I am not sure whether he [Obama] would produce results, but for sheer ability to put things the way he wants them, the way he feels would go down with the people, with Americans, he’s got a knack for it.
DO YOU BELIEVE this American journalist was shamelessly disloyal to listen silently (actually, more like guffawingly) as this foreign leader of a tiny country, without any of the burdens and responsibilities of a superpower, tore into one of our former presidents?
He utterly belittled him—an American leader who, after all, had only garnered a Nobel Peace Prize after leaving office. I mean, how many Singaporeans have won a Nobel? (Answer: zero) And so who is this LKY to be so disrespectful of the president of a country so allegedly important to Singapore and to world stability?
When LKY decides on something or someone—that such and such is unimportant, or over-rated, or not the real quality deal—you get the sense that appeals are a waste of your time and money. I tried to get former President Carter to assess the place of LKY in history, but as you noticed in the front of the book, the request was declined. I wish the former president had taken a broader view. It would be salutary for LKY to get a bit of his own medicine, as it is for all of us.
In the category of Things-He-Does-Not-Have-a-Huge-Amount-of-Respect-or-Need-for, please include near the top of the list the news media. It is believed, in the West at least, that an independent news media is essential to a political culture. Over the decades Lee has shown he believes no such thing. His government and the People’s Action Party put a lid on its own media, and when they felt the foreign press was becoming too feisty, they made it more difficult for the offending news outfit to operate in Singapore.
So, to be provocative, I ask him about Singapore’s own news media, often criticized in the West as supine to the government and thus intrinsically second-rate. (By the way, my own view is that, except for its obvious punch-pulling as regards the big shots at the Istana, The Straits Times, the country’s leading daily, is a first-rate newspaper). His response is unmistakable.
He sighs, for this is not his favorite topic, especially as I am a career Western journalist: “First, the Singapore people are not deprived of any news. All magazines are available, Internet is open. What we have not allowed is for the local media to go crusading. Report factually, express your opinion in the editorial page and in letters from readers in the Forum Page. We receive many letters from the public, mostly complaints, but also some compliments and suggestions. We reply to every one of them, those that are serious. We don’t own the newspapers, they are run as profitable businesses. But they are losing readers because of online news. We encourage them to report wrongdoings. That is one way for wrongdoings to surface when we miss them.”
Well, that is that. His mind is made up on this. So why do we even bother to listen to this guy? But that’s the fascinating issue—people do. You do. I certainly do. We all do. But why do many people want to know his views and generally listen carefully when he offers them, even though he is anything but the second coming of Thomas Jefferson on certain issues?
LKY has received honors from high-level institutions all over the world, has been often treated as a world-class senior statesman par excellence (when not being denounced as a new-age Torquemada by groups that focus almost non-contextually on issues such as human rights and capital punishment), and has climbed into—specially since stepping down as prime minister in 1990—the unofficial chair of Contemporary Asian Oracle. The well-respected American journal Foreign Policy even crowned him, as he turned 86, as the Asian Kissinger.
Why?
There are reasons for almost everything, as Lee would say. One is his reputation for saying pretty much what is on his mind, and you get the sense that this is one mind that is rarely blank. Another is that his intellectual independence (saying what he wants) derives in part from Singapore’s position in the region and the world. Since his country depends on almost everyone for something (Malaysia for water, Indonesia for produce, the West for firearms and security, et cetera), it is wholly dependent on no one in particular.
From the U.S., for example, Lee never asked for nor accepted a dollar in formal foreign aid grants. He is not interested in being viewed as a welfare dependent on Uncle Sam. That would undermine Singapore’s independence. So what praise he has for us is thus not purchased and is surely sincere; what criticisms he offers are (from his standpoint) reasoned, scientific. What’s more, many people listen to him as the true Sage of Singapore, someone with decades of experience who has hung in there through thick and thin like a true warrior.
And as Asia has surged in prominence, Lee’s voice has risen in parallel, as have those of some others in Singapore and elsewhere in the region. Who else are we to listen to from Asia? Only the Dalai Lama? Only China’s President Hu Jintao? Some Indian guru whose name no one can pronounce?
To be sure, Singapore’s high self-regard irritates its neighbors. But it is necessarily a non-threatening nation; it has never invaded anyone, and it never will, if only because it can’t. It is not a nuclear power and it’s hard to imagine it would ever want to be. It lurks over no one, though its defensive capabilities are no joke. This gives it a certain above-the-fray status, like some highly intellectualized and technocratic version of India back in the days when Nehru spoke with a voice that carried far beyond the Punjab.
Then there’s the issue of style. Soft authoritarian or not, Lee’s Cambridge diction, elite level of learning, emphasis on continued mid-career learning for himself and his elite, and focus on the big, if not philosophical, issues render his public voice distinctively instructional. Except perhaps for the very longest of his long speeches, he is always extremely interesting to listen to, and to read (his prose style is often blunt to the point of coming across as Basic Hemingway 101). His writer’s voice contains recognizable elements, in various ways, of India’s Nehru, the international media’s David Frost, some Chinese Machiavelli and Daddy Dearest. It is an accumulated voice like no other I know of.
We chat about the importance of speechifying.
I submit: “When I was in graduate school, I took a seminar at Princeton from Ted Sorensen, who was President Kennedy’s illustrious speechwriter, and he said to me this: Tom, you are a great talker and all of that, but talking is not writing.”
He nods: “Yeah, talking isn’t writing.”
“Ted Sorensen said something like, that’s really different, you’ve got to be more disciplined, more organized, very clear, except when you don’t want to be.”
“Because when you talk, you can repeat.”
“And you can use body language, the atmosphere of the moment.”
LKY: “When you write, you can’t. The moving eye does not go back. If it has to go back, that means you’ve written poorly.”
Me saying: “Now, if you are a good writer and a good communicator, which you are, that is a huge plus for a leader, but if you are not, it’s a huge handicap for a leader.”
“Well, yes, because, I mean, to be a leader, you must be able to communicate your feelings and move the other fellow. It’s not just ideas, you know.”
“And you don’t have to be a genius. You may be, but you don’t have to be. Ronald Reagan was not a genius.”
“But you must move the other fellow’s position.”
I say: “Yeah, and be clear. After Carter, that was Reagan’s great strength. He had three ideas: America is great, less government is better government, and the Soviet Union is the evil empire. End of story. That was it; that was the whole deal. But he would stay on it. He didn’t change his tune every three months. Who is the great communicator of our time now in politics?”
“Today? Maybe Obama, as a fluent speaker. I am not sure whether he would produce results, but for sheer ability to put things the way he wants them, the way he feels would go down with the people, with Americans, he’s got a knack for it.”
It’s hard to know how far that talent can carry Obama, though: “Sorensen said that too about Obama, and so, between his opinion and yours, that just about nails it for me. But, still, I have very unhappy doubts about Obama; I wonder whether he will have a second term. But leaving that aside, I remember before he was president, someone said: Obama? He is only good at giving speeches. And then Ted Sorensen weighed in and said, hey, wait a minute, that’s really important for a president, to be able to communicate, to indicate direction. Don’t belittle that talent.”
I am not sure whether he [Obama] would produce results, but for sheer ability to put things the way he wants them, the way he feels would go down with the people, with Americans, he’s got a knack for it.
Theodore C. Sorensen, whom I admired as a student and thereafter as a journalist, was totally devoted to John Kennedy, of course. JFK lucked out. Ted was all talent. And, like LKY, in fact, JFK as well as TS was a real writer (who in another life might have been a newspaper or newsmagazine editor), and a real thinker, sardonic and sometimes unpredictable. Kennedy, through Sorensen, it seemed to me, could often be seen searching for large, Hedgehog-like ideas; he had such a lively mind. LKY, it seems to me, is always searching for them, restlessly. But, for a number of reasons, he doesn’t want to make too big a deal of it.