Transcription
What advice would you give you to an incoming president about what's the opportunity for America right now? I think first amongst among your allies, uh, this triumphalism, this hubris should be tempered down. I mean, you are ahead of them. I mean, not just in military technology, but in the internet, in IT, you're 10, 15 years ahead of, 10 years ahead of Europe, 15 years ahead of Japan, as you know. Whilst they were tinkering away with the old economy, you developed a new one. Right. Uh, but it's unwise to believe that they are congenitally incapable of catching up. I think they will catch up, if not 10, 15, if not 15, 20 years from now, and maybe the catching up may be faster. So you've got to try and anticipate that moment when they are more cohesive, when the euro is not going down from 13 to, uh, 85, 84, 83 cents and intervention pushed up to 86 cents. Uh, the scales will tip. Uh, the dollar is overbought. People start selling dollars and buying euros and things change. It is important to let them believe, not just by statements, but in actual practice, that they do count as a very strong and reliable ally of America, not as an addition.
So the United States has to make sure with respect to its European allies, uh, that it wants to be a partner. It has to look at China and the Russian Federation and say, we don't have to be adversaries. Uh, we have to coexist. Yeah. In an engaged relationship because the world is smaller and smaller and smaller because of technology and communications and satellites and all of that. Yes. What else should we do? Uh, in trade, in technology, and through the internet, and through your investments there, you can create a multiple set of bonds, of links that will not only closely tie up the two economies so that they are dependent on each other, but also people there, CEOs with your CEOs, their engineers with your engineers, their accountants with yours, lawyers and so on, so that there is a broadband appreciation of each other. And for the next 20, 30 years, they'll be doing much of the learning. There's precious little they can teach you about modern management, but beyond that, I think you may begin to learn to do things from them.
Like what? Like a certain cohesiveness of a society. I mean, they are very much, uh, they used to be, they call themselves Marxist-Leninist, but in fact, they've always remained Confucianist. Yes. Uh, they will not allow, uh, their society to become too disparate. The distance between the successful and the less successful. This is one of their greatest ambitions or objectives is not to allow there to be too great a distance between the most successful and the least successful. That's right. Because it rips at the social fabric. Because it goes against the philosophy of life. It's a Confucianist philosophy that the wealthy and the, the powerful owe a duty to the downtrodden. Do you believe that? Yes, I do. Because of a Confucianist philosophy or? So you don't find beggars, you don't find, uh, uh, half-starving people sleeping on doorways or in under the bridges or whatever. It, it offends the whole society. So we pay a little bit more, uh, rehabilitate them, put them in proper homes, feed them, teach them a job. We just can't leave them as derelicts in society. It's, it's offensive. Offensive to, to the rest of society. And the judgment of history and the judgment of? No, our judgment of ourselves as a self-respecting people. Yes.
Back to the United States. What should we as a nation, in partnership with Asian countries, with Europe? What is the obligation to the third world and less developed countries? Because you are on record now as being careful about retiring third world debt. Uh, I was asked by Barbara Crosset of the New York Times whether debt relief will solve third world problems. I said, no. But it's, you're not on saying on face, it's a bad idea. No, I'm not saying that it's a bad idea, but I'm saying it's not going to solve the problem. There may be cases where your, a country is destitute because of drought, famine, uh, whatever, and it can't get restarted. So maybe you'll help, help it to, uh, get some credit by wiping out previous debt. Wiping off debt without the structures and the policy to get it off the ground means it will not be able to get another loan. I'm not going to lend money to a country that says 10 years after borrowing the money and not paying interest, is please write it off because that's the way you help third world countries.
Next time they come to your bank, you say no. Next time, my bank will close its door. Here's what I hear you saying, that that the idea, if anybody thinks that canceling debt or retiring debt is a panacea for getting your house in order, they're wrong. And if you look at what happened to Indonesia, it was a mistake that could have been avoided. Yes, of course. I'm not saying that they should have written off the $80 billion worth of debt by the private sector in Indonesia. They could have held it in moratorium and allowed the economy to continue. But without US support, without IMF support, and the solution that they imposed to change the nature of the playing field, to change the system of government so that the ruler, President Suharto then, will no longer give contracts to his children or to his friends, in the midst of a financial crisis that challenged him. He was offended. He went out of his way to give a few contracts to his children, and that broke market confidence. And why did you choose the models you did? Did you have some experience with people? Did you look somewhere? What made you know? Did you know this was bad? Look what's happened to all these countries and how bad they're doing. This is now 1965.
Yeah. Did you have an internal belief in markets that somehow you had been convinced that markets was the way to go and that competition would produce an economy that would be competitive? It wasn't that simple. By 1965, I've traveled through the whole of Africa, 17 countries. I went through in 1964 on a special mission. I've traveled widely in Asia and in Europe and in the region. I've been to Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and I've seen what didn't work. First, leaders became soft. Right. They promised the world, follow me. In fact, in Ghana, there was a statue of Nkrumah. Right. And he called it Black Star. Black Star Square. And there was a black star. And there was his statue. And there's a plinth which says, "Seek ye the kingdom of politics and all will be unto you." I thought, "God, that's blasphemy." But never mind. Yeah. That was the rumor. And it was an awful mess because you could see the thing wasn't working. It had all the symbols, black star, marching troops. We had to feed 2 million people. How agriculture was negligible, commerce was coming to an end, industry was in its infancy. So I had been to see Hong Kong, the nearest to us, but Hong Kong had the British government, which ensured military defense, security, stability, and British capital. Now, I had none of those. I saw Taiwan. They had an American alliance. So somehow I had to get this thing going. So we tried many things. Brought garment manufacturers from Hong Kong and Taiwan, textile mills, started our own glass factory with our own cash. When we didn't have the, the silica to make good bottles, we sold it off later. Trial and error. And finally, I had spent one term in Harvard. Right. It was in the 60s, was it? In the fall of '68. Right. And as luck would have it, that was also the height of the Cultural Revolution in China. And I had earlier met a UNDP expert who had come to help us, and he came up to see me one day. He said, "Why are you looking so worried?" I said, "I'm in a spot." He says, "No, you are in a spot, but imagine how much more difficult a spot you'd be if you had 100 million Japanese as your neighbors instead of Indonesians." That set me thinking. Yeah. Think what you can do with them, or what they will do to you. Provide a market. No, they'll take you over. Ah. So he said, "Look at Israel. It's got 100 million Arabs that refuse to trade with them. They leapfrog flowers, fruit in winter to Europe, and many other things, and manufacture stuff, but starting with very simple agriculture." So in my term in Harvard, I met many people, economists, people like Samuelson, who taught me why Americans made textiles, and although it's low tech, the economist. Uh, I also met many businessmen, and I decided, no, we will leapfrog a different way. We'll get these big American multinationals to manufacture in Singapore and re-export to America and the world. And as luck would have it, the Cultural Revolution made them bypass Taiwan, Hong Kong. They came to Singapore. Texas Instruments, Hewlett-Packard, National Semiconductors, you name it, they all came. Seagate, and we became the biggest manufacturer of disk drives in 20 years. We were the center for disk drives and computer parts and computer peripherals. We never looked back.
Then, as a corollary to that, the other side of the coin, I came up with the idea says, look, people are going to come here and explore the region, and it's a dangerous region. I mean, pestilence, malaria, typhoid. Here in Singapore, we'll create a first-world oasis out of this island. It was a third-world island, but we'll create a first-world condition. From third world to first. Yeah. So that they will base their, they'll break camp here and then venture out, and when they're sick, they'll come back, and their precious equipment will be left here. So we had first-world standards of infrastructure, roads, airports, seaports, communications, health, schooling, personal and public security. Later on, we added concerts, theaters, etc. But the basic was first world. That was easy, the hardware. The difficult part was getting the population as being behaving like a third world to start behaving like the first world. And that's what I want to know. How did you do that? Well, people used to make fun of us because the foreign correspondents came and watched us, uh, start these campaigns on television, and ministers saying, "Stop spitting, stop littering." We had them by the month, you know. Uh, let's do it differently. You can't do silly things like you did before because you've got, you want to be host to first-world guests. So you can't be peeing all over the place as you did in the old squatter villages. But there were a few who were still troublesome. So they will pee into the lift just to be a nuisance to their neighbors. So we installed in the lift special sensitive instruments that will stop the lift the moment you do that, and you apprehend them. But it's funny, but it's real. It is, but it worked. But it's real. Then they were smart. They opened the lift door and peed from the outside in, and you caught nothing. You see how wicked they are. So we installed a camera that will catch them from the outside. Yes. Into. And so it went on, but it improved. I'm not saying we are there, but if you want tourism, you've got to have clean public toilets. Right. And we didn't have that. So we had to run a campaign says, "Flush it, you stupid man. You owe it to the next chap, or you may be the next chap." Took it. Took some doing. We're not there yet, but we are getting there. We still have people with mobile phones at concerts that go "cring" and make to stop that. Catch all of them by the scrap of that neck and throw them out for the rest.
Now, you also have one of the highest rates of capital punishment. Yes. That's for drugs. Yeah. And we, because you think drugs deserve to be treated with the maximum punishment. If we could kill them a hundred times, we would, because you destroy whole families. It's, it's terrifying to see because you are, you are then drug-dependent. You steal, you cheat, you rob your own parents. I mean, it's, it's soul-destroying. And they come in knowing that death if they are found with these goods on them, but the rewards are so great. You don't, and they try very, very unusual people from Africa, big mammies come to sell clothes, and in between the clothes, uh, kilos of heroin. And if you say, if you bring heroin into Singapore, you hang. You hang. You hang. Anything beyond 10 grams, you hang. Below 10 grams, maybe, you are convicted of bringing in more than 10 grams of heroin, you hang. You hang. That's right. After a jury trial? Yes. No, no jury. Judge. Judge. Judge listens to the evidence presented. Yes, of course. And if he says you're guilty, you hang. You hang. And they still come. Unbelievable. Do you believe capital punishment is a deterrence or not? Uh, without capital punishment, our transshipment rate as a drug center would quadruple or quintuple. Because you're right on the passageway. Yes. And our internal consumption would go up by a multiple of 10.
Do you care when you look at the achievements that they say, "Boy, Lee Kuan Yew has created a miracle in Singapore, but he is an authoritarian. He doesn't care about democracy. He cares little about a free press. Doesn't care, uh, believes almost that he knows what's right for Singapore. He knows what's right for the people, and that he is going to see it the way he believes it ought to be, come hell or high water." Let's put it in a, kinder way. More objective. No, no, no, not kinder. Just more objective. I have to govern now 4 million people. 3 million are Singaporeans. 1 million are foreigners who get jobs in Singapore. And of that, 1,100,000 are professionals. Why do they come there? Because it's a thriving economy that gives them jobs, and their families are happy and safe. No drugs, no muggings, no rapings. They can walk the streets 3:00 in the morning. You're okay. Now, how was it achieved? By the male fist? You won't see any policemen there. You won't see soldiers aligning the streets. Every four years to five years, I have to renew, I had to renew my mandate as a free election, and there are about five, six, seven different parties that will spring to life one year before the elections and try their luck. And in the last few elections, they devised a new strategy. They knew that the people wanted a PAP government, but wanted an opposition. So they say, "Right, on nomination day, we will contest less than half." So the PAP has already formed the government, and it worked, and they won four seats. But what was the concession they made? That the people wanted a PAP government. Why should I be authoritarian when I had the people with me? That's what the people wanted. They wanted a high quality of life, low crime rate, good future for the education of the children and jobs, better homes, better hospitals, and a higher quality of life culturally. So, art galleries, concert halls, symphony orchestra.
How about a free press that's free to criticize a government as much as it wants to? Provided I have the right of reply. The right of reply. Yes. I don't. You have the right to reply to do anything. You have access to. They don't give me the right of reply. With the local press, yes, I have the right of reply. Right. Exactly. But with a foreign press that sells in Singapore, they used to deny me that. What's your conflict with the Wall Street Journal? Well, the Wall Street Journal started off. This is a great newspaper. Yeah, it is. But it didn't have a great reporter. And the reporter wrote the story in 1988 or '89 that we were, as a government, unloading dud companies to our people. And a government that prides itself on its integrity was being accused of unloading in an IPO, utterly untrue. So we said, "Please print this reply." They refused. And you said? And I said, "In that case, we will restrict your circulation." Yes, you did. I mean, it's not funny to people. Journal, they think this is. See, freedom of. Could not be angry at you. Surely. So we said to them, well, you have done this to create controversy, then you will sell more papers to Singaporeans. So you'll sell more advertisements. Now, if you will remove your advertisement from your newspapers, we will not restrict you. What did they say? No. You're trying to run our papers. What did they say? No. No. Our papers and the advertisements go together. So we said, then we restrict you to 500 copies. Nobody is denied because with a photo. 500 copies. I mean. But with a fax machine, it becomes 5,000, 50,000. But with. But that's not the spirit of a free press. Oh, no. That's not the spirit of a fair, open press that allows a counterargument, a counterview to be placed. So, in the end, they agreed. They're going to print what you say. I mean, they're going to cover what the then prime minister said. They don't. They don't. They don't. All right. They always put a spin on it. Yeah. You don't. Do you believe in a free press? Do you believe in the idea of a free press? I believe in truth. Truth. That's different, isn't it? And I don't believe that the press should be crusading and putting a spin on things. I think they should print the story and editorialized or pontificate separately and not skew it with the headlines and the sub-headlines and putting it in the inside pages.
Do you believe if someone said Singapore? Yes. This modern state, city-state that pretty much escaped most of the Asian economic crisis that plagued Japan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia. You were relatively compared to them immune. Yes. Not immune, but our damage was collateral. We had lent them money, and we had lost money. Yeah. And when money was pulled out of the region, they pulled it out of Singapore, too. You seem to believe not in the individual, but in the state. You seem to be much more of a statist than someone who's such a fan of free markets. There's a profound difference in the core philosophy between the American and the Chinese, and it's a reflection of your history. You came over in the Mayflower, you were seeking religious freedom, so much so that you refused to allow it to be taught in the schools. You believed in the individual as the creator of all things, and you captured the wild west. I mean, on horseback, new town, main street, you be mayor, I'm sheriff, you're saloon keeper, we build a gold rush town or cattle or whatever it is. You have been immensely fortunate and successful. Two world wars left Europe in a shambles, and you emerged as the undamaged technological and industrial power. China has a completely different and a checkered history. 4,000 to 5,000 years of ups and downs, long periods when there was no government, anarchy, warlords. I once had a Chinese master when I was in Beijing, working my game shoulder, and we were talking, and I said, "During the war, Japanese time, what currency did you use?" I said, "You said so." Said, "Japanese currency if it's in Japanese-controlled areas, or other currencies in other areas." So I said, "How many currencies are there?" "Two, three." Says, "14 or 15, depending on which warlord's area you're in." So why have they survived in spite of anarchy, disaster, floods, famines? Because there was a social network independent of government that sustained them. The immediate family, the extended family, the clan. You owed them an obligation. You cannot turn them away. That's how they survived. I would be loath to believe that in Singapore, you will never have anarchy, that there will always be government that will provide for social security. That has been your experience. I'm not sure that will be a Singapore experience. I think we are safer if we keep those family bonds, those traditional life raft systems, not dependent on the state, which places the emphasis on family, extended family, and then the government, and not the individual at the expense of the family and the state, which is the American system. So you have Bill Gates or John Chambers of Cisco, or you look up Forbes or Fortune or whatever, and 50 of the best and the brightest and the wealthiest. That's your experience. That's not China's experience. That's not our experience. Yes, we also now want to try and get Bill, our little Bill Gates going, but in the context of keeping our society solid so that we will survive as a people. You have never been occupied. You have only had one civil war. Quite a traumatic experience. So you will never understand what it is. I've been occupied by the Japanese three and a half years. It didn't represent me. There was no human rights. The first thing I saw two days after they came in, when I went out to sort of buy some food, were two human heads on a pole outside the tallest building in Singapore, in Chinese characters, to say, "If you are not well-behaved, you will end up here." I thought to myself, "If only I had a camera." Here was this modern 12-story building, highest in Singapore then, and this medieval scene. So the Japanese never talk of human rights because they understand the brutality, the cruelties that they inflicted on fellow Asians whom they came to so-called liberate. These are realities. And why did they succeed? Not because of individual Japanese heroism, but because as a group, they were a powerful force. And they still are. You, in fact, believe that it is not impossible that they may once again be a powerful military force with ambitions that could lead them to war. Uh, I wouldn't say exactly with ambitions, but I'm quite convinced that they can become a very powerful military force, and if cornered again, the way they were in 1941 with an oil embargo and no exports, rather than curl up and die, they'll fight. It's in the nature of the culture of a people. They are not people who are going to lie down, curl up, face the war. Would you fear the Japanese more than the Chinese? Uh, with the Americans around, I fear neither. Why? Because I think there's a balance. The United States will, the United States together with Japan will be able to balance China. And that's the way you see the future. I think so. The strategic balance between the United States and Japan on one hand, and China on the other. Absolutely. I, I don't think the Japanese would be wise to go it alone, and they know it. I don't think the United States alone can take China and Japan. So if Japan and China, which which is culturally unlikely ever to happen, if they got together, that's coupled for the rest of Asia. Yeah. But here's the point. We all thought in the 60s and 70s and beginning of the 80s that Japan had a lock on the economic future. They were 75% of the Asian economy. 75%. And look what happened. All of a sudden, we're not following their economic model. All of a sudden, we're looking and saying, "Why did they fail?" No. No. Just, just pause for a moment. Okay. You are in Southeast Asia, primarily in the extractive industries. You take Indonesia. You're there extracting gold, copper, oil, gas, other things. They are there manufacturing tires, cars, textiles, TV sets, audio sets, many, many manufactured goods. And they're going to come back. They're going to come back when there's a semblance of order and the work can resume and productivity can be up again. And I'm absolutely certain they'll come back before the Chinese are able to move in. It is in their national interest. Do you have more respect for their toughness than you do for the Chinese? I'm not sure respect is the right word. Okay, we'll choose a word. I accept that as a fact of life. They're tougher than anybody in the, on the, any of your neighbors. They're the toughest. Yes. Is that because of your personal experience of occupation or is it something else? No. I've confirmed it with 40 years of twoing and throwing with the Japanese. In personal physical toughness, the Koreans can beat the Japanese, but not in group solidarity. As a group, neither the Koreans nor the Chinese nor the Vietnamese. They're all East Asians. They're all Confucianist. They can't beat the Japanese. They are like Lego bricks, you know? They fit into each other. It's beautiful. Yeah, and impressive. What do you make of the unification possibilities of the Koreans? Uh, it's going to be a climate of dread, but I don't see reunification anytime soon. Kim Dae-jung does not want quick unification because it's too costly. Kim Jong-il does not want reunification in his lifetime. China, that's backing Kim Jong-il, will lose if there's reunification because the South is smaller than the, the North is smaller than the South, and economics, and the South is so much more powerful. And they've lost, they've lost a buffer. So I believe the North will stay separate. China will help it stay separate, but it will keep on saying, "Let's get together and let's get rid of the American forces. How can we go to bed with these strangers in our midst?" So they are going to put pressure on your military.
Do you believe the Chinese will take over Taiwan? I believe reunification is inevitable in the next 50 years. I cannot say. Maybe 50, maybe more, maybe less. If, if foolish things happen in Taiwan, if they make it to what, what happens to cause the Chinese? If use force? They may not have to use complete force. They can just use pressure and destabilize the economy. If they feel that Taiwan, under a new government, a new president, is edging away and determined to make a run for it, they're going to stop it because they've had 12 years of Li Kuan Yew, and in the 12 years, although he agreed to "one China, to each his own interpretation," in the 12 years he edged and edged surreptitiously away until he came up the two-state theory, and then the red flag went up. Yeah. You're not going to have that. Deng Xiaoping. Yes. Is clearly a man that you admire as much as anybody that I know. If you have met him and you know what China would have been without him, you cannot but admire the man at 70. Well, you more than admire. I mean, you look at him as, as one of the giants of our time. He saved the country after the Cultural Revolution. 1.2, 2 billion people would have imploded like the Soviet Union. After the Cultural Revolution, or after Tiananmen? No, he saw it in the 1970s, before Tiananmen. Yeah. He saw it before the Soviet Union imploded, and he said, "Open up to China, to the Chinese, open up all the coastal provinces. Let's do this controlled exercise. See whether it will work. Free trade zones, and in the countryside, contract farming, no longer communes." No. It succeeded. But you also say that he, there's built in there some real possibilities of conflict because those people in those zones, Yeah. are going to do better than people in the rest of the country. And therefore, you have built-in resentments. Right. That's one of the big problems they have. That's one of the problems. But you admire him because you think that he saved China from collapse. From collapse and implosion. Yes. That's no mean feat for a man of 76 to abandon a lifelong belief in Marxism-Leninism and saying, "Yes, the market works." Well, did he abandon that, or did he simply say, "We got to use the market?" Because he didn't abandon the political control. He, he, he couldn't. And had he done, had he done it like Gorbachev, if Gorbachev had gone for restructuring without Boris Yeltsin. Yeah. He might have succeeded. If Gorbachev had understood what Deng Xiaoping understood.
Here's what's interesting about you two. This book ends in the year, this book, 2000. Um, you gave up power in part as prime minister in 1990. Marcos didn't give up willingly. Deng Xiaoping died in office. Most of the people who've had the influence, have had the success and power that you've had, have not been willing to go from power. Now, they will say you're Senior Minister, and you still will wield enormous power in Singapore. That's not true. I wouldn't be here sitting chatting with you or spending three days at the Kennedy School lecturing and meeting students. If I were in power, the buttons will be with me day by day. There are events that are happening that have to be responded to, and I'd be in Singapore. If I'm here, I'll have a whole team and a constant flow of faxes and email and. So why'd you give up power? Well, it's quite simple. By the time I was 65, which was in 19, 23, 65, '88, I won my last election, and I told my colleagues, "Choose your leader, take over." I just won. I was at the height of my career, and I wanted. Yeah. I wanted an exit whilst my head and tail was up. And where you could have some influence on your successor. Uh, no, I allowed, I allowed them, the group that I had recruited into the cabinet, Right. To choose their successor, because I had seen Tang Xiaoping appoint two successors and then sack both of them. Right. Exactly. I did not want to do that. I said, "You choose, and whoever you choose, you've got to support him." They chose Goh Chok. Yeah. They've had to support him. He's doing pretty well. Good for him. Well, I mean, in fact, he's done better than you suggested he might do. Yes. Yes. And guess who the deputy prime minister is? The deputy prime minister was chosen by the prime minister. And who is the deputy prime minister? He is my son. And he will one day, in the next five years, be prime minister. I have lived long enough to know that these things cannot be predicted with certainty. Eight years ago, out of the blue, when I was conferencing in South Africa, in Johannesburg, talking to the Financial Review and investments, my son rang me up when I was actually presenting my paper. I rang back. I knew it was bad news, and he said, "I have lymphoma." The world just turned gray. I spent the next few days discussing with my doctor what does it mean? Fortunately, they diagnosed and did the biopsies, and it was a lymphoma which was intermediate grade and responded to chemotherapy. Had it been high grade or low grade, he would have had six, seven, eight years and finished. But he had the intermediate grade, chemotherapy worked. The specialists in Stanford and in Singapore said, "If it doesn't come back, come back after five years, you're in the clear." It's now eight years, and I keep my fingers crossed for him. But life has got that big question mark. You never know.
Greatest person, greatest leader you ever met. Deng Xiaoping. Yes. The most enduring. You say about her? Oh, she's toughest. The toughest. Not, not necessarily. Thatcher didn't even compare. Margaret Thatcher. No, I think she's tougher than Margaret Thatcher. She's tougher. You knew Mao Zedong? Yes. But then he was already half a vegetable. Yeah. Didn't know Winston Churchill. No. Admired him greatly. Yes. Think about leadership, subject you talked about last night. You know, what is it? And it's easy words to use. A leader has to have, and are they qualities you're born with or you learn? If you don't have that natural zest, a desire to do things for other people, not just for yourself and your family, then you can't be a leader. You must have an interest in people beyond your own immediate, beyond, and their welfare. You must be able to connect with them, and you must be able to communicate with them. And if you want to last, you can't break faith with them. You break faith, they distrust you. You're out. You can, you can be the best communicator in the world. They are always having that question mark against you. I have lasted because I learned very early on, never say something which I'm not going to do. I don't have to say it, that I'm not going to do it, but if I say I'm going to do it, I have to do it, and they know that, and they're comfortable with me.
News today. Ceasefire talks reached. Israel agrees to pull back. Palestinian. Ah, Barak, you know him. Yeah. No. I don't know him. Well, but you know what he said? You knew Rabin? Yes, I knew. You knew Sadat? Yes, I knew Sadat. Questions of leadership. You think that Barak made a mistake in going to Camp David? No, I don't think he made a mistake in going to Camp David. I think he made a mistake in going that far at Camp David when Yasser Arafat was not a Sadat and would not respond. He stuck his neck out. He stuck his hand out. On the wrong guy. He stuck his hand out. The other guy did not have a long enough and strong enough arm to meet it. And Rabin would have felt it and wouldn't have put his hand out. But Rabin had made a decision. You said this very well to me before we started. Made a decision that I have got to, for the next generation of Israelis, I have got to find a way to peace. Absolutely. Because otherwise is endless wars or tensions and the danger eventually of a holocaust.
I did a year-end broadcast with Henry Kissinger and others at the end of the millennium. You know what Kissinger said to me? The most important thing in the new century will be science. Yes. He also chose Einstein as the most important figure of the last century. And science is the most important force. You buy that? Yes. Because science means you're able to master the universe, change nature to the advantage of man, and through technology make the world a better place for human beings. But I am also concerned that in our exuberance and our inability to have that moral balance, we may change the world to such an extent that we may threaten our own existence. How so? Well, the environment is one issue. I mean, earth warming, the danger of, uh, nuclear problems, uh, new mutants of AIDS. Uh, they are imponderables. I mean, once you can mutate these genes, you, it doesn't take long for somebody in Libya or Iraq to have a gene, or a germ, a virus that will spread without a cure, and we're all dead. They'll be dead too. So we are into a world where knowledge can change the nature of the universe and the nature of our lives. It's quite scary, and also quite uplifting, because cures to diseases. Yes, of course. And, uh, a quality of life and a standard of living unimaginable even 10 years ago.
Kissinger wrote the foreword to this book. Henry Kissinger wrote the foreword to this book. You've known each other for how long? I knew him first when he was teaching here at Harvard, and I was here in the fall of 1968. That's about 32 years. Friend? Yes. Learn from him? Yes. What a certain objectivity, a certain balance, a global view that there are endless battles. You can win one battle, the war is not over. What do you regret most so far? It's a, it's a parlor game, really. So many things to regret. We could have done something better. But I regret most is the years we spent building up the momentum for Malaysia and breaking it off in less than two years. It never got a chance. We, if there was a stronger prime minister in Malaysia who was prepared to give a more equal balance to the various peoples in Malaysia, the story might have ended differently, and it would have been better for all of us. Because Singapore combined with Malaysia, and all that that would have meant, would have given you a much more powerful point of leverage. No, not for me, but. Well, I don't mean you, but for. But for the people, they would have had a better life. Have you had a moment in which you say, "Listen, all these world leaders, boy, if I could have, and maybe this is it. If I could have written, painted on a broader canvas, think of the things I could have done." You know, I said once. Cuz all these. Go ahead. I had dinner with Deng Xiaoping once in November of 1978, and in a moment of whimsy, part of my speech, I said, "I wonder what would have happened if Deng Xiaoping was born in Singapore and I was born in China." He looked askance. I said, "I'm quite sure that Deng Xiaoping would be running Singapore. I'm not sure Lee Kuan Yew would have got halfway up the heap because you would have had, I would have had so many brights, so many tough, so many conspiratorial groups that would have just knocked me down." It's a greasy pole. Uh, you get there as much by luck as by merit. Really? Yes, it is. Luck, timing. Uh, well, for the first generation, Mao, it was just sheer will. He imposed his will on the party. For Deng Xiaoping, it was will and the group of people, generals and other party stalwarts who preserved him from Mao's rancor. For Hua Guofeng, he scratched him, he had, he scrapped, and he had to make a choice, and he chose Hua Guofeng from Shanghai party secretary because he kept Shanghai quiet without using force, but not allowing the students to run the place. That was pure luck. But of course, he's staying there and staying on top. That's not luck. That's real leadership skills within the confines of the Communist Party elite.
What do you think your strongest skill is? In my context, a capacity to persuade my people to do tough things. Do you really? Yes. Otherwise, they wouldn't have changed. Mind you, had I had a Chinese or base in China, not transplants in Singapore, I may not have succeeded. You try making them stop spitting in China. Can't be done. I've done it in Singapore. I think it probably was the capacity to grow. Your capacity to grow. Well, yes. You got to learn all the time. Yeah. You understood that you could not stand still. And you understood that you had to learn from history. Yeah. Or be, or as Santayana said, to repeat it. Yeah. And keep on learning all the time. You never stop. The day you stop learning, that day you're dead. So that's why you're here at Harvard for another visit. From Third World to First: The Singapore Story, 1965 to 2000. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore and the Asian Economic Boom. I thank you for the time. Thank you. A conversation that took place earlier today at Cambridge with Lee Kuan Yew.