The focus on Kim's foibles and on his reputed unpredictability always hampered understanding of the man and of the real nature of the regime. From beginning to end during 17 years of rule, he was capable of minutely sliced and, it must be stressed, rational calculations about how to stay in power and how to keep the world at bay.

The word rational will irk many, who find the images of craziness easier to swallow, given the immense suffering the Kim regime has visited on its people. Normally, most of us would like to believe that reason serves good ends and nudges people and nations toward relatively better outcomes. But that is a matter of our delusion, and not Kim's.

To understand another person, it is usually helpful to try to put oneself in his or her place, and with countries I can think of few examples where this exercise is more useful than on the Korean Peninsula. Kim Jong Il inherited power on his father's death in 1994, an era when the bloom had come suddenly off of the rose for North Korea.

It is hard to imagine this today, given the astonishing prosperity of South Korea, but during much of his father's rule, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea was more prosperous than its neighbor to the south. Even during the early years of relative decline, the economy remained fairly robust, thanks to the balancing act that Kim Il Sung, the regime's founding father, played with his two big, mutually suspicious allies, China and the Soviet Union. It was on this foundation of success that the regime built much of its legitimacy.

By the time Kim Jong Il took power in 1994, though, the Soviet Union, along with its financial subsidies and spare industrial parts, was but a memory. The younger Kim was underestimated right from the start, but he keenly understood how weak his hand was and quickly learned how to play it to maximum advantage.

The shtick of apparent madness flowed from his country's fundamental weakness as he, like a master poker player, resolved to bluff and bluff big. Kim adopted a game of brinkmanship with the South, threatening repeatedly to turn Seoul into a "sea of flames." And while this may have sharply raised the threat of war, for the North, it steadily won concessions: fuel oil deliveries, food aid, nuclear reactor construction, hard cash-earning tourist enclaves and investment zones.

As a bureau chief for the New York Times in northeast Asia in the 1990s and 2000s, reporting from Japan, the Koreas, and later China, I had a front row seat for much of this. Up close, I covered the Nobel laureate and South Korean President Kim Dae Jung's moneybags approach to the North, which he labeled Sunshine Diplomacy. It won the South's Kim a summit meeting with his counterpart, which the "crazy" Kim hosted and managed to totally dominate. At the level of appearances, which was all-important for the internal propaganda purposes of a "hermit regime," he reduced Kim Dae Jung to a mere supplicant.