By Will Inboden
Ambassador James Lilley died
on November 12. With his passing, America also lost one of its most
accomplished Asia-hands. It is perhaps a fitting tribute to his legacy that
his death occurred the same day that President Obama departed for an Asia
shaped so much for the better by the devoted lifetime of service of Ambassador
Lilley and his fellow statesmen.
When Lilley joined the CIA in 1951 upon his graduation from
Yale, Asia was convulsed with conflict and poverty, and communism seemed to be
everywhere ascendant. China had just two years earlier fallen to Mao Zedong,
foreshadowing years of isolation and totalitarian brutality. American troops
were mired in a bloody stalemate on the Korean peninsula, trying to prevent
Chinese forces from completing communist North Korea's invasion of the South.
Taiwan was a beleaguered, impoverished island outpost for Chiang Kai-Shek and
the Nationalists. Japan was a traumatized, war-torn nation in the nativity
phase of its reconstruction. Southeast Asia was convulsed by anticolonialist
nationalisms that often blended with communist insurgencies.
Over the next four decades, Jim Lilley's career embodied
Asia's remarkable transformation and America's evolving posture in the region. Born and raised in China, throughout his life he combined a deep and abiding
affection for Asia with a patriot's love for America. It seemed he was in the
middle of almost every significant conflict or foreign policy development. He
ran clandestine operations in China and the "secret war" in Laos, became the
first CIA station chief in Beijing after the Nixon-Kissinger opening, helped
solidify the US defense commitment to Taiwan, and played a key role as U.S.
Ambassador in encouraging South Korea's transition to democracy in 1987. He
served as Ambassador to China during the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, and
for over a year afterwards sheltered Chinese dissident Fang Lizhi in the US
Embassy compound. Ambassador Lilley demonstrated throughout his career that
American interests and values need not be in conflict, that a wise Asia policy
combines pragmatic cooperation with the regimes in power and principled
commitments to universal values of human liberty and dignity. By the end of
his government service, Asia was incomparably more prosperous, stable, and
free.
As a junior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute some
years ago, I had the privilege of knowing Ambassador Lilley during the twilight
of his career and the early stages of my own. He was invariably engaging,
animated, opinionated, and always ready to dispense bits of wisdom gleaned over
a lifetime with the captivating style of an accomplished raconteur. His memoir
China
Hands: Nine Decades of Adventure, Espionage, and Diplomacy in Asia, written
with his son Jeff, is an elegant model of erudition and insight, a profoundly
moving family chronicle, and an indispensable resource for understanding the
relationship between the United States and Asia in the 20th
century.
In short, his was a life lived in the spirit of his beloved
alma mater: for God, for country, and for Yale. May he rest in peace.
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