As president from 1998 till 2003, Mr. Kim was the first opposition leader to take power in South Korea.
Once vilified by his rivals as a Communist, Mr. Kim flew to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, in 2000 to meet that nation’s leader, Kim Jong-il, in the first summit meeting between the Koreas. That meeting led to an unprecedented détente on the divided Korean Peninsula, which remains technically at war because no peace treaty was signed at the end of the Korean War in 1953.
Under Mr. Kim’s “sunshine policy,” the two Koreas connected roads and railways across their shared border. They jointly built an industrial park. Two million South Koreans visited a North Korean mountain resort. And in a scene televised worldwide, aging Koreans separated by the war a half century ago tearfully hugged one another in temporary family reunions.
“Through his political dedication and persecution, he has come to symbolize South Korea’s democratization,” Kang Won-taek, a political scientist at Soongsil University in Seoul, said Tuesday. “He also broke longstanding taboos in South Korea — he led the liberals to the fore of South Korean politics after decades of conservative rule, and he changed North Korea’s status among South Koreans from an enemy to be vilified to someone that can coexist with the South and can be engaged.”