ORIENT BLACKSWAN PRIVATE LIMITED Registered Offi ce 3-6-752 Himayatnagar, Hyderabad 500 029 (A.P.), India E-mail: centraloffi [email protected] Other Offi ces Bangalore, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Chennai, Ernakulam, Guwahati, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai, New Delhi, Noida, Patna © World Health Organization 2012 Published on behalf of the World Health Organization. Th e views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, decisions or policies of the World Health Organization. Th e mention of specifi c companies or of certain manufacturers’ products does not imply that they are endorsed or recommended by the World Health Organization in preference to others of a similar nature that are not mentioned. Errors and omissions excepted, the names of proprietary products are distinguished by initial capital letters. All reasonable precautions have been taken by the World Health Organization and Orient BlackSwan to verify the information contained in this publication. However, the published material is being distributed without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. Th e responsibility for the interpretation and use of the material lies with the reader. In no event shall the World Health Organization or Orient BlackSwan be liable for damages arising from its use. ISBN 978 81 250 4617 2 Typeset in Chaparral Pro 11/13.5 by OSDATA, Hyderabad 500 029 Printed at Yash Printographics, Noida Published by Orient Blackswan Private Limited 1/24 Asaf Ali Road E-mail: [email protected] Contents Foreword by Han Kwang-su vii Preface ix Acknowledgements xiii Abbreviations xv Introduction: ‘Th is Great Doctor’ 1 PART I 1945–1979: Korea 1. ‘Our Longing is for Reunion’ 9 2. ‘An Adventure of Friendship’ 21 3. St Lazarus 33 4. Chuncheon 42 PART II 1979–2003: The Pacifi c and the World Health Organization 5. Honolulu, Pago-Pago 57 6. WHO, Suva: ‘What a Change!’ 69 7. Manila: ‘An Astute and Capable Manager’ 80 8. Geneva 90 9. ‘Want to be Reassigned?’ 106 vi Contents PART III 2003–2006: Director-General 10. Transition 123 11. Shock and SHOC 139 12. Progress 147 13. Social and Other Determinants 159 14. Celebrity and Travel 169 15. Revolt and Leisure 178 16. ‘Th e Boss Has Collapsed’ 185 Epilogue 194 Annex 199 Bibliography 249 Index 255 Foreword Dr Lee Jong-wook, the sixth Director-General of the World Health Organization, is remembered by the world as ‘the Vaccine Czar’, ‘the Schweitzer of Asia’, or ‘the Little Giant’. But to the Korean people, Dr Lee is most remembered as a proud fi gure who became the fi rst Korean to lead an international organisation. Despite his global impact, surprisingly few records remain in and out of Korea as to what kind of person he was. Dr Lee was born in Korea in 1945, when the poorest country in Asia had just been liberated from the grip of colonial rule. He proved himself a man of great conviction and action, leaving behind what wealth and honour his profession as a medical doctor would have brought him in the newly industrialising and increasingly prosperous Korea. Instead, he opted to practise medicine for the good of public health by treating the poorest people in the world. Despite his initial relative obscurity in the realm of international public health, his dedication made him the fi rst technical staff of the WHO Secretariat to be appointed to the leading position of WHO in 2003. Only after his election to the post did the world start to pay attention to him, his unfaltering work, and his substantial contribution to public health. With the attention and expectations directed his way, history took up a pen to record his life as he lived it. But in May 2006, only halfway through his term as WHO Director-General, the pen abruptly dropped. How a person is evaluated is bound to diff er as the process of evaluation is inextricably linked to each viewer’s social and cultural background, as well as his or her knowledge. If even one person is inspired to continue the humanitarian work of Dr Lee, viii Foreword then his legacy, and the diff erent accounts of his life in this book, will serve as a valuable historical record when discussing what kind of person Dr Lee truly was. May 2012 Han Kwang-su, MD, PhD President Korea Foundation for International Healthcare Preface Lee Jong-wook died on 22 May 2006. Th e day after his funeral, I was invited by email to write his biography. Having known him as a colleague since 1988 and then as his speech writer from 2003 to 2005, I welcomed the opportunity to continue our friendship in that way. In the process of fi nding out about him I became more and more aware of the paradoxes he embodied. He was often rated great but partly because he did not deny his limitations. He was often rated humble but he also boasted about his successes, and had few apparent inhibitions about being a top person. Th ere was a kind of happy ending to his life in the sense that he won honour and approval that exceed most people’s fondest dreams, but it was also a sad one in that he did not live to see the success of his eff orts or to realise his full potential. If he had died later, on the other hand, he may have achieved more or he may not have, but in either case the moment for heartfelt applause on a grand scale may not have come. Contradictions of this kind, which might appear in any life that is at all well known, defy eff orts to ignore them or resolve them by settling for one side or the other, for instance by idealising or belittling the person concerned. In what follows I have tried to avoid both those errors and just assemble enough information about the man and the history of which he was a part to enable readers to come to their own conclusions. Out of respect for the dead and for those living who are still close to him, I have not delved into his private life, but out of respect for truth I have not tried to make a saint, genius or hero out of him. Every account is partial, however, in both senses of the word: it can only assemble part of the evidence that may be relevant; and it cannot help refl ecting the opinions which guide the writer’s choices of material. x Preface An important restriction for the present writer which should be recognised at the outset is that I am English and Lee Jong- wook was Korean. He had lived more than half his life in what is now the Republic of Korea before he set foot outside it, whereas I have only spent a few days in that country and learnt only a very few words of its language, and even those I probably pronounce unintelligibly. Th ough we were born in the same year, so lived through the same period of world history, England and Korea are about as diff erent as two countries can be, so there is room for plenty of incomprehension. To me and other westerners he was a thoroughly cosmopolitan English-speaking man with a Korean background, but the reality might be put more truly the other way round: he was a thoroughly Korean man with cosmopolitan ways of saying and doing things. Th e material in the following pages refl ects this limitation in the writer by consisting only of what was available to me in English. Th is diff erence of language and background, for better or for worse, leaves an even vaster amount of potentially revealing material out of sight than would otherwise be the case with a discreet man involved in a large number and variety of confi dential matters. Lee Jong-wook did not keep a diary and was not much of a letter writer. He did not publish much either—only two or three co-authored research articles in his early days as a leprosy specialist, and policy articles written for him in his later days as a senior health offi cial. So this account of his life and work depends mainly on other kinds of evidence: the memories of family members, friends and colleagues, press coverage, historical and institutional records, and the literature on matters in which he was involved. I did not spend a lot of time listening to him and drawing him out, as I might have done if I had known I was going to be his biographer. Even if I had, he would probably have still been hard to pin down. A symptom of his elusiveness is the never entirely settled question of what to call him. In his medical student and early international days his English-speaking friends called him ‘Uggy’ and he signed his letters initially in Chinese characters, later Preface xi either with that name in Roman characters or its origin, ‘Jong- wook’, in Korean characters. In the 1990s he preferred his friends to call him JW. He was called offi cially Jong-wook or JW Lee in the World Health Organization (WHO) to start with, but when he became Director-General he decided his name should be written ‘LEE Jong-wook’, following the French practice of capitalising the surname in some cases. Th is was not always practical; for instance in lists of names, the rule would either have to be applied to all of them, which is not usually done in English, or be dropped to avoid bizarre ostentation.