Did Lee Hsien Loong ever really earn his father’s respect?

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

I ask this question because some things are becoming evident to me. I refer once again to the feud between the siblings Lee Wei Ling and Lee Hsien Loong.

The open criticism of LWL of her brother indicates a profound lack of respect for the brother. I have brought this up before. Let’s remember that LWL worships her father, and that in all probability, there is not man on earth that is ever going to impress her the way her father did. Fair enough. I accept that her respect for her own brother will never be the same as the respect for her own father. But we are not talking about her respect here of LHL being a little or a lot less then Papa. We are talking about outright disrespect here. How did this come about? After all, it’s her own older brother.
It occurs to me that because she is so close to her father (In many ways, closer then even LHL), she might mirror his personality and opinions on many things. Even her own father said she was the closest in temperament to him, but without the self control. She travelled with him extensively and certainly spent more personal time with him then the other siblings.

This raised the point to me: If Lee Kuan Yew was truly impressed, and proud of his son’s political achievements and ruling of Singapore, surely he would have brought this up to LWL. Would he not have communicated to LWL about some accomplishment that Gay Loong brought forth? If he had tremendous respect for his son’s achievement, surely, LWL would also have the same respect for her brother. I cannot see how she would be disrespectful of a person that her father was very respectful of, especially if it was her own brother.

But what if LKY was never impressed by his own son’s political term in office or his son’s performance in Govt.? I searched for articles and quotes from LKY praising his son for something or other and was shocked at the paucity of such articles. In fact, according to Gay Loong, it was Wooden who asked him to run for office, not his own father. But why not? I personally believe this story to be BS, it’s more likely that his own mother talked him into politics and Wooden might have joked about it. In any case, there are to my knowledge, no anecdotes of how good his son was as a politician by LKY. Nor are there any short stories or analogies about why he thought his son would make a good Prime Minister.

How is this possible? Wouldn’t a father naturally praise his son for a job well done, or for some innovation, or some task done well? Especially if the son was relatively new to political office and would need as many endorsements from his own father as possible. Yet, this was lacking and not forthcoming at all.

Lee Hsien Loong’s first occasion to shine on a solo basis was the Sentosa Cable car incident. In my opinion, he came within a hair’s breadth of screwing that up big time. His proposal to order the Commandoes to go down the cables and enter the cars to rescue the occupants was borderline Marvel Comics like. If the New Zealand helo instructor pilot had not save those people by rescuing them via helicopter, it would have ended very badly. After this incident, LHL was never publicly given a job/task/action where he was the known person in charge.

It’s very hard to follow the footsteps of LKY. Pretty much impossible. But Even though he did come from a family of some means, LKY in many ways was a self made man. A self made man usually despises people who were born with a silver spoon in their mouth and got to where they are by buying their way there or through family connections. LKY is never going to say that his son is not fit for politics or that he is doing just an average to poor job. If the mother had not advanced the son into politics, LKY might have been perfectly happy letting his son be a maths professor in NUS. Also, LKY is proud of his accomplishments and he might not want a less then stellar son to succeed him and ruin his legacy.

People might say that LKY was autocratic. Yes he was. But he also surrounded himself with people who were good at their jobs, people like Goh Keng Swee and Hon Sui Sen, and he let them alone to do their jobs. LHL instead has surrounded himself with SAF Scholar Generals like George Yeo, Lim Hng Kiang, and Teo Chee Hean, who poor copies of Goh and Hon. How can a father respect this sort of leadership?

LHL has mentioned many interactions between him and his father. For example:

PM Lee recalled how, several years ago, the Istana staff wanted to remove a few trees to improve visibility for security. "I was going to agree. And he sent me a note to say, are you sure you need to do this? Why don't you leave it be? This place is green and we've made a point of making this place green. And you've got birds, you've got the wildlife and you want to keep it like that. So in the end, I didn't cut the trees down."

Seriously? Old Fart had to counter command his son’s decisions to cut down a few trees in the Istana? Such a minor item and he has to be involved? And notes were passed? What happened to picking up the phone and calling. Writing a note sounds so impersonal when it comes to communication between father and son. I mean how many people do that? Also, I look at this remark from LHL:

Asked how they dealt with each other and what advice his father gave him when he became Prime Minister, PM Lee said: "I can't remember anything specific which he said but I think it gave him a lot of satisfaction that the system of transition, of renewal, was working, that not only had he managed to hand over to a successor but his successor had done, had worked up in a job, succeeded. And another transition had taken place to a third generation.

Your own father did not give you some pearls of wisdom on the eve of you becoming PM? Nor any advice or words to live by? Seriously? Nothing specific? Wow. I seriously think that Old Fart never considered his own son to be in the same league as himself. On this I have to agree. And as such, he never accorded his son the same respect that others accorded him. Somehow, this rubbed off on LWL and today, we are where we are in her relationship with her brother. If his own family does not respect him, why should I, an ordinary citizen do so? Just my 2 cents.


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