Scholar Bresnan comes full circle

Berni K. Moestafa, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Everything has a beginning. Indonesia's economic miracle until the '90s began with the economists who designed it.

Tracing back to their names, and the search for a beginning, would likely end with John J. Bresnan.

The economists on his account include Widjojo Nitisastro, Ali Wardhana and Emil Salim. Together with Mohammad Sadli they took tertiary programs at the University of California at Berkeley, and are now often referred to as members of the "Berkeley Mafia".

This group was behind the Soeharto era development, which turned to foreign investment and debt to drive one of the fastest growing economies in the world.

Currently an adjunct senior research scholar at Columbia University's East Asian Institute, Bresnan sent them to Berkeley while he was working for the Ford Foundation.

Back then, between 1961 and 1964, he was the assistant representative to the foundation, and was its representative here from 1969 until 1973.

He was responsible for helping send some 5,000 Indonesians to various universities across the United States.

The author of Managing Indonesia and From Dominoes to Dynamos recently spoke to a selection of guests and friends during a tribute for him by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

"I did not set out to build a special relationship with Indonesia. I set out to be useful in the world," Bresnan said.

"I imagine that the same sort of rational economic planning that worked in Greece in the late forties could work as well in these new nation states.

"Indonesia was especially appealing because it was largely unknown to the English-speaking world. Indonesia excited my curiosity, I wondered what it was all about and when I was given an opportunity to come here to work, I took it immediately."

His entrance into the Ford Foundation, he confided, was not so much because of ambition but rather fate.

"I was there because I needed a job. It was that simple," he told reporters after the CSIS tribute.

Maybe it was also his interest in the world that drew him to the foundation, or at least kept him working there. Bresnan worked at the U.S. Embassy in Greece before he was forced to look for a new job.

The Eisenhower administration responded to the threat of Communist infiltration of the State Department with mass layoffs at U.S. embassies across the world.

"I saw people being sent home one after another. I kept being asked to take one of their jobs as well as the one I had before."

"And then what happened is, they had got rid of all the people they wanted to get rid off and they had not reached the quota that Eisenhower set. They fired all the employees."

So Bresnan ended up at the Ford Foundation at the age of 25.

It was there that he met with Michael Harris, the foundation's representative in Jakarta during the 1950s who stirred Bresnan's curiosity about the country. Harris invited Bresnan to come to Indonesia, which he did in 1961.

Did the country met his expectations? "Oh yes. It seemed like the end of the world."

Indonesia in the early 1960s was poor and became poorer around 1965, a time when Sukarno appointed himself president for life and when communism gained influence in the government.

Bresnan said his first five years in Jakarta were difficult. He remembered how his team had to fight for a budget in the foundation, with other countries faring better than Indonesia.

The Indonesian government was not helpful either. Then foreign minister Subandrio issued a memorandum banning Indonesians from studying in the United States.

This emergency called for a meeting with president Sukarno and Bresnan recounted the president saying: " ... well what's your problem?"

"And we said, 'This memo.'"

"And he said, 'Well, why is that such a problem for you?'"

"We said, 'We have 13 people, right now, ready to go for their PhDs,'" Bresnan said, explaining that in 1964 one of the names on that list was former Indonesian ambassador to the United States and current Coordinating Minister for the Economy Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti.

"And he said, 'Well, maybe there are some exceptions. How many exceptions are there on the list of 13?'"

"We said all 13 are exceptionable."

"So he said, 'Aduh, you make it difficult for me'. He said 'tell Subandrio it's all right'."

Still, this was easier said than done. Bresnan took Sukarno's unwritten approval to secure "some kind of approval from someone else in a position of authority".

However, the unfavorable environment, with political instability and communism on the rise, made it impossible to maintain the foundation's presence in Indonesia.

Bresnan recalled that by 1965 all the other foreign aid agencies, including the United Nations, had left Jakarta.

"I felt a deep lack of accomplishment after the four years of work at Taman Kebun Sirih," he said referring to the foundation's address.

But when Soeharto replaced Sukarno, his priority was to rebuild the wrecked economy and in doing so he let technocrats lead the way.

This vast political change proved to be Bresnan's first real break in attempting to emulate what he called "rational economic planning" on nations like Indonesia.

He said then foreign minister Adam Malik came to New York to reclaim Indonesia's seat in the United Nations General Assembly.

Bresnan remembers meeting him and him saying, "We want to remind you that we didn't ask you to leave."

Eighteen months after it left Jakarta the Ford Foundation was back in town. Overall the foundation has given away over US$125 million in grants since 1954.

Bresnan left his representative position in Jakarta to head the foundation's Asia-Pacific office from 1973 to 1981.

"I had the intellectual resources of what amounted to a worldwide think tank on the subject of development, and I was limited only by my imagination," Bresnan said during the tribute. "I thought at the time, and I still think, it's the best job in the world."

Last Wednesday, Bresnan was awarded the Bintang Jasa Pratama, or the Star of Primary Service, one of the highest honors for work promoting Indonesia.