Kim Dae-jung, South Korea's former leftist president who died yesterday at the age of 85, was a political brawler right to the finish.

In the months before his death, the Nobel Peace laureate accused Seoul's conservative government of backsliding into the traits of the military dictatorship he helped topple in the late 1980s. These scathing attacks were deeply embarrassing to the government because of Kim's stature as an architect of South Korea's vibrant democracy.

Although best known in the west for trying to engage communist North Korea with a “sunshine policy” of rapprochement, South Koreans will remember Kim as the democracy activist whom the military governments just could not kill in the 1970s and 1980s. He said he survived five attempts on his life, some of them sounding like escapades from the pages of a James Bond novel.