Rubbing Shoulders With Two Presidents
Tom Graciano / Indonesia Media
 Mas Dipo later told me the Suhartos had a first-class private tutor who taught English to the whole family. He was Clive Williams, an Australian. According to information I gathered from various sources, the president met him in Semarang, Central Java, years before when he was still commander of Central Java’s Diponegoro military division. To the Suharto teenaged children he was Oom (Uncle) Clive who reportedly lived with the first family at their Jalan Cendana residence. Clive Williams taught them the language with a great emphasis, of course, on conversation. He would make them all practice their English conversation skills with him every day. Like I said earlier in the story, Ibu Tien went to a Dutch secondary school where she learned English. So she was a few steps ahead of the president and the children.
 By the time Ibu Tien finished what she had been doing we – the president, Ray and myself – were sitting on the chairs by the coffee table again. The first lady then joined us. I can’t remember if August was with us again. But the two gentlemen who were with us at lunch came over to sit with us. Pak Harto was in the mood for telling Ray and me how he and Ibu Tien first met that led to their marriage. The president continued to speak in English but once in a while turned to Ibu Tien to ask, in bahasa Indonesia, “How do you say that in English, Tien?”
For almost one hour Pak Harto told us how he, then as Lt. Col. Suharto, a middle-ranking officer of the TNI (Indonesian National Army), went with some of the troops under his command into Yogyakarta ( Central Java) in early 1949. The Dutch military occupied the city at the time following its aggression in December 1948 against what was then the capital of the Republic of Indonesia. President Soekarno and other government leaders were exiled to the island of Bangka off South Sumatra, while the seat of the new Republican government was moved to Bukittinggi (West Sumatra) with Sjafruddin Prawiranegara as caretaker prime minister. The Dutch military aggression caused the Indonesian troops, along with the guerrilla freedom fighters, to evacuate the city and move to safer areas in wooded hills and villages around Yogyakarta.
The president said he was preparing a major attack against the Dutch troops in Yogyakarta to show the international world that the Indonesian military was determined to liberate the city and bring the legitimate government back to it. He and a few of his intelligence officers went into the city passing off as ordinary peasants going to the market to sell their produce. They were given shelter and protection by the Sultan of Yogyakarta in his palace or kraton. The late Sultan Hamengkubuwono IX later became one of the key leaders supporting Pak Harto in his new order government. In fact, he became vice-president for one term.
It was in the kraton that the president met Ibu Tien who was a nurse with the Indonesian Red Cross or Palang Merah Indonesia (PMI). I can’t remember exactly how Pak Harto got slightly wounded. Ibu Tien treated him for the wound which was how the two first met. As Col. Suharto and his men were drawing up their strategy in the kraton to launch the attack on the city, interaction between Pak Harto and Ibu Tien became increasingly frequent. Their frequent interaction developed into a romantic relationship which brought the ringing of wedding bells into their life.
 On March 1, 1949 Col. Suharto led the all-out attack on the Dutch troops in Yogyakarta and occupied the city for six hours. This offensive is recorded in Indonesia’s history as “Serangan Umum Satu Maret” or “the First of March All-Out Attack.” A movie was made based on a novel about this military action which, if I’m not mistaken, was titled “Janur Kuning.” I can’t remember the other details of Pak Harto’s after-lunch story he told Ray and me in English with great enthusiasm, putting on his famous smile all the time. Ibu Tien would jump in every now and then to clarify some points in the president’s narrative.
President Suharto was not like the late Bung Karno as far as interacting with newsmen was concerned. Bung Karno made himself easily accessible to reporters on every official occasion in Merdeka Palace or anywhere else. Pak Harto would quickly disappear from the media people on such occasions and let a spokesman handle their questions. As far as I can remember, until the last year of my journalistic stint in Jakarta in 1976 he never gave any interview to a local journalist, let alone a foreign newsman. So after that godsend lunch on Pulau Monyet, I never had any similar opportunity to have a one-on-one dialog with the president.
However, there were a couple of occasions on which I found myself in close proximity with the president again. In mid-1970 I started my own public relations agency in Jakarta while still stringing for Time magazine and CBS News. Freeport Indonesia, at the time a subsidiary of Freeport Minerals Inc. of New York, was the first foreign company who signed an agreement with the Indonesian government following the enactment of the country’s Foreign Investment Law, known as Law No. 1 of 1967. President Suharto had agreed to inaugurate Freeport Indonesia’s copper-mining operations in Tembagapura, Papua, then known as Irian Jaya.
I was invited by the company’s resident director, the late Ali Budiardjo, to cover the inauguration ceremony. Later on, Bruce Harrison, Vice-President for Public Relations of the parent company in New York, found out I was also running a PR agency. So they hired me as a PR Advisor for the inauguration ceremony. In that position, I had to make sure senior representatives of top local and foreign media were invited to cover the event, the first major foreign investment project officiated during the early years of Pak Harto’s new order administration.
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