BEIJING A few days after Roh Moo-hyun committed suicide, I went digging around in my son's toy chest to find the small plush doll of the former South Korean president I'd bought shortly after he was inaugurated.

It was one of many souvenirs for sale at the time - T-shirts, mugs, clocks, figurines that dangled from mobile telephones. The one I bought had a suction cup for hanging it from the inside of a car window.

My son, three at the time, was delighted to have his first male doll. Every time he heard television newscasters refer to the president, he thought they were talking about his toy.

But years passed, and I found the doll stuffed next to a broken Harry Potter action figure. It brought home the tragedy of what had happened in South Korea. The 62-year-old Roh jumped off a cliff last Saturday, facing imprisonment on corruption charges, disgraced and reviled. What is even more unimaginable is how wildly popular Roh once was among younger South Koreans.

The first time I met Roh, he was campaigning at a sports stadium in Incheon. It was April 2002, and Roh was a dark horse in South Korea's first presidential primaries. He was sufficiently unimportant that he gave me more than one hour for the interview, which I believe was the first in the US media. We sat on folding chairs in a back room fragrant with sweat, alone except for a Korean colleague who was interpreting. Roh didn't speak a word of English, somewhat unusual for a South Korean professional.

But then, Roh broke the mould in many ways.

He came from a poor rural family. Although he hadn't gone to college or law school, he was able to pass the bar exam through exceptional intelligence and industry. In law practice in the 1980s, when South Korea was still ruled by a military dictatorship, he'd represented tortured students and protesters who had staged an attack on the US Information Service offices in Pusan.

He had a reputation for being anti-American, but in our interview, he waxed on about America and his admiration for Abraham Lincoln, about whom he'd written a book. He quoted liberally from Lincoln. He told me that in order to govern “the main principle you have to respect is never to lie.”

”I am envious of American democracy. I have a very high opinion of the values on which America was founded,” he said.

I was charmed. The night of Dec 19, 2002, when he won presidential election, I wrote this for the next day's Los Angeles Times “In a country where elites zealously guard their power, the man who won South Korea's presidential election is a novelty. A maverick who likes to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln, Roh Moo Hyun beat tremendous odds.”

Although South Korea had held free elections since 1987, there was something more democratic about this one. It was the first time the country had held US-style primaries instead of having party politicos choose candidates in the back rooms. Roh also had found a way around the traditionally conservative South Korean media, using the Internet to take his message directly to netizens.

Headlines around the world described Roh as the first Internet head of state. He had his own online fan club, “Nosamo,” Korean for “I love Roh,” with 80,000 members, which was remarkable at the time - keeping in mind this was in 2003, before Facebook and its six-million-plus fan club for Barack Obama.

”You wouldn't think you'd have young people gushing over a politician, but they were crazy about him,” Hun Un-na, a pro-Roh assemblywoman said.

After his inauguration in January 2003, crowds started flocking to his home village to pay tribute - and to study the geomancy of the place. Many superstitious South Koreans thought it might be the lie of the land and of the ancestors' tombs that allowed a penniless boy to become president. It was there that I bought my son the doll.

Only a year later, however, Roh's conservative opponents impeached him on charges that he violated election laws. He was reinstated by a court, which found the infraction minor. Although he survived, the public became increasingly disenchanted with Roh's political ineptness and his leanings toward accommodation with North Korea. In the 2007 election, conservatives came into power under the current president, Lee Myung-bak.

Soon, the prosecutors were after Roh. While he was in office, his family had accepted $6 million from a businessman. Relentless, numbing headlines of “Scandal!” and “Corruption!” make it hard to for an outsider to conclude whether or not the money was a bribe.

What is certain is that Roh follows in a sad tradition of South Korean presidents who've either self-destructed or were destroyed by the system. South Korea's last two military presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, served prison time for corruption and treason. Sons of the democratically elected presidents, Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, also went to jail. (Two other South Korean presidents were ousted in coups, and another assassinated.)

It is such a bad track record that you often hear Koreans say that if the peninsula is reunited, prosperous South Koreans will take charge of the economy; North Koreans, the politics. They're not entirely joking. Their xenophobic Communist neighbour has had only two leaders since its founding in 1945 - Kim Il Sung and his son, Kim Jong Il.

The tragedy is not just Korea's. In Beijing, where I am now based, I hear many young Chinese saying they fear democracy is too messy, too chaotic. Japan has had more than 25 prime ministers since the end of the war. It doesn't look much better in Taiwan, where former president Chen Shui-bian was detained on corruption charges one hour after he left office in May 2008.

Whether you liked Roh Moo-hyun or not, thought him a refreshing maverick or a dangerous demagogue, whether he was corrupt or the victim of a political vendetta, from wherever you look in the region his death appears to be a setback for democracy.—Dawn/LA Times-Washington Post News Service

Barbara Demick, currently Beijing bureau A mourner takes a picture of former South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun's

chief, was the LA Times' Seoul correspondent from 2001 to 2006.