Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew's memoir From Third World To First is worth reading not only because it's a history of modern Singapore told by its first prime minister – whose son now occupies that position – but also because it's quite revealing of him and his family.
Mr Lee recalls his public outburst against the US government when it failed to send a medical specialist he had requested to treat his wife in 1965 as well as episodes like this involving her:
One evening over dinner in Singapore in March 1992, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt asked me whether China could ever become democratic and observe human rights like the West. Choo, who sat next to Schmidt, laughed outright at the idea of 1.2 billion Chinese, 30 per cent of them illiterate, voting for a president.
But more about that later, for that's not why I picked up this highly absorbing book, published nine years ago.
I wanted Mr Lee's account of the Vietnam war when McNamara died on July 6. The former US defence secretary who served presidents Kennedy and Johnson and escalated the war did not get a hero's send-off. "Robert McNamara, Architect of a Futile War, Dies at 93," said the headline in the New York Times obituary.
The war, McNamara himself admitted in his memoirs in 1995, had been "wrong, terribly wrong".
More than 58,000 US soldiers died in the war along with three to four million Vietnamese and one-and-a-half million to two million Laotians and Cambodians.
But the war benefited Singapore. The tiny city state, which had just gained independence in 1965, became a modern industrial economy with ship and aircraft repairing facilities to support the war effort and multinationals setting up base for operations in Southeast Asia.
Mr Lee supported the war as a staunch anti-communist.
He draws only a thumbnail sketch of McNamara – "bright-eyed, eager and full of energy" – but writes at length about how he personally urged President Johnson and, later, President Nixon to continue the war.
He was fighting for a lost cause. The war brought down Johnson, Nixon came to an ignominious end with the Watergate scandal. McNamara was reviled even after he admitted he had been wrong. The New York Times said in an editorial:
His regret cannot be huge enough to balance the books for our dead soldiers. The ghosts of those unlived lives circle close around Mr. McNamara. Surely he must in every quiet and prosperous moment hear the ceaseless whispers of those poor boys in the infantry, dying in the tall grass, platoon by platoon, for no purpose.
They did not die in vain, in Mr Lee's opinion. He writes:
Although American intervention failed in Vietnam, it bought time for the rest of Southeast Asia. In 1965, when the US military moved massively into South Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and the Philippines faced internal threats from armed communist insurgents and the communist underground was still active in Singapore. Indonesia, in the throes of a failed communist coup, was waging konfrontasi, an undeclared war against Singapore. The Philippines was claiming Sabah in East Malaysia. Standards of living were low and economic growth slow. America's action enabled non-communist Southeast Asia to put their own houses in order. By 1975 (when the Vietnam war ended) they were in better shape to stand up to the communists. Had there been no US intervention, the will of these countries to resist them would have melted and Southeast Asia would have most likely gone communist. The prosperous emerging market economies of Asean ( Association of Southeast Asian Nations) were nurtured during the Vietnam War years.
Mr Lee recalls lighter moments, too, as he looks back and muses on the state of the world. Here's the full quote describing his wife laughing at dinner with the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt:
One evening over dinner in Singapore in March 1992, former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt asked me whether China could ever become democratic and observe human rights like the West. Choo, who sat next to Schmidt, laughed outright at the idea of 1.2 billion Chinese, 30 per cent of them illiterate, voting for a president. Schmidt noted this was her spontaneous reaction to the absurdity of it. I replied that China's history of over 4,000 years was one of dynastic rulers, interspersed with anarchy, foreign conquerors, warlords and dictators. The Chinese people had never experienced a government based on counting heads instead of chopping off heads. Any evolution towards representative government would be gradual. Nearly all Third World countries were former colonies that, after decades of colonial rule without either elections or democracy, received democratic constitutions fashioned after those of their former rulers. But the British, French, Belgian, Portuguese, Dutch and US democratic institutions had taken 200 years to evolve.
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