Introduction

Summary

This project suffered a few false starts. I began by looking for books about Dr Goh. These are surprisingly few, the most prominent of them being his daughter-in-law Tan Siok Sun's recent Goh Keng Swee: A Portrait. It took some time for me to realize that a book on Dr Goh could not possibly build on secondary sources and on what interviewees remember about him, regardless of the state of their memory and how well they knew him. Although people were most willing to help, useful documented sources about him were a scarcity.

Besides, Singapore's historiography suffers a narrative bind caused not only by the minute size of the island, its small population and its short history, but also by widespread concerns about national security and legal consequences. Such conditions persuade political biographers and historians to rely on interviews with an ever diminishing group of aging insiders and on limited access to official documents.

After some ingestion of information about Dr Goh, I saw that what was lacking once Siok Sun's book had come out in 2007 was a volume that dealt at length with the man's thoughts. After all, he was a thinker above all else, with the qualifier of course that thought and action were intertwined in his personality. What better way is there to understand Dr Goh then than through his own words?

And so, the concept for this book became clear. What was also gratifying was to learn that he wrote a lot throughout his life, and already as a young teenager. Furthermore, he was an oldworld politician who had a wonderful command over his language of choice and who personally wrote practically everything he allowed to be publicized. He was also highly respected by his colleagues for his scope of knowledge, and his need to do research on anything he was to give a talk on.

From that point onwards, the book developed with a dynamic of its own. All I had to do was find the material, sieve through them, pick out texts that I found representative of his major trends of thought, and analyse them within a historical context. A natural demarcation in Dr Goh's life was when he became an elected politician.