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By Lee Sun-ho
American political scientist Henry Kissinger will turn 100 on May 27. Since nobody alive has more experience with international affairs as a scholar, a national security adviser, a secretary of state, the recipient of numerous highest awards and then as a consultant and emissary to a number of world leaders and major enterprises, I cannot help remembering my honored free talks with him for a couple hours 26 years ago in Seoul.
It was on May 15, 1997, a dozen days before his 74th birthday, when I was invited to the dinner in honor of Dr. Kissinger as special guest speaker calling over 100 dignitaries from public and private sectors in Korea at Lotus Room of the Grand Hyatt Seoul hosted by then Chase Manhattan Bank Seoul. At that time, Kissinger was a special business adviser of then Daewoo Group, while I was a board member of the Export-Import Bank of Korea.
At the outset of the function, one vice president of Chase asked me to move my seat to the head table. Then, I was seated to the right-side chair of the guest of honor. I was honored for the favorable treatment curiously awarded to the possibly youngest among the invited guests. Sixteen years later on Jan. 13, 2013, the Dailian, non-paper daily established on April 1, 2004, reported, with my picture taken with him at the dinner table, that the seat was prepared for the late Daewoo Chairman Kim Woo-choong, but he was unable to join because of an urgent need to travel for business negotiation overseas. So, I was picked up as a pinch hitter for him.
While having dinner with Kissinger, I had free conversation with him without any burdens for diplomacy or business affairs at all. He said to me he had been able to meet all the series of past presidents of Korea from founding Syngman Rhee through Kim Dae-jung. He presented me a heavy thick book called "Diplomacy" authored by him published in 1994 with his signature.
Since he was educated at Harvard and later became a professor there, lived in New York and worked in Washington, D.C., it was convenient for me to talk with him on my student life in Boston, job in New York and frequent visits to Washington, D.C., regarding the sights and sounds of the three major cities in the eastern parts of the United States.
To him, I mentioned I was lucky enough to able to visit travel-restricted parts on the globe to Koreans, such as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, Red China, the Middle East, the Central Asia and North Vietnam as a mere Korean bank executive. I told him that I should highly appreciate the results of his astonishing successful international diplomatic influence he activated. Then, Kissinger's response seemed to be so pleased and happy to hear my simple compliments.
I understand he is a baseball fan. Would he be a Korean, he is qualified to receive a goosefoot cane instead of a baseball bat from the current president of Korea after May 27 in commemoration of his becoming a centenarian.
Whether there are radical pros and cons on the world peace and AI progress issues at hand, it is time to hear from him how to avoid any possible World War III between China and America, and extensively, between the continental powers and the oceanic allies, I imagine.
Given his age and his long influence on global affairs, many in their commentary on the decades beyond might, no doubt, continue to name him the most pragmatic 'statesman' in recent times. Kissinger's stance for ceasefire in Ukraine would be his definition of the status quo as of the pre-Feb. 24's international borders between Russia and Ukraine as a prerequisite to initiating direct or indirect dialogue between the two.
As the oldest former U.S. cabinet member who dramatically fled Nazi Germany with his family as a Jewish refugee in 1938, I earnestly wish him good health to be maintained henceforth and expect his prominent role to be prolonged, as long as Kissinger retains his office on the 33rd floor of an Art Deco building in midtown Manhattan.
Happy centenary to Henry Kissinger! Congratulations!
The writer (wkexim@naver.com) is a freelance columnist living in Seoul.
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