by Doug Wead
While the president took his phone call I had a moment to look and quickly read some of them. It was clear that the two men had grown close and were quite friendly, that there was something almost paternal about Trump’s relationship with Kim.
When the president finished his call, I moved the stack of letters farther away from my plate. I didn’t want to get any food stains on these precious papers. In my own personal collection I have letters from presidents Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, and William Howard Taft, and notebooks full of many others. A spot could cost a collector $10,000. And I suspected that in a hundred years these letters might end up under glass in some collector’s display.
The White House waiters took our salad dishes and replaced them with dinner plates with a filet mignon, french fries, and broccoli. How can I describe the steak? They hadn’t asked how I wanted it cooked, but it was so fresh, almost like it had been cooked on a stone and had only just been transferred to the plate. It certainly hadn’t been sitting under a heat lamp. This was what you would expect from a White House steak. Having served years before on senior staff, I knew it had been delivered by an elevator from the kitchen downstairs.
“Mr. President,” I asked, “why do you think Kim responded to you and not to your predecessors? Is it because you finally tried something more direct, and they wouldn’t take that chance?”
“No, that’s not it. They tried. If you read the internal history, the signals were sent, an effort was made. Other American presidents tried. Maybe not enough, maybe not the right way, but North Korea wouldn’t even talk to them. They didn’t even respond.”
“Was it a celebrity thing?” I asked. That brought up a discussion of Kim’s fascination with American culture, including its celebrities. There was the basketball star.
“Dennis Rodman,” Sarah Sanders said.
“Maybe Kim wanted to meet you as a celebrity president?”
“I don’t know about that,” Trump said. “I don’t know about that. You can read those letters and see what you think. But I can tell you the exact moment when everything changed.
“Our language started to get really violent, the toughest. Violent. Nobody had even seen anything like this. But something had to be done. And what Americans missed was how he was threatening the whole region.”
The president was talking about the wider implications of the North Korean nuclear threat, which was something that the myopic American news media had not fully covered. Anything beyond our own shores often went unreported. In the United States we had watched the progression of the North Korean missile program as steps to reaching the American mainland. “Now he can reach Guam.” “Now Hawaii.” “Now San Francisco.” But the fact was that Kim Jong-un’s threats had not been directed solely at the United States. Early in the summer of 2017, Kim announced that his nuclear missiles could now reach Brisbane, Australia. In America, the news did not even merit a mention, as we were preoccupied by fires in California, but it was on the front pages in Australia. Likewise, Kim’s bullying of Japan, whose defense was totally reliant on the United States, was ominous and dominated the daily national discussion in that country.
Kim’s threats had become so angry that Trump had finally responded in kind. During a briefing on the opioid epidemic, held at his clubhouse at his Bedminster, New Jersey, country club, Trump invited in reporters and gave them an earful. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he said. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”4
That summer, using back channels, the Trump administration succeeded in gaining the release of Otto Warmbier, a University of Virginia student who had been arrested during a tour of North Korea. He had allegedly tried to take home a propaganda poster as a souvenir. A North Korean court sentenced him to fifteen years of hard labor.5 But Warmbier’s return to the United States was bittersweet. The young man was in a coma and died within a week.
In September 2017, President Donald Trump announced he would be meeting the parents of Megumi Yokota on an upcoming visit to Japan.6 Megumi was a teenager who had been snatched from her Japanese homeland and taken to North Korean forty years before. She was heading home after school badminton practice when North Korean agents had landed by boat, abducted her, and taken her away. Her parents learned the details of the abduction only long after, in 1997, when a former North Korean spy defected to the South and told the story. The North Koreans claimed that the teenager had committed suicide, but when they sent her remains back to Japan in 2004, DNA analysis showed it was another body.
Against advice, Trump outed the whole story in a public speech before the United Nations. “We know it kidnapped a sweet thirteen-year-old Japanese girl from a beach in her own country to enslave her as a language tutor for North Korea’s spies.”7 By some estimates, North Korea was holding up to one hundred hostages from around the world. The Kim government was humiliated by Trump’s speech. But the family of the girl and the Japanese government thanked the president for speaking up.
While past American presidents kept stories of hostages quiet, saying that more could be done if the offending nations were not publicly embarrassed, Trump’s style was the opposite, and it soon bore fruit.8
We were reviewing some of this history when President Trump suddenly looked up from his lunch, with a mischievous smile on his face. “Kim especially doesn’t like it when I talk about hostages. He hates that word. ‘Hostages.’”
“Really?”
“Yes. He said to me, ‘Please, do not say that. Please do not use that word.’”
Trump had found a nerve.
“You want to know why?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it makes him look bad. And because Obama paid the Iranians $1.8 billion dollars for hostages. I paid nothing. And I got ours back from Kim for nothing.
“But I will tell you all about that. It’s not over. There is still a long way to go, but I will tell you how it all turned around, the turning point. This will be good for the book.”
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes from President Trump come from conversations and interviews conducted by the author between 2016 and 2019.
2. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate
3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mi41C3gV9kw
4. https://www.latimes.com/politics/washington/la-na-essential-washington-updates-trump-warns-north-korea-of-fire-and-1502220642-htmlstory.html
5. https://dailycaller.com/2018/05/27/president-trump-freed-17-prisoners/
6. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/13/trump-meet-parents-japanese-teenager-seized-north-korea-abductions-megumi-yokota
7. https://www.apnews.com/94fab8f77bcb4fb5864669026906bf60
8. https://dailycaller.com/2018/05/27/president-trump-freed-17-prisoners/
2
LUNCH WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP
“He better watch his ass!”
—PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP, TALKING TO THE AUTHOR ABOUT KIM JONG UN
It all turned around that week at the United Nations,” President Trump said. “That’s when it happened. I told everybody, ‘The Little Rocket Man is going to cause the total annihilation of his country.’”
On November 30, 2017, President Trump tweeted the message publicly: “The Chinese Envoy, who just returned from North Korea, seems to have had no impact on Little Rocket Man. Hard to believe his people, and the military, put up with living in such horrible conditions. Russia and China condemned the launch.”1
At the time, President Trump’s critics, which consisted primarily of the American media, were on all sides of the issue. They complained when the Trump White House sent out feelers to talk to North Korea. He was consorting with an evil dictator, they said. Or he was giving away too much by his apparent willingness to talk. But they were hysterical when Trump began talking tough to Kim Jong-un. “He’s going to start a war.” And yet, at the same time, everyone agreed that it was the status
quo that had brought America to the brink. Eleven American presidents had failed to make peace with North Korea. Even some of the most unadventurous State Department bureaucrats were wondering if Donald Trump’s hyperactive motions might force the issue.
“Understand what I am saying to you, Doug,” the president said, “I was saying stuff that you would never say no matter how close you are to the edge. No matter how much dislike there is. You only say this if you are ready to act on it. It was unbelievably close.”
The critics were complaining that Trump should watch his language. That he should only talk like that as a last warning, a last effort to shock the enemy into realizing that war was imminent. Otherwise, you may unintentionally provoke the very war you fear. As early as April 2017, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof had written an op-ed speculating on a possible nuclear war with North Korea.2 Was President Trump now telling me that the United States had actually been there? Had we, indeed, been on the verge of going to war? He would know, because he would have had to make that decision.
“It was unbelievably close.”
Others were actually discerning this at the time, but their voices were often obscured. Uri Friedman, writing for The Atlantic, claimed that the Trump confidant Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, “was telling me there was a 70 percent chance of the president launching an all-out war against the Kim regime if North Korea tested another nuclear device.”3
Trump’s tough talk to Kim was not a bluff. That was what he was making clear to me during our lunch interview. He was not going to let America be hit by a nuclear missile on his watch. And yet the national media was furious with him, blaming him for the growing escalation. Calling for a more reasonable approach.
When it came to Communist dictators, history tends to favor Trump’s hard line. When John F. Kennedy met with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961 he had tried to extend an olive branch, and the Soviet dictator had seen it only as a sign of weakness.4 Khrushchev ordered nuclear missiles to Cuba, and it brought the world to the brink of a nuclear war.
At the Yalta Conference in 1945, the American president Franklin Roosevelt had tried to be generous to the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. The two men carved up post–World War II Europe, as Churchill looked on. It resulted in sending tens of thousands of Eastern Europeans to their deaths in the Gulags.5 Historians note that Roosevelt had been sick and weakly. He would be dead within two months of the Yalta Conference.
By contrast, critics had been upset by Ronald Reagan’s tough, American cowboy approach. He had called the Soviet Union “the evil empire.” They said he was only provoking them. They were afraid. But most historians now accept that Reagan’s strength helped bring an end to the Cold War and saved the world from nuclear annihilation in his day.
Although a young man, Kim Jong-un had been born into a line of old Communist dictators, in the tradition of Nikita Khrushchev, Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong. He ran concentration camps. He tortured prisoners. A sensational story in a Hong Kong newspaper claimed that he had executed his uncle by feeding him alive to 120 starving dogs.6 North Korea said he was shot. In February, 2017 Kim Jong-un was believed by many to have orchestrated the murder of Kim Jong Nam, his own half brother and a possible political rival. It had been an audacious, public assassination at the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.7
One of the most troubling issues had been the ongoing famines in North Korea. I am a founding board member of Mercy Corps, the relief organization that had taken the lead in distributing food during the 2008 North Korean famine.8 Our people had been some of the few outsiders allowed into the country. They saw firsthand, on the ground, the devastation. In 2017, even while developing its nuclear arsenal, North Korea was apparently facing famine yet again.9 The very real concern was that if Kim Jong-un was willing to allow hundreds of thousands of his own people to starve in a famine, why would he have qualms about risking the annihilation of an American city within reach of his missiles? San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Seattle?
Kim Jong-un, who had learned from his father and grandfather, and who came from the old Communist dictator tradition, was apparently a man who respected strength. Communist dictators are predators. And like predators in the wild, they target the weak, not the powerful. Donald Trump’s rhetoric, which rattled the American media, apparently had its impact in Pyongyang.
“Kim said, ‘I have a button on my desk, a red button,’” Trump said, telling the story, “I mean, you can’t misunderstand this. I mean foreign policy people study the tea leaves, but you don’t have to study these words very long to know what they mean.
“And I said, ‘That’s right and I have a much bigger button than you do and my button works.’ By the way, he knew what that meant. He knew what that meant. We both knew what North Korea could and couldn’t do.”
From this exchange, I got the impression that the North Korean missile program had some limitations and the United States knew what they were. Trump wanted Kim to know that we were aware of what was real and what was only bluster.
“And everybody said, ‘Oh, it is so vicious.’” Trump began to act the part of his panicked critics. “They were all saying this. And for some reason, when I made that speech at the United Nations. Remember? Where I call him ‘Rocket Man’? Where I say, ‘He better watch his ass!’ Well, after that, everything changed. It got so incredible. And then they wanted to talk! It is really an amazing thing.”
If the American media was frightened by Trump’s rhetoric, the United Nations got the point. The Security Council voted 15–0 to adopt hard-hitting resolutions against North Korea. Trump was able to bring China and Russia into the effort. Kim was isolated and soon reached out to America to solve the problem.
Incidentally, this whole conversation with President Trump was at times surreal because there was actually a long, narrow, wooden block on the luncheon table, connected to a cable, and there was a big, fat red button in the middle of it. At one point the president actually pushed the button. It did not launch missiles on North Korea, but it did magically produce a steward with another Diet Coke.
TRUMP’S DESCRIPTION OF THE SINGAPORE SUMMIT
On June 12, 2018, American president Donald Trump and North Korean chairman Kim Jong-un met at the Capella hotel on the resort island of Sentosa in Singapore. It was the first time in history that the leaders of these two nations had met.
Trump, ever the television artist and stage manager, was enthusiastic as he described the setting. “We got a great location. In between South Korea, Russia, and China. How good is that? And I can tell you that it was quite a nice piece of real estate.”
“What surprised you?”
“Well, first I can tell you that Kim and I had great chemistry. That I can tell you. As you may know, that is important to me. All through my life, whether in business or politics, I know when I have it with someone and I know when I don’t. And very often, it’s not there. By the way, Doug, I think you and I have good chemistry. That’s going to be a good thing for this book.”
We all laughed.
“Thanks, Mr. President. But you and Chairman Kim had such harsh words leading up to that moment. So I’m wondering, after all of the hurtful things that you and Chairman Kim said about each other, how could you suddenly have good chemistry? Some of the attacks were very detailed and personal.”
“Well, at a certain point,” Trump continued, “as we met and talked, you could begin to feel that we both wanted this to work.”
“Did that surprise you?’
“Some. It surprised me some. Look, we both wanted it to work. For the sake of our people. For the sake of the world. I went into the meeting with a positive attitude. Sure, I went in there with Otto Warmbier on my mind too, that his life would not be in vain. But a lot depended on us finding answers. War was a real threat. Nuclear war. Who wants that? But yes, I was surprised by the immediate desire to get things resolved.”
“What else surprised you?”
“I�
�ll tell you a moment that neither one of us fully expected. How could anyone prepare for this moment? And that was when Kim and I were introduced to the international media.
“Now, I have some experience onstage before cameras. I had been to conventions and awards ceremonies. Melania and I first went to the Academy Awards back in 2001.10 There were a lot of cameras. But this? This was something I did not fully expect. And I am sure, Chairman Kim, living in North Korea, did not expect it either. When we walked out onstage and shook hands and then turned to face the international press, each photographer there had to get their photo for their organization, from countries all over the world, well it was amazing.”
“The noise?”
The president nodded. “The noise.”
He was referring to the repetitive sound of digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) technology.11 It turns a camera from a picture-taking sniper rifle into a machine gun, capturing hundreds of pictures that can be viewed and edited later. While the president is known for his enthusiastic hyperbole, on this occasion he was probably exactly right. This was the first time when this technology had intersected with a historic world summit. It was a unique moment. Instead of hearing a flutter of shutters that can sound like a flock of birds stirring, Trump and Kim heard a sound more like the roar of a thousand helicopters lifting off.
“That moment was unexpected. I can tell you. Though we both kept a straight face. And I can tell you that it took us both by surprise. There were thousands and thousands of cameras. And the flashes. Nobody had ever seen anything like it.