Roh: "I Am a Positive Person"

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

The President-elect of South Korea is a pragmatic man. As a young military officer, he wore a small brown identification tag with his name inscribed in English as NO. It was the most common pronunciation of his surname. Quickly, however, the unpropitious English meaning of no got to him. Using a less frequent but acceptable pronunciation, No Tae Woo became Roh Tae Woo. Said Roh: "N-o is negative, and I am a positive person. So I prefer R-o-h." He will need that kind of flexibility to lead his country on the still bumpy path toward democracy.

Roh Tae Woo was born Dec. 4, 1932, in a modest three-room farmhouse in the tiny rural town of Yangjinmal, ten miles from the industrial city of Taegu. His was an impoverished childhood, made worse by the severity of the Japanese occupation. Every day the young Roh walked five miles to elementary school classes. The future army general liked to play war games, reserving the leading roles for himself.

In 1951 Roh entered the Korea Military Academy outside Seoul. There he befriended Chun Doo Hwan, who would later become South Korea's President. The two graduated in 1955, members of the first class to complete the school's new four-year program. The friends had different temperaments. Where Chun was cold, Roh was affable. Where Chun was imposing, Roh was self-effacing.

Still, Chun's and Roh's lives ran almost parallel. They were together at a six-month special warfare course at Fort Bragg, N.C., and both saw action in + Viet Nam as unit commanders with South Korea's Tiger Division. In December 1979, after both had become generals, Roh's infantry division came to his friend's aid when Chun overthrew South Korea's ruling clique of senior military officers and eventually took over the country.

Roh rose steadily under Chun. After his retirement from the military in 1981, Roh was named Minister of Political Affairs and oversaw national security and foreign relations. In 1985 he became second-in-command, after Chun, of the ruling Democratic Justice Party. By early this year, after rivals resigned from the government amid a police-brutality scandal, Roh was poised to become Chun's chosen successor.

Roh is a family man who listens to his children. Last June, when the country erupted in protest after Chun designated Roh the ruling party's presidential candidate, his 21-year-old son Jae Heon influenced his decision to propose direct presidential elections. Jae Heon is a student at Seoul National University, a hotbed of antigovernment student activism. "My son is very critical at times," Roh noted last summer. But after the candidate championed democracy, his son said for the first time, "Father, I respect you." Roh's daughter So Young, 26, is a graduate student at the University of Chicago.

Roh works out regularly, but his campaign schedule has curtailed his twice- weekly tennis matches. He still quotes from memory lines from his favorite author, the German writer Hermann Hesse, whose visionary novels (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi) describe the quest for enlightenment and serenity. That should be good inspiration for the next President of South Korea.

With reporting by Barry Hillenbrand and K.C. Hwang/Seoul