He was a lawyer and former professor at Harvard Law School. He and his wife, Joan, were a fixture on the diplomatic cocktail circuit and he developed relationships with many correspondents, including me. It was a friendship that lasted decades and manifested itself in several important Overseas Press Club events in New York. He died September 22 at the age of 95.
Just a few years before my arrival in the region, Mao Tse-tung died in 1976 after the turbulent decade of the Cultural Revolution. It was a period of sometimes violent revolutionary zeal that Mao whipped up against Chinese suspected of being “bourgeois” or “capitalist roaders.” Millions died without any pretense of due process.
