Ex-president's suicide leaves S. Korea with questions about its leaders

Reporting from Seoul — He entered the national stage as Mr. Clean, a tireless crusader in a country rife with high-level corruption. He left disgraced, taking his own life amid suspicion that he had been dirtied by the culture of political bribery he had promised to clean up.

The suicide of former South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun, days before he was expected to be indicted in an influence-peddling inquiry, left the nation grappling today with new and troubling questions about the moral character of its elected leaders.

"He was a two-faced person," said Kim Seung-hwan, a senior research associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Seoul. "He set himself up as this crusader who was going to clean up South Korean politics.

"But he left so many questions about the influence of people around him and whether he himself was corrupt. For Koreans, he left behind a lot of frustration."

Roh, 62, who jumped to his death from a rocky promontory near his home in the southern city of Busan, also leaves a hard-luck legacy of a flawed leader perhaps too human for the righteous agenda he swore to pursue.

With his emphasis on national sovereignty and independence from superpowers such as the United States, supporters say, Roh symbolized South Korea's progress toward becoming a more liberal and independent democracy.

But critics say history will not be so kind to Roh, who left office last year after his five-year term ended.

Often contentious and insecure, he lacked the leadership skills to rally a nation that craved a new political direction. He defied conservative wisdom to pursue more lenient policies toward North Korea and questioned his own qualifications for the nation's top political post.

From the start, Roh's roots were different from that his presidential predecessors, mostly wealthy men who moved into the realm of national politics.

He was born in 1946 to a farming couple in the rural town of Gimhae. In a book on South Korean politics that includes a chapter on Roh, author Choi Jin wrote that Roh's impoverished childhood shaped his policies as president, such as his drive to raise taxes on the upper middle class.

"His childhood is full of a sense of inferiority and anger and resistance," Choi wrote. "His mother was full of rancor for being left out [of society] in a mountain village."