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INSIGHT: In memoriam: Richard H. Solomon, peacemaker
Solomon had helped direct US foreign policy toward East Asia during his tenure as a bureaucrat and scholar and in general he gave support to ASEAN and had an understanding of Indonesia’s role in it.
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A 1988 photo of writer and activist Bette Bao Lord; her husband, Winston Lord, U.S. ambassador to China; Chinese Ambassador to the United States Han Xu; and Henry Kissinger; Richard Solomon is in the background. (Associated Press/Gerry Herbert)
Richard “Dick” Solomon was a great friend of mine and of Indonesia. He passed away peacefully on March 13.
It was 1973 when I first met him at the Old Executive Office Building next to the White House in Washington, DC. It was my first visit to Washington to do a round of visits that I repeated many times afterwards. Then Dick was an official at the National Security Council (NSC) headed by Henry Kissinger. I was so impressed by Dick, not only because he was at the NSC, but mostly because he was such a nice and soft-spoken official, who really knew what he was saying.
Being a China specialist, Dick was invited to join the NSC staff from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. We clicked immediately at this first meeting and I met Dick several times later when he was head of the Political Science Department at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, California. He organized a meeting in early 1977 on “Development in East Asia” initiated by Dick Holbrooke, then the assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific. It was during the event I also met Yukio Satoh from Japan, who was then a private secretary to foreign minister Sunao Sonoda.
As a token of our friendship I invited Dick and another close friend, George Tanham, vice president of RAND, to Indonesia in early 1979. They did their rounds in Jakarta and we had a two-day sojourn in Bali before they left for Australia.
Solomon had helped direct US foreign policy toward East Asia during his tenure as a bureaucrat and scholar and in general he gave support to ASEAN and had an understanding of Indonesia’s role in it.
I met him again when he was in charge at the Policy Planning State Department in 1986 and when he was the assistant secretary for East Asia in 1989. During this period he was active in assisting ASEAN to achieve a breakthrough after the invasion of Cambodia by Vietnam, especially at the Paris Meeting, and in the implementation of its decisions that followed.
Dick was the United States ambassador to the Philippines in 1992 and 1993 and left the post to become president of the US Institute of Peace from 1993 to 2012, the longest stint of his career. Based in Washington, DC, the institute is a nonpartisan, independent, federally funded institution that has promoted nonviolent conflict resolutions, particularly on the Moro problems in the southern Philippines, and given political support to the resolution of the decades-long conflict in Aceh.
