A Magic Memo

Chairman Kim Jong Il said:

"Comrade Kim Il Sung was the great leader whom our people held in high esteem for the first time in their history of thousands of years, and the sun of humankind who was looked up to by the whole world."

President Kim Il Sung was a great leader we acclaimed for the first time in history spanning thousands of years and a great leader of the world revolution. He had gained boundless reverence and respect of the heads of the parties and the States and prominent figures of many countries for his unique political competence and wide scope of information and encyclopedic knowledge.

In the middle of December, Juche 55(1966), he was having a meeting with Brezhnev, the then head of the Communist Party of Soviet Union.

In the meeting President, with composure, used to bring the gravity of the situation into the open analyzing the points acutely or renew the atmosphere with his good sense of humor. Brezhnev had a thick note of 200~300 pages in front of him on the desk, while President Kim Il Sung had a small memo on the desk.

Before the meeting, Brezhnev volunteered to recite a poem as a digression and recited a poem in which the writer praised the graceful mountains and rivers of his country. When he finished reciting, the great leader said; the poem was by President Mao Zedong of China, who enjoyed writing poems in his leisure time, and it was one of the favorites of Chinese people; Mao had ardently loved his native place and written that poem in 1930s. Brezhnev was agape with wonder at the lucid interpretation of the great leader. He said that he could not understand the poem because it was a self-evident truth that mountains are high and seas are deep. The great leader said that being self-evident may have been the very reason why it was worth being an object of description and Brezhnev was completely tongue-tied.

President took the first floor in the meeting and he gave a comprehensive and detailed outline of the bilateral relations in politics, defence, economy, culture and many other fields as well as the international situations. In his nearly four hour-long presentation, the first page of the memo was never turned and he kept talking without glancing at it.

As time went by, Brezhnev often glanced at the memo in front of the great leader. When the great leader's speech was going to an end, Brezhnev stood up on his feet all of a sudden and carefully looked over the memo, with his hands on the table. Everybody present was shocked at this unexpected situation unprecedented in diplomatic customs.

Without caring about his decency, Brezhnev excused himself and asked the great leader about the book. He was wondering what on earth was written on that magic memo which enabled the great leader to talk so smoothly about the topics of all different fields without any note but that small memo. President Kim Il Sung said that the book was a simple data notebook, a simple notebook that kept track of anything necessary. Brezhnev was so impressed. He said that he had so far met heads of state of many countries, big and small, in this room but he had never seen anybody speaking fluently for more than four hours without a manuscript, like President Kim Il Sung. He opened his heart and said that he had so far met a lot of great men including several heads of states, but President Kim Il Sung was the first all-powerful great man he had ever seen.

Then, reporting that he had finished the transcription of the meeting, the recording engineer of the Soviet side who attended the talks expressed his impression like this; President Kim Il Sung is really a rare man; the leader of our Party did not manage to read the manuscript properly, while President Kim Il Sung spoke without any manuscript, but I could not find any syllable wrong. He highly praised his speech to be so logical and philosophical that it could be a great treatise and a great works.

The officials who had accompanied the President reported this to Chairman Kim Jong ll when they came back home. Saying in deep emotion that this anecdote proved that our President was a great man recognized by the world, Chairman Kim Jong Il asked them to give wide publicity to the story of the "magic memo".

Indeed, President Kim Il Sung was the elder statesman of the world and the greatest man who was boundlessly respected and revered by the world revolutionary people.