The summit of the two Koreas which began yesterday in Pyongyang is a personal triumph for South Korea's 74-year-old President Kim Dae-jung, who has survived imprisonment, a death sentence and two assassination attempts in pursuit of his lifelong goals of democracy and reunification.
Even today, as the public rejoices in Seoul at the historic meeting of the divided peninsula's two leaders, Mr Kim's "sunshine policy" of engagement with North Korea is bitterly criticised by some members of the opposition Grand National Party, which in its previous incarnations governed the South from the end of the second World War until February 1998.
Conservatives have always depicted Mr Kim as soft on communism, and in the 1997 presidential election campaign he was damaged by stories planted in the Seoul media alleging that he received campaign funds from Pyongyang. The smear was the brainchild of the outgoing National Security chief who was unmasked and sentenced to five years in prison.
The North Koreans have also made life difficult for Mr Kim, responding to the olive branch he held out on taking office in 1998 with provocations, including several intrusions by armed vessels into disputed southern waters, one of which last June resulted in the sinking of a North Korean patrol boat.
The decisive South Korean victory in that encounter was a factor in Pyongyang's decision to accept Mr Kim's invitation to talks, according to a senior Western diplomat in Seoul, who said it was a defining moment for North Korea as it exposed their hand-controlled weaponry to be no match for South Korea's precise computerised technology.
The son of a farmer, Mr Kim first emerged to prominence as the leader of the democratic movement in South Korea when he won 45 per cent of the vote in a presidential election in 1971, almost unseating the military ruler, Park Chung-hee. During the campaign, a lorry hit his car in what he claims was an assassination attempt, leaving him with a permanent limp and chronic neuralgia.
Mr Kim became such a potent symbol and rallying point for opposition groups that the notorious Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA) abducted him from a Tokyo hotel and tried to drown him at sea by lashing him to a board weighted with concrete; only desisting when a US helicopter mysteriously appeared overhead. He was thrown into a South Korean jail instead.
President Park was assassinated in October 1979, and in 1980 South Korea experienced a pro-democracy uprising, and Mr Kim was released. However, army officers re-established martial law, he was jailed again, and special forces brutally crushed pro-democracy demonstrations in his home town of Kwangju. Mr Kim was sentenced to death for treason but reprieved in 1981 after a worldwide outcry against the obviously rigged charges.
After democratic reforms he had another chance to win the Presidency in 1988, but the pro-democratic vote was split. Even when he finally took office in 1998 he had to form a coalition government with the former head of KCIA which had repressed him as a dissident.
Mr Kim took over a country on the verge of bankruptcy which had just accepted a humiliating $60 billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Now he is credited with turning the situation around by assuring foreign investors South Korea would conduct free-market policies and rapid reform.
The former champion of workers' rights paid a price: he is reviled by labour militants for engineering a new deal whereby most workers in South Korea are now hired on contract and employers can lay off workers.
In an effort to promote national unity, Mr Kim pardoned former presidents Chun and Roh Tae-woo, both former generals who led the Kwangju crackdown.