Transcript
CHARLES "JACK" PRITCHARD: Let's start first with the relationship between the leaders, between President Bush and Prime Minister Koizumi. I'm not quite sure how that evolved. I think it has to do with the people around the President at the time he became President, and the first few months in office. I think Prime Minister Koizumi, by his recollection, has been in office 3 years and 9 months, so that puts Bush a couple of months senior to Koizumi in that relationship. But at the time, at the start of the Bush administration, you had some very powerful influences, and if nothing else, President Bush has been very impressionable early on during the transition period and the first couple of months or so in his first administration. And I think this can be attributed to Deputy Secretary Armitage, and most specifically to Torkel Patterson, who succeeded me at the NSC as the Senior Director for Asian Affairs. They both, and I'm sure others involved, put a great deal of emphasis on the value in the relationship and the potential of what Koizumi represented. With that in mind--and I can remember very vividly when Torkel was pushing for the first encounter to happen at Camp David to be extraordinarily symbolic of what this new relationship would look like in contrast to the problems that had occurred, from a Japanese perspective in the relationship between President Clinton and his counterpart.
Now, to be fair, that's the wrong word, he didn't have a counterpart. He had seven counterparts over his term. And I can remember vividly one meeting in which the President—and I actually don't even remember who the Prime Minister was at the time—was in a meeting in the Oval Office, and he hands Sandy Berger a note, and he says, "Can you list all of my counterpart prime ministers?" And then he puts, "In order."
And Berger wrote back, and I think he got them all right, but got the order wrong, but that kind of showed the problems that were occurring. And by contrast, what the Clinton administration was dealing with, particularly towards the end of that, was the Asian financial crisis and a desire that Japan lead Asia out of that, and there was certainly a stream of attention and activity throughout the Clinton administration and particularly towards the end that focused on economic relationships and getting Japan back on track in such a way that I'm sure the Japanese did not appreciate that the United States had no limit to their advice on how they could do that. That's in sharp contrast to the relationship that we have now. So let's take a look at that. That's No. 1.
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