NEW YORK -- Veteran Asia-hand Nicholas Platt isn't quite ready to canonize Roh Moo Hyun as a great contemporary Asian leader -- notwithstanding last week's stunning endorsement of the populist president of South Korea in elections that catapulted the progressive, pro-Roh party to the top of the heap in the National Assembly.
The former American diplomat suspects Roh's full measure has yet to be taken. For now, in fact, Platt (a former ambassador to Pakistan and the Philippines as well as a career foreign service officer and a prominent Washington national security official) favors only a handful of contemporary Asian leaders, including (though not exclusively) India's Atal Behari Vajpayee, Thailand's Thaksin Shinawatra and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, "though they all have their particular faults," he says firmly.
Listening to the precise Platt talk about the Asian political continent with such sweep and verve (notwithstanding his nearly seven decades) is like luxuriating in an intense conversation with a great orchestral conductor about everything from Beethoven to Schoenberg. For even though this lanky gentleman is soon to step down gracefully as president of the Asia Society after 12 years of notable accomplishment, he has lost nary an intellectual step or an ounce of enthusiasm for that part of the world he knows and loves: Asia.