How was Roh Moo-hyun different from Lee Jae Myung?

Former President Roh Moo-hyun remains a figure of the present in South Korean politics.

He is still one of the pillars used to explain the identity of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), while his name is repeatedly invoked to lend legitimacy to particular political factions or policy agendas.

Ahead of the DPK’s national convention in August, candidates for party leadership competed to put forward their own interpretations of Roh, while even whether someone attended his funeral became a point of contention in debates over who could claim to be the party’s legitimate heir. The abolition of prosecutors’ supplementary investigative powers was also described as “a homework assignment left by the late president.”

As different political forces invoke only the version of Roh that serves their own interests, concerns have grown that misconceptions about him are spreading and that younger generations who did not know him well may feel increasingly disconnected from his legacy.

It was against this backdrop that "A Biography of Roh Moo-hyun," published by Wisdom House, was released. The book was published to coincide with the 80th anniversary of Roh’s birth on Sept. 1.

Its author, Yoon Tae-young, served as spokesman for the Roh administration, head of the presidential first secretariat and presidential speech planning secretary. For more than two decades beginning in 1988, he recorded Roh’s words and writings and became known as “Roh’s voice,” “Roh’s scribe” and “Roh’s confidant.”

“I wrote the book with the idea of bringing together various records, including the ones I personally kept,” Yoon said. “More than anything, I strongly felt that I needed to portray Roh in a way that would allow generations who did not know him well to understand him. I wanted people to be able to learn about Roh without prejudice. That is why I tried to provide fairly detailed explanations.”

Yoon was interviewed on Aug. 29 at Bongha Village in Gimhae, South Gyeongsang Province, where an event marking Roh’s 80th birthday was held. The interview was also conducted by phone. This article combines the two interviews with material from the biography and Yoon’s lectures.

The biography was published more than 17 years after Roh’s death. Yoon presented a copy of the book at Roh’s grave in Bongha Village.

“I feel overwhelmingly inadequate, but I have finally completed, with great difficulty, the oldest assignment the president left me,” he said at the grave.

“May this bring a small measure of comfort to a great politician who agonized and made decisions at critical moments in modern Korean political history for the advancement of democracy.”

Yoon said he believes this will probably be the last time he expresses Roh through writing.

He began working on the biography 10 years ago. He initially expected to finish it within three years, but the project took far longer.

The years he had spent watching Roh at close range and documenting his every move, along with the enormous volume of material he had accumulated, had given Yoon confidence. Yet once he actually began writing, he struggled to make progress.

“I think I was overwhelmed by the weight of writing a biography,” he said. “I would put it away and then take it out again, repeating the process. That is how it took this long.”

Yoon modestly attributed some of the delay to his own laziness, but the amount of material he reviewed was enormous.

He examined more than 160 previously unpublished records, including oral histories and speeches from the Roh Moo-hyun Foundation’s Presidential Archives, as well as notes, transcripts and memoranda kept by his aides. He also went through more than 600 notebooks and 1,000 files he had personally preserved, along with 365 videos from Bongha Village.

“When I looked through my old notebooks again, I found that about half of them were impossible to decipher, and I could no longer remember why I had written about 30 percent of the entries,” he said. “It also took considerable time to cross-check them against historical records from the period.”

The result is a 928-page “brick” of a book.

Despite its size, however, the book is relatively easy to read. Much of that is due to Yoon’s decision to preserve Roh’s words and writings as close to their original form as possible.

“I tried hard to preserve the president’s words as they were,” Yoon said. “I believed his own words were more important than my thoughts or judgments. I wanted to portray him in a straightforward and objective way.”

According to Yoon, Roh once gave him the following advice: “There’s nothing to worry about. Just write what you saw and heard. There’s no need to exaggerate anything, and don’t deliberately leave anything out.”

Those words became the guiding principle for Yoon as he wrote the biography.

Roh Moo-hyun and today's politics

Roh's remarks are vividly captured in the book, including his response to a corruption investigation in 2003 involving close aides such as An Hee-jung and Yeom Dong-yeon, who were accused of receiving money from the Boseong Group in connection with an alleged lobbying scandal involving Narae Jonggeum.

“I believe the wrongdoing of anyone who worked for me is also my wrongdoing," Roh said. "And I take full responsibility for all of it. However, as I am currently serving as president, criminal prosecution against me would inevitably be suspended during my term. If there is anything for which I am legally responsible, I will gladly accept that responsibility as soon as my term ends.”

Roh had intended to include these remarks in the draft of his first address to the National Assembly after taking office, but his aides persuaded him not to.

Another episode described in detail concerns Roh’s proposal for constitutional reform in 2007. When he proposed a constitutional amendment introducing a four-year presidential term with the possibility of one reelection and aligning the terms of the president and National Assembly members, opposition parties accused him of seeking to regain political initiative near the end of his presidency. Some also suspected that the amendment was designed to extend the incumbent president’s tenure or enable him to run for another term.

At a luncheon with leaders of the ruling Uri Party, Roh reportedly said: “No matter how much I think about it, I cannot see what benefit this would bring me. I appreciate that you think of me as a master strategist, but…”

That same day, Roh made his position clear at a press briefing. “This constitutional revision has nothing to do with me. Even if the Constitution is amended, I cannot run for president again.”

These episodes inevitably overlap with contemporary political debates surrounding President Lee Jae Myung. Roh’s remarks about accepting legal responsibility after leaving office raise the broader question of how those in power should approach judicial proceedings involving themselves. His insistence that he would not be eligible to seek another term under a revised Constitution also evokes Lee, who has spoken in favor of constitutional reform centered on a four-year presidential term with the possibility of reelection, without explicitly addressing whether he himself would seek another term.

Writer Yoon said that working on the biography made him realize that many of the issues debated in the past remain unresolved.

“Some issues are still unfolding, while others are challenges that President Roh ultimately failed to accomplish. That is probably why what happened then can serve either as a lesson or a precedent for what is happening now.”

'Roh Moo-hyun spirit': Accepting losses for principles

In 2003, Roh accepted Kim Yong-dam as his nominee for Supreme Court justice despite having differences with then-Chief Justice Choi Jong-young. Yoon, who witnessed the episode firsthand as Roh’s presidential spokesman at the time, might have been expected to offer an interpretation of the current dispute between the presidential office and Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae over the nomination of Supreme Court justices through the lens of Roh’s political philosophy.

But Yoon firmly rejected the idea of using Roh’s name to interpret current political affairs.

“My role was to faithfully put the president’s thoughts and philosophy into writing. Using those ideas to interpret current issues goes beyond my abilities and the scope of my role.”

Yet when discussing Roh’s political philosophy itself, Yoon spoke with confidence.

He identified “national unity” as the central goal Roh sought to achieve throughout his political career.

“The president believed that his election itself had achieved about 50 percent of national unity. But as his term progressed, he began using the word ‘frustration’ more and more often. He believed that he had achieved a great deal in terms of national unity, but toward the end of his presidency, he also seems to have felt that he had accomplished nothing.”

Before becoming president, Roh had lost four of the six elections he contested, including three defeats in Busan. According to Yoon, Roh regarded his own election as president — after challenging regionalism throughout his political career — as an achievement in national unity. But by the end of his presidency, he felt the limits of that achievement, having ultimately failed to break down the country’s entrenched regional political divisions.

The conversation also touched on the idea of the “Roh Moo-hyun spirit,” a phrase frequently invoked in political circles. While acknowledging that it can be interpreted in various ways, writer Yoon identified it as “politics that is willing to accept personal losses for the sake of principles.”

Yoon cited several examples: Roh’s decision to pursue a career as a human rights lawyer, his submission of a resignation letter from the National Assembly, his refusal to join the three-party merger, and his decision to run in Busan’s Buk District and Gangseo District rather than seek reelection in Seoul’s Jongno District.

“The president emphasized that he practiced politics by accepting personal losses,” Yoon said. “I believe the Roh Moo-hyun spirit means having the courage to give up vested interests when necessary to uphold principles that serve the interests of the people and the country.”

It was perhaps the clearest message to politicians who invoke Roh Moo-hyun’s legacy today.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.