Winston Lord

Winston Lord was the US Ambassador to China from 1985 to 1989,the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 1993 to 1997, and is currently Chair Emeritus at the International Rescue Committee. Prior to those roles, Ambassador Lord was the Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor, where he accompanied Henry Kissinger on his secret trip to Beijing in 1971, President Nixon on his first official US visit to China in 1972, and President Ford on his visit in 1975. Lord attended every meeting in the 1970s that Nixon, Ford, and Kissinger held with Mao (five times), Zhou and Deng (100s of hours). He was a principal drafter of both the 1972 Shanghai Communiqué, which opened relations with China, and the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, which ended the Vietnam War. He authored "Kissinger on Kissinger: Reflections on Democracy, Grand Strategy, and Leadership" about this period of his career. Ambassador Lord became the Director of Policy Planning at the Department of State from 1973 to 1977 and then the President of the Council of Foreign Relations from 1977 to 1985. He was also a member of the National Endowment on Democracy, Asia Society, American Academy of Diplomacy, the America-China Society, the Aspen Institute of Distinguished Fellows, the Women’s Tennis Association, and the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea, and has won the State Department’s Distinguished Honor Award and the Defense Department’s Outstanding Performance Award. Ambassador Lord graduated magna cum laude from Yale in 1959 and received an M.A. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy in 1960.