JIMBIALEK
은색 party member 은색
Posts: 239
Join date: 2008-07-14
 |  Subject: Re: Bill Clinton visits North Korea in bid to free journalists Wed Sep 23, 2009 6:00 am | |
| | catcher22 wrote: | | And they were likely all buddy-buddy in private |
We're past this topic now, but I found this and thought it was interesting. I don't think they were "buddy-buddy"
"IT WAS a hard-eyed, unemotional get-together. They had never met face-to-face, but once sparred dangerously. Bill Clinton, the unusually unsmiling former American president who had probably come closer to fighting North Korea than any president since the Korean war, was in Pyongyang to win the release of two female American journalists facing 12 years of hard labour. There he met Kim Jong Il, the grim-faced leader of arguably the world’s most repressive regime and a defiant nuclear bomb-tester to boot.
Mr Kim is an ace non-smiler. In receiving Mr Clinton (he had turned down earlier suggested emissaries), he was out to show his people and the world that, despite rumours of ill health, his was a regime to be reckoned with, and that even powerful America would have to reckon with it. Mr Clinton, no doubt asked to do nothing to help Mr Kim’s cause, was determined above all, well, not to smile.
Whether the normally affable Mr Clinton managed to stay poker-faced through the three hours and 15 minutes he and Mr Kim spent in each other’s company (long enough, even with translation, for a chin-wag), his aides are not saying." |
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