Thomas Plate

Early life

Thomas Plate was born in New York City. At the age of five Plate's parents moved him and his sister Maureen, to Long Island. He attended public schools on Long Island before transferring to the Franciscan Preparatory Seminary in Pennsylvania at the age fifteen. Plate eventually left the seminary and entered Walt Whitman High School on Long Island and became an editor of the school newspaper, The Whitman Window. He graduated from high school and left Long Island in 1962.

After a year at the University of Pittsburgh under a General Motors Scholarship, he transferred to Amherst College. In 1966, he received a Bachelor's degree in political science from Amherst (Phi Beta Kappa, cum laude). While at Amherst College, Plate became Managing Editor of the Amherst Student, was head of the student speakers' program and editor of PAIDEIA, then the student literary magazine. In 1965 (March 3) his editorial arguing against U.S. involvement the Vietnam war appeared in the Amherst student newspaper, where he was managing editor. It was considered one of the first, if not the first, student newspaper anti-war statements. He continued his studies at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. There, Plate served on the editorial board of the Woodrow Wilson School student policy review and earned his master's degree in public and affairs from Princeton in 1969, with an emphasis on the U.S. role in the world.

Career

During his years at Amherst and Princeton, Plate worked as a campus correspondent at Newsweek and the Washington Post. He also interned at both media institutions, as well as at the United States State Department in Washington in the summer of 1967 as a speechwriter between Amherst and Princeton.

In 1970 he wrote his first book Understanding Doomsday: A Guide to the Nuclear Arms Race for Hawks, Doves and People. His career in journalism includes long stints at: Newsday (Long Island, under David Laventhol), New York Magazine (under Clay Felker), the Los Angeles Herald Examiner (under James Bellows), where he won a coveted Deadline Writing Award from the American Society of Newspaper Editors and for three-years-running the Beat Editorial Award from The Greater Los Angeles Press Club,^[3] The Daily Mail of London (under Sir David English); New York Newsday (under Don Forst); and Time magazine (under Ray Cave). In 1989, Plate moved from New York City to Los Angeles.^[4] In Los Angeles, from the end of 1989 to the fall of 1995, Plate was Editor of the Editorial Pages of the Los Angeles Times. In this position he supervised the daily editorial and op-ed pages, as well as the Sunday OPINION section. While there, these sections garnered significant professional recognition, including awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association and national newspaper design awards. In 1992, when he was editor of its editorial pages, the Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Los Angeles Riots. In 1999, he was selected as a Hoover Institution Media Fellow.^[5] In 2011, 'Conversations With Lee Kuan Yew,' the first in the 'Giants of Asia' book series, in the annual open-voting competition organized by Popular Books in Southeast Asia, was awarded the People's Choice Award for English nonfiction.

As a journalist, Tom Plate has interviewed leading political figures and world leaders, including U.S. Presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, British Prime Ministers John Major and Tony Blair, Japanese Prime Ministers Keizo Obuchi and Junichiro Koizumi, South Korean Presidents Kim Young Sam and Kim Dae Jung, Singaporean Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew, Malaysian Prime Minister Mohamad Mahathir, Thailand Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. While column-writing for the Los Angeles Times in July 1997, he was the first American commentator to warn that the implosion Thailand's Baht currency could the trigger a larger crisis in East Asia.^[6] His columns have been the longest-running newspaper-appearing column about Asia based in the U.S. In the Foreword to Plate's 2014 book 'In the Middle of China's Future: Tom Plate on Asia', Ambassador Kishore Mahbubani, dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, wrote this: "Tom Plate is one of the few Western journalists who have gotten the world's biggest story [the rise of China] right."

As an educator, Plate has presented guest lectures or courses at a wide-ranging array of institutions, including Stanford University, the U.S. Pacific Command in Honolulu, Santa Monica College, Kyoto University in Japan and the United Arab Emirates University in Al Ain, UAE, where he was a Visiting Professor and prepared a joint live Internet interactive course between UAEU and LMU on the media and politics of Asia. Since then he has conduced joint live Internet inteactive courses from LMU with major Asian universities such as Fudan in Shanghai (2015) and Yonsei in Seoul (2016). Over the years he has been invited to prestigious international conferences, including for four years the World Economic Forum in Davos and, most recently, the World Innovation Summit for Education in Doha, Qatar. In Los Angeles, at Loyola Marymount University, Plate, as its Distinguished Scholar in Asian and Pacific Studies, teaches a number of courses, including "An Introduction to the Media and Politics of Asia" and "The Future of the United Nations," the latter based in part on his 2010-2012 exclusive interviews with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, for his 4th Giant of Asia, "Conversations with Ban Ki-Moon." His 'Tom Plate on Asia' book series includes "In the Middle of the Future' (2012), "In the Middle of China's Future" (2013) and "Yo-Diplomacy" (2017; and also 'The Fine Art of the Political Interview' (2015), all published by Marshall Cavendish Asia.

Recently, he accepted the position of Vice President of the Pacific Century Institute, a track-two 'building bridges' nonprofit based in Los Angeles.