This work is based on the private papers of the late Tun Dr Ismail Alhaj bin Datuk Haji Abdul Rahman. These documents were found in somewhat scattered condition in his home after he passed away on 2 August 1973. His eldest son, Tawfik, understood that it was his inescapable duty to collect them and to care for them until such times when they could be used to tell his father's story, and to speak of the Malaysia he envisaged. The collection of Ismail's letters was in the keeping of one of his brothers, and came into Tawfik's care much later.

In March 2005, after lengthy discussions with his old friend Ambassador Verghese Mathews, a visiting research fellow at Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), Tawfik decided to deposit these papers, which were in danger of physical deterioration, with ISEAS Library.

ISEAS Director Ambassador K. Kesavapany, who immediately decided that a biography about Tun Dr Ismail was long overdue, gave me the honour of writing it, and convinced Tawfik to be consultant and adviser for the project.

Perhaps because Tun Dr Ismail was a stickler for rules, hardly any official documents are to be found among his papers, with the exception of a Special Branch report from the early 1960s, the introductory page to which is missing. Being a hard-working and xiv Preface conscientious man, he tended to finish his work at his office, and seldom took important files home.

The documents that this biography relies upon most are, first, an unfinished and unpublished autobiography called “Drifting into Politics” that Tun Dr Ismail authored after he resigned from government work in mid-1967, to which he made only two additions in later years; second, the collection of correspondence he kept throughout his life, which though incomplete, provides intriguing information about his life, his friends and his character; and third, the series of reports that he wrote between September 1957 and January 1959 for the benefit of Prime Minister Tunku Abdul Rahman, when the former was Malaya's first Ambassador to Washington and first Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. These three constitute the “core” of his papers.