Lee Kuan Yew’s squabbling children are tarnishing his legacy
Tom Plate says Singapore’s credibility on the global stage, which its founding leader helped to build up, is being hurt by the public washing of his family’s dirty laundry
My fondness for Singapore was never to wane during subsequent trips and interviews, not only with Lee but also with other huge talents such as diplomat Tommy Koh, foreign minister George Yeo, global thinker Kishore Mahbubani, former prime minister Goh Chok Tong, newspaper editor Cheong Yip Seng and others. I feel gratitude for their time and mentoring even today.
Though sometimes wrong, on the big things Lee Yuan Yew had an uncanny knack for being right
Many years later, I related this to Theodore Sorensen, the iconic policy adviser and speech-writer for John F. Kennedy, months before he left us at the age of 82. Ever sharp until the end, Ted, a mentor in graduate school, tried playfully to curb my enthusiasm. The occasion was a 2010 party at Singapore’s UN mission in New York for my book Conversations with Lee Kuan Yew. Chuckling, Sorensen related that after his first visit to Singapore, Lee asked for an assessment. “Minister Mentor,” Ted reportedly said (and knowing the sharpness of his needle, I m sure he did say this), “I now feel my life is complete. I have been to Utopia.”
To be sure, Lee never remotely claimed to have created utopia in the actual, but in ambitious thrust he tried, as did the many hard-working Singaporeans he carried with him to transform a third-world backwater into a first-world city state. Yet about this we would joke – relaxed, he was very witty – with my once suggesting that if Singapore were utopia, then its citizens had to be Martians, not human beings. This remark somehow got to him, but then he smilingly said: “We’re not Martians!”
Judging from the sordid Lee family rift that has now just surfaced, it looks as if the Singapore elite is more Earthbound than suspected. From the prime minister – Lee’s son, in office since 2004 – to his thoughtful daughter, a brilliant neurologist, this near-utopia today looks creepy-swampy with back-stabbing and name-calling. On the surface, the unseemly divisiveness focuses mainly on the late founder’s last will, and his wish for the modest home of his last 70 years to be demolished, not glorified into some Chinese Mount Rushmore (Singapore itself being the monument). I won’t venture to sort out all the details, which have been ably reported by this newspaper. But I believe this was in fact his last wish, and feel as does a former colleague and current resident of Hong Kong who is also a devoted Singapore watcher: “I’m shocked. I feel sorry for LKY.”