Rough-Edged Atomic Pioneer

May 29, 2013

NY Times: Books of The Times

‘Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center,’ by Ray Monk

By Janet Maslin (05-27-13)

Ray Monk had begun work on his J. Robert Oppenheimer biography in 2005, when Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus” was published. That book, billed as “the first full-scale biography” of Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist, gave Mr. Monk good reason to worry. It covers scientific, historical, moral, political and personal aspects of Oppenheimer’s life, conveying his arrogance, brilliance, self-destructiveness and lady-killing charisma. What gaps remained for Mr. Monk to fill?

The introduction to Mr. Monk’s “Robert Oppenheimer: A Life Inside the Center” cites at least one of them: physics.

“One would never know from reading Bird and Sherwin’s book how much of Oppenheimer’s time and intellectual energy was taken up with thinking about mesons,” Mr. Monk writes sniffily, noting that the subatomic particle does not even appear in Bird and Sherwin’s index. Mr. Monk’s own book mentions “Thirty Years of Mesons,” a lecture delivered by Oppenheimer in 1966 to the American Physical Society. And according to his index, Mr. Monk gives the meson its due on at least 21 out of 695 pages.

This is a strange way for Mr. Monk to compete. He is a professor of philosophy, with excellent books about Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell to his credit. And he is not a great explicator of physics, merely a not-bad one. Would anyone seriously interested in Oppenheimer seek out a biography for this?: “What, really, is an electron? A particle? A wave? Could it possibly be both? Might it possibly be neither? How should one, if indeed one should at all, picture an electron and its movements?”

It’s also odd that Mr. Monk (right) adopts a vaguely atomic metaphor to describe Oppenheimer’s life. His book appeared in England under the main title “In the Centre,” as if Oppenheimer were a nucleus and not a person. Time and again he hits that analogy hard, emphasizing the importance of logistics in Oppenheimer’s personal and intellectual life.

It’s true that he played the crucial role in secret atomic research conducted in Los Alamos, N.M., and that he would never escape central responsibility for creating the atomic bomb. But Mr. Monk takes a needlessly mechanistic approach to a man who has seemed much more interestingly human in other, keener studies.

This lengthy book does aspire to be more comprehensive than earlier volumes. Before Oppenheimer even makes his entrance into Mr. Monk’s narrative, much has been said about the German-Jewish tradition into which he was born, the privilege that allowed him to be so aloof and the Ethical Culture beliefs that shaped his family and education. Mr. Monk also writes at length about anti-Semitism and the kinds of Jews who practiced it, with Oppenheimer among them.

As part of his overall arrogance and superciliousness, Oppenheimer allowed himself to be treated as the antithesis of a Jewish stereotype. He grew from, in his own words, “an unctuous, repulsively good little boy” into such an urbane prodigy that Harvard never bothered to discriminate against him. A quota system applied to Jews in 1922, when Oppenheimer arrived there.

In the earlier, formative chapters, which are better than the book’s treks over the best-known, most public part of Oppenheimer’s adult life, Mr. Monk also illustrates how easily Oppenheimer’s snobbery trumped anybody else’s.

“Instead of 5,000 keen, intellectually alive, well-read young men who have come here to think out ideas and to learn the ideas of others,” he complained about his fellow Harvard students, “I find 5,000 tawdry yokels, yanked from fat farms and snoring small towns, to bellow at ball games.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Monk believes Oppenheimer was intimidated by the broad sophistication he found at Harvard and later Cambridge. Not until he arrived at Göttingen University in 1926, at the age of 22, did he feel free of academic elitism, in a place without “the weight of 700 years of tradition bearing down upon it.”

By this point in his book, Mr. Monk has begun to explain quantum physics and drop the names of the heavyweights. Here is a book that ticks off the reactions of Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, Born and Dirac to Schrödinger’s “wave mechanics,” and shows how remarkably smoothly Oppenheimer insinuated himself into those ranks.

The 1927 “On the Quantum Theory of Molecules” which he co-wrote with Max Born, may not have been one of Born’s greatest hits, but it became one of Oppenheimer’s better-known works. Without Mr. Monk, many readers interested in Oppenheimer’s life might not have known that at all.

Mr. Monk does a strong job of explaining how Oppenheimer, with unwanted assistance from Nazi Germany, helped shift the center of theoretical physics from Europe to California (he taught at both Berkeley and Caltech). That shift leads the book to Los Alamos during wartime, though it is notably more colorless than other accounts of the guarded community there. The familiarity continues through the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the conscience-searing effects on Oppenheimer of his breakthroughs in the science of mass destruction.

Mr. Monk gives very detailed accounts of F.B.I. surveillance of Oppenheimer and those around him. And he replays Oppenheimer’s familiar, contorted, much-dramatized testimony to the Atomic Energy Commission hearings in 1954, which stripped him of his security clearance and branded him a risk to national security.

The remainder of Mr. Monk’s book describes Oppenheimer’s relatively glamorous years leading the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., the ongoing debate about his reputation, and the growing infrequency of his appearances as a public figure. “Thirty Years of Mesons” notwithstanding, he withdrew into a life that is only sketchily explained here.

It is typical of Mr. Monk’s distanced view of his subject that he writes this, in conclusion, about Oppenheimer’s wife and two children: “Oppenheimer loved Kitty, Toni and Peter, but he was never able to be the reliably affectionate husband or father they needed him to be. The problems he had as a child forming close bonds with other people had remained with him throughout his life.” Though Oppenheimer left behind nearly 300 boxes of papers, Mr. Monk says they contain “remarkably little that gives away anything of an intimate nature.” That’s hard to believe. Other biographers have seen Oppenheimer at closer range, in living color.

A version of this review appeared in print on May 28, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rough-Edged Atomic Pioneer.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/28/books/robert-oppenheimer-a-life-inside-the-center-by-ray-monk.html?ref=books

Kamil Jaafar–The Diplomat Extraordinaire of My Generation

May 19, 2013

COMMENT: Kamil Jaafar (he insists that I forget the “Tan Sri” bit when I address him) was my senior at MU and Wisma Putra (I joined the Foreign Service in 1963 when Tun Ghazalie Shafie was the Permanent Secretary to the Ministry of External Affairs) and housemate together with Tun Mohd Khalil Yaccob, the present Governor of Malacca (right) and a host of other foreign  service colleagues at No 272, Jalan Brickfields/Jalan Tun Sambanthan, Kuala Lumpur in the heart of Little India.

Despite his many achievements as Malaysia’s top career diplomat, the First Among Equals, Kamil remains the simple and kind man that I knew when we first met at Bukit Mertajam railway station when we took the train to MU at Kuala Lumpur. Of course, he was not really that nice on the train!

He and another Kedahan, (Tan Sri) Razali Ismail (left), who was President, United Nations General Assembly in 1996-1997, ragged me throughout the night.  But I suppose the ragging brought us together to this day.

I promised Kamil that I will review his book, Growing Up with the Nation after it is launched by our respected friend, the Governor of Malacca on May 22, 2013 at 4.30 pm at Hotel Impiana, Jalan Pinang, Kuala Lumpur. My wife Dr Kamsiah and I will be there and hope you will join us at the launch.–Din Merican.

The Tiger of Wisma Putra still has his bite

by Balan Moses@http://www.nst.com.my

RESPECTED AND REVERED: After 51 years of diplomatic service, the imposing former Secretary-General has stories to tell

THE giant who greets me at the door of his spacious condominium unit in the upmarket Jalan U Thant suburb of Kuala Lumpur is wearing a wide smile, inimical really,  on the diplomat extraordinaire never known more than three decades in harness to smile.

He might have smirked, but that was par for the course, fitting the carefully cultivated image of the uncaring senior civil servant, who tolerated subordinates (and superiors), only as long as their actions and professional philosophy were in consonance with his.

But if anyone is looking to read about a Tan Sri Ahmad Kamil Jaafar, who ran roughshod over everyone, was vengeful and worked only for his glory, nothing is further from the truth as “I never harmed anyone and I never kept anything in my heart”.

“If you did well, you were promoted and gained my trust and respect. If you did not see things the way I did (in the larger interest of the nation) and fumbled, you were on your own,” he says a little past midway into the interview for this column on his memoirs — Growing Up With the Nation — to be launched on Wednesday (May 22, 2013).

“Of course, I even scolded ambassadors (and a few others in various capacities) at airports and other places, with many afraid to even talk to me after that,” the 76-year-old says, admitting that his temper sometimes got the better of him.

But again, I get the feeling that even those episodes were crafted to fuel the image of the hard-boiled bureaucraft who did not suffer fools gladly, when he was actually just a man on a personal mission to serve his country to the best of his abilities using the manpower available.

The smile for me this morning is part of a countenance reserved for friends and people that Kamil likes, a compliment for a story I wrote nine years ago in my column “Diplomatic Dealings” about him that he fancied.

The breezy welcome from the former number one diplomat at Wisma Putra, more famous for his scowls and penetrating gaze than the expansive countenance he is wearing today, is courtesy of the fact that he will be baring all about his 51 years in diplomatic service (the last 17 years or so on national service as special envoy to the Prime minister) at Hotel Impiana in three days’ time.

The 189cm-tall Kamil, a little thicker around the waist, more jowl than cheek and slightly slower in movement than in 2004, is in his element, casting a commanding eye over all he surveys at home. It is not very much unlike the towering presence he had at Wisma Putra as secretary-general, frightening lesser beings into acquiescence with a look that told you where you stood in his esteem.

Kamil is almost curt on the phone in his baritone that has lost a little of the boom it held in years past, but is still respected enough to be listened to carefully by his wife, Lena Hultgren Kamil, son, Tariq, daughter, Yuhanis, a wide range of friends and acquaintances.

If there is an occasional observation of a seemingly lack of steel in his overt personality, I feel it is just another side to the multi-facetted life of the man touted as the most famous non-conventional diplomat that Malaysia has ever produced.

The cloak-and-dagger stuff of the spy (he refuses to be buttonholed in this genre) is still very much evident to me in the almost whispered requests to steer clear of issues “better less spoken about”.

This is vintage Kamil at its best, always putting the nation first as he had since he began serving the nation under founding Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman in 1962 and continuing under five Prime Ministers, including Dato’ Seri Najib Razak (son of second Prime Minister Tun Razak Hussein, for whom he probably had the most personal affection for…”he was a very kind man”).

“This is my first and last book, Balan. Don’t expect to interview me on another book,” the tiger that roamed the corridors of Wisma Putra says in an almost threatening growl, sans a few of the proverbial “teeth” that gave him his bite in office.

Kamil beams as I ask him who will launch his book as the honour goes to old friend and bosom buddy of 56 years, Tun Mohd Khalil Yaacob, the Yang di-Pertua Negeri of Malacca, one of four classmates (also prefects) at Malay College Kuala Kangsar, who wrote new chapters in the schools annals with their mischief.

“We did a lot of havoc like going to the prefects’ room and sneaking a few cigarettes. At night, we used to leave the school and go for packets of char kuey teow in town and come back before dawn. We also used to take laundry money from students under our charge, use it for a taxi to town to live it up before giving what was left to the dobi and telling him he will get the rest the next month,” he says, chuckling at the incident that occurred in the 1950s.

His four partners-in-crime rose to high office in different areas of calling; Khalil became the head of a state; Tan Sri Razali Ismail became Malaysian special envoy to the United Nations; Sallehuddin Alang joined the French Foreign Legion; while the late Dalil Awin became a senior executive here.

All these episodes find print in his memoirs, written in a style that could be termed “diplomatese”, in the sense that the memories are strong in their profundity, but are often played out in a style that lacks the colour and character of a true-blue novelist. But then, Kamil has never claimed to be a writer, admitting in his low-key manner that “I speak better than I write”.

I am convinced that the veracity of his stories, told in a frank, guileless and breathtaking manner, will embrace and captivate the reader to a great extent.

The man who has worked with Kings, Prime Ministers and Statesmen has vignettes for some of them in his book, that traces his genesis from a gangling kampung boy in Kedah to a respected and towering figure in international diplomacy.

“Tunku Abdul Rahman was almost like a father to me. He used to tell his wife, Sharifah Rodziah, that I looked like my father because of our height. I remember one night in Bangkok, when I had to physically dig up the remains of his younger brother as he wanted them to be reburied in Kedah.

“It was a terrible night, with heavy rain and thunder, almost like out of a ghost movie, and there I was, a middle-ranking diplomat in a Muslim cemetery in a Buddhist country, up to my arms and knees in mud.”

Tun Abdul Razak was also almost like a father to Kamil, constantly wanting him to take up a diplomatic position in London, which the latter gently demurred as he wanted to be at home to do national service here. On Tun Hussein Onn, he says the old soldier was made of the stuff of legends, with his razor-sharp ethics that were premised on the fact that “one must not do to others what you do not want others to do to you”.

Kamil reminisces that Hussein (he always had a ruler and pen with him) took his own time with decisions, which sometimes did not work in consonance with the demands of a Foreign Ministry that worked around the clock. But his career truly took off under Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, with whom he had a special chemistry based on a shared belief that Malaysians were no lesser beings than others, “especially whites, who sometimes thought we were second-class people”.

On Dr Mahathir, he says they worked extremely well in “unconventional diplomacy”, which fitted the former Prime Minister’s bill as both had the force of will, commitment and character to help the downtrodden in places like Bosnia and Kosovo.

“I became an arms runner of sorts when I helped arrange for delivery of weaponry to the Bosnians, who were at the mercy of Serbs around them. Dr Mahathir and I shared a personal commitment to the Bosnians that went beyond the pale of our jobs.”

Kamil may be getting on in age, but the sharpness that sometimes riled others at senior levels in government is still there.

“Wisma Putra committed a faux pas a little while ago in the case of Bahrain, where there was a disconnect between the reality and the advice given to the leader of the land (Najib). This would never had happened back then.”

There is more new ground touched upon as Kamil meanders into Malaysian politics, which he has always studiously steered clear off, but here again, his comments are in relation to foreign policy.

“The ground under our feet is shifting after what Malaysians collectively did at the recent general election.Our foreign policy is shaped on a multiracial, multilingual and multireligious character at home and represents the sociopolitical make-up of the nation.”

Kamil wants the powers-that-be to address the problem fast,  “with special attention paid to communitarian and normative values as these are important and at the core of our social fabric”. The former diplomatic craftsman also remembers people like Farah Aidid, the Somali strongman, who  gave him a walking stick which “he said had kept him alive for years, but you know that he died the month after giving me the souvenir”.

Kamil tries to laugh the deep laugh that rang through his office and that of his friends  (he has great memories of his late friend, historian and author, Dr Chandran Jeshurun)  years ago,  but is unable to do so, no thanks to a 50 per cent lung capacity,  courtesy of scores of Camel cigarettes for a major part of his life.

“I never cry when giving speeches,  but I cried when delivering his eulogy,” says the characteristically unemotional  diplomat,  never known for asking for a quarter  and certainly giving none to no one of his childhood friends, fellow Malaysian visionary and noted historian.

Today, Kamil says the days of unconventional diplomacy are over and that he never bothered to pass on the tricks of the trade that he wrote the book on in his heydays between 1962 and 1989,  when he ruled the heap at Wisma Putra. The world at large, however, should never forget that the slightly bent (crouching) tiger still has much fire in his belly, a phenomenon  that Malaysians may witness (if he so decides to) at the launching of his book.

After all, he is still the Special Envoy to the Prime Minister and who knows what demands the nation may still make of the man who managed more delicate scenarios in foreign service than a hoard of diplomats across the board will ever handle in their lifetime.

Margaret Thatcher by Charles Moore; Not for Turning by Robin Harris – Review

April 28, 2013

by Andy Beckett, The Guardian, Wednesday 24 April 2013 13.57

Two authorised biographies have lots of new material. Do they have a new honesty too, asks Andy Beckett

How much more is there to say about Margaret Thatcher? That these biographies have the same phrase in their title is not a promising start. Nor is it a title – taken from one of her most self-mythologising moments, her studiedly defiant speech to the doubting 1980 Conservative conference – that suggests these heavy volumes will be leavened with too much fresh or independent thinking. Robin Harris worked with Thatcher, often “closely” in his words, for a quarter of a century from the late 70s, as a speechwriter, ghostwriter, adviser, organiser and diehard supporter.

In her memoirs, she calls him “my indispensable sherpa”. Charles Moore has been one of Britain’s best-known right wing journalists for equally long. Since Thatcher’s death, he has seemed happy to mix his promotional duties as an author with defending her against, as he put it on Question Time, “People who are horrible … promoting the idea that she is [sic] very divisive.”

Moore was chosen by Thatcher to be her official biographer in 1997. It was the year her party finally lost power: her reputation, it was reasonable to assume, was going to need some protecting. “The arrangement that Lady Thatcher offered me,” writes Moore, “was that I would have full access to herself … and to her papers. She would assist all my requests for interviews with others … As a result of her support … the then Cabinet Secretary, Sir Richard Wilson, gave permission for all existing and former civil servants to speak freely to me about the Thatcher years, and allowed me to inspect government papers, held back from public view under the thirty-year rule.”

Moore has exploited this unique access with thoroughness and skill; but a sense of the British establishment granting favours to one of its own hangs over this book, and is never quite dispelled.

Harris began his book in 2005, the year of another post-Thatcher Tory general election defeat. Despite the existence of the Moore project, it appears she was keen to collaborate with Harris too.

He reprints a letter from her: “I can think of no one better placed than you to tackle the subject … You know, better than anyone else, what I wanted our reforms to achieve.” Elsewhere in his preface, Harris pointedly describes Moore’s book as “a further, ‘authorized’ work”.

As Prime Minister, one of Thatcher’s ambitions was to make Britain more competitive; posthumously, it’s clear that included her biographers.

Yet as in the utilities she privatised, competition sometimes doesn’t produce much choice for consumers. Both these books begin, as almost every Thatcher biography has for decades, with a reverent depiction of her Grantham childhood, all formative hard graft and small town English virtues, which in the retelling – not least by Thatcher as a rising politician – has long become as sepia-tinted as a rustic Hovis advertisement.

Moore describes her ambitious shopkeeper father as “tall, with piercing blue eyes and wiry blond hair”; Harris calls him “tall, blond and blue-eyed”. As a young girl, writes Harris, Thatcher had “a sweet smile, beautiful hair, flashing blue eyes”. Here, as in much of the rightwing writing about her since her death, Thatcher seems to be becoming a sort of Tory Evita.

But then Harris’s book wakes up. In Grantham and afterwards, he abruptly remarks, Thatcher “would never be very interested in people’s personalities … only in their actions – and specifically those of their actions that directly concerned her.” Further tart assertions about her personality and habits quickly follow.

When she ate, food would be “hoovered up as quickly as possible”. When she worked on official papers as Prime Minister, she often sat “in her [Downing Street] study in a high-backed chair … Over the years her feet wore a hole in the carpet. She refused to have a new one and had a patch inserted.”

In political conversation, “She had no real sense of place … adopting even in private discussion the same aggressive and self-justificatory stance as she would in a hostile television interview.” As a thinker, although she carried a collection of excerpts from Winston Churchill’s speeches and broadcasts in her handbag, Harris writes, she “did not have much historical sense, merely some rather romantic and fanciful historical notions”.

After all the eulogies, it is refreshing to read about an odd, driven, believable person – rather than some abstract national saviour or demon. In his confident generalisations about Thatcher, Harris is like a long-faithful courtier freed by a monarch’s death to speak the truth about them. He is not that interested in piling up evidence for his assertions. Like an article in the Spectator, the writing can be lordly rather than logical, and the word “probably” appears more often than in most biographies. Much of the book is closer to memoir or polemic – you need to take it on trust.

The recounting of Thatcher’s dark-horse dash through the Conservative party pack and tumultuous premiership is efficient rather than revelatory. There are slow stretches where Harris summarises and justifies her policies, one by one; and equally relentless but more quotable attacks on Thatcher’s many Tory enemies and allies-turned-nemeses, such as her chancellors Nigel Lawson (“too clever by half”) and Geoffrey Howe (“raddled with bitterness”).

Moore is more measured. His dense, intricate volume, the first of an intended two, follows Thatcher only up to the autumn of 1982, less than a third of the way into her premiership. For now at least, this cut-off date robs his version of her story of the always-compelling element of rise and fall – the latter vividly and emotionally depicted by Harris – and instead makes Moore’s Thatcher narrative like one of the economic graphs in Thatcherism’s boom years: jagged but generally upward.

There are some surprises, though. Thatcher’s sister Muriel, barely mentioned by other biographers, is revealed as the recipient of frank letters from the teenage Margaret. Of an Oxford university boyfriend, pre-Denis, also previously undetected by biographers, she writes: “Tony hired a car and we drove out to Abingdon to the country inn ‘Crown and Thistle’. I managed to borrow a glorious royal blue velvet cloak … I felt absolutely on top of the world as I walked through the lounge … and everyone looked up.” That Thatcher had a bit of a life before parliamentary politics claimed her in the early 50s is a less sensational discovery than some of the publicity around this book has trumpeted; but Moore, with typical care and perceptiveness, produces a clever coda to his account of the Tony relationship.

In 1974, long after it was over, Tony, now a stockbroker with a professional interest in the housing market, produced a scheme for council tenants to buy their homes. As the shadow minister responsible for housing, Thatcher invited him to the Commons. “She made only the most glancing acknowledgement of their old acquaintance and got straight down to the policy, towards which she was very receptive.”

Jamie Hodgson/Getty Images

This is Moore’s first book (Harris has written or ghostwritten half a dozen), and its prose is understated and less partisan than his journalism. Occasionally, the long, controlled paragraphs curl almost imperceptibly into dry wit. In the mid-60s, he writes, “At the highest levels of the [Tory] party … suspicions were aroused that the rise of Margaret Thatcher might represent some sort of threat to male peace and tranquility.” Nor is Moore a total prisoner of his many sources.

Their testimony is weighed, and sometimes contradicted. Even Muriel, who granted a rare interview, is corrected when she claims that Margaret was too busy to go to their father’s funeral, with reference to Margaret’s “two engagement diaries of the period” and a report in the Grantham Journal.

There is a downside to all this neat dovetailing of material and elegantly murmuring, High Tory style. Thatcherism was in many ways an unsubtle, unstable political project, exhilarating or brutal depending on where you stood; yet only the exhilaration feels fully present in Moore’s narrative, for all his conscientious detailing of Thatcherism’s 70s and 80s ups and downs. Part of the problem may be the slightly sketchy way he deals with the world beyond.

There is not quite enough sense of the social texture of Britain, and how that changed, as Thatcher rose, and how that change helped her. Similarly, events outside Westminster that proved pivotal for her – the 1978-9 winter of discontent that probably won her the 1979 election; the 1981 urban riots that so undermined her early premiership – are recorded too briefly and cursorily. Meanwhile, Moore’s politics surface unhelpfully when he caricatures postwar Britain as in “steep decline”, the economy under Labour in the 60s as a “car crash”, and the IMF that eagerly helped do away with British social democracy in the 70s as “impartial”.

As much of the debate since her death has shown, there are still plenty of takers for this doomy, simplistic view of pre-Thatcherite Britain. But present-day historians are becoming steadily less keen on it, and the struggles of our Thatcherised economy since 2007 don’t augur too well for the long-term reputation of books that present her rule as having solved all our problems.

Moore is more nuanced than that; unlike Harris, he offers a few quiet but stinging criticisms of her policies, for example on council house sales, which led to “the gradual build-up of a housing shortage which, in 1979, had not existed, and the stoking, for the future, of a housing bubble”.

NY Times Book Review: ‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr

April 22, 2013

Books of The Times

Superpower, Leading From Behind

‘The Dispensable Nation,’ by Vali Nasr

by Michiko Kakutani (04-18-13)

The title of Vali Nasr’s provocative and uneven new book, “The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy in Retreat,” plays on President Bill Clinton’s description of the United States as the world’s one “indispensable nation.” Mr. Nasr — who was a senior adviser to Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan (AfPak) — suggests in this sharply critical volume that the foreign policy pursued under Mr. Obama has diminished America’s leadership role in the world.

To our allies, Mr. Nasr writes, “our constant tactical maneuvers don’t add up to a coherent strategy or a vision of global leadership. Gone is the exuberant American desire to lead in the world. In its place there is the image of a superpower tired of the world and in retreat, most visibly from the one area of the world where it has been most intensely engaged,” the Middle East.

Mr. Nasr does not grapple here with how the Bush administration’s aggressive, pre-emptive policies led the United States into a costly and unnecessary war in Iraq, and he also fails to provide a convincing and detailed assessment of just how the developments of the Arab Spring might have been more cogently handled by the Obama administration.

What Mr. Nasr’s book, at its best, does do is shed light on the heated infighting within the Obama administration, particularly between the White House and the State Department, adding new details and insights to dynamics previously chronicled in news reports and books like “Little America,” by Rajiv Chandrasekaran; “The Obamians,” by James Mann; and “Obama’s Wars,” by Bob Woodward.

Mr. Nasr (left) offers his own thoughts about one of the most watched relationships in modern politics, the pas de deux of former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and President Obama: he asserts that had it not been for Mrs. Clinton’s personal connection with the president and her tenacity, “the State Department would have had no influence on policy making whatsoever.”

He also fleshes out our understanding of the contentious relationship that developed between Mr. Holbrooke and the White House, which was the result of turf wars, philosophical differences, a clash of personalities (the brash, sometimes swashbuckling style of Mr. Holbrooke crashing up against the “no drama” style favored by President Obama and many of his aides) and differing ideas about how to bring the war in Afghanistan to a close.

It was a rivalry, Mr. Chandrasekaran argued in “Little America,” that “sabotaged America’s best chance for a peace deal to end the war” there. Mr. Holbrooke became ill during a meeting in Mrs. Clinton’s office on December 10, 2010, and despite surgery to repair a tear to his aorta, died a few days later.

In this book Mr. Nasr contends that “the White House campaign against the State Department, and especially Holbrooke, was at times a theater of the absurd. Holbrooke was not included in Obama’s video conferences” with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, “and was cut out of the presidential retinue when Obama went to Afghanistan.”

“The White House,” Mr. Nasr says, “resented losing AfPak to the State Department,” and “that was one big reason” it was “on a warpath with Holbrooke — he was in their way and kept the State Department in the mix on an important foreign policy area.” Mr. Holbrooke, he goes on, “would not cede ground to the White House, not when he thought those who wanted to wrest control of Afghanistan were out of their depth and not up to the job.”

Mr. Nasr describes Mr. Holbrooke (who oversaw the 1995 Dayton peace accords that ended the war in Bosnia) as “a brilliant strategic thinker in the same league as such giants of American diplomacy as Averell Harriman and Henry Kissinger.” And he uses his own in-depth knowledge of the geopolitics of the Middle East to make an impassioned case for many of Mr. Holbrooke’s diplomatic initiatives and ideas, which often failed to find traction within the White House.

In these pages Mr. Nasr — who is now dean of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington — writes about Mr. Holbrooke’s pressing for reconciliation talks with the Taliban early on, when, in Mr. Nasr’s words, “our leverage was at its strongest — when we had the maximum number of troops on the ground in Afghanistan,” and before troop withdrawal plans were announced.

Mr. Nasr also writes thoughtfully about Mr. Holbrooke’s understanding of the regional dynamics of the Middle East and South Asia. He discusses Mr. Holbrooke (right)’s belief that lasting political solutions could be forged not by military means alone but through a combination of leverage and diplomacy involving all the stakeholders in the region (including countries like Iran and India), and his conviction that such diplomacy included engagement on issues of long-term social and economic interest to individual countries.

The problem with this book is that its genuinely interesting analyses are often undermined by Mr. Nasr’s certainty about matters that are subject to an incalculable number of variables; his vitriolic anger at the Obama White House; and his penchant for making overly broad, sometimes willfully alarmist generalizations.

Mr. Nasr asserts that the president was “very concerned with shielding his right flank so as not to open himself to right-wing criticism,” then goes on to declare that “it is not going too far to say that American foreign policy had become completely subservient to tactical domestic political considerations.”

He writes that the administration’s current policy toward Iran (its assumptions and strategy are now “hardly distinguishable,” he says, “from those of the Bush White House”) will “eventually turn Iran into a failed state” that will “pose a new set of security challenges to the region and the United States.” And he argues that the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia” policy and what he sees as its neglect and mismanagement of the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan and the unspooling fallout of the Arab Spring are simply pushing that vital region “further into China’s bosom.”

One nightmarish possibility envisioned by Mr. Nasr goes like this: in a couple of decades, “China and Russia will have gobbled up Central Asia, cornered Europe’s energy markets, and planted themselves smack in the middle of the Middle East. They will have emerged as global giants challenging America’s place in the world and perhaps the primacy of the U.S. dollar as the currency of international exchange. And once that happens, it will be all but impossible to reverse. We would then face global threats, threats on a scale we encountered during the cold war, threats that dwarf whatever danger Iran can ever pose.”

Mr. Nasr makes some persuasive arguments for more concerted diplomatic and economic engagement on the part of the United States around the globe, though his observations about America’s essential role on the world stage owe a lot to those set out by Zbigniew Brzezinski in his astute 2012 book, “Strategic Vision: America and the Crisis of Global Power.”

When it comes to specifics, Mr. Nasr’s recommendations can sound vague or unrealistic. For instance, he writes that “solving the problems of the Middle East and the threat they pose to the world requires a fundamental change in the region’s economic profile,” and the “international community would have to make a sizable investment — a Marshall Plan in scale — to bring about change of that magnitude.”

He acknowledges that this is problematic, given the economic difficulties America faces today, but in another chapter complains that our settling “for doing so much less” — in Egypt — “than we did after 1989 in Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America speaks volumes about our disengagement from the region. If the potential for democracy held by the Arab Spring was not enough to compel our engagement, it is not clear what would be.”

In the end, Mr. Nasr’s eagerness to see virtually every action taken by the Obama administration on foreign policy through as dark a glass as possible distracts attention from his many valid criticisms, and from his thought-provoking assessments of how developments across the Middle East and South Asia today — in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Libya and Syria — are intertwined historically, economically and politically in a fantastically complicated puzzle that has no easy or straightforward solutions.

A version of this review appeared in print on April 19, 2013, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: Superpower, Leading From Behind.

A Tribute to Aishah Ghani: An Examplary UMNO Leader and Patriot

April 20, 2013

by Zaharah Othman | features@nst.com.my

http://www.nst.com.my

Between the pages of her book is an eye-opening journey and an ode to love. Zaharah Othman finds out more

TAN Sri Aishah Ghani’s tale is a love story on many levels. Love for her husband, her children and her country. But it was what she called her first love that took her away from them. In search of her first love that had long eluded her, she boarded The Canton at Tanjung Pagar Harbour in Singapore on April 10, 1955 leaving her husband and children aged 8 and 6 at the harbour. The youngest, aged 20 months, was too young to be there.

During the voyage that took her halfway around the world, Aishah, who wrote Ibu Melayu Mengelilingi Dunia: Dari Rumah Ke London under the pen name Aishah Aziz, documented her visits to Colombo, Bombay and Eden where the ship docked, taking her readers on an eye-opening journey as she described the local politics, commented on social issues and customs and traditions.

The book, published by The Standard Engravers & Art Printers in Campbell Road, Kuala Lumpur, was written in Malay and featured some black and white pictures of the writer during her travels. What shone through was her attempt at travel writing at a time when not many people were traveling, putting into perspective her astute observations for her readers to experience.

After reaching her destination at Tilbury Docks in London on May 9 of the same year, she embarked on what could only be described as her passionate affair with that first love — education. In the beginning of her book, she had penned a very moving poem, promising to come back to her husband once her thirst for education was quenched and her passionate affair with her first love was over.

All these and more were written in a slim book that I found sandwiched between other heavyweight titles of Malay books on the shelf at the British Library nearly 20 years ago. With the colour of its pages fading, it would have gone unnoticed, if not for its title Ibu Melayu Mengelilingi Dunia: — Dari Rumah Ke London.

Reading through the thin, fragile pages of the 83-page book, I couldn’t help but feel in awe of this woman who must have wrestled with her conscience and struggled with her sense of responsibilities, to give priorities to an ambition she had nurtured even before her marriage.

“Only God knows the pain,” said Aishah, her voice resonating with the pain she must have felt as she lost sight of her husband and children standing at the harbour in Singapore that day 57 years ago.

As a writer she used her husband’s name Abdul Aziz Hassan, her rock throughout her political career. After discovering the book in London, I blogged about it at http://www.kakteh.blogspot.com and the entry attracted a lot of readers including her family. I had wanted this interesting book to be reprinted. It did not materialise until last year when I met Mohd Khair Ngadiron, Managing Director and CEO of Institut Terjemahan & Buku Malaysia, who immediately put the wheel in motion.

The new edition was published late last year with a new cover and new black and white pictures.What is profound about Aishah’s writing is her nationalistic feeling, her yearning for the country to be independent and progressive. She had visions and great ambitions for her country and the people she left behind. Her accounts of her stint in London, her visits to places like Liverpool and Kirkby resonate with reflections and comments on current affairs and social developments during that time. While she enthuses about women’s rights and the British love for arts, she laments the moral decadence, infidelity and free sex.

“I wouldn’t be able to do this again,” said Aishah when we met at her office in Kampung Baru in December last year. She had admitted that she didn’t even have the original copy of the book and was indeed delighted with the reprint.

“But let me tell you something. My husband was one in a million. He encouraged me to further my studies and was willing to look after the children while I was away. He wrote every day about the children and never once did he complain,” she said of the sacrifice her husband made to enable her to realise her ambition.

For someone who had just celebrated her 89th birthday, her memory is still sharp and she took me back to the day she met her husband — an English teacher in Padang, where she was studying at Maktab Perguruan Tinggi Islam.

“I met him on Jan 1, 1942. I remember the day because it was during the war and we were all stranded. It wasn’t really a love affair. I saw him three or four times but there was something about him. He was a caring person. That attracted me to him. We didn’t get married until 1946,” she said.

After her marriage, it was apparent that she was still restless. As a bright child, she was made a trainee teacher at the age of 11 and was handpicked by the school inspector to go to the Kajang Convent. However, her father opposed. But she was thankful for the opportunity to study in Indonesia the year after as it allowed her to be independent and, more importantly, that experience sowed the seeds of nationalism and politics in her young mind.

Upon her return, she became politically active but she still harboured the ambition to continue her studies.

“My husband took me to see Dr MacPhearson, who told him that there was nothing wrong with me. He said there was something that preyed on my mind… something that I have not achieved.”

Her husband’s willingness to look after the children enabled her to pursue her course in Journalism at Regent’s Street Polytechnic. On her return, she worked as a journalist at Berita Harian. When she became active in politics again, it was her husband who stayed at home when work demanded that she travelled.

“Some colleagues made fun of him and they phoned him and asked him what he was doing at home. He would say, ‘I am wearing a skirt!’” she laughed. Upon being made the first woman senator in the country, her husband bought her a Mercedes, while he himself drove an old car.

“It was my husband who wanted me to write this book. He was very proud of me. He helped to publish it,” said Aishah. In a way the reprinting of the book is a tribute to not only a great politician but also to her dedicated late husband.

The book may not be true to its title of a woman’s journey around the world. But spurred on by her political aspirations and achievements, Aishah has indeed travelled extensively as a leader who had contributed so much to the country.
Excerpts from the poem on her opening page:

“Tahukah kau, oh, sayang,
Sebelom kau dan aku berkenalan,
Aku telah menchintai sesuatu,
Kuanggap ia sebagai kekasehku pula
Tapi keadaan tak meizinkan kami bertemu,
Kerana kekurangan sharat pada diriku.
……..
Sayang:
Izinkan aku pergi menemui kekasihku,
Dan aku akan kembali kepadamu,
Setelah kami puas berchumbu, berchengkerama,
Di-pantai chita-chita.”

Did you know, my darling,
before you and I met,
I have loved before,
one that I consider my lover
but situations did not allow us to meet, because of what I lacked

…..

My love,
allow me to go and meet my lover,
and I will return to you,
after our passionate affair
on the shores of ambition… “

Book Review: AB Sulaiman’s Sensitive Truths in Malaysia

April 14, 2013

by S Tayaparan@http://www.malaysiakini.com

‘If at all I am pro-something and anti-another, it is that I am pro-truth and human rationality, and anti-lies and hypocrisy.’- AB Sulaiman

BOOK REVIEW: Critics of AB Sulaiman’s resonant book, ‘Sensitive Truths in Malaysia: A Critical Appraisal of the Malay Problem’ will find much to disagree with. They will lay bare the partisan nature of his writing and hone in on the fact that he disputes the notion of ‘Ketuanan Melayu’ as anything other than an ideological creation meant to unify a disparate community at odds with a changing world and country.

Admirers of this book will find much to agree with. No doubt, they will find comfort in his simpatico thinking normally exhibited by ‘reasonable’ Malays. The term ‘soul searching’ is often described in connection with writings such as these. However, I find another phrase more useful. What AB Sulaiman has done with this book is lay bare his Malay soul.

To be clear, the writer takes great pains to frame his ideas in a universal context, mindful of the fact that ethnicity and culture, is what divides us as Malaysians, so his ‘Malay’ soul is a reference of mine.

At the heart of this book rests the examination of ‘Malay thinking’. Sulaiman approaches this subject as a ‘rationalist’. To quibble over the provocative nature of the term would be pedantic. Suffice to say what he attempts to do is examine the two main foundational elements of Malay identity, which are Islam and ethnicity.

Unlike many other writers who start dissecting this issue from an ‘outsider’ perspective, the writer resolutely deals with the problem, and delves into the numerous problematic issues as an ‘insider’.

Approaching any issue from an insider perspective throws up various intellectual problems. For instance, one could be too sympathetic to the subject and objectivity could be constrained. Alternatively, the observer could mitigate or worse dismiss issues that an outsider perspective would consider germane to the subject in discussion.

Readers can be assured that Sulaiman’s examination suffers from none of this. The writer may approach the intellectual and philosophical foundations in which he bases his discourse on as a ‘layman’ but he is meticulous in defining the terms of his arguments and the thinking behind them.

Best lottery draw

Beginning in the preface where Sulaiman writes, “…the Malay also claim that his society is unique, the only one where all its members are also Muslims. Apparently, not even Arabs who founded Islam can claim this singularity based on an understanding that many Arabs are Christians.

Being Malay and Muslim (thereby a Malay-Muslim) is therefore the best lottery draw any member of the human race could ever wish for” – the writer begins his and our journey deep into the meaning of what it means to be ‘Malay’ from a personal and constitutional viewpoint.

And in examining the consequence of winning the best lottery draw, the writer turns his curious mind on the arduous task of defining philosophical (Western) and spiritual (Islamic) components in the cultural dissonance within the Malay community.

Sulaiman uses history as a context to explore the evolving cultural mindset of his majority community. Readers are cautioned that those expecting knee-jerk liberal platitudes would be sorely disappointed.

In a nuanced tone, Sulaiman explores the issue of identity and culture, which shaped the Malay community throughout the decades. His conclusion that the reactionary forces within the Malay community hold sway for political and social reasons is arrived at with painstaking research and a empathic understanding of the variables at play.

A fascinating aspect of this book and perhaps unusual in a book concerning itself with religion specifically Islam, is that the author references popular culture as a means to humanise and transmit his rather philosophical questions.

An example of this would be when in the chapter on religion, in which the writer attempts to define the commonality of various religions as a means of transmitting the idea of “universality”, Sulaiman references the noted atheist polemist Richard Dawkins.

This example underscored two points. The first, is that the author is curious enough not to discard arguments which would seem anathema to his own religious viewpoint but more importantly, the second point, that the author is an example of how a Muslim is not so easily swayed from their professed religion.

Depending on your partisan bent, certain readers would be appalled by the ‘progressive’ leanings of this author. However by no means is this book a definite tome on the inner workings of the Malay mind and should not be read as such.

Reigniting a dormant discourse

This book is one in a long line of subaltern narratives that seeks to transmit the idea of a polychromatic Malay discourse that has been deliberately hidden by establishment forces seeking conformity at any cost.

What we need to understand is that the real aim of this book is to reignite a long dormant discourse that if allowed to flourish will only enrich the Malay community. There are many ideas contained in this book that could, nay, should be challenged.

What this book should evoke is not hostility but the same curiosity that the author has and willingness to articulate ideas that could lead many other Malays to join in the discourse offering different perspectives of their own.

This book is a personal journey into what it means to be Malay in the changing face of Malaysia. It is a courageous exploration of a community at odds with itself and Islam but ultimately a hopeful sensitive narrative of coming to terms with the quixotic dream of a Malaysian identity.

The profound beauty of this book is that the author stares into the mirror as a Malay and discovers a multiracial face looking back at him. In the end, what non-Malay readers should take away from this book is the idea that sensitive truths do not reside in the ‘other’ but in each of our own communities. AB Sulaiman has taken the first tentative step in reminding us of this fact.

The Messenger and the Message

April 10, 2013

‘The First Muslim,’ by Lesley Hazleton

by Hari Kunzru (04-05-13)

In today’s febrile cultural and religious climate, what project could be more fraught than writing a biography of Muhammad? The worldwide protests at “The Innocence of Muslims,” 14 minutes of trashy provocation posted on YouTube, are a terrible reminder to the would-be biographer that the life story of the prophet of Islam is not material about which one is free to have a “take.”

Lesley Hazleton’s “First Muslim” is a book written by a white woman of dual American and British citizenship, published in America more than a decade after the 9/11 attacks. For many believers it is already — even before it is read, if it is read at all — an object of suspicion, something to be defended against, in case it should turn out to be yet another insult, another cruel parody of a story such an author has no business telling.

To others, of course, this book offers a welcome chance to read that life story in a more familiar and accessible form than the Islamic sources, a window into the parallel world where it is worth killing and dying to preserve the Prophet’s aura of holiness. Bigots looking to confirm their prejudices will, by and large, find “The First Muslim” a disappointment: Hazleton approaches her subject with scrupulous respect.

She blogs as “the Accidental Theologist,” where she describes herself as “a psychologist by training, a Middle East reporter by experience, an agnostic fascinated by the vast and often terrifying arena in which politics and religion intersect.” In 2010, she gave a TED talk debunking some of the more egregious myths about the Koran, notably the salaciously Orientalist “72 virgins.” This is a writer who is working to dispel contradictions, not sharpen them.

Where does this leave the reviewer? Embroiled, unfortunately. A few days after I was assigned this book, the Darul Uloom in Deoband, a conservative Islamic seminary, called for me to be barred from speaking at this year’s Jaipur Literature Festival. At last year’s event I read an excerpt from “The Satanic Verses,” still banned in India, to protest the death threat that had forced Salman Rushdie to cancel his scheduled appearance.

I was one of four authors who gave such readings. Lawyers and festival organizers advised us to leave town (and in my case India) immediately. Seven police complaints were subsequently brought against us under Indian laws protecting religious feelings from offense. Since I have, as another Muslim group put it in their own press statement, “hurt the sentiments of the community,” some people will find my judgment of this book a priori worthless, or at least suspect. Reader, beware.

The story of Muhammad is undoubtedly extraordinary. Orphaned in childhood in Mecca, an Arabian trading hub, he rose to be the trusted business agent and later husband of Khadija, a wealthy merchant woman. This respectable citizen took to climbing into the mountains overlooking the town, where he would spend nights in solitary meditation. Eventually he received a revelation, in the form of the voice of the angel Gabriel, who began to dictate the verses of the Koran.

As the messenger of this radical new form of monotheism, he disrupted the power structure and eventually led his followers out of Mecca to nearby Medina, where he took full political control and began military operations against the rulers of his birthplace. By the time of his death, Islam had been embraced throughout the Arabian Peninsula and was spreading farther afield.

“The First Muslim” tells this story with a sort of jaunty immediacy. Bardic competitions are “the sixth-century equivalent of poetry slams.” The section of the Koran known as the Sura of the Morning has “an almost environmentalist approach to the natural world.” Theological ideas and literary tropes are “memes” that can go “viral.” Readers irritated by such straining for a contemporary tone will find it offset by much useful and fascinating context on everything from the economics of the Meccan caravan trade to the pre-Islamic lineage of prophets called hanifs, who promoted monotheism and rejected idolatry.

In the terms it sets itself, “The First Muslim” succeeds. It makes its subject vivid and immediate. It deserves to find readers. However, its terms are those of the popular biography, and this creates a tension the book never quite resolves.

Though based on scholarship, it is not a scholarly work. Factual material from eighth- and ninth-century histories is freely mixed with speculation about Muhammad’s motives and emotions intended to allow the reader, in the quasi-therapeutic vocabulary that is the default register of so much mainstream contemporary writing, to “empathize” or better still, “identify with” him. Inevitably, a forest of conditionals surrounds such speculation, as Hazleton tries to intuit what Muhammad “must have felt” or “surely would have” done.

“For an adolescent trying to cement a life from the shards of loss and displacement,” we are told, “the monotheistic idea has to have been immensely powerful.” One might equally be justified in saying that animism would have made him feel less alone. Elsewhere we are invited to appreciate “the sheer humanness” of his terrified reaction to the Koranic revelation.

Occasionally a novelistic impulse takes over, as in a passage describing a flash flood where “you” “flail and fall” and try to pick yourself up because “the roar of it is on you now.” Has Hazleton been in such a flood? Is she paraphrasing someone else’s account? This is innocent enough as an exercise in style, but it makes one uncertain about the status of more substantial passages.

Muhammad’s transition from humble messenger to political leader, and from peaceful preacher to war leader, forms the substance of the story. The factional struggles, political assassinations, night flights and pitched battles that surround it are reminiscent of the experience of another prophet, the Mormon leader Joseph Smith, as is the role of revelation in exonerating sexual impropriety — in Muhammad’s case to allay suspicions of infidelity surrounding his third wife, Aisha.

Despite the orthodox Muslim insistence that Muhammad, while possessed of human failings, is irreproachable, some of his actions are deeply troubling. Even Hazleton finds it hard to put a positive spin on the mass beheading of up to 900 surrendered men of the Jewish Qurayza tribe, losers in one round of the factional battles for control of Medina.

However accurate her book, however laudable her intention to bridge the chasm between believers and unbelievers, Hazleton still has to confront the question of the authenticity of religious revelation. Respect is not the same as belief: her interpretation of “whatever happened up there on Mount Hira” is to stress Muhammad’s “experience” of revelation while sidestepping its objective existence. In various places, she hints that the Koran and the Hadith, like other holy books, have a textual history and that certain events in the life of Muhammad are best considered tropes.

A fuller examination of these points would have been fascinating, but it would have forced her to embrace the perilous notion that the Koran, instead of being the revealed word of God, might be a text like any other. In evading such material Hazleton clearly hopes to avoid giving offense, but try as she might, she cannot escape the fact that in our time even a well-meaning and fundamentally decent book such as this can never be innocent, because it cannot stand outside our violent recent history.

Hari Kunzru’s most recent novel is “Gods Without Men.”

A version of this review appeared in print on April 7, 2013, on page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: The Messenger and the Message.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/books/review/the-first-muslim-by-lesley-hazleton.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

‘Out of Order,’ by Sandra Day O’Connor

April 1, 2013

Summary Judgment

‘Out of Order,’ by Sandra Day O’Connor

by Adam Liptak (03-29-13)

Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the Supreme Court in 2006, but she still turns up for the occasional argument, sitting off to the side in one of the seats reserved for important guests. She can look a little grim, and with reason. The court has been busy disassembling her work.

In its 2010 decision in Citizens United, for instance, the court struck down limits on political spending by corporations and unions, overturning a 2003 decision that had been one of O’Connor’s major achievements. “Gosh,” she said a few days later, “I step away for a couple of years and there’s no telling what’s going to happen.”

O’Connor is 83, but she still hears cases in the federal appeals courts. In her frequent public appearances, she talks about her service as the first woman on the Supreme Court, encourages students to learn about their government and worries about the consequences of the distinctively American practice of electing judges.

She has a lot to say. But, the provocative title of her new book notwithstanding, she is not saying it here. Instead, she has delivered a disjointed collection of anodyne anecdotes and bar-association bromides about the history of the Supreme Court. “Out of Order” is a gift shop bauble, and its title might as well refer to how disorganized and meandering it is.

This is particularly disappointing in light of the recent string of quite good books from other justices. Antonin Scalia and Stephen G. Breyer have published competing accounts of their judicial philosophies; Sonia Sotomayor a vivid and moving memoir; and John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010, a candid account of his 35 years on the court.

O’Connor says she wrote the book in response to requests from “people across the country and across the world for my ‘insider’ perspective on the court and its goings-on.” What she has given them is institutional hagiography.

The book is short and padded. The main part, only 165 pages long, is interrupted by stock photographs and curious, unexplained editorial cartoons. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are included in an appendix. They are surely worth rereading from time to time, but their main purpose here seems to be to add some bulk to a very skimpy effort.

The illustrations are particularly infuriating markers of missed opportunities. In one cartoon from 1981, the year O’Connor joined the court, the Rev. Jerry Falwell is seen on his knees, praying and crying, as she swings in what looks like one of the scales of justice. He is not mentioned in the text, and the reader is left to guess at what he is so worked up about. That he wants O’Connor to vote to strike down Roe v. Wade? (She was, as it turned out, an author of a 1992 joint opinion reaffirming its core, also not discussed in the book.)

There is, similarly, a courtroom artist’s sketch of the argument in Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision upholding affirmative action in admissions decisions at public universities. Grutter is very likely to be weakened or reversed before the end of the current term in June. But the picture just floats there, unmoored to the text, which does not mention O’Connor’s majority opinion in the case.

O’Connor is fond of the stock phrase and profligate with the exclamation point. She will tell you the same story twice. And she will recount a joke but withhold its meaning. We hear that the court works “in an atmosphere insulated as far as possible from political pressures” and then, some 60 pages later, that it works “in an atmosphere insulated, as far as possible, from political pressures.” Same phrase — but now with commas. We are told three times that Justice John Rutledge resigned from the Supreme Court in order to become Chief Justice of South Carolina.

On Page 26, Justice O’Connor lists the original members of the Supreme Court, noting that Robert Hanson Harrison “resigned soon after his confirmation as an associate justice to become chancellor of Maryland, an important judicial post.” She repeats the list on Page 52, but now “Justice Harrison resigned for health reasons before the first session even took place!”

A more careful editor would have saved the author from these fumbles. But O’Connor herself is to blame for missing the point of some of her own stories. In one, she quotes from an internal memo that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist sent to his colleagues about a draft opinion in a 1991 decision upholding a ban on nude dancing. “Accentuate the positive,” Rehnquist wrote, reciting the lyrics to a Johnny Mercer song. “Eliminate the negative / Latch on to the affirmative / Don’t mess with Mr. In Between.”

The memo demonstrated, O’Connor writes, Rehnquist’s “penchant for music.” But what it really showed, as scholars and journalists noted when the memo emerged in the papers of Justice Thurgood Marshall and as John A. Jenkins wrote in his recent biography of Rehnquist, was a lighthearted acknowledgment that the opinion could not be reconciled with First Amendment precedents.

The larger problem is not that Justice O’Connor’s little sketches and lessons are wrong. Quite the contrary. The problem is that they are empty. She writes, correctly, that “the court’s only weapon is its moral authority.” But she refuses to give this and similar sentiments substance.

In retirement, she writes, she has “taken up the cause of promoting civics education in our nation’s schools.” But civics are just a skeleton. They need the flesh of argument to come to life, to have bite, to matter.

Adam Liptak covers the Supreme Court for The Times.

A version of this review appeared in print on March 31, 2013, on page BR8 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Summary Judgment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/books/review/out-of-order-by-sandra-day-oconnor.html?ref=books&_r=0

A New Concert of Nations

March 26, 2013

In 1990, a billion people earned enough income to consider making discretionary purchases. By 2010, the figure had more than doubled.

by Tom Nagorski (03-19-13)@http://online.wsj.com

The Indian scholar Brahma Challaney recently gave a talk at the Asia Society in New York about the coming global water-supply crisis. It was a dispiriting forecast: drought and pollution, even wars over water. That same morning brought dreary news from other fronts: a fresh threat from North Korea, another atrocity in Syria, a frightening smog alert from Beijing.

Anyone feeling the weight of the world’s woes will be grateful for Kishore Mahbubani’s “The Great Convergence,” a sweeping survey that proves to be, in large measure, a counterweight to global gloom and doom. Mr. Mahbubani, Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, is under no illusions about the troubles we face, but he takes the longer view, reaching back a few decades to see an upward trend and to marvel at how far we have come.

Under Mr. Mahbubani’s lens, we see a plunge in the rates of extreme poverty and early-childhood deaths; a rise in literacy; a drop in the number of armed conflicts. “Major interstate wars,” says Mr. Mahbubani, “have become a sunset industry.” The good-news numbers are remarkable. In 1990, one billion human beings earned enough income to consider making discretionary purchases beyond mere necessity; by 2010, the figure had more than doubled. Mr. Mahbubani has lived this change. He was raised, he says, in “a typical third world city . . . [with] no flush toilets, some malnutrition, ethnic riots and, most importantly of all, no sense of hope for the future.” The city was Singapore, today an economic juggernaut with a per-capita income that outranks America’s.

Such statistics are presented as evidence of a “great convergence,” a phrase that Mr. Mahbubani first spotted in a Financial Times column by Martin Wolf, in which the columnist was describing a convergence of global interests, values and economic fortunes. Of course, nothing says “convergence” like the rush to connectivity, and while we know this story well, Mr. Mahbubani’s treatment still startles: Eleven million cellphone subscriptions, world-wide, in 1990; 5½ billion today. In 1985 the world’s fastest computer, the Cray 2, the size of a washing machine, was prohibitively expensive and required coolants to avoid overheating. Today the Cray 2′s match is the iPad 2, and it runs on 10 watts of power.

The Great Convergence

By Kishore Mahbubani
(PublicAffairs, 315 pages, $26.99)

Mr. Mahbubani is a big-picture writer and thinker, a Thomas Friedman with a strong Asian perspective, and like Mr. Friedman he is inclined toward the aphorism or analogy. When he eventually leaves his world-is-improving narrative to fret about future geopolitics, he does so with a maritime metaphor: “People no longer live in more than one hundred separate boats. Instead they all live in 193 separate cabins on the same boat. But this boat has a problem. It has 193 captains and crews, each claiming exclusive responsibility for one cabin. However, it has no captain or crew to take care of the boat as a whole.”

This passage sounds Mr. Mahbubani’s second theme: If we are gaining ground and converging in inspiring ways, we still lack an effective architecture for global governance. The need is critical, Mr. Mahbubani believes, because that metaphorical boat may soon run into an iceberg. The new arrivals in the Asian middle class, for example, will expect the trappings of success: a car, a refrigerator and so on, and our planet won’t be able to support them. For Mr. Mahbubani, the answer is some kind of global stewardship, one especially concerned with the environment, the economy and security. In short, we need a global referee.

But how to get there? Mr. Mahbubani skewers existing structures—the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the G-20—as either ineffectual or beholden to the great powers. The largest carbon emitters, to take a favorite example, have rejected global protocols (the U.S.) or signed them and pursued a “development first” strategy (China and India). It’s hard to argue with Mr. Mahbubani on that point but also hard to see how a new global architecture is possible when the great powers aren’t interested.

One great power, of course, is particularly uninterested, and in these pages Mr. Mahbubani casts the U.S. as an arrogant actor, a hegemon with no patience for multilateralism. Here his argument weakens from overreach. America’s frustration with the U.N. is not, as he argues, merely a matter of self-interest; it is also rooted in real concerns about mismanagement and certain U.N. policies.

As for Mr. Mahbubani’s charge that the U.N. acts only “when the residents of Park Avenue” (his phrase for the five permanent members of the Security Council) are affected, that just isn’t so. We have seen U.N. interventions in Somalia, Kosovo and Libya, none of which was exactly a “Park Avenue” interest.

But Mr. Mahbubani has a good idea for reforming the Security Council itself (a kind of staggered, tiers-of-influence plan), and he has good questions for Americans. Are we ready to accept being “No. 2″ on the global stage, at least by certain metrics? In fewer than five years China’s share of global income (only 2% two decades ago) will surpass that of the U.S., and yet the political discourse in America suggests an unwillingness to face that outcome, let alone plan for it. “The West will not lose power,” Mr. Mahbubani writes. “It will have to share power.”

In the end, he remains hopeful because he really believes it’s the long view that matters. If Southeast Asia—a war-torn, poverty-riven corner of the globe only a half-century ago—is today a region of peace and prosperity, then, Mr. Mahbubani believes, much else is possible. “In this rapidly changing world of ours,” he writes, “. . . miracles can happen.”

Mr. Nagorski is Executive Vice President of the Asia Society and the author of “Miracles on the Water: The Heroic Survivors of a World War II U-Boat Attack.”

A version of this article appeared March 20, 2013, on page A13 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A New Concert Of Nations.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324590904578288022370871376.html

Lee Kuan Yew, Grand Master of Asia

March 16, 2013

by Graham Allison, Robert D. Blackwill -March 1, 2013

On his desk in the Oval Office, President John F. Kennedy kept a small plaque that reminded him of the vicissitudes of life, even for the leader of the most powerful nation on earth. It read: “Oh God, my boat is so small and thy ocean so large.” In the turbulent sea in which statesmen, corporate leaders, investors, and the rest of us are trying to get our bearings in international affairs today, where can one find wise coordinates?

In thinking about the rise of China, the stumbling of the United States, the potential of India, or the claim that the twenty-first century will belong to Asia, whom should we look to for insight about this uncertain future? Among the seven billion inhabitants of planet Earth today, only one has created a modern Asian city-state whose nearly six million inhabitants now enjoy higher levels of income than Americans. Only one individual has been called “mentor” by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese leader who initiated China’s march to the market, and its new leader Xi Jinping. Only one individual has been called upon for counsel about these developments by every U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. That individual is Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore.

Over the past 18 months, we have been privileged to engage Lee Kuan Yew in a series of interviews and conversations about these issues. Having listened, reviewed what he has written and said in other settings, and then returned to follow up, we have been able to drill down in ways that capture many of his most penetrating strategic insights.

As they have embraced the magic of Adam Smith’s marketplace, Asian economies have grown at unprecedented rates. In a nation of 1.3 billion, China has raised more than 600 million people out of conditions of abject poverty and created a rapidly expanding middle class already larger than the entire population of the United States. On its current trajectory, for the first time in history, millions of individuals will experience a one-hundred-fold increase in their standard of living in a single lifetime. In Europe, that took one thousand years.

After three decades of double-digit growth, an economy that was smaller than Spain’s in 1980 now ranks second in the world and will become number one in the next decade. Do China’s leaders intend to displace the United States as the predominant power in Asia in the foreseeable future? Lee Kuan Yew answers: “Of course. Why not? Their reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.”

Will a China that has risen to become the world’s largest economy follow the path chosen by Japan and Germany, accepting its place within the postwar order created by the United States? Lee says decidedly not. “It is China’s intention to become the greatest power in the world—and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the west.”

Nevertheless, Western ideals of individuals’ basic rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have become part of the mental geography of China’s “golden billion,” who are becoming increasingly part of the world outside China.

Lee thinks this bodes well for the future of the Asia-Pacific: “peace and security in the region will turn on whether China emerges as a xenophobic, chauvinistic force, bitter and hostile to the West, or educated and involved in the ways of the world, more cosmopolitan, more internationalized and outward looking.”

Will India rival or even surpass China’s rise? The U.S. government recently asked its $50 billion intelligence community this question. Their recently released report, Global Trends 2030, forecasts that “the most rapid growth of the middle class will occur in Asia, with India somewhat ahead of China in the long term.” Lee Kuan Yew disagrees strongly.

As he puts it, provocatively: “When Nehru was in charge, I thought India showed promise of becoming a thriving society and a great power,” but it has not “because of its stifling bureaucracy” and its “rigid caste system.” Being deliberately provocative, Lee says: “India is not a real country. Instead it is thirty-two separate nations that happen to be arrayed along the British rail line.”

In the competition between East and West, he expects Asia to overshadow the Euro-Atlantic powers. The principal reasons why have more to do with culture than with numbers. In his view, “Westerners have abandoned an ethical basis for society, believing that all problems are solvable by a good government. In the East, we start with self-reliance.”

No one will agree with all of Lee’s views. No one, however, can fail to be challenged by his direct, pithy answers, or to be enlightened by his insights. For navigating in the buzzing, booming confusion of international affairs today, the strategic grand master is a source of wise coordinates.

Graham Allison is director of Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and Robert D. Blackwill is Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. They are coauthors of Lee Kuan Yew: The Grand Master’s Insights on China, the United States, and the World, published Feb. 1 by MIT Press).

http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/lee-kuan-yew-grand-master-asia-8169

Book Review: The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World by Kishore Mahbubani

March 12, 2013

by Nathan Gardels

The rise of Asia is the single most important historical development of our era. Yet, for all its now well-established might, few voices from the region have stepped forward to address what role Asia, and above all China, must play in shaping Globalization 2.0 — the interdependence of plural identities that now characterizes our world.

Grand Western strategists like Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski get the new reality, but have not yet gone so far as to envision in any specific way just how the West and China will share power in the region, let alone the world.

The Chinese scholar Yan Xuetong has mused in his book Ancient Chinese Thought, Modern Chinese Power  how interstate relations in the spring and autumn and Warring States period in pre-Qin China 2,000 years ago might be reflected today. He argues for the “power of example” over the “example of power” approach of hegemony or tyranny in the relation between states, but says little about how China, which has never been a world player but only a regional one, might take on a more central role in the extant global institutions of governance that have kept the peace and fostered prosperity since the end of World War II.

Zheng Bijian, the eminence of China’s strategic thinkers and author of the “peaceful rise” doctrine, has lately articulated the more engaging concept of “building on a convergence of interests to create a community of interests.” But his focus is really on how to beneficially guide Chinese national interest in a changing world more than on what role China should play in shaping the institutions of world order itself.

In his new book, The Great Convergence: Asia, the West and the Logic of One World, Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, at last rises to the challenge. In a way, it is no surprise that a former UN Ambassador from one of the smallest countries in Asia has the largest vision. Singapore — probably the most global state anywhere — has thrived by its wits navigating the ever-shifting rapids of globalization.

Mahbubani’s magnum opus is so far the most comprehensive and objective proposal out there to update the world institutions — the United Nations, the Bretton Woods organizations like the IMF and World Bank, the WTO — by accommodating them to the rise of the rest. Indeed, he evinces more faith in those institutions than in their Western founders who, as he acidly notes, are starting to see their own creation as a disadvantage now that power is shifting away from their control.

With characteristic Asian pragmatism, Mahbubani’s essential argument is not for the creation of new institutions that enshrine the global powershift, but rather closing the “democratic deficit” by filling up the old bottle of the West’s rule-based system with the new wine of the rising rest. For Mahbubani, the old institutions should remain, but under new management. In a departure from his trademark agitating manner, what makes Mahbubani’s proposals so provocative is their very moderation.

Indeed, by Mahbubani’s lights, the greatest paradox of the present historical moment is that the “common norms” that have made Asia successful and are the basis of “the logic of one world” have been adapted from the West. In this, the long-time apostle of non-Western modernity arrives at the mirror image conclusions of historian Niall Ferguson, the long-time champion of the virtues of Western imperialism.

Mahbubani’s “common norms” more or less overlap with Ferguson’s famous “killer apps” of modernization that Ferguson sees as becoming more robustly embraced these days in the East than the West. Neither could be further from Sam Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.

The “common norms” for Mahbubani are modern science and logical reasoning, free-market economics, a social contract that accountably binds ruler and ruled, and multilateralism. Ferguson’s six killer apps are: competition, science, property rights, modern medicine, consumer society and the work ethic.

Both avoid the loaded term “democracy” as a norm or an application. For Ferguson, “competition” would seem to encompass not only multi-party contests, but also meritocratic performance competition within one party, as in China. For Mahbubani, the West was the first to leap ahead by destroying feudalism, but democracy is not yet universally shared. In China, he nonetheless sees a kind of systemic accountability of the Party to the masses since it must “earn its legitimacy daily” through performance.

It is in this interstice that separates values from norms and apps where the rub lies. The challenge is precisely how to establish effective institutions of governance based on common interests — or even “one logic” — but not preceded by a common identity rooted in a common value system.

For Mahbubani, employing the “one logic” of common norms that we all share as an operating system is sufficient to sustain a rules-based system.This, however, implies tilting toward the geo-civilizational worldview of the East, in which incommensurate values coexist in one world with many systems. That contrasts with the stubborn geo-political worldview of the West, which sees territories and ideologies as either won or lost.

Mahbubani is not naïve. He exhaustively inventories the geopolitical stumbling blocks that can throw a wrench into his optimism (e.g. China vs. India, sea lanes between Japan and China, an Iranian nuclear detonation, etc). At the same time, his trust in the allegiance to a rules-based system in the West from whence it emanated seems to me grounded in a time warp.

Indeed, the greatest stumbling block from my point of view is how the democratization of global institutions he proposes will be frustrated by the democratic publics of the West. It’s democratization vs. democracy.

First, these publics are turning ever more inward to protect themselves from the withering gales of competition the post-WWII system has unleashed. We see this not only with the China-bashing in the U.S. We also see how difficult it is for democratic European states to make the tough reforms necessary to maintain the competitiveness required to finance their generous welfare state in the face of the double challenge of demographic demise and the rise of the rest.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has put the issue squarely: Europe is 7 percent of the world population, produces 25 percent of global product and accounts for 50 percent of social spending. That will be tough to maintain as Europe’s proportion of global production shrinks. Today, the continent is paralyzed by this prospect.

Second, and most importantly, the UN and the Bretton Woods system were put in place after World War II, when the democratic American public still trusted its elites enough to agree to delegate power to institutions that would benefit all. That trust in the “best and brightest” was shattered by the Vietnam war, trampled during the counter-culture sixties, de-legitimated during the Reagan and New Right war on government and finally laid to rest by the advent of the dis-intermediating information revolution.

If there is any flaw in this otherwise excellent volume, it is Mahbubani’s projection of East Asia’s trust in elites onto the West where their legitimacy has fatally withered.

Finally, as Mahbubani readily acknowledges, the Pax Americana period of a rules-based international system that provided global public goods also served U.S. interests. But, as former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer has said in the European context, where values and identity much more closely coincide than, say, between China and the U.S., “it was believed that formalized rules would be enough” to contain the imbalances within the Eurozone without a full fiscal and political union. “But this foundation of rules turned out to be an illusion: principles always need the support of power or they cannot stand the test of reality.”

Even if the old rule-based system invented by the West ought to maintain, it cannot do so without the full engagement of China and the United States. No reorganization of the UN or the IMF or WTO will matter if these two powers don’t buy in. Given the weakness of elites in the U.S., this suggests that China — while its Communist Party autocracy is still invested with legitimacy and the broad allegiance of its public — needs to drive any new embrace of the global rules-based system in a way that provides common public goods for all.

Clearly, China’s leaders need to get ready for prime time. America, which can’t even decide at home how much government it wants and is willing to pay for, is in no position to take the lead in shaping a new world order that accommodates the interests of new players on the block. American democracy hasn’t even managed to rein in the “too big to fail” financial firms that instigated the global crisis in 2008-2009. They are bigger now than before. We can’t even agree to ban assault weapons on our own turf, no less achieve non-proliferation globally.

The danger is that this moment could be a repeat of 1914 — when a system of shaky alliances with waning and waxing powers jockeying for advantage was tripped into world war by a small event. The hope, which Mahbubani so optimistically and thoroughly sketches out in his vision, is that the immediate period ahead can be like the early 1950s when enduring institutions that kept the peace and promoted prosperity to the benefit of all were constructed.

A world adrift desperately needs global thinkers, most of all from Asia. Kishore Mahbubani fits the bill with this signal work at this critical time. The kind of robust institutions he calls for in his book are all that will stand between us and 1914 all over again. Let’s pray his optimism is justified.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-gardels/can-asia-step-up-to-remak_b_2424670.html

Book Review: Sandra Day O’Connor’s ‘Out of Order’

March 8, 2013

Books of The Times

Bumpy Start for a Court Cloaked in Grandeur

Sandra Day O’Connor’s ‘Out of Order’

by Michiko Kakutani (March 4, 2013)

Sandra Day O’Connor or, as she likes to call herself, the Fwotsc — the First Woman on the Supreme Court — is the author of one wonderful book: “Lazy B,” an evocative memoir about growing up among “old-time, long-suffering, good-natured cowboys” on a cattle ranch on the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Written with her brother, H. Alan Day, that book not only did a magical job of conjuring an isolated and now vanishing world of big skies and wide-open plains, but it also underscored how the frontier values of her childhood — self-reliance, competence and dependability — shaped her pragmatic judicial philosophy.

Her next book, “The Majesty of the Law,” a collection of speeches and essays on legal history, was drier and less revealing, although it contained some interesting musings on women and the law.

Her latest, “Out of Order,” is even more of a hodgepodge: a look at the history of the Supreme Court; portraits of famous justices, including Oliver Wendell Holmes and William O. Douglas; and a bunch of asides about things like humor on the court. (A law professor’s 2005 study of “laughter episodes instigated,” she notes, suggested that Antonin Scalia was the funniest justice, with Stephen Breyer coming in a faraway second.)

There are no big revelations in this volume about Bush v. Gore or the author’s thoughts on Roe v. Wade; nor are there momentous insights into the dynamics between Justice O’Connor and her colleagues on the bench, or how she felt about being the crucial swing justice, whom the legal writer Jeffrey Rosen once called “the most powerful woman in America.”

Her moving remarks about Thurgood Marshall here echo some she made in “The Majesty of the Law,” and other observations walk in the footsteps of ones she has made in the past as well.

The reason to read “Out of Order” is to get Justice O’Connor’s succinct, snappy account of how today’s court — so powerful, so controversial and so frequently dissected by the media — evolved from such startlingly humble and uncertain beginnings that it initially seemed like a jerry-built enterprise constructed on entirely ad hoc principles.

Justice O’Connor writes that in its early years, the court “had no home, little money, and virtually no cases” — “it is a wonder it survived at all!” Indeed many aspects of the court were “shaped and developed little by little, year by year, person by person.” After all, Article III of the Constitution, which vested the “judicial Power of the United States” in “one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish,” left Congress with an awful lot of blanks to fill in.

John Jay, nominated by George Washington to be the first Chief Justice of the new court, resigned the post after six years to become Governor of New York and spurned John Adams’s efforts to return him to the court, citing health problems and what he called the court’s lack of “energy, weight and dignity.” In his opinion, Justice O’Connor writes, “the Supreme Court would never amount to much.”

Early court records, she goes on, “were rife with textual errors, corrections and revisions” — not least because the clerk’s and reporter’s offices were a far cry from the professional operations they are today. Written opinions, she says, were not required until 1834, during President Andrew Jackson’s administration.

For almost a century and a half, the court lacked a permanent home and led a nomadic existence, moving from the Merchants Exchange Building in New York to what is now known as Independence Hall in Philadelphia and later to the Capitol Building in Washington before settling, in 1935, into the magisterial marble edifice designed by the architect Cass Gilbert that it now occupies.

To complicate matters further, Justice O’Connor points out, for much of the court’s first century, the justices also had to serve as roving trial judges in the lower federal courts, traveling thousands of miles a year around the country (and this was before airplanes) to preside over trials and intermediate appeals. It took some justices six months a year, she reports, to complete their circuits — which meant six months a year away from their families, trundling from town to town over rough roads by horse and carriage and staying in taverns along the way, where “they were sometimes forced to share rooms with unsavory characters.”

Many other aspects of the court have also changed over the years, including the style of oral argument that lawyers have employed there. Justice O’Connor observes that the classical allusions and emotional appeals of a Daniel Webster (who compared the plight of Dartmouth College to that of Julius Caesar, surrounded “by those who are reiterating stab upon stab”) gradually gave way to the more concise, almost conversational style of Thurgood Marshall and his “understated method of answering questions with succinct answers,” which would prove to be “the path of the future.”

As for the vociferous debates over recent cases (like Bush v. Gore, perhaps, or Citizens United), Justice O’Connor suggests that they pale next to earlier events in the history of our judicial system. For instance, the Judiciary Act of 1801 (passed in the final days of John Adams’s administration) was denounced by Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans as a Federalist scheme to pack the new circuit courts with Federalist appointments; and after the inauguration of Jefferson and a Republican-majority Congress, the act was repealed.

“In one stroke, the Republicans had dismissed 16 sitting federal judges, all of them appointed by the opposing party,” she writes. “Can you imagine the scandal? I don’t think anything in modern history even comes close. But the Republicans’ next move was even more brazen. To prevent the Supreme Court from striking down the Repeal Act as unconstitutional, Congress simply canceled the Court’s next Term!”

How else has the court changed in recent years? Justice O’Connor says it’s “highly unlikely” that a President today “would nominate a federal jurist who had no law degree and no experience as a lawyer or judge.”

And, she adds toward the end of this slender volume, you can “safely predict” that Byron White (chosen by President John F. Kennedy) will be the last Supreme Court justice “to ever lead the N.F.L. in rushing in a rookie season.”

A version of this review appeared in print on March 5, 2013, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bumpy Start For a Court Cloaked In Grandeur. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/05/books/sandra-day-oconnors-out-of-order.html?ref=books&_r=0

‘Wise Men’ by Stuart Nadler

March 2, 2013

Here is something light  and entertaining, yet philosophical about life. We all have our moments, both good and bad, except that some of us do not learn the lessons of life. We keep talking and blabbering to the Kingdom come in self justification, pouring out invented stories and revising history to fit our version of reality. I can only quote my favourite Black novelist James Baldwin of the Civil Rights era here for those who continue to remain in that mode (with apologies to Minister Rais Yatim): “People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction”.–Din Merican

Books of The Times (www.nytimes.com)

One Summer and One Girl Will Define Him Throughout His Lifetime

‘Wise Men’ by Stuart Nadler

by Janet Maslin (02-24-13)

The title, setting and central romance of Stuart Nadler’s “Wise Men” are whoppingly bland. The novel is about two men, a father and son, whose surname is Wise. Its main setting is a pokey but fabulous seaside compound on Cape Cod. And at first it seems to be about That Summer, the time when a shy boy develops a hopeless crush on some unattainable woman and seems unlikely ever to get over her. Lots of gooey romances fit this description.

But Mr. Nadler’s version travels a long way from those inauspicious beginnings. And it gains strength as the story stretches over both Wise men’s lifetimes and fills them with resonant complications. It becomes a bigger, more surprising book than it initially seems to be.

“Wise Men” begins in 1947, with a plane crash that transforms Arthur Wise, a small-time litigator, into the nation’s most famous ambulance chaser. Arthur figures out a way to profit enormously from class-action lawsuits, specializes in air disaster and makes himself the terror of the aviation industry. He becomes enormously rich and isn’t shy about flaunting it. By the time Arthur buys a sizable chunk of Cape Cod coastline and settles his family there, his only child, 17-year-old Hilly, is mortified by his father’s showboating.

Hilly (born Hilton) narrates the book and recalls every little wince he experienced when the family moved to its grand new world. A lot of his mortification involves Lem Dawson, a black caretaker who lived there before the Wise guys took over.

“The sellers threw in their boy,” says Arthur, whose casual racism is only one of his cringe-worthy attributes. As Hilly becomes increasingly fascinated by Lem, his problems with his father get worse. That may be exactly what Hilly wants, but he’s too young to know it.

When Lem is visited by another black man and a young woman in a beat-up old Packard, Arthur berates him with typical crudeness. (“You call the whole goddamned N.A.A.C.P. over for a clambake?”) That’s not the only reason Hilly falls for Savannah, the girl in the car, who turns out to be Lem’s niece. But Mr. Nadler leaves it to his readers to guess what role Arthur’s bigotry plays in such a forbidden attraction. In any case, Hilly falls into a swoon over a girl he barely gets to know. He will yearn for Savannah for most of his life.

Even as Mr. Nadler sears That Summer into Hilly’s mind with an episode of terrible cruelty, “Wise Men” retains its early formulaic feel. It’s only after the book leaps forward two decades that its scope and impact can start being felt. At 38 Hilly has grown up to be a Boston newspaper reporter specializing in racial strife. The year is 1972, and he needn’t leave Boston in search of material.

Still, he travels to Iowa to follow up on a small news item he’s spotted. He thinks it may have something to do with Savannah. For reasons that remain intriguing because they’re so unexplored (by Hilly, garrulous as he is) and so understated (by Mr. Nadler, more subtly than might be expected), he remains determined to find her.

There are good reasons to bridle at such sentimentality. But Mr. Nadler counters them well. Hilly’s narrative voice ages so credibly that this book’s final pages really do sound as if they come from a much older and wiser man. (Eventually “Wise” makes a decent double entendre.) And Hilly’s sheer irrationality makes him much more interesting than he first seemed. He seeks a life he can never have and can’t stand the family he was born into.

Arthur craves his son and heir; Hilly refuses to be bought. To the chagrin of his girlfriend, Jenny, he won’t take a dime; if their roof leaks, tough luck. He hates the money, and he hates his father’s ruthlessness, which remains undimmed even when Arthur is in his 90s.

Mr. Nadler is also the author of “The Book of Life,” a short story collection. There are times when “Wise Men” feels like an interlocking series of stories, smoothly linked and anthologized. The description of Savannah’s father, a gambler and onetime baseball player, is expertly wrought, but it’s a tangential part of this big, rambling novel.

Each encounter between Hilly and Savannah exists in a world of its own. Arthur’s arrogant rich-guy antics are a whole other tale, as is the complicated relationship between Arthur and his only partner, a much quieter lawyer who moved to the Cape enclave with the Wises and stays there for the rest of his life. And Hilly’s life as a father and grandfather is touchingly different from his life as a lovestruck teenage boy.

As he grows up on the page, Hilly likes to overexplain himself to the reader. “Time does that,” he says, as an older man looking backward; “it kills the mystique, replaces the boundlessness of wishing and hoping with some well-earned, necessary clarity.” Talk kills mystique too, and by some lights “Wise Men” talks too much about too little. But in taking a long view of his characters’ lives, and following them so closely, Mr. Nadler finally gives them what they’ve lacked: staying power.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/books/wise-men-by-stuart-nadler.html?ref=books

A version of this review appeared in print on February 25, 2013, on page C9 of the New York edition with the headline: One Summer and One Girl Will Define Him Throughout His Lifetime.

NY Times Sunday Book Review: “Ike and Dick” By Jeffrey Frank

February 17, 2013

The Odd Couple

‘Ike and Dick,’ by Jeffrey Frank

by Joe Scarborough,  February 15, 2013

It may be the closest of political relationships, but it rarely ends well. Vice President Thomas Jefferson challenged President John Adams for the top spot in the vicious campaign of 1800. President Andrew Jackson mused sardonically about executing Vice President John C. Calhoun.

In the modern era, Lyndon Johnson seethed at slights real and perceived during John Kennedy’s thousand days, then turned around and humiliated his own vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Even Dick Cheney and George W. Bush fell out by the end of their tumultuous terms. But perhaps the most intriguing — and dysfunctional — political marriage in history was the one between the subjects of Jeffrey Frank’s meticulously researched “Ike and Dick.”

Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president memorably said that being No. 2 was in effect not worth a bucket of warm spit. Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president may have considered that assessment overly generous after spending eight years under the heel of a war hero whose sunny smile hid the soul of a cold, calculating politician. Frank, a former editor at both The New Yorker and The Washington Post, examines how Ike’s cool nature and detached management style left Richard Nixon insecure and embittered through the remainder of his political career.

“Ike and Dick” is a highly engrossing political narrative that skillfully takes the reader through the twisted development of a strange relationship that would help shape America’s foreign and domestic agenda for much of the 20th century. The two men’s political paths first crossed in 1952 after Eisenhower’s advisers listed Nixon as a potential running mate. (When later asked to explain the pick, Eisenhower would say dismissively, “He was on the list.”) But once his choice was made, Ike found himself tied to a political brawler whose aggressiveness on the campaign trail embarrassed him even when he benefited from those rough-and-tumble tactics.

Eisenhower, whose legacy was assured by the victory in World War II, harbored a quiet disdain for ambitious politicians like Nixon, preferring instead the company of a coterie of self-made, accomplished and influential business leaders. Throughout his public life, Ike was not simply a member of the club — he was the club, whether on the course at Augusta National or playing bridge at Camp David with the most powerful men in the country. The resentful Nixon, by contrast, was in constant battle with an East Coast establishment that would never fully accept him. But as “Ike and Dick” vividly shows, nothing written in a New York Times editorial or caricatured in a Herblock cartoon could sting Nixon like the rejection he faced repeatedly from his own boss.

During the 1952 presidential campaign, after the press reported on a secret Nixon fund, Eisenhower had the New York governor Thomas Dewey deliver the news that he wanted his running mate off the ticket. Nixon later said the episode “left a deep scar which was never to heal completely.” Four years later, Ike once again considered dumping Nixon, and once again the vice president survived the near-death political experience, but he called it “another period of agonizing indecision.” The deepest wound inflicted by Eisenhower, however, came in the middle of Nixon’s own tough 1960 campaign against Kennedy, when the aging president was asked to name one policy position taken over eight years that Nixon had influenced. “If you give me a week, I might think of one,” was Ike’s cold response.

Those betrayals left a lasting mark. Frank writes, “Nixon could never be sure what Eisenhower really thought of him, but it never ceased to matter, and his restive pursuit of Ike’s good opinion remained one of the few constants in an extraordinary life.” Like Lyndon Johnson’s after him, much of Nixon’s pathos sprang from his painful contemplation of his boss’s public slights.

“Ike and Dick” begins on the day General Eisenhower arrived in Manhattan for a ticker-tape parade celebrating his leadership in the victory against Hitler’s Germany — and with a young Navy Lieutenant Commander Nixon straining to get a better look at the great general through 30 stories of confetti. The book ends a ­quarter-century later inside Nixon’s own Oval Office, with the president bitterly sobbing at the news of Ike’s death, knowing that the acceptance he always craved would never come. Nixon eventually created his own mythic deathbed scene, in which the dying general slowly lifted his right hand in final salute to his able No. 2.

Through it all, Nixon tempered his burning ambition. He remained the loyal soldier in a continuing attempt to prove his worth, while seeking Eisenhower’s trust and confidence through persistent public demonstrations of his subordinate position. In the process, he redefined the office of vice president for the modern era.

A fascinating subplot in Frank’s story details Nixon’s role in pushing the administration on the issue of civil rights. Long criticized as the author of the Republican Party’s racially tinged “Southern strategy,” Nixon is shown by Frank to be a determined advocate for the Civil Rights Act of 1957, as well as a trusted ally of Martin Luther King Jr. and Jackie Robinson. Robinson wrote to Nixon after passage of the bill, stating, “I and many others will never forget the fight you made and what you stand for.” King was even more effusive, saying how “deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the civil rights bill a reality.”

Nixon’s support of King’s cause angered Southern conservatives and further distanced the vice president from his disapproving president. He would even be attacked by Lyndon Johnson, then the Senate majority leader, for heading a “concerted propaganda campaign” in support of a stronger voting rights bill. Despite this abuse, Nixon argued that Republicans should remain the party of Lincoln on civil rights. Because Eisenhower disagreed, Republicans ceded the issue to a converted Johnson and the Democratic Party, losing the African-American vote for at least the next 50 years.

After Eisenhower’s presidency — in the period Nixon referred to as his “wilderness years” — Ike began to show a more personal interest in Nixon. Having taken a well-paid position at a prestigious Wall Street law firm, Nixon had temporarily become the kind of man Eisenhower was always drawn to — a wealthy member of the establishment. But to the end, the legendary war hero from Kansas remained little more than a distant figure to his vice president, who always wanted to believe that he had more value to Ike than simply being “on the list.”

Joe Scarborough is the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

A version of this review appeared in print on February 17, 2013, on page BR1 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Lives of the Party.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/17/books/review/ike-and-dick-by-jeffrey-frank.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

Book Review: ‘Engineers of Victory,’ by Paul Kennedy

February 9, 2013

War Machines

‘Engineers of Victory,’ by Paul Kennedy

By Michael Beschloss
Published: February 8, 2013

The historian Daniel Boorstin once complained to me about the Smithsonian Institution’s decision in 1980 to delete the final two words from the name of its Museum of History and Technology. Boorstin had a point.

Scholars of other fields do often tend to underestimate the influence of technology. Although most of us know that World War II brought us radar, the literature of that titanic conflict is by no means exempt from this phenomenon. For instance, the biographer Joseph P. Lash subtitled his 1976 wartime account of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill “The Partnership That Saved the West,” in response to which I once heard a British scholar carp, “If Lash is right, then why did all those scientists and intelligence officers and factory workers bother working so hard?”

With this fresh and discursive new work, the Yale historian Paul Kennedy, best known for his widely debated “Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” published in 1987, calls attention to the way “small groups of individuals and institutions” surmounted seemingly insuperable operational obstacles to enable Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill and Stalin ultimately to grasp the laurels for an Allied triumph.

“Engineers of Victory” achieves the difficult task of being a consistently original book about one of the most relentlessly examined episodes in human history. Unlike most studies of the war, this one is not primarily about politics, generalship or battlefield glories. References to the Big Three are few. Instead, like an engineer who pries open a pocket watch to reveal its inner mechanics, Kennedy tells how ­little-known men and women at lower ­levels helped win the war.

Kennedy concentrates mainly on the European theater and on Allied progress during the period from early 1943, when Hitler’s Admiral Doenitz sank 108 Allied vessels in a single month, provoking fears that England would be starved of essential bunker fuel, to the almost fantastic summer of 1944, when British and American troops scrambled onto Festung Europa. By Kennedy’s telling, a number of concurrent accomplishments spelled the difference between victory and, if not defeat, then, at least, a struggle that might have dragged on past 1945, with countless additional casualties.

The first was ensuring that Allied convoys could cross the Atlantic without being sunk by Germans. As Kennedy acknowledges, this was the first war in which sea power’s success was decided by air power, so part of the solution was cranking out airplanes (especially long-range bombers). But vital too were innovations like the Hedgehog, a forward-firing ship-­mounted mortar (devised by an idiosyncratic British unit called “Wheezers and Dodgers”), and the Leigh Light, which exposed German U-boats that were surfacing at night to recharge batteries so that British bombers could do their deadly work. In contrast with the cadre of popular and scholarly authors who since the 1970s have written, often breathlessly, about glamorous code breakers, Kennedy is skeptical of Bletchley Park’s importance, because the intelligence operation known as Ultra “could do only so much.”

Command of the air over Germany was seized only when American squadrons arrived to augment the Royal Air Force, upend the existing British doctrine of restricting attacks to nighttime and demand pinpoint bombing of specifically identified German military and industrial targets. The zenith of Allied accomplishment in the air, of course, was D-Day 1944, when a previously unimaginable 11,590 planes were sent aloft. “There had been nothing like it in world history,”

Kennedy writes, “nor has there been since. . . . There was no chance for the completely diminished Luftwaffe to do anything except lose more and more of its planes and pilots whenever they rose into the air.” Kennedy goes on to describe how the Allies stopped the ferocious blitzkrieg assaults of 1939 to 1942 by deploying “stronger, tougher and better-equipped forces (with panzers, bazookas, mines, better tactical aircraft)” in concert with the western thrust of the Soviet Army, aided by their T-34-85, which Kennedy calls the “most all-round battle tank” of the war.

Victory in Europe before the summer of 1945 also required the Allies to make hasty progress in perfecting the art of amphibious warfare. After World War I, Kennedy notes, with “a badly defeated and much-­reduced Germany, in a badly damaged and scarcely victorious France and Italy, and in an infant Soviet Union, there were many thoughts of war, but none of them involved the projection of force across the oceans.” The disheartening debacle of the one-day Allied trial effort in August 1942 to breach the Atlantic Wall with a raid against the modest German garrison at Dieppe, France, provided crucial lessons that led directly to the world-­important success on D-Day two years later.

Kennedy shows how wise the Allies were to restrain themselves from invading France until their commanders and troops had gained more experience in amphibious landings and until control of the Atlantic had been secured. He insists that D-Day could have been a rout but for the fact that by mid-1944, British, American and Canadian warriors — from the top down — had transformed their organization into a smoothly functioning apparatus, refined their means of gathering intelligence and designed the now-­famous “bodyguard of lies” that misled the Nazis about when and how the Allies would invade Europe.

Succinctly covering the Pacific theater, Kennedy illuminates some of the main tools that enabled United States forces to make their slow progress across the ocean in order to bomb Japan — new fast carrier groups, new fighters like the F6F and bombers like the B-29, as well as the American submarine service and the 325,000 enlisted members of the Navy’s construction battalions, the “Seabees,” which by the end of the war had erected $10 billion worth of military infrastructure around the world.

While Kennedy rightly elevates the importance of technology and those much-too-­unheralded bands of Allied innovators, on a grander scale he fully appreciates that “the winning of great wars always requires superior organization,” which “will allow outsiders to feed fresh ideas into the pursuit of victory.”

An ingredient badly missing from the centralized systems of imperial Japan and Nazi Germany was the willingness, demonstrated again and again by top Anglo-American military and political leaders, to share power with those of more modest rank who had greater expertise in tackling a particular problem and who were closer to the action. Kennedy notes that even the dictatorial Stalin “began to relax his iron grasp once he understood that he had a team of first-class generals working for him.”

Although occasionally prolix and repetitive, Kennedy’s volume is an important contribution to our understanding of World War II, and it sets a high standard for historians writing about other conflicts by reminding us to keep a close eye on technology. The curious reader may well finish this book and wish that scholars would pay more attention to how much American setbacks in lesser wars like Korea and Vietnam might have been influenced by gaps in our technological mastery.

Michael Beschloss, the author, most recently, of “Presidential Courage,” is writing a history of American presidential leadership in wartime.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/books/review/engineers-of-victory-by-paul-kennedy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=books

A version of this review appeared in print on February 10, 2013, on page BR15 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: War Machines.

On Azharudin M Dali’s Sejarah Masyarakat India di Malaysia

February 8, 2013

Commentary on Azharudin M Dali’s Sejarah Masyarakat India di Malaysia

by Dr. Ranjit Singh Malhi (received via e-mail)

The Malaysian Sikh Community has the distinction of being a progressive and dynamic community which within one generation was transformed from predominantly being one of policemen, bullock carters, watchmen, dairymen and mining labourers into doctors, lawyers, teachers and other professionals. The Sikhs, proportionately, have perhaps the largest number of professionals compared to any other group in Malaysia.

Unfortunately, the history of the Sikhs in Malaysia is yet to be fully written and has received scant academic attention to date. In this regard, the latest book by Dr. Azharudin Mohamed Dali of the University of Malaya entitled Sejarah Masyarakat India di Malaysia with one entire chapter on the Sikh Community is greatly welcomed.

I am currently completing a book pertaining to the social, economic and political history of the Sikhs in Malaysia. Allow me to share with your readers numerous factual errors pertaining to the Malaysian Sikh Community in Dr. Azharudin’s book as shown in the table below to avoid them being repeated in subsequent writings. To be fair, two of the factual errors can be traced to the sources cited by Dr. Azharudin.

 

	Errors	Facts (Authoritative Sources)
1.	Date the Order of the Khalsa was instituted     (pg. 110)  – 1619	1699
2.	Date Khalsa Diwan Malaya was established  (pg. 113)  – 1902	27 December 1903
3.	Sikhs have not objected to being referred to as “Bengalis” (pg. 14)	In April 2008, Sikhs objected strongly when Perak’s Menteri Besar, Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin wrongly referred to the Sikhs as “Bengalis”
4.	There was only one Sikh organization in Malaya  in 1917 (pg. 112)	There were at least five Sikh organizations in Malaya in 1917: Khalsa Diwan Malaya, Sri Guru Singh Sabha Ipoh,  Sri Guru Singh Sabha Pusing, Sri Guru Singh Sabha Larut and Sri Guru Singh Sabha Central Workshops (Sentul)
5.	Name of Sikh organization formed in 1926     (pg. 112)  -  Malaya Khalsa Diwan	Guru Khalsa Diwan Malaya
6.	Date Sikh commercial immigrants arrived in Malaya in significant numbers (pg. 106)            -  early twentieth century	Late 1920s
7.	Name of second MIC President  (pg. 111)           -  Bodh Singh	Budh Singh
8.	Khalsa Diwan Malaya of Selangor was formed in May 1918 (pg. 113)	Khalsa Diwan Malaya of Selangor was registered in January 1918
9.	Wir Singh was in Singapore until December 1915 before leaving for Penang and Perlis               (pg. 120)	Wir Singh was in Perlis in January 1915 and when Jagat Singh was arrested in May 1915, he fled to Sumatra to continue his anti-British activities
10.	Date Komagata Maru (ship) arrived in Vancouver  (pg. 119) – 21 May 1914	23 May 1914

Additionally, Dr. Azharudin gives the erroneous impression that the Sikhs of the Malay States Guides (MSG) stationed at Singapore played a major role in the Singapore Mutiny of February 1915. The hard truth is that the 1915 Mutiny was a rebellion against the British started and conducted almost entirely by one half of the 5th Light Infantry regiment (Muslim Rajputs) of the British Indian Army stationed at Singapore. The ringleaders of the mutiny – Subedar Dunde Khan, Jemedar Chisti Khan and Havildar Imtiaz Ali – and Sepoy Ismail Khan who fired the first shot of the mutiny were all men of the 5th Light Infantry.

 Only eleven (7 Sikhs and four Muslims) out of about 97 men of the MSG (Mountain Battery) stationed at Singapore were charged and convicted of complicity in the mutiny. The seven Sikhs were found in Tiong Bahru where shooting had taken place in the vicinity and two of their rifles having been recently fired. Six of the Sikhs were sentenced to nine months and the seventh sentenced to eleven months of imprisonment.

According to Dr. T. R. Sareen in his book, Secret Documents on Singapore Mutiny 1915, the seven Sikhs were sentenced to imprisonment under very flimsy circumstantial evidence. Both the rifles confirmed to have been fired were not used by the Sikhs against any British officers or troops loyal to them. It is highly likely that these rifles were thrust upon the Sikhs by the native officers of the 5th Light Infantry when the rebellion broke out. The four other Guides (non-Sikhs) were sentenced to imprisonment terms of between one and a half to two years “without hard labour” for being absent from their camp for three days and having arms in their possession, a few of which belonged to the 5th Light Infantry.

There was no evidence at all that the Mountain Battery of the MSG had participated in the outrages committed by the 5th Light Infantry. When the mutiny broke out, most of the Guides ran away to Singapore town and some surrendered themselves at the Central Police Station.

Later evidence revealed that some men of the MSG were intimidated to join the mutineers and that two Sikhs of the Mountain Battery of the MSG removed the breechblocks of two artillery guns and buried them in the ground. Both guns were later recovered after the mutiny.

The role of the MSG in the 1915 Mutiny has been aptly summarized by Dr. T. R. Sareen as follows:  “… there is no shred of evidence to connect the individuals (of MSG) with any of the outrages or with various detachments of mutineers … their conduct though lacking in initiative, was perhaps justifiable.”

To sum up, out of the 202 men tried by court-martial for their involvement in the 1915 Mutiny, only 11 belonged to the MSG and all of the 47 insurgents sentenced to death and executed were men of the 5th Light Infantry.

 

 

 

 

RIP, Barry Wain

February 5, 2013

http://asiasentinel.com

Veteran Journalist and Editor dies in Singapore

by Asia Sentinel

Barry Wain, who died Tuesday in a Singapore hospital, was one of the finest, most dedicated foreign journalists to have worked in Asia, with a career in the region spanning more than forty years. His last major published work, Malaysian Maverick, a biography of Mahathir Mohamad, is ample testimony to his combination of in-depth research, fair judgment and willingness to confront his subject with some unpalatable truths.

Barry, an Australian from Brisbane, worked for The Australian in Canberra before moving to Hong Kong where he worked on a local newspaper and then on the desk of the Far Eastern Economic Review. He joined the Asian Wall Street Journal when it was established in 1976 and was soon posted as its correspondent in Kuala Lumpur and to Bangkok in the early 1980s. During his time there he wrote, The Refused, a book about the plight of Vietnamese refugees. He later moved back to Hong Kong as Managing Editor of the Journal and subsequently became a roving correspondent and columnist focusing on Southeast Asia.

For the past several years he has been a scholar at the Institute for South East Asian Studies in Singapore. His position as writer in residence enabled him to undertake the research for his book on Mahathir  a work widely praised as the only balanced account of the career of one of Asia’s leading and controversial political figures.

Barry was a fine tennis player as well as an amiable colleague who kept trim and fit. His death followed months of complications from what was supposed to be a routine operation earlier last year.

He is survived by his wife Yvonne and son David. He will be missed by his many former colleagues and by the readers who learned so much from his dedication as a journalist who combined hard work with high principles.

Read Asia Sentinel’s review of Barry’s last book: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times

Book Review: Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times

Written by John Berthelsen

Friday, 04 December 2009

by Barry Wain. Palgrave Macmillan, 363pp. Available through Amazon, US$60.75. Available for Pre-order, to be released Jan 5.In 1984 or 1985, when I was an Asian Wall Street Journal correspondent in Malaysia, an acquaintance called me and said he had seen a US Army 2-1/2 ton truck, known as a “deuce-and-a-half,” filled with US military personnel in jungle gear on a back road outside of Kuala Lumpur. Since Malaysia and the United States were hardly close friends at that point, I immediately went to the US Embassy in KL and asked what the US soldiers were doing there. I received blank stares. Similar requests to the Malaysian Ministry of Defense brought the same response. After a few days of chasing the story, I concluded that my acquaintance must have been seeing things and dropped it. It turns out he wasn’t seeing things after all. In a new book, “Malaysian Maverick: Mahathir Mohamad in Turbulent Times,” launched Dec. 4 in Asia, former Asian Wall Street Journal editor Barry Wain solved the mystery. In 1984, during a visit to Washington DC in which Mahathir met President Ronald Reagan, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and others, he secretly launched an innocuous sounding Bilateral Training and Consultation Treaty, which Wain described as a series of working groups for exercises, intelligence sharing, logistical support and general security issues. In the meantime, Mahathir continued display a public antipathy on general principles at the Americans while his jungle was crawling with US troops quietly training for jungle warfare. That ability to work both sides of the street was a Mahathir characteristic. In his foreword, Wain, in what is hoped to be a definitive history of the former prime minister’s life and career, writes that “while [Mahathir] has been a public figure in Malaysia for half a century and well known abroad for almost as long, he has presented himself as a bundle of contradictions: a Malay champion who was the Malays’ fiercest critic and an ally of Chinese-Malaysian businessmen; a tireless campaigner against Western economic domination who assiduously courted American and European capitalists; a blunt, combative individual who extolled the virtues of consensual Asian values.” Wain was granted access to the former premier for a series of exhaustive interviews. It may well be the most definitive picture painted of Mahathir to date, and certainly is even-handed. Wain, now a writer in residence at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, is by no means a Mahathir sycophant. Advance publicity for the book has dwelt on an assertion by Wain that Mahathir may well have wasted or burned up as much as RM100 billion (US$40 billion at earlier exchange rates when the projects were active) on grandiose projects and the corruption that the projects engendered as he sought to turn Malaysia into an industrialized state. Although some in Malaysia have said the figure is too high, it seems about accurate, considering such ill-advised projects as a national car, the Proton, which still continues to bleed money and cost vastly more in opportunity costs for Malaysian citizens forced to buy any other make at huge markups behind tariff walls. In addition, while Thailand in particular became a regional center for car manufacture and for spares, Malaysia, handicapped by its national car policy, was left out. Almost at the start of the book, Wain encapsulates the former Premier so well that it bears repeating here: Mahathir, he writes, “had an all-consuming desire to turn Malaysia into a modern, industrialized nation commanding worldwide respect. Dr Mahathir’s decision to direct the ruling party into business in a major way while the government practiced affirmative action, changed the nature of the party and accelerated the spread of corruption. One manifestation was the eruption of successive financial scandals, massive by any standards, which nevertheless left Dr Mahathir unfazed and unapologetic.” That pretty much was the story of Malaysia for the 22 years that Mahathir was in charge. There is no evidence that Mahathir himself was ever involved in corruption. Once, as Ferdinand Marcos was losing his grip on the Philippines, Mahathir pointed out to a group of reporters that he was conveyed around in a long black Daimler – the same model as the British ambassador used – that the Istana where he lived was a huge mansion, that he had everything he needed. Why, he asked, was there any need to take money from corruption? Nonetheless, in his drive to foster a Malay entrepreneurial class, he allowed those around him to pillage the national treasury almost at will, which carried over into UMNO after he had left office and which blights the country to this day. Wain follows intricate trails through much of this, ranging from the attempt, okayed by Mahathir, to attempt to rescue Bumiputra Malaysia Finance in the early 1980s which turned into what at the time was the world’s biggest banking scandal. In the final analysis, much as Lee Kuan Yew down the road in Singapore strove to create a nation in his own image and largely succeeded, so did Mahathir. Both nations are flawed – Singapore in its mixture of technological and social prowess and draconian ruthlessness against an independent press or opposition, Malaysia with its iconic twin towers and its other attributes colored by a deepening culture of corruption that has continued well beyond his reign, which ended in 2003. Mahathir must bear the blame for much of this, in particular his destruction of an independent judiciary, as Wain writes, to further his aims. Mahathir, as the former Premier said in the conversation over his mansion and his car, had everything including, one suspects, a fully-developed sense of injustice. He appears to this day to continue to resent much of the west, particularly the British. Wain writes exhaustively of Mahathir’s deep antagonism over both British elitism during the colonial days and the disdain of his fellow Malays (Mahathir’s parentage is partly Indian Muslim on his father’s side), especially the Malay royalty. That antagonism against the British has been a hallmark of his career – from the time he instituted the “Buy British Last” policy for the Malaysian government as prime minister to the present day. Robert Mugabe, in disgrace across much of the world for the way his policies have destroyed what was one of the richest countries in Africa, remains in Mahathir’s good graces. Asked recently why that was, an aide told me Mugabe had driven the British out of Zimbabwe and was continuing to drive out white farmers to this day, although he was replacing them with people who knew nothing of farming. That expropriation of vast tracts of white-owned land might have destroyed Zimbabwe’s agricultural production. But, the aide said, “He got the Brits out.” For anybody wishing to understand Mahathir and the nation he transformed, Wain’s book is going to be a must – but bring spectacles. The tiny type and gray typeface make it a difficult read. And a disclaimer: Wain was once my boss.