BORN AND RAISED on the island of Singapore, living here all his life except for schooling abroad and a lot of hard-driving globe-trotting, LKY has held the center of the island city-state’s public life for more than five decades. And he thinks even Singaporeans don’t really know him—much less outsiders? Amazing!
Perhaps this desire to reveal more of himself than ever before helps account for the relative alacrity with which he agreed to these interviews. His press secretary, Madam Yeong Yoon Ying (or YY, as she is fondly addressed sometimes) says she cannot recall Minister Mentor giving a U.S. journalist this much interview time.
No, there must be something else underneath the surface of LKY, this ethnic Chinese man whose Singapore patriotism (and thus his political career) was born amid the horrific wartime Japanese occupation, and whose unbroken line of serial governments have led this strategically located island state of almost five million into an unexpectedly prominent destiny.
Who does he think he is?
He understands that he sometimes seems unapproachable, distant, even menacing.
I ask light-heartedly: “Will you greatly dispute me if I do not characterize you thusly, ‘fun-loving’ and ‘light-hearted’?”
He shakes that off and answers un-defensively: “I would not call myself ‘fun-loving’ or ‘light-hearted’. But I am not serious all the time. Everyone needs to have a good laugh now and then, to see the funny side of things, and to laugh at himself.”
But I doubt many Singaporeans ever see his interior funny side. Maybe that’s what he means when he says his people only know the exterior Lee.
This is not surprising. People often label Singapore the ‘Nanny State’. It wakes you up in the morning, watches out for you during the day, and tucks you into bed at night. But it’s necessarily a suffocating love, with little room for bubbly mirth.
But the ‘Nanny State’ appellation seems too un-masculine. Singapore puts a Darwinian emphasis on discipline and hard work. And looking over all is LKY, the ultimate godfather. To me, at least, the country has always seemed more like a ‘Daddy State’. This reflection reminds me of an old American TV show—broadcasted decades ago—called “Father Knows Best”.
It was a huge hit. The point of the storylines was that, yes, father did know best, even if the rest of the family sometimes did make fun of him behind his back. Many Americans watched admiringly, almost religiously. This was before America’s feminists had made major inroads into U.S. culture. This was before the divorce rate soared, before gay marriage was a national political issue, and long before AIDS.
My own father, long deceased, had perhaps at least one quality in common with LKY: he was certain that this particular father did know best all the time. I am not entirely certain when I first knew of my ability to get along well with strong authoritarian figures who were always so sure of themselves. But it probably originated with the problem of getting along with my father. He was (shall we say?) not easy to get along with.
He was much taller than LKY, all German (as in Prussian, Poland-bound invasion type-A). He was poorly educated, but hard-working and decent, yet addicted to painkillers from wartime injury in the U.S. Marines, and as a teenager had been beaten sometimes on the back with an ice pick—by his father, who had (shall we say?) temper-control issues.
A lengthy conversation with my father was a rarity, and a negotiation. He also had a temper. He never hit me, though there was a time when I left the top off his after-shave lotion overnight that I thought I was done for.
My best friend in college was a bit like my father, too—mostly inaccessible, almost deliberately inept with small talk—but, like LKY, brilliant, in a quietly intimidating way. And then there were those overbearing father-knows-best bosses at New York magazine, Time magazine and a few other places where I worked but won’t mention—demanding, unforgiving, difficult, though often (annoyingly) brilliant.
In truth, I was mostly comfortable with them.
I am always comfortable with LKY.
From him, you see, I don’t expect fresh pastries, ballet music, a smell of saffron or an impromptu bout of standup comedy. To be fair, Minister Mentor Lee—at least in other interviews with him for my syndicated column prior to the far lengthier ones for this book—was always easier to talk to than my dad and always offered some of the very best interviews a journalist can have.
I find talking to him almost relaxing. Honest.
And, looking at this otherwise stalwart statesman, apparently having a bad health day, I now see he is dialing down into a slightly better mood. The heat compresses—one after another after another—seem to be soothing, and this interviewer from the West Coast of the U.S. hasn’t irritated him with the usual nothing-is-new Western style questions about human rights, chewing gum and caning.
In fact, what Lee doesn’t know (or maybe he does) is those questions seem less compelling to me precisely because they have been asked of him and his elite team over and over and over again.
The fact of the matter is that the country’s prosperity and civility cannot be denied. What must be faced up to is this: Singapore is a huge success and an obvious gem (with imperfections, of course). We in the West may quarrel with the way it was achieved, but the achievement somehow seems to dwarf the critique. Why tear down a monument to hard work and smart decision-making? Singapore isn’t about to invade neighboring states and impose its system on the unwilling. My goal in this book of conversations isn’t to whittle Singapore down to size, for whatever sadistic motive, but to size up the mentality and philosophy of modern Singapore’s founder and see what can be learned.
Lee shifts his weight in his chair. He awaits.
Here we go: “I wanted to ask you about something that you’ve written about, which is your temperament, the anger issue that you attributed to your father who had such a temper.” Rather than insult him by asking point-blank if he’s a hothead, the question becomes the extent to which his alleged hot-headedness is inherited.
It is in this stormy context that Lee mentions his father in the first volume of his sweeping autobiography, The Singapore Story. I don’t ask him to go too deep into this. Amateur psychoanalysis won’t get us very far.
So we approach the temper issue from the perspective of policy pursuits rather than psychic permutations: “My theory is that your temper is primarily a tool of governance, leadership. Machiavelli—in your writings you do explicitly refer to Niccolò Machiavelli—said it was always best for the leader to be loved and feared, but if you can achieve but one, it is better to be feared than loved. So is temper a character defect or a tool of government?”
This seems the classy way of approaching it. After all, Hitler and Stalin had serious anger issues (then again, so did Gandhi and, well, Beethoven, not to mention Van Gogh and Von Karajan ... and certainly Bill Clinton).
LKY seems to shift his weight a little. “If you can switch it on and off, yes, it can be a tool of government, but people with irrepressible tempers cannot switch it on and off. Now, because my father had a nasty temper, I decided that tempers are bad because it created unhappiness for my mother and for the family. So, I have never, I never try to lose my temper. Maybe I have occasionally, but I try to control it.”
“You use it for effect, though, if you have to?” Frankly, this is one of the very few, if not only, times during the hours of interviewing that LKY, it seems to me, is being less than fully honest with himself.
“Seldom. If I am really angry, my body language will show that I am most dissatisfied.”
“Can we say that you are almost like a young person growing up in an alcoholic family? They tend not to drink. You are saying it was a poisoned potion as far as you are concerned?”
It’s not that I am thinking Lee is a liar. Being completely self-candid is hard for anyone. For years my regularly scheduled drinking of significant quantities of alcohol created problems, but it never occurred to me that what I was looking at was a truly serious drinking problem. But it occurred to my wife.
Lee pauses, then: “Yes, of course, and I have never struck my children which my father did. He took me by the ears and put me over the well because I’d rummaged his very precious Vaseline [brilliantine] called 4711, expensive in those days. I’ve never forgotten that. I read in the magazine, American Scientific, when something happens to you and it is traumatic, you’ll never forget it.”
Of course.
“I’ve never forgotten because I was only about four, five years old. So, I decided my father was a foolish man who never controlled himself.”
And then me quickly inserting, noticing that all during this interview not a creature stirred outside in the corridor or around the interview table: “And then an uncontrolled temper is messy, right?”
“He made the whole family unhappy. He made my mother unhappy, and because of rows, all the children became unhappy. Confucianism requires me to support him [my father] in his old age, which I did.”
The terms Confucianism and Asian values will crop up a lot in discussions with—and about—Lee. Roughly speaking, they mean a philosophy and ethics that lean toward traditional family-based and community-oriented values over modern technocratic and individual-centric ones. The achievement of Singapore has been to blend the two worlds together, though not without real pain. But his critics liken him to a Confucian emperor more than a democratically elected political figure. The knock on its founder is that he hides behind the old values (like his mother’s skirt) whenever critics raise moral or ethical issues based on more individualistic, Western standards. What they may not understand is that no matter how Westernized Lee Kuan Yew became at Cambridge, his DNA is millennia-deep Chinese.
It seems unnecessary to push him further on the personal temper point. Everyone in the world knows he has one, whether controlled or otherwise. If he doesn’t know this, then what’s the point at this point? Every dry martini I take contains inherent unforeseen consequences. I still take one occasionally, but that’s because even at my age, part of me is still a baby. All men are. Age is irrelevant. We guys tend to stay submerged in denial rather than surface and face certain deeply personal realities.
But, fool that I am, I push him one more time.
He nods, accepting that the book needs to be more personal if it is to add appreciably to what is known: “My faults are impatience in getting things done, pressing my associates and aides in putting in their best to get the job done, or fairly quickly replacing them when they are not making the effort well.”
During the exchange, his two aides, seated at the other end of the table, say nothing and avert my eyes, despite my repeated staring. I am reasonably sure they are alive.
Lee adds: “I tend to blow up when my secretaries are dilatory and I am under pressure.”
I wonder if there is anything else.
“This is not an exhaustive list. I cannot see myself.”
There is a silence.
He adds: “My faults are many and numerous. You will have to ask my opponents and enemies, and there are many in Singapore.”