James Claude "Jim" Thomson Jr. (September 14, 1931—August 11, 2002) was an American statesman, historian and journalist.
Born in Princeton, New Jersey, to Congregationalist missionary parents only temporarily home from the Republic of China, he soon moved with them and his siblings to Nanjing. His siblings were Anne (who goes by Nancy), Sydney, and John, and he was a friend and brother in law to theologian Robert McAfee Brown, Sydney's husband. (Only Nancy and Sydney are still alive.)
Thomson was a student at the University of Nanking, and later graduated with a B.A. from Yale University in 1953. As a Yale-Clare Fellow at Cambridge University, he received a B.A. in history in 1955, and an M.A. in 1959. He received his Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1961. When not in Washington, D.C., he lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts with his wife, Diana, whom he had married in 1959.[1]
A member of the Democratic Party, Thomson was an assistant to Chester Bowles during the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign of 1956. He held various jobs relating to East Asian Affairs in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, resigning in 1966 in protest of the Vietnam War. In May 1964 he was involved in drafting what would eventually become the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. He later called the original idea "fairly benign," yet it was shelved in June of that year due to the threat of a congressional filibuster.[2]
His article "How Could Vietnam Happen?" in the April 1968 Atlantic Magazine examined and condemned American involvement in Vietnam in terms of State Department bureaucratic politics, the purging of expertise in the McCarthy era, and Democratic administration remembrance of the "loss of China" charges.[3] Thomson appeared briefly on ABC during Richard Nixon's visit to the People's Republic of China, and he demonstrated the use of chopsticks for the American public.
He wrote two books; one, published 1969, was While China Faced West: American Reformers in Nationalist China, 1928-1937,[4] and the other in 1981, Sentimental Imperialists: The American Experience in East Asia, along with co-authors Peter W. Stanley and John Curtis Perry. He was a lecturer in history at Harvard University starting in 1970, and in 1972 he was appointed curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. He taught at Boston University from 1984 until 1997. His death in 2002, two years after his wife's, was due to a heart attack. Both of their funerals were held in the Memorial Church of Harvard University, and they are both buried in Heath, Massachusetts.[5]