James Sasser, a three-term Democratic senator from Tennessee who, with no background in diplomacy or Chinese affairs, thrived as President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to China in the late 1990s until a bombing in Europe left angry mobs besieging his embassy, died on Tuesday at his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. He was 87.
Gray Sasser, his son, said the cause was apparently a heart attack.
Never a charismatic senator, from 1977 to 1995, Mr. Sasser found his niche as Mr. Clinton’s envoy to the People’s Republic of China from 1996 to 1999, when he helped turn around a long period of eroding relations between the two superpowers by facilitating summit meetings and trade agreements. But his tenure ended badly when NATO bombs intended for a Serbian dictator mistakenly hit China’s embassy in Belgrade, setting off violent protests in Beijing.
Mr. Sasser first drew Mr. Clinton’s attention as a like-minded moderate-leaning liberal who, with the end of Cold War threats from the Soviet Union, favored deep cuts in military spending to promote health, education and community development. In 1993, Senator Sasser engineered Mr. Clinton’s first budget, setting a pattern for annual surpluses and low deficits that were a Clinton signature.
After nearly 18 years in the Senate, Mr. Sasser seemed to be coasting to a fourth term in 1994 and a pinnacle of power as the Senate majority leader. But on the threshold, he lost his seat to a political novice, Bill Frist, a Nashville heart- and lung-transplant surgeon, who joined the so-called “Republican Revolution” that seized unified control of Congress for the first time since 1952.
Shortly after Mr. Sasser’s return to private life, the United States ambassador to Beijing, J. Stapleton Roy, asked to be relieved in early 1995, and the president picked Mr. Sasser to succeed him. White House officials said Mr. Clinton regarded him as a trusted ally who had a good grasp on foreign affairs, was a quick study and performed well in complex situations.
“Clinton offered me a number of positions, but I was only interested in being ambassador to China,” Mr. Sasser said in an interview for this obituary in 2021. “I thought that the relationship between China and the United States was the most important thing in the world, going forward. I wanted to be part of that, and to do something that would be challenging.”
It was a time of deteriorating relations with China, a nuclear power with 1.2 billion people and the world’s fastest growing economy. Washington and Beijing differed sharply over human rights, weapons proliferation, trade and Taiwan. In a rebuke for allowing Taiwan’s president to make a private visit to the United States, China recalled its ambassador, and until February 1996, Mr. Sasser’s move to Beijing was held up by further Senate and Beijing reservations.
But the trouble had deeper roots: China’s crushing of a democracy movement at Tiananmen Square in 1989, its sale of missile components to Iran and its abuses of prison labor and pirated copyrights. And in the background were allegations, never proved, that Beijing had tried to steal American nuclear technology and influence the 1996 presidential election.
“Relations had been very poor since the Tiananmen blowup,” Mr. Sasser recalled. “When China began launching rockets in the Taiwan Straits, I realized how treacherous they were. We didn’t understand each other. We were not talking to each other. I came back to the United States and arranged for a series of meetings in China.”
Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the national security adviser Anthony Lake met counterparts in Beijing, Mr. Sasser said.
“They had several days of intensive dialogue that laid out policy goals on both sides, and that opened an era of good feeling that lasted for a while,” he said. “There were still a lot of conflicts, but suspicion went down.”
In 1997, Mr. Sasser and the Clinton administration helped ease tensions further by negotiating $2 billion in trade deals, including the sale of Boeing 777 jetliners to China, and an agreement signed by Mr. Sasser that allowed the United States to keep a consulate in Hong Kong, long a British colony, after it reverted to Chinese control that summer.
Mr. Sasser also helped arrange reciprocal visits by President Jiang Zemin to the United States in 1997 and Mr. Clinton to China in 1998. The ambassador accompanied Mr. Jiang and Mr. Clinton on both state visits, and hosted Mr. Clinton and his wife, Hillary Clinton, at the embassy in Beijing.
As Mr. Clinton’s nine-day, five-city visit began, China arrested several democracy advocates in what appeared to Western observers to be a calculated insult to President Clinton. Mr. Sasser’s formal protest drew a disdainful rebuff from Chinese officials, and Mr. Clinton responded forcefully a day later in an address at Beijing University that was televised nationally in China.
“We are convinced that certain rights are universal,” Mr. Clinton said, “not American rights or European rights or rights for developed nations, but the birthrights of people everywhere, now enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights — the right to be treated with dignity, the right to express one’s opinion, to choose one’s own leaders, to associate freely with others and to worship, or not, freely, however one chooses.”
After talks later between the two presidents covering the future of Chinese-American relations — including trade, human rights and visions of an independent judiciary in China — Secretary of State Albright said: “They went way beyond what people thought were the possibilities of having this kind of discussion. We have moved the relationship into a qualitatively and quantitatively different direction.”
But any residual mood of amity was shattered in May 1999, when NATO warplanes, in an attack aimed at the autocratic Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, pounded Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and struck the Chinese Embassy by mistake, killing three Chinese nationals and causing many casualties at other unintended targets, including hospitals.
NATO quickly admitted the errant bombing and expressed regrets. Mr. Sasser and other American officials reached out to Chinese leaders. But the Chinese news media portrayed the bombing as a deliberate act of aggression.
The reaction across China was unforgiving. For four days, tens of thousands of protesters, largely unchecked by the police, surrounded the American Embassy in Beijing and hurled rocks, chunks of concrete and other debris. Windows were shattered, employees’ cars were smashed, and a score of personnel, including the ambassador, feared for their lives. A photograph of Mr. Sasser looking out a broken window appeared worldwide in the media.
Communications with the outside were not disrupted, and Mr. Sasser, appearing on American television news programs, said that he and his staff were uninjured but virtual prisoners, unable to change clothing or shower, reduced to eating military rations and sleeping without blankets on their office floors. It was clear, Mr. Sasser said, that the protests had been choreographed by the Chinese authorities and that the only police action was to prevent mobs from entering the embassy.
A few days later, President Clinton announced that Mr. Sasser would be replaced by Joseph W. Prueher, a retired admiral. Mr. Sasser, whose retirement had been scheduled long before the siege, soon returned home and ended his government career.
James Ralph Sasser was born in Memphis on Sept. 30, 1936, one of three children of Joseph and Mary (Gray) Sasser. His father was a United States Department of Agriculture agent who combed back roads, teaching farmers agricultural techniques that might improve their impoverished lives. His mother, the last person to leave the average party she attended, was seen as the family’s politician.
James and his sisters, Jo Marilyn and Phyllis, attended public schools in Nashville. He graduated from Hillsboro High School in 1954. After a year at the University of Tennessee, he transferred to Vanderbilt University in Nashville and received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1958. He earned his juris doctor from the Vanderbilt Law School in 1961.
In 1962, he married Mary Gorman, a teacher he met as a fellow student at Vanderbilt. They had two children, a son, Gray, and a daughter, Elizabeth.
In addition to his son, Gray, he is survived by his wife; a daughter, Elizabeth Sasser; two sisters, Jo Marilyn O’Brien and Phyllis Donnally; and four grandchildren.
From 1961 to 1977, Mr. Sasser was a partner in a civil law practice in Nashville. Active in Democratic politics since 1960, when he joined the last campaign of Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, Mr. Sasser was chairman of the Tennessee Democratic Party from 1973 to 1976. That year, he won a Senate seat on his first try, defeating the one-term incumbent, Senator Bill Brock, heir to a Chattanooga candy fortune and a future chairman of the Republican Party. Mr. Sasser easily won re-election in 1982 and 1988 against lesser-known opponents.
In the Senate, he championed affirmative action and foreign aid programs and was chairman of the Budget Committee from 1989 to 1995. In that role he was a key ally of the Senate majority leader, George J. Mitchell of Maine.
After Mr. Mitchell announced his decision to retire in January 1995, Mr. Sasser was regarded as his probable successor as majority leader, with two provisos: that he win re-election to a fourth term, and that the Democrats retain control of the Senate. But the Republicans won the Senate and Mr. Sasser lost.
After retiring as the ambassador, Mr. Sasser was a visiting professor at George Washington University for a year, then became a Washington-based business consultant to American and Chinese companies for a decade. He later taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he and his wife settled after giving up homes in Washington, Tennessee and Virginia.
Asked in the interview for this obituary to assess his work as a senator and ambassador, Mr. Sasser said: “I always felt that I made a greater contribution to United States interests in three years in China than in 18 years in the Senate. My first love was the Senate, except for that disastrous 1994 election, when I lost to Dr. Frist. But I can laugh about it now.”
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