campaign, in 1971. Kim believes it was a disguised assassination attempt; if so, it was only the first of several such attempts by his political opponents. As president, he is protected from threats to his life and his privacy by all the panoply of government. In earlier days, he faced persistent harassment and worse. His house in Seoul was surrounded by platoons of government agents on nearby streets and rooftops who monitored and intimidated his visitors. On this day in March 1998, a little more than a month after his inauguration, South Korea was at the nadir of its most serious economic crisis since the Korean War; "a dark IMF tunnel," as he had told his people in a televised town meeting. Four months earlier, South Korea's amazingly rapid economic rise, the exemplar of "the East Asian miracle," had been suddenly interrupted by the loss of investor confidence and the abrupt flight of international capital. As the crisis leaped northward from Thailand, South Korea's currency lost 40 percent of its value and its stock market dropped 42 percent. The Seoul government was forced to go hat in hand to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a $57 billion bailout, accepting in return a stringent austerity program and an overhaul of its economic policies.