[2] Her doctoral work at Harvard University was supported by an anonymous full scholarship to learn Chinese and to pursue research in the field of United States relations with East Asia.

She did her doctoral work under the direction of Ernest R. May, a scholar of American foreign relations, and John King Fairbank, an historian of China.

She recalled in her presidential address to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations: I find that I have spent most of my life as a teacher and scholar thinking and writing about war.

In less than two weeks a 30-year-old vocabulary is back: credibility gap, seek and destroy, hard to tell friend from foe, civilian interference in military affairs, the dominance of domestic politics, winning, or more often, losing hearts and minds.

[2] While in graduate school she met and married Ernest P. Young, an historian of China described by a friend as her "early intellectual companion."