[Photo: Then First Deputy Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong thanking residents of Marine Parade GRC during the victory tour in the 1988 General Election. "I did not feel he wanted to insult me...He had his purpose in saying what he said," Mr Goh says of Mr Lee Kuan Yew's candid assessment of him.]

Lee Kuan Yew might have accepted the second-generation leaders' choice of Goh Chok Tong as their leader in 1984 but he unsettled both them and the public four years later, at the National Day rally in August, when he made public his 1980 assessment of the five key men.

His blunt statement on how he thought Goh tried to please too many people when he should not and that his first choice as successor was Tony Tan, although he had known by 1984 that the latter was not interested in the job, shook the people.

Goh, who was "puzzled and stunned" by the speech, remembered the awkwardness at the reception after the event.

"How would the people come and greet me? It was very awkward. They looked at me...they didn't know whether to smile or to sympathise with me," he said.

His good friend Ahmad Mattar was furious, he said.

He told Ahmad in jest: "If the prime minister does this to me again next year, I'll walk out."

"I'll walk out with you," Ahmad said to him.

Goh's wife, equally puzzled, asked: "Why did he say that?"

Lee caused yet another stir among the people a few days later - at a session with students from the National University of Singapore and the Nanyang Technological Institute, now Nanyang Technological University - when he described Goh as "wooden" and said that he might have to see a psychiatrist about it.

In pointing out how Goh could not convey through television and mass meetings what he could in individual face-to-face or small group discussions, he said: "I have suggested to him (to seek) perhaps a bit of psychological adjustment, maybe (see) a psychiatrist...something holds him back. He is...before a mass audience...he gets wooden - which he is not. When you speak to him one-to-one, he has strong feelings. Get him on television, it's difficult (to see that). He has improved, I will say, about 20 per cent. He needs to improve by more than 100 per cent."

Someone differently constituted from Goh could have been thrown on the mat by so harsh a public judgement and not get up after the count of 10 but not Goh.

Looking back, he said simply: "It did not hurt...I knew Mr Lee well. He's not a man to slam you for nothing. He was never personal. So I did not feel he wanted to insult me...He had his purpose in saying what he said. I think he was disappointed with me for my inability to mobilise the ground. So he wanted to get me to do something about it."

He added: "I knew myself. I was a block of wood. So? It was the truth. But I was prepared to take on the job. If I could not do the job, then so be it. That was my strength. I was not chasing after the job. If I were, if my ambition was to be prime minister, then I'd be furious that my chances had diminished."

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