Word: lees
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Lee reportedly told a Harvard audience Friday that he has no right to tell America or Americans what to do. But he also said that the United States could have sharply limited its Vietnam operation in 1954, 1956, or even 1961, but now it is too late. On those occasions, he thought, the United States could have "drawn a line west of Mekong and said it will defend no more than that...
...Lee thinks there's some point to buying time with a shield because he believes in the great-man theory of history. And the great man is none other than Lee Kuan Yew, who thinks that because of his own competence and shrewdness Singapore has succeeded where South Vietnam has failed. "If you can find the group of men who could do it," Lee said in Dunster, "Saigon can do what Singapore did." In fact, the prime minister boasted, "If one looked at Saigon and Singapore in 1954, one would have said Singapore was the goner, not Saigon...
Because he believes one great man makes the difference, Lee blames the Eisenhower administration for America's present dilemma, because Eisenhower "permitted Diem to systematically eliminate all alternatives to him." South Vietnam no longer had a pool of talent from which a hero-ruler might emerge. "You can't go talent-scouting for leaders like in a telephone directory," Lee points out; "the British didn't create...
...British may not have created Lee, but they did provide him with a Cambridge education and later bolstered him when his political machine began to sputter. Lee was the head of the ruling People's Action Party, and in 1962, British officials decided his power was eroding so quickly that his three-year old nation left alone would soon become another Cuba. The British decided that the best way to preserve Lee's power over Communist obstructionists was to unite Singapore and Malaysia, an ideal for which Lee had been striving for a decade. With British support, such a federation...
...Lee's strength probably has derived, in part, from his shrewdness. At Dunster House, he was the complete politician--deftly dodging embarrassing questions about the absence of political opposition in Singapore, humbly reiterating that it is not his place to order Americans around, and mentioning his accomplishments in Singapore just often enough to establish his credentials. The prime minister spoke into what looked like a microphone but was actually an attachment to his private tape recorder, "so I can check back and make sure I wasn't misquoted," he explained...