[3] Lee had never graduated from middle school, but independently searched for learning opportunities constantly.

He was never able to graduate from either school, although Kyung Hee eventually awarded him an honorary bachelor's degree in October 2014.

When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, he picked up English through a mixture of practice and independent study.

[3] In 1954, Lee entered the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), making him one of the first Korean Americans to do so.

He earned both a bachelor's and master's degree from the school, and was accepted into the PhD in Political Science program at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957.

His knack for languages caught the attention of Robert A. Scalapino, who had been planning to write a book on communism in East Asia around that time.

After 16 years of research, they eventually published Communism in Korea in 1973, which won a Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award.

He also researched major figures in modern Korean history such as Syngman Rhee, the first president of Korea; Lyuh Woon-hyung, a Korean politician and reunification activist in the 1940s; and Park Chung Hee, the third president of Korea, who seized power through a military coup.

[11] Lee published an autobiography in 2020 that covered his life until 1974, but "left out the rest of the stories for next time".