Preface

Summary

After a long process that culminated in the first half of 2018, this memoir was finally completed, just in time to be published for my seventy-fifth birthday. In many ways, efforts for this memoir began long before its actual writing, when I was Minister of State for Administrative Reform. It was during this period that I instructed a group of young people at the ministry to conduct interviews of their colleagues and seniors, with the view to collecting material for an autobiography. Unfortunately, for reasons unknown to me, those I charged with the task were halfhearted in their efforts, and the few interviews they made were never handed in to me.

Around the early part of 2000, my journalist friend Dwi (Donny) Iswandono—who was a sports reporter when I was President of the Indonesian Association of Lawn Tennis (PELTI)—and his colleague Iput Bambang Putranto came to talk me into reviving the idea of a memoir. We also discussed the issue of the forest fires that had ravaged Sumatra and Kalimantan in 1997, the horrors of which were still fresh in our minds.

In turn, I suggested to both Donny and Iput that they begin collecting information and data on the forest fires, which then became a book titled Kemelut Politik di Balik Asap: Refleksi atas Bencana Nasional Kebakaran Hutan 1997–1998 (Political Crisis behind the Haze: A Reflection on the National Disaster of the Forest Fires of 1997–1998). Alas, this book is not discussed in depth in this memoir, which only covers the period between 1948 and 1988.

Early in 2000, my brother Mochtar Kusuma-Atmadja and I discussed whether we both needed to write our own respective autobiographies for posterity. At the time, Mochtar did not feel the urgency to do so. He felt he had been sufficiently productive in writing about foreign policy, legal reform, the environment and new initiatives in the cultural sphere. Mochtar believed his works should speak for themselves as part of his legacy. In fact, he tended to believe that any text on his life might end up becoming a string of self-justifications, not to mention being an egocentric exercise.