Archives to judge Lee’s legacy

THE final verdict will not be in the obituaries. The final verdict will be when the PhD students dig out the archives,” Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew told The New York Times soberly when asked about his legacy in a September 2010 interview. On Monday morning, Lee passed away at 91 following weeks at the Singapore General Hospital and on the 50th year of the republic’s founding. Even if any true assessment at this time would be premature by his standards, how do we remember Lee Kuan Yew?

There are those who will cite his “strategic thinking.” Henry Kissinger himself once admitted that of all the world leaders he has met over the past half-century, none has taught him more than Lee. Richard Nixon famously said that had Lee lived in another time and another place, he may have “attained the world stature of a Churchill, a Disraeli, or a Gladstone.”