Selig S. Harrison
Encyclopedia
Selig Seidenman Harrison (born March 19, 1927 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania
Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania
Wilkinsburg is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States adjacent to the city of Pittsburgh. The population was 15,930 at the 2010 census, having lost more than 13,000 in the 70 years since 1940, when 29,853 people were enumerated...

) it is a scholar, journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

, and author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 who specializes in South Asia
South Asia
South Asia, also known as Southern Asia, is the southern region of the Asian continent, which comprises the sub-Himalayan countries and, for some authorities , also includes the adjoining countries to the west and the east...

 and East Asia
East Asia
East Asia or Eastern Asia is a subregion of Asia that can be defined in either geographical or cultural terms...

. He is the Director of the Asia Program and a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy
Center for International Policy
The Center for International Policy is a non-profit public 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 as "promoting a U.S...

, and a senior scholar of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars , located in Washington, D.C., is a United States Presidential Memorial that was established as part of the Smithsonian Institution by an act of Congress in 1968...

. He has written five books on Asian affairs and U.S. relations with Asia. His latest 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 appear on Op-Ed pages of many major newspapers, including The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

, The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...

, The International Herald Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and The Financial Times. He is currently a member of the Afghanistan Study Group.

Career

Selig S. Harrison graduated from Harvard University
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 (B.A., 1948). Several articles credited to his name were published in The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson
The Harvard Crimson, the daily student newspaper of Harvard University, was founded in 1873. It is the only daily newspaper in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is run entirely by Harvard College undergraduates...

 between 1945 and 1949. Harrison served as South Asia Correspondent of the Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...

 from 1951 to 1954, in New Delhi, returned as South Asia Bureau Chief of The Washington Post
The Washington Post
The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

 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
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is a foreign-policy think tank based in Washington, D.C. The organization describes itself as being dedicated to advancing cooperation between nations and promoting active international engagement by the United States...

, 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
Balochistan conflict
The Balochistan conflict is an ongoing conflict between Baloch nationalists and the Government of Pakistan over Balochistan, the country's largest province...

 and Pashtun nationalism.

Harrison is a former managing editor of The New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...

, has served as senior fellow in charge of Asian studies at the Brookings Institution
Brookings Institution
The Brookings Institution is a nonprofit public policy organization based in Washington, D.C., in the United States. One of Washington's oldest think tanks, Brookings conducts research and education in the social sciences, primarily in economics, metropolitan policy, governance, foreign policy, and...

, 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
The Johns Hopkins University, commonly referred to as Johns Hopkins, JHU, or simply Hopkins, is a private research university based in Baltimore, Maryland, United States...

 School of Advanced International Studies, and an adjunct professor of Asian studies at the Elliott School of International Affairs, George Washington University
George Washington University
The George Washington University is a private, coeducational comprehensive university located in Washington, D.C. in the United States...

. Harrison is frequently invited to testify as an expert witness before Congressional committees and has lectured at the National Defense University
National Defense University
The National Defense University is an institution of higher education funded by the United States Department of Defense, intended to facilitate high-level training, education, and the development of national security strategy. It is chartered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Navy Vice Admiral...

, the National War College
National War College
The National War College 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. It was officially established on July 1, 1946, as an upgraded replacement for the...

 and the State Department’s Foreign Service Institute
Foreign Service Institute
The Foreign Service Institute is the United States Federal Government's primary training institution for employees of the U.S. foreign affairs community, preparing American diplomats and other professionals to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests overseas and in Washington...

. He has appeared on “The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,” “Nightline
Nightline
Nightline, or ABC News Nightline is a late-night news program broadcast by ABC in the United States, and has a franchised formula to other networks and stations elsewhere in the world. It airs weeknights, usually for 31 minutes. Created by Roone Arledge, the program featured Ted Koppel as its main...

,” “Morning Edition
Morning Edition
Morning Edition is an American radio news program produced and distributed by National Public Radio . It airs weekday mornings and runs for two hours, and many stations repeat one or both hours. The show feeds live from 05:00 to 09:00 ET, with feeds and updates as required until noon...

” and “Talk of the Nation
Talk of the Nation
Talk of the Nation is a talk radio program based in the United States, produced by National Public Radio, and is broadcast nationally from 2 to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. Its focus is current events and controversial issues....

”.

North Korea

Harrison has visited North Korea eleven times, most recently in January 2009.

In the last week of May, 1972, Harrison, representing The Washington Post, and Harrison Salisbury
Harrison Salisbury
Harrison Evans Salisbury , an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist , was the first regular New York Times correspondent in Moscow after World War II. He was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota...

 of the New York Times became the first Americans to visit North Korea since the Korean War
Korean War
The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...

 and to interview Kim Il-sung
Kim Il-sung
Kim Il-sung was a Korean communist politician who led the Democratic People's Republic of Korea from its founding in 1948 until his death in 1994. He held the posts of Prime Minister from 1948 to 1972 and President from 1972 to his death...

. 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
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...

, 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
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 was signed on October 21, 1994 between North Korea and the United States...

 of October 21, 1994.

Harrison favors handling North Korea through diplomacy
Diplomacy
Diplomacy is the art and practice of conducting negotiations between representatives of groups or states...

 and has advocated normalizing relations with North Korea, 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
Sunshine policy
The Sunshine Policy was the foreign policy of South Korea towards North Korea until Lee Myung-bak's election to presidency in 2008. Since its articulation in 1998 by South Korean President Kim Dae Jung, the policy resulted in greater political contact between the two nations and some historical...

 era. During the fifth round of the Six-party talks
Six-party talks
The six-party talks aim to find a peaceful resolution to the security concerns as a result of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.There has been a series of meetings with six participating states:* The Democratic People's Republic of Korea ;...

 Harrison branded the officials David Addington
David Addington
David Spears Addington , was legal counsel and chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney, and is now vice president of domestic and economic policy studies at The Heritage Foundation....

, J.W. Crouch and Robert Joseph
Robert Joseph
Robert G. Joseph 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. Prior to this post, Dr...

 as an "Axis of Evil
Axis of evil
"Axis of evil" is a term initially used by the former United States President George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address on January 29, 2002 and often repeated throughout his presidency, describing governments that he accused of helping terrorism and seeking weapons of mass destruction...

" 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
Lee Myung-bak is the President of South Korea. Prior to his presidency, he was the CEO of Hyundai Engineering and Construction and the mayor of Seoul. He is married to Kim Yoon-ok and has three daughters and one son. His older brother is Lee Sang-deuk, a South Korean politician. He attends the...

 as a "hard-liner", who had "invited retaliation" from North Korea by reversing the policies of his Sunshine-era predecessors.

Reputation

His 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
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize is a U.S. award for achievements in newspaper and online journalism, literature and musical composition. It was established by American publisher Joseph Pulitzer and is administered by Columbia University in New York City...

, cited Harrison’s prediction of the 1965 Indo-Pakistan War
Indo-Pakistani War of 1965
The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 was a culmination of skirmishes that took place between April 1965 and September 1965 between Pakistan and India. This conflict became known as the Second Kashmir War fought by India and Pakistan over the disputed region of Kashmir, the first having been fought in 1947...

 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
Soviet war in Afghanistan
The Soviet war in Afghanistan was a nine-year conflict involving the Soviet Union, supporting the Marxist-Leninist government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan against the Afghan Mujahideen and foreign "Arab–Afghan" volunteers...

, 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, 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
Brian Reynolds Myers is an American associate professor of international studies at Dongseo University in Busan, South Korea, a contributing editor for the Atlantic, and an opinion columnist for the New York Times and Wall Street Journal...

 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
Songun
Sŏn'gun, often spelled Songun, is North Korea's "Military First" policy, which prioritizes the Korean People's Army in the affairs of state and allocates national resources to the army 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
Bombardment of Yeonpyeong
The bombardment of Yeonpyeong was an artillery engagement between the North Korean military and South Korean forces stationed on Yeonpyeong Island on November 23, 2010. Following a South Korean regular artillery exercise at waters in the south, North Korean forces fired around 170 artillery shells...

 in November 2010, Harrison proposed that the United States solve the crisis by redrawing the Northern Limit Line
Northern Limit Line
The Northern Limit Line or North Limit Line is a disputed inter-Korea maritime demarcation line in the Yellow Sea between the Democratic People's Republic of Korea on the north, and the Republic of Korea on the south...

 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
The Chosun Ilbo is one of the major newspapers in South Korea. With a daily circulation of over 2,200,000, the Chosun Ilbo has undertaken annual inspections since Audit Bureau of Circulations was established in 1993...

, and characterized as "simplistic and inaccurate" in The Korea Herald.

Books by Selig S. Harrison

  • 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)

Publications by Selig S. Harrison

  • c-editor of India and the United States (Macmillan, 1960)
  • c-author with K. Subrahmanyam of Superpower Rivalry in the Indian Ocean: Indian and American Perspectives (Oxford University Press, 1989)
  • c-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)

External links

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