Richard Llewellyn Williams

Richard Llewellyn Williams
1st United States Ambassador to Mongolia
In office 1988–1990
Succeeded by	Joseph Edward Lake

Richard Llewellyn Williams, (born December 28, 1929) was a career member of the Senior Foreign Service who, over three decades as a career U.S. diplomat, opened the first American consulate in mainland China since the 1940s (in Guangzhou, 1979), served as the first U.S. Ambassador to the Mongolian People's Republic from 1988 to 1990 (Diplomatic relations were established with the Mongolian People's Republic in January 1987) and then was named Consul General in Hong Kong from 1990 to 1993. Williams was also director of Chinese affairs at the U.S. State Department during the Tiananmen crisis.^[1]

Career

Richard L. Williams was born in Chicago, IL in 1929. As a child, Williams was one of the kids on the radio program Quiz Kids from 1940 to 1945. He graduated from the University of Chicago with an A.B.in 1948, then obtained his bachelor's degree from Purdue University in 1951. He went on to earn an M.B.A. from Harvard University in 1953 after which he served in the United States Army, from 1953 to 1955.^[2]

Williams joined the Foreign Service in 1956. From 1965 to 1967 he was detailed to the White House correspondence staff. From 1968 to 1972 he was a political officer at the Consulate General of the United States, Hong Kong. Between 1972 and 1975 he served as an international relations officer for the Bureau of Intelligence and Research. He was a country officer for Fiji and Papua New Guinea at the Department of State from 1975 to 1977; and then a student at the National War College from 1977 to 1978. In addition he was Deputy Director of the Office of Micronesian Status Negotiations (1978–1979), Consul General in Guangzhou (Canton) (1979–1981) (recounted in his 2005 memoir At the Dawn of the New China ^[3]), and Deputy Consul General in Hong Kong (1981–1985).

Williams was nominated by President Ronald Reagan to be the first U.S. Ambassador to the Mongolian People's Republic (MPR) on May 8, 1988. Bilateral relations with MPR had only been established a year earlier, in January 1987. Given the infrastructure challenges in Ulaanbaatar at the time, the State Department decided to accredit an Ambassador stationed in Washington. During this period Williams also served as Country Director of the Department of State's Office of Chinese and Mongolian Affairs during a particularly tense period in Sino-American relations following the events of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Instead of co-accrediting an ambassador from a usually larger neighboring country, as was standard practice when the State Department did not have the resources to establish a proper embassy in a particular country, the State Department decided to base Williams in Washington in order to avoid giving the Mongolians the impression that it considered them an adjunct of either Moscow or Beijing.^[4]

For seven years following his 1994 retirement from the Foreign Service, Williams taught graduate level China-related courses at Columbia and New York Universities.

References