“MY NICKNAME IS ‘THE silent one,’ ” the new chairman of Samsung
admitted. “At home, I’m known as the person who’s no fun.” He had
originally wanted to be a film director or start a movie production
company.
Chairman Lee was something of a recluse who spent much of his time
in his home, where he lived a life of contemplation. He refused to take calls
from Samsung executives. Stacks of videotapes littered his bedroom. His
interest in movies was a passion that he had developed as a lonely child
raised for a few years in Japan, with few school friends, hiding away at the
local movie theater on weekends or locking himself in his room and
watching as many as eight movies a day. His favorite genre was wildlife
documentaries, and he also loved the Academy Award–winning film Ben-
Hur. He would also take apart radios, televisions, and other electronic
devices to better understand how they worked.
“He digs into one issue for hours and hours, days and days, years and
years,” former aide Hwang Young-key, a banker who advised Lee on
finance and translated texts into English for him during his tenure, told me
in his office over tea.
Lee Uh-ryeong, a professor at Ehwa Womans University, called him
Homo pictor, or “man the artist.” Uh-ryeong, who knew Lee personally,
described him as an abstract thinker and a rather awkward, brooding
fellow, but with broad insight into Korean culture and civilization (as
opposed to Homo faber, the maker of tools, the hands-on craftsman of the
workshop). In any event, he was a man brimming with ideas.
“Even in idle conversation, I could not help but marvel at Chairman Lee
Kun-hee’s sharp insight into 21st century civilization and his steadfast grasp
of Korean culture,” Uh-ryeong wrote in Lee’s book, Lee Kun-hee Essays.
“He did not strike me as particularly lively,” the Korean novelist Park
Gyeong-ri wrote about meeting Lee, on the other hand, in the same book of
essays. “He was neither nimble nor elegant. But he was unique because he
had an air of fineness, meticulousness and a sense of reticence. A creative
sensibility, that is what I felt.”
An erudite loner lacking the loquaciousness of so many modern CEOs,
he spoke little, and sometimes not even in full sentences. He seemed to
prefer spending time with his dogs to human contact. He had more than two
hundred pups in the magisterial family kennel and was credited with the
first pure-breeding of South Korea’s national dog, the Jindo.