In Korea there is a joke about Kim Dae Jung. It says that as difficult as it is to save a life, in Kim's case it is difficult to die. Sitting in his small office on the fourth floor of Harvard's Center for International Affairs, Kim chuckles as he explains the joke. There have been several serious attempts on his life since he became an opposition leader and advocate of democracy in South Korean politics in the 1960s.

For a man who has been marked for death, Kim looks very well; but as he rises to answer a phone call, he walks with a stiffness in his hips that is the result of a car accident in South Korea which he says was staged to kill him, and did kill three people in the car behind him.

Now he is a visiting fellow at Harvard, in the same fellows program that Filipino dissident Benigno Aquino participated in three years ago, before his assassination as he stepped off the plane in his home country this August.

Kim's participation in Korean politics began when he was elected to the National Assembly. In 1961, he had become such a prominent member of the Korean National Assembly that he was imprisoned after General Park Chung Hee staged a military coup.

He spent the next 10 years in and out of prison until 1971, when he ran for president in South Korea and tallied 46 percent of the vote in the official results, a count which was said to have been fixed against him.

In August 1973 after Park proclaimed martial law. Kim was kidnapped from a hotel room in Japan by agents of the Korean intelligence agency.

"They were going to kill me in the bathtub," Kim says. "They were going to dismember my body but failed because of the appearance of a relative." The agents took him on a boat where Kim says they had bound his arms and legs, and were preparing to throw him into the sea when a plane buzzed the boat and unnerved his would-be executioners. They released him.

Even after his escape from death, Kim was still politically active in Korea and was one of the first people arrested after Chun Doo Hwan seized power in late 1979, a move that engendered anti-American feeling among Koreans.

When hundreds of people demonstrated outside the building he was being held in. South Korean soldiers under American direction violently, restrained the crowd. This "disappointment" among the Korean people with the U.S. was only made worse when President Reagan made Chun the first state visitor after Reagan's inauguration.

"Nearly 80 percent of young people conceive an anti-American feeling," which leads to rioting. Kim says "I never support such destructive manner, but I can understand their sentiment."

However, following Chun's visit to the White House, and some say as a result of the visit. Kim's death sentence was commuted as part of a general amnesty policy for dissenters. And, in December of last year, he arrived in the United States with a passport valid only in the U.S.

"At first I didn't want to come here," Kim says. "I wanted them to leave me in Korea. But if I had not accepted the U.S. Korea proposal [to come to the U.S.], the rest of my colleagues would not have been released.

Reservations

Although he is grateful to the U.S. government for saving his life. Kim has some reservations about its foreign policy. One of Kim's major criticisms of the Reagan Administration is its support of current dictatorships like that of Chun. He outlines three changes he would like to see in Reagan's current policy on Korea that U.S. should more openly advocate the American attitude of democracy in other countries: stop additional financial and to the Korean government and guarantee the neutrality of the Korean army in Korean politics.

If America could change its attitude, my people could change tomorrow. But if America should stay in its attitude, my people will be anti-American I worry about that Kim formerly reserved now sitting forward in his chair gesturing, says "I don't want to see America hated anymore, but my country will be crucified in accordance with American failure."