Selig S. Harrison
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Selig Seidenman Harrison (March 19, 1927 – December 30, 2016) was a
scholar A scholar is a person who pursues academic and intellectual activities, particularly academics who apply their intellectualism into expertise in an area of study. A scholar can also be an academic, who works as a professor, teacher, or researche ...
and
journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
, who specialized in
South Asia South Asia is the southern subregion of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The region consists of the countries of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka.;;;;;;;; ...
and
East Asia East Asia is the eastern region of Asia, which is defined in both geographical and ethno-cultural terms. The modern states of East Asia include China, Japan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. China, North Korea, South Korea and ...
. He was the Director of the Asia Program and a senior fellow at the
Center for International Policy The Center for International Policy (CIP) is a non-profit foreign policy research and advocacy think tank with offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City. It was founded in 1975 in response to the Vietnam War. The Center describes its mission ...
, and a senior scholar of the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars (or Wilson Center) is a quasi-government entity and think tank which conducts research to inform public policy. Located in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washi ...
. He was also a member of the Afghanistan Study Group. He wrote five books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations with Asia. His last book, ''Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement'' (Princeton University Press), won the 2002 award of the Association of American Publishers for the best Professional/Scholarly Book in Government and Political Science. His outspoken, constructive criticisms of Administration policies often appeared on op-ed pages of many major newspapers, including ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'', ''
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'', the ''
International Herald Tribune The ''International Herald Tribune'' (''IHT'') was a daily English-language newspaper published in Paris, France for international English-speaking readers. It had the aim of becoming "the world's first global newspaper" and could fairly be said ...
'', ''
The Los Angeles Times ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...
'', and ''
The Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and published digitally that focuses on business and economic current affairs. Based in London, England, the paper is owned by a Japanese holding company, Nikk ...
''.


Career

Harrison graduated from
Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
(B.A., 1948). Several articles credited to his name were published in ''
The Harvard Crimson ''The Harvard Crimson'' is the student newspaper of Harvard University and was founded in 1873. Run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates, it served for many years as the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Beginning in the f ...
'' between 1945 and 1949. Harrison served as South Asia Correspondent of the
Associated Press The Associated Press (AP) is an American non-profit news agency headquartered in New York City. Founded in 1846, it operates as a cooperative, unincorporated association. It produces news reports that are distributed to its members, U.S. newspa ...
from 1951 to 1954, in New Delhi, returned as South Asia Bureau Chief of ''
The Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'' from 1962 to 1965, and served as Northeast Asia Bureau Chief of the Post, based in Tokyo, from 1968 to 1972. From 1974 to 1996, as a senior associate of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP) is a nonpartisan international affairs think tank headquartered in Washington D.C. with operations in Europe, South and East Asia, and the Middle East as well as the United States. Founded in ...
, he pursued investigative assignments every year in a variety of countries, especially those where he worked as a journalist, such as India, Pakistan, China, Japan, and the two Koreas. During the late 1970s Harrison conducted field research on the Baluch insurgency and
Pashtun nationalism Pashtun nationalism ( ps, پښتون ملتپالنه) generally refers to the idea that Pashtuns must always be united to preserve their culture and defend their homeland against any oppressor. It propagates the view that Muslims are not a nation ...
. Harrison worked as managing editor of ''
The New Republic ''The New Republic'' is an American magazine of commentary on politics, contemporary culture, and the arts. Founded in 1914 by several leaders of the progressive movement, it attempted to find a balance between "a liberalism centered in hum ...
'', served as senior fellow in charge of Asian studies at the
Brookings Institution The Brookings Institution, often stylized as simply Brookings, is an American research group founded in 1916. Located on Think Tank Row in Washington, D.C., the organization conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in ec ...
, and as a senior fellow at the East-West Center. Harrison was a professorial lecturer in Asian studies at the
Johns Hopkins University Johns Hopkins University (Johns Hopkins, Hopkins, or JHU) is a private university, private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, Johns Hopkins is the oldest research university in the United States and in the western hem ...
School of Advanced International Studies, and an adjunct professor of Asian studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs,
George Washington University , mottoeng = "God is Our Trust" , established = , type = Private federally chartered research university , academic_affiliations = , endowment = $2.8 billion (2022) , preside ...
. Harrison was frequently invited to testify as an expert witness before Congressional committees and lectured at the
National Defense University The National Defense University (NDU) is an institution of higher education funded by the United States Department of Defense, intended to facilitate high-level education, training, and professional development of national security leaders. As ...
, the
National War College The National War College (NWC) of the United States is a school in the National Defense University. It is housed in Roosevelt Hall on Fort Lesley J. McNair, Washington, D.C., the third-oldest Army post still active. History The National War Colle ...
and the State Department's
Foreign Service Institute The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is the United States federal government's primary training institution for employees of the U.S. foreign affairs community, preparing American diplomats as well as other professionals to advance U.S. foreig ...
. He appeared on ''
The News Hour with Jim Lehrer ''PBS NewsHour'' is an American evening television news program broadcast on over 350 PBS member stations. It airs seven nights a week, and is known for its in-depth coverage of issues and current events. Anchored by Judy Woodruff, the prog ...
'', ''
Nightline ''Nightline'' (or ''ABC News Nightline'') is ABC News' late-night television news program broadcast on ABC in the United States with a franchised formula to other networks and stations elsewhere in the world. Created by Roone Arledge, the progra ...
'', ''
Morning Edition ''Morning Edition'' is an American radio news program produced and distributed by NPR. It airs weekday mornings (Monday through Friday) and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 5:00 to 9:00 AM ...
'', and ''
Talk of the Nation ''Talk of the Nation'' (''TOTN'') is an American talk radio program based in Washington D.C., produced by National Public Radio (NPR) that was broadcast nationally from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. It focused on current events and controversial issu ...
''.


North Korea

Harrison visited North Korea eleven times, the last time being in January 2009. In the last week of May 1972, Harrison, representing ''The Washington Post'', and
Harrison Salisbury Harrison Evans Salisbury (November 14, 1908 – July 5, 1993), was an American journalist and the first regular ''New York Times'' correspondent in Moscow after World War II. Biography Salisbury was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He gradu ...
of the ''New York Times'' became the first Americans to visit North Korea since the
Korean War , date = {{Ubl, 25 June 1950 – 27 July 1953 (''de facto'')({{Age in years, months, weeks and days, month1=6, day1=25, year1=1950, month2=7, day2=27, year2=1953), 25 June 1950 – present (''de jure'')({{Age in years, months, weeks a ...
and to interview
Kim Il-sung Kim Il-sung (; , ; born Kim Song-ju, ; 15 April 1912 – 8 July 1994) was a North Korean politician and the founder of North Korea, which he ruled from the country's establishment in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of ...
. Following his second visit to Pyongyang in 1987, Harrison presided over a 1989 Carnegie Endowment symposium that brought together North Korean spokesmen and American specialists and officials for the first time and has reported on this meeting in his Endowment study, Dialogue with North Korea. In 1992, he led a Carnegie Endowment delegation to Pyongyang that learned for the first time that North Korea had reprocessed plutonium. On June 9, 1994, on his fourth visit, he met Kim Il Sung for three hours and won an agreement to the concept of a freeze and eventual dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear program in exchange for U.S. political and economic concessions. President
Jimmy Carter James Earl Carter Jr. (born October 1, 1924) is an American politician who served as the 39th president of the United States from 1977 to 1981. A member of the Democratic Party (United States), Democratic Party, he previously served as th ...
, meeting Kim Il Sung a week later, persuaded the North Korean leader to initiate the freeze immediately. This opened the way for negotiations with the U.S. that resulted in the
Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea The Agreed Framework between the United States of America and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (북미제네바기본합의서) was signed on 21 October 1994, between North Korea (DPRK) and the United States. The objective of the agreeme ...
of October 21, 1994. Harrison favored handling North Korea through
diplomacy Diplomacy comprises spoken or written communication by representatives of states (such as leaders and diplomats) intended to influence events in the international system.Ronald Peter Barston, ''Modern diplomacy'', Pearson Education, 2006, p. 1 ...
and advocated normalizing relations, saying "we have got to get into diplomacy, and not go into naval exercises" to resolve tensions on the peninsula, and writing elsewhere that "the United States should move as quickly as possible to normalize relations. Normalization would speed up the denuclearization process." Harrison was especially critical of "hard-liners" in the Bush Administration during the
Sunshine Policy The Sunshine Policy () is the theoretical basis for South Korea's foreign policy towards North Korea. Its official title is The Reconciliation and Cooperation Policy Towards the North (), and it is also known as The Operational Policy Towards the ...
era. During the fifth round of the
Six-party talks The six-party talks aimed to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns as a result of the North Korean nuclear weapons program. There was a series of meetings with six participating states in Beijing: * China * Japan * North Korea ...
Harrison branded the officials
David Addington David Spears Addington (born January 22, 1957) is an American lawyer who was legal counsel (2001–2005) and chief of staff (2005–2009) to Vice President Dick Cheney. He was the vice president of domestic and economic policy studies at the He ...
, J.W. Crouch and
Robert Joseph Robert G. Joseph (born 1949) is a senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy and professor at Missouri State University. He was the United States Special Envoy for Nuclear Nonproliferation, with ambassadorial rank.Amb. Robert Jos ...
as an "
Axis of Evil The phrase "axis of evil" was first used by U.S. President George W. Bush and originally referred to Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It was used in Bush's State of the Union address on January 29, 2002, less than five months after the 9/11 attack ...
" within the administration, accusing them of undermining negotiations with North Korea and orchestrating "a campaign to depict North Korea as a “criminal regime” with which normalized relations are not possible." More recently Harrison also characterized South Korean President
Lee Myung-bak Lee Myung-bak (; ; ; born 19 December 1941) is a South Korean businessman and politician who served as the 10th president of South Korea from 2008 to 2013. Before his presidency, he was the CEO of Hyundai Engineering and Construction, and the ma ...
as a "hard-liner", who had "invited retaliation" from North Korea by reversing the policies of his Sunshine-era predecessors.


Reputation

Harrison's reputation for giving "early warning" of foreign policy crises was well established during his career as a foreign correspondent. In his study of foreign reporting, ''Between Two Worlds'', John Hohenberg, former secretary of the Pulitzer Prize Board, cited Harrison's prediction of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War 18 months before it happened. Hohenberg wrote: "What Harrison foresaw came to pass, and when it happened, American editors suddenly rose up in their wrath – as they always do at such times – and demanded, 'why weren't we told about all of this?' They had been told at great length, but because too many editors were bored with a place like India, they weren't listening." Terming Harrison "one of the few correspondents in all of Asia who was able to maintain a balanced point of view," Hohenberg called him a model of the "first-rate correspondent who knows the past of the area to which he is assigned, writes with clarity and meaning of the present and has an awareness of the future." More than a year before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, Harrison warned of this possibility in one of his frequent contributions to the influential journal, ''Foreign Policy''. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, he was one of the earliest to foresee that the Soviet Union would withdraw its forces and become a leading advocate of a two-track policy designed to promote a withdrawal through a combination of military pressure and diplomatic incentives. He was also one of the few who predicted that the Kabul Communist regime would not fall immediately after the withdrawal. Rep.
Stephen Solarz Stephen Joshua Solarz (; September 12, 1940 – November 29, 2010) was an American politician who served as a United States representative from New York until his political career ended in the wake of the House banking scandal in 1992. Solarz w ...
, chairman of the House Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs, introducing him at a hearing on February 21, 1989, one year after the withdrawal, observed that "with each passing day his reputation as a prophet is enhanced. I am sure it wasn't easy for Mr. Harrison, in the face of a phalanx of analysts, academicians, and others who were all saying the opposite, to maintain his position, but he had the intellectual fortitude and moral strength to stick by his guns, his analytical guns, and I think he deserves credit for that." Some of Harrison's writings on North Korea have been challenged by other voices in the media.
B.R. Myers Brian Reynolds Myers (born 1963), usually cited as B. R. Myers, is an American professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, best known for his writings on North Korean propaganda. He is a contributing editor f ...
doubted Harrison's assertion that, based on discussions with North Korean officials, there is a long-running "hawks vs. doves" split within its ranks, stating that "there may well be differences of opinion inside the military-first regime, but they almost certainly do not rise to the level of a hawk-dove split, and even if they did, they would never be divulged to outsiders." In the wake of the inter-Korean tensions that followed the North Korean shelling of the South Korean island of Yeonpyeong in November 2010, Harrison proposed that the United States solve the crisis by redrawing the
Northern Limit Line The Northern Limit Line or North Limit Line (NLL) – 북방한계선 (in ROK) – is a disputed maritime demarcation line in the Yellow (West) Sea between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) on the north, and the Republic of Ko ...
southward to a position more favorable to North Korea, with South Korea allowed no veto in the matter. Harrison's editorial was roundly criticized in the pages of the major South Korean newspaper
The Chosun Ilbo ''The Chosun Ilbo'' (, ) is a daily newspaper in South Korea and the oldest daily newspaper in the country. With a daily circulation of more than 1,800,000, the ''Chosun Ilbo'' has been audited annually since the Audit Bureau of Circulations w ...
, and characterized as "simplistic and inaccurate" in
The Korea Herald ''The Korea Herald'' is a leading English-language daily newspaper founded in 1953 and published in Seoul, South Korea. The editorial staff is composed of Korean and international writers and editors, with additional news coverage drawn from int ...
.


Personal life

Selig S. Harrison was married and had two children and four grandchildren.


Death

Harrison died at age 89 from a blood disorder in
Camden, Maine Camden is a resort town in Knox County, Maine. The population was 5,232 at the 2020 census. The population of the town more than triples during the summer months, due to tourists and summer residents. Camden is a summer colony in the Mid-Coas ...
on December 30, 2016.


Works


Books authored by Harrison alone

* ''Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and U.S. Disengagement'' (Princeton, 2002) * ''In Afghanistan’s Shadow'' (Carnegie Endowment, 1981) * ''The Widening Gulf: Asian Nationalism and American Policy'' (The Free Press, 1978) *
China, Oil, and Asia: Conflict Ahead?
' (Columbia, 1977) * ''India: The Most Dangerous Decades'' (Princeton, 1960)


Books co-authored or edited

* co-editor of ''India and the United States'' (Macmillan, 1960) * co-author with K. Subrahmanyam of ''Superpower Rivalry in the Indian Ocean: Indian and American Perspectives'' (Oxford University Press, 1989) * co-author with Anthony Lake, ''After the Wars: Reconstruction in Afghanistan, Indochina, Central America, Southern Africa, and the Horn of Africa'',(Transaction Publishers, 1990) * co-author with Diego Cordovez of ''Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal'' (Oxford, 1995) * co-editor with Masashi Nishihara, ''U. N. Peacekeeping: Japanese and American Perspectives'', (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1995) * editor of Japan's ''Nuclear Future: The Plutonium Debate and East Asian Security'' (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1996) * co-author with Leonard Spector, ''Nuclear Weapons and the Security of Korea'', (Brookings Institution Press, 1997) * co-editor with Paul H. Kreisberg, Dennis Kux & Lee Hamilton, ''India and Pakistan:The First Fifty Years'' (Woodrow Wilson Center Press), 1998) * co-editor with Clyde V. Prestowitz of ''"Miracle": Redefining U.S. Economic and Security Principles'' (Economic Strategy Institute, 1999) * ''Pakistan: State of the Union'' (Center for International Policy, 2009)


References


External links


Biography
at Center for International Policy Staff Page
Pakistan: State of the Union
(Center for International Policy, 2009)




Column Archives at Foreign Affairs

Column Archives at the Financial Times


Princeton University Press,
Column Archives at the New York Times


PBS Newshour, Interview with Selig Harrison, June 26, 2008

{{DEFAULTSORT:Harrison, Selig S. 1927 births 2016 deaths Harvard University alumni Johns Hopkins University faculty The New York Times writers The Washington Post people People from Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania Journalists from Pennsylvania Brookings Institution people