When he was 8, his parents moved to Washington, D.C., where his father worked as Chief of the Orientalia Division at the Library of Congress.

In 1944 he and Laurance Tipton, a British prisoner, escaped and joined a unit of the Nationalist guerrillas who fought against the Japanese.

He served after that as Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Taiwan before being appointed to the position of United States Ambassador to Burma in 1968.

He then joined the third and final United States-China communiqué as a negotiator where he helped the U.S. reaffirm their ties with the People's Republic of China.

After retiring from the U.S. Department of the State, he acted as the director of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies.