President Barack Obama described Singapore's Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew as "one of the legendary figures of Asia in the 20th and 21st centuries".
MM Lee was praised even more effusively by the late Richard Nixon — with whom and whose successor Gerald Ford — he enjoyed a warm relationship.
In his autobiography, From Third World To First, he mentioned the tips Nixon gave him on how to greet Americans and later how Ford allowed him to use his private bathroom in the White House.
Nixon's toast to the Lees' romance
Nixon even mentioned how the Lees got married in this warm and utterly charming toast when Lee Kuan Yew with his wife visited America as Singapore's prime minister in April 1973.
The full speech is here.
Nixon began by paying tribute to Mrs Lee:
"We have welcomed many very distinguished guests in this room, and I would say that none is more deserving of our respect and of being honoured, as we honour him tonight, than the Prime Minister and, I may say, his wife."
"Singapore is the best run country in the world," he said, recalling the words of the then US Treasury Secretary John Connally. "And here is the man who runs it."
Nixon then recalled how the Lees got married. He said:
"Now, I had read something about their courtship. I knew that, like (US State) Secretary (William) Rogers and Mrs. Rogers, they had gone to school together, they had both graduated from law school in the same class, and so tonight, very early in the evening, when you saw me turning to Mrs. Lee, I said, 'Mrs. Lee, tell me, is it true that you were number one in the class at Cambridge Law School and your husband was number two?' And she said, 'Mr. President, do you think he would have married me if that were the case?'
"But I probed further, and I found that, as a matter of fact, Mrs. Lee, our distinguished guest, did receive a first at Cambridge Law School. Her husband did also, but like a very loyal wife, she said, 'He had a first with a star after his name, and that is something very special.'"
The Lees were much younger then. MM Lee was only 49 years old when Nixon recalled his romance in that delightful toast. He was just a year older than Obama now.
Nixon was 60. He had to step down as president a year later — in August 1974 — because of the Watergate scandal.
Nixon announced his resignation on August 9, Singapore's National Day.
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