Evoking the words of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in a passionate speech, Emanuel Pastreich made his formal declaration of candidacy for President of the United States in front of an enthusiastic audience on June 16at the Seoul Foreign Correspondents’ Club. Pastreich insisted that his candidacy was as an independent and he openly questioned the capacity of the established political parties to respond to the current crisis.
Pastreich called for a profound moral change in the United States, suggesting that piecemeal reform was insufficient.
He exclaimed,
“This moment is such a moment and I declare my candidacy for President of the United States not because I desire the perks that accompany that position, perks that have grown gaudy as that institution has decayed, but because there will be no hope of stanching the flow of our nation’s lifeblood unless those who have benefited the most from our finest traditions are willing to throw themselves into the battle.”
Although ignored in the mainstream press, Pastreich’s platform has gathered broad attention as he takes on serious issues otherwise completely ignored by politicians in the United States. From financial accountability for the Pentagon to a comprehensive response to climate change, to a commitment to 9.11 truth, to an end to foreign wars, the platform goes far beyond anything any other American politician has presented.
A product of Yale and Harvard with a background in Asian studies, Pastreich has taken up the tradition of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a “traitor to his class,” describing in-depth the actual experience of Americans and moving away from mainstream assumptions.
He explained,
“Moreover, after I wrote the speech and spoke with a variety of people, from working poor to teachers and restaurant employees, I came to believe that I was able to represent precisely the needs of the country because I have not accepted any external funding, and I was myself unemployed. As someone in the same position as the majority of Americans, I can represent them in a manner that privileged politicians could not possibly do.”
The talk was followed with a discussion about US-Korean relations opened by Buyoung Lee former head of the Korean National Assembly and a leader in the democracy movement in the 1980s. Members of the panel included Heo Sinhaeng, former minister of agriculture, and Jeong Raegwon former Korean ambassador for climate change, and Do Jaeyoung, former Vice President of the KIA Group.
Emanuel Pastreich was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1964, a year after the assassination of John F. Kennedy-a political figure he would later feel tremendous sympathy for when he embraced international politics.
His father, Peter Pastreich, was the son of a pharmacist who ran his own humble store in Brooklyn New York. Peter Pastreich was formerly the CEO at the San Francisco Symphony.
Emanuel’s mother Marie Louise Rouff is an artist and a voracious reader who lives on Martha’s Vineyard, an island of the coast not far from Boston. At the age of 90 she cooks for herself and also grows her own vegetables. Radically independent in her thinking, and convinced of the importance of art in society.. She grew up in Luxembourg, a small country surrounded by the great powers of France and Germany, and the struggle in Luxembourg for cultural identity and independence also had great influence.
He was accepted at Yale University in 1983 and decided to major in Chinese in part because he had many Chinese friends from High School in San Francisco and in part because he felt that China would become the most important country in the future and that Americans had to have a profound understanding of that country and that culture. He went to National Taiwan University for one year and enrolled entirely in Chinese language classes, avoiding Americans to make sure he spoke only Chinese.
But at the time, it was Japan that was the quickly rising power in Asia and Emanuel decided to devote his attention to building up and understanding of China that was equivalent to his understanding of China. He started the Japanese language his last year at Yale and was able to get a scholarship to study Japanese full time in Japan at the best academy for American Asia experts from the summer of 1987.
After a year of learning the Japanese language, Emanuel entered the department of comparative literature at the University of Tokyo in 1988 and started attending classes in Japanese as a research student. He did well and was able to write and give presentations in Japanese within a year. He entered the MA program then and engaged in a crash course to get himself up to the highest level of proficiency in Japanese possible, conducting all his work in Japanese and writing a 150 page MA thesis in Japanese.
There were two aspects to Emanuel’s studies in comparative literature at the University of Tokyo. On the one hand, he devoted himself to the careful study of classical literature and Confucian thought, reading many Chinese and Japanese original texts and developing a sophisticated understanding of both countries. On the other hand, even as he was being trained to be a professor, he did not give up the original dream of playing a vital role in politics and international relations as a bridge between the United States and Asia. It was clear to him, however, that America needed someone with a profound understanding of Asia and he hoped that there would be occasion for him to play such a role in the future.
Keeping his role in the United States in mind, Emanuel decided that rather than continuing on in Japan and becoming a professor at a Japanese university, he would return to the United States and pursue a Ph.D. in Asian studies at Harvard University. he returned in 1992 and quickly established a very close friendship with his advisor Stephen Owen, the leading expert in Chinese literature in the United States and also a graduate of the same department at Yale as Emanuel.
While at Harvard, Emanuel became increasingly aware of Korea. There were many talented students at Harvard working on Korean studies and he was increasingly aware of the importance of Korea’s role in Asia, especially as Korea became more open. He decided to teach himself Korean and to take a class in Korean in 1995 at Harvard. Eventually, Emanuel obtained a scholarship to study at the Department of Chinese literature at Seoul National University for one year.
Emanuel started his career at a professor at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 1998. Once he was established as a professor, however, it became clear that his strength was not so much as professor of literature, but rather as a figure who could build bridges between the United States and Asia. He quickly established close relations not only with top administrators at the university, but also with many faculty in the engineering school.
Increasingly Emanuel’s work involved international exchanges for University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, with Asia. This led to close cooperation with multiple schools, and especially with the College of Engineering. He became a member of ACDIS (Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security) where he started writing papers on international relations, security, and technology as part of new interest on his part on how to utilize his expertise in languages and his new interest in technology.
Eventually there were several experts who learned about Emanuel’s work at the University of Illinois and suggested that he come to Washington D.C. to work directly on policy issues related to East Asia. Emanuel accepted some consulting work and moved to Washington D.C. in 2004, but the increasing political chaos in that city at the time meant that it was hard for him to get work at American think tanks or government organizations and he ultimately started working for the Korean Embassy as the head of a new Korean think tank known as KORUS House and the editor of a newspaper “Dynamic Korea” produced by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. That work also involved considerable cooperation with Korean diplomats and the ambassador.
Emanuel was offered a job as foreign exchange advisor to the newly elected governor of Chungnam Province Lee Wan-guin February, 2007 and moved to Korea with his family. He helped the government with cooperation overseas and also to develop tourism and international education programs. Ultimately, however, Emanuel ended up working as an advisor to the Daedeok Research cluster where he helped research institutes to establish closer ties with partners in the United States, Japan, and elsewhere and to make plans for Korea’s future technology policy together with other experts.
Emanuel became a professor at Kyung Hee University in 2011 and started far broader activities in Seoul including the publication of six books in Korean, two books in Chinese, and one book in Japanese.
The Asia Institute, a think tank that Emanuel established in Daejeon in 2007, took off from this time as a major space for original thinking in Korea, and its regular seminars were well attended. Eventually the Asia Institute opened offices in Tokyo, Hanoi, and Washington D.C. in addition to Seoul.
Emanuel decided to return to Washington D.C. in 2019 to run the Asia Institute there and to do his best, along with a close group of friends, to contribute to American cooperation with East Asia and to argue in writing and in a series of important seminars that America’s future was in Asia and that a profound reorientation was required.
From January of 2020, however, immediately before the COVID 19 crisis, Emanuel found he could no longer carry out his work in Washington D.C. and decided to extend a short trip to Asia into a longer stay because he found it easier to work on a vision for a response to climate change, and for peace in Northeast Asia when in Seoul. Washington D.C. had become paralyzed in a political sense and anti-Asia sentiment infected the discussion of Asia policy.
In February of 2020, just before he moved back to Seoul, Emanuel announced his candidacy for President of the United States as an independent. He delivered a profound speech on the essential problems that the United States faced and put forth a vision for fundamental transformation. He continued these efforts in Seoul as well, gathering a substantial group of followers in the United States and in Korea (and elsewhere).
The candidacy of Emanuel for President of the United States at first was not taken seriously by many. There was a tendency to assume that unless one has a lot of money, and backing by the establishment media, it is absolutely impossible to be taken seriously as a candidate for president and that discussing the possibility was a waste of time.
Pastreich addressed this issue in his speech, saying,
“If the requirement for becoming a presidential candidate is having the backing of the rich and being praised by a corrupt media empire, then clearly I am not qualified. But the United States constitution, which should always be our starting point, does not say anywhere that money or power is required to be president. I say that if the other candidates are taking money from investment banks, from multinational corporations, or from the super-rich, that it is they, and not I, who are not qualified to be president.”
