Cover Story
Rising Son
Palau president Tommy Remengesau, Jr. learned early the lessons of leadership.
Conventional wisdom says he’s too young to be president. But Tommy Esang Remengesau, Jr., the Republic of Palau’s youngest chief executive at 45, has been battling conventional wisdom since his days as a rebellious teenager growing up in Koror in the early 1970s. In the process of winning all five of the elections that he has contested since 1984, Remengesau has been one of the young nation’s first politicians to successfully mobilize the youth vote. In the process, Remengesau has forever changed the long-held traditional norm in the Pacific that you have to be at least 50 with gray hair before anyone will pay attention to you.
After spending eight years in the Senate and another eight as vice president, this outspoken, often brash and always in a hurry to get things done Palauan politician has matured. By trial and error he’s learned that although a fiery speech may feel good and win points with the public, a quiet meeting with key people can get far more achieved to solve a problem. While Remengesau’s ascent to power makes him the youngest chief executive in the Micronesian region, his presidential election also has had a major personal ramification: For the first time in his political career, indeed in his life, Tommy Remengesau, Jr. has stepped out of the long shadow of his father’s acclaimed career as a public servant.
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For while his father, Thomas Remengesau, Sr., was one of the best known and highest serving Micronesians in the American Trust Territory administration, was a vice president under former President Lazarus Salii, and then briefly served as president after Salii’s 1987 suicide. But the senior Remengesau was never elected president of the Republic. After years of hearing people talk about him following in his father’s footsteps, President Remengesau is now walking in his own.
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Born in 1956, Remengesau is the eldest of eight children of Thomas O. and Ferista Esang Remengesau. He was reared in his first few years by his grandfather, Remengesau Delkuu, in Ngebuked hamlet in what is now known as Ngaraard State on the northeastern coast of Babeldaob. There was no electricity or running water in the village; children were up at the crack of dawn helping to pick up leaves around the house and to collect firewood so breakfast could be cooked.
“You couldn’t eat if you didn’t do your chores,” Remengesau recalls. Aside from the hard work and discipline of living in the village, Remengesau also absorbed a few life lessons from following his grandfather around. He recalled one occasion during the trochus season when a group of family members went to collect the valued shellfish at low tide. Along the reef flat, the young Remengesau spotted a school of red snappers in a shallow pool and eagerly began spearing one after another.
“I put about 50 on a line and took them back to the raft,” Remengesau says. “When my grandfather saw them, he belted me on the head with a bamboo pole and scolded me for killing so many fish.”
The family was there only to take trochus; they hadn’t brought ice, so the fish would spoil, his grandfather said. By the afternoon, the fish began to smell.
“It was a valuable lesson,” he says. “Get what you’re going to eat. Don’t show off and waste food.”
“Distinguished” is a word that comes to mind to describe the senior Remengesau’s career as a Trust Territory administrator and later as an elected leader. When people talk about Thomas Remengesau, they do so in terms of his honesty and forthrightness as a District Administrator in Palau and government leader. It also meant that he was busy and frequently away from home.
President Remengesau reflects on his now-close relationship with his father, saying that when he was young, “my biggest disappointment was that we didn’t spend quality time together.” Remengesau describes his youth as “rebellious” and from his description, his activities more than raised concern of his highly positioned parents and other family members. “I was a good example of a juvenile delinquent,” he says. If there was a checklist for a juvenile delinquent, Remengesau says, “I would have marked ‘all of the above.’ They say that short people have short tempers. In high school, I was always getting into fights.”
Remengesau did fine academically; in fact, he was valedictorian his senior year. His father, he recalls, was a tough disciplinarian. But his father’s discipline restrained the younger Remengesau only temporarily. Then he’d be back to his old tricks.
Remengesau’s aberrant behavior peaked when, in his late teens, he took a new government vehicle and crashed it, totaling the car and sending himself to the hospital for three weeks with a broken collarbone. He was out for barely a week before cracking up on a motorcycle and breaking his leg. That landed him back in the hospital for several more weeks.
“It was a turning point for me,” he says. “While I was in the hospital, I thought, is this the kind of life I want to lead? The back-to-back accidents were a blessing in disguise for me.”
While still hospitalized, he applied to college. He was accepted at Grand Valley State College in Michigan. When he left, everyone in his family fully expected him to be back home in a matter of weeks, he says. “My parents were surprised that I wanted to go to college,” he recalls. “My mother told me it was my last chance and to make use of it.”
It was advice he paid attention to as the transformation that started in the hospital was now in full gear. In his first few months in the U.S., he was tempted to use his fists to settle problems. “But then I’d think, if I do it will just prove everyone right,” he says.
His arrival in Michigan in mid-winter is a classic “fresh off the boat” story. “I arrived in winter wearing a T-shirt and Levis,” Remengesau recalls. “I was shivering in the taxi. I had to ask the driver to turn up the heat.”
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He didn’t return home until the summer of his junior year to work with the Micronesian Legal Service office in Koror. When his father saw him back on the island, “he sort of smiled,” the elder Remengesau’s form of a compliment — three years and still in school. Despite the cold, and the betting odds based on past behavior, the younger Remengesau proved the doubters wrong, earning himself a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice from Grand Valley in 1978.
It wasn’t until his college years, and later, that Remengesau began to fully appreciate the wisdom of his father, now retired from government service and active in the Council of Chiefs as a ranking traditional leader. Among his advice that the younger Remengesau has taken to heart is a commitment to public service. “He always said if I was going to be a public servant, I had to be 100 percent committed,” Remengesau said. “You can’t serve two masters by being both a government worker and a private businessman. “
While at school, he also visited several states on the U.S. East Coast. And, after graduation, he drove to California. “I wanted to experience America,” he says.
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The vastness of the U.S. confirmed his determination to return home. “The only way in life I could make a difference was to come home,” he says. The visit to California was fortuitous in other ways, as well, for he met his future wife, Debbie Mineich of Airai State in Babeldaob, who was going to school in Mountain View.
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Back in Koror, with a college degree in hand, the 27-year-old Remengesau went to work for the Olbiil Era Kelulau (OEK), Palau’s national congress. He decided to take a shot at an OEK Senate seat in the 1984 election, but there probably wasn’t anyone in Palau save the candidate and his wife who thought he’d have a chance. Everyone said he was too young to be elected — to be sure, he was a generation younger than the other 14 candidates vying for the three seats from northeastern coast of Babeldaob.
“No one wanted to support me,” he recalls. “It was just me and Debbie, a two-person committee going door-to-door. We walked all over the east coast of Babeldaob.” He says that he was also the first Palauan candidate to stand on the side of the road with a sign waving to motorists. At one point, as the election neared, his mother offered consolations in advance, explaining that he needed to be prepared to take a negative result in stride.
As the votes were tallied from the villages, where mostly elderly residents lived, Remengesau was receiving counts of one or two votes. With Babeldaob counted, he was in about 10th place. But once the count got to Koror, and the Guam, Saipan and U.S. votes were added, Remengesau emerged as the number one vote-getter in the 1984 election, astounding everyone except his committee of two.
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Once the euphoria of his victory wore off, however, he was faced with the realities of the being the youngest member of the OEK. “To be honest, I had a very cold reception in the OEK,” he says of his freshman term. Older generation politicians who weren’t about to pay attention to him dominated the OEK. “Members were not persuaded by my ideas or the merits of an issue,” he recalls. “I was just too young. I had to pay my dues.”
It took Remengesau a couple of years to learn to operate effectively within the OEK. But he says that period was extremely useful: he both learned and proved he could do the job.
He won reelection to the Senate in 1988. Four years later, when he took aim at the vice president’s job — in Palau elections, the president and vice president run independently — he was, again, too young for the job. “It was the same issue again,” he said. “Everyone said I should stay longer in the Senate to get more experience. It was a challenge to overcome.”
Job duties of presidents in Washington and Koror may differ somewhat, but one element that doesn’t is that work never ends at 5 p.m. Remengesau and his wife frequently jog or walk at Palau’s national track in the evenings. Even there he ends up touching base with politicians or local businesspeople who he bumps into burning calories around the track. He tries to get out to fish in the Rock Islands, but has found since his January 2001 inauguration as chief executive that he doesn’t have time to do it as often as he’d like.
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“As a general rule, I try to avoid bringing work home,” he says. But the work has a way of following him home. Or, quite often, it’s people asking him for financial help, knocking on his door in the middle of the night. “He talks to everyone,” says his wife Debbie. “He’s really a man of the people.” Remengesau adds: “I’m a victim of my own policy. I’m always available. People can see me anytime.”
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Pacific politicians are always targets for people who need money, but when you’re at the top, the line gets longer. Remengesau says he could write a book of the most creative requests for help. Some people say, “I voted for you and by the way, do you have $20?” To sell their request for aid, people often create false emergencies. One fellow came by Remengesau’s house and said his wife was about to deliver a baby. He desperately needed some money to help out. So Remengesau gave him $20. A few hours later he found the guy in a bar drinking up the contribution.
“Just when you think there are no new ways to ask for money, someone comes up with one,” he says.
There were two lessons that Remengesau says he learned as vice president: the importance of delegating responsibilities and patience. The latter wasn’t an easy adjustment. “I can never understand why it takes someone two weeks to write a letter,” he says of working with the government bureaucracy. “It’s frustrating.”
After Sandra S. Pierantozzi won the vice presidency, there were some who wondered how the two would work together given that they didn’t run as a team and had actually run against each other in a previous election. Remengesau’s eight years as VP has given him some insight into the role of the second highest job in Palau. The key to their working relationship, he says, is delegation of authority — “getting her involved” — and that they both speak their minds.
“What I like about our relationship is I say what I want and she says what she wants. She is a manager and I support her as a manager. We see eye-to-eye on the things that we need to do to become more efficient.”
“Preserve the best, improve the rest,” was Remengesau’s election slogan in 2000. “Thirty years ago, I would probably have told you that Palau would be more beautiful if it had a skyscraper, more cars, a theater, television,” he says. “People growing up to put more emphasis on materials needs.” But he admits that isn’t the vision that drives him today.
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“As a parent, it makes you stop and think: Is it possible that my children may not know the Palau that I knew when I was growing up? So you look to what has changed in your lifetime and you try to protect it but at the same time you have to head to the future.”
In 10 to 20 years, Remengesau says he’d still like to see what makes Palau beautiful: a clean ocean, uncrowded beaches. “I would hope to see modern changes but I would hope that there are changes that Palauans can be part of, to benefit from.”
But it’s more than a concern for the environment. The cultural intangibles that make Palau a unique place in the world are an integral part of Remengesau’s personality, adding significant weight to the political and economic decisions that must be made.
“I will always be a Palauan if I don’t starve in Palau, if I can have that fish soup,” he says. “If I can see my children survive because there’s help from the extended family. Where they can survive not because of money but because of that unique system, then I know I’m a Palauan. But the day that we start relying solely on the power of money then that’s when things will begin to suffer. We won’t be Palauan anymore.”
Photos: Floyd K. Takeuchi
