I arrived in Washington DC thinking Asia needed its own Franklin D Roosevelt.
Four terms. The Depression, then the war. One leader who carried a country through its toughest years. Asia faces its own version between now and 2045, and I wanted to write about who might lead it.
My brother Dan and I spent three days walking the city. He’s Chief of Communications for the UN Global Compact in New York, so naturally the conversation kept circling back to the UN. What it’s for now. The wars it can’t stop. A Security Council that can’t agree.
Then we turned a corner in the Roosevelt memorial and found Eleanor. Bronze, standing in front of the UN emblem. Someone had left roses in her hands.
FDR died in April 1945, two weeks before the conference that founded the UN, and Eleanor carried it on. She led the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The institutions they started are still standing eighty years later, dents and all.
America has always been an experiment. Washington said so at his first inauguration. It worked because at the moments it might have failed, a president found the words and the deeds. Lincoln held the union together. Roosevelt stopped it falling apart with his New Deal. Kennedy pointed it towards the moon. Each built on the last, and each left behind something bigger than himself. That’s how a country becomes a ‘city on a hill’.
Asia has never been short of strong leaders. What it needs over the next twenty years is leaders who build things that outlast them. Courts that hold. Rules that don’t change every time the government does.
I came looking for Asia’s Roosevelt. I should have been looking for its Eleanor.
PS. More from the corridor at www.davidthomas.asia
