James Laney, former ambassador to Korea and Emory University president, dies at 98

James Laney held conversations with presidents and politicians, diplomats and decision makers, but perhaps his greatest gift was his ability to listen.

He liked knowing those “behind the scenes, and he made friends everywhere,” says his daughter Joni Laney, including custodians, secretaries, nurses and groundskeepers.

“He made people think more positively about themselves,” says physician Mark Rosenberg, a member of the Task Force for Global Health and a longtime friend of Laney. “He had an incredible intellect and an unshakable moral compass. ”

The former president of Emory University, James Laney later served as the U.S. Ambassador to Korea under President Bill Clinton. He died of heart failure at home in bed, next to his beloved wife Berta, on Aug. 13. He was 98.

Born in Wilson, Arkansas, he was the only child of Mary Hughey Laney, an elementary school teacher, and Thomas Mann Laney, a salesman. His grandfather Thomas Monroe Hughey, a well-known Methodist minister in Arkansas, was a huge influence on him.

At 10 years old, Laney started working a series of jobs in tiny Wilson to make money during the Depression, his daughter Joni says. His efforts to repair a broken popcorn machine didn’t work, so he sold magazines door-to-door, earning 25 cents a day, enough for doughnuts or ice cream. When the family moved to a larger town, at 15 he operated a filling station and car wash.

“These jobs show his go-get-‘em personality,” says his daughter.

His junior year of high school, Laney moved to Memphis, where he attended Central High School and met Berta Radford. He studied hard, played football and earned a full academic and athletic scholarship to Yale College.

At 19, he left college to join the U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) in Korea, then returned home three years later to marry Berta and complete his undergraduate degree in economics at Yale.

His experience in Korea, the mentorship of the chaplain at the Wesley Foundation, Doug Cook, and the example of his grandfather led him to change his focus from business to the ministry. He enrolled in Yale’s divinity school.

Laney was ordained in the Methodist Church and pastored churches before returning to South Korea in 1959 with Berta and their three children. Fluent in Korean, he served as a missionary educator at Yonsei University for five years. He loved the students he taught there, and he made lifelong friendships. While in Korea, he and Berta welcome two more children into the family.

“He always wanted a large family,” says Joni. “He didn’t like being an only child.”

The family returned to Connecticut and Jim completed a doctorate in Christian ethics at Yale in two years. He told his friend Jason Shaplen he learned an important lesson while there. He was struggling with something he was reading and decided to take a break. On a walk, he saw a professor eating ice cream, who told him, “Whatever’s wrong with the world, ice cream makes it better.”

Joni says her father “really did love ice cream. And he loved food. He remembered the food he ate wherever he went.”

With his doctorate in hand, Laney taught in Vanderbilt’s divinity school before becoming dean of Emory University’s Candler School of Theology in 1969. From there, in 1977 he was appointed president of Emory University. In 1979, he helped convince legendary Coca-Cola chairman Robert W. Woodruff to donate 3 million shares of company stock to the university, which was valued at $105 million, the largest philanthropic investment given to an American university at the time.

Faculty say he transformed Emory from “a good, regional school” into a world-class research university. Under his leadership, Emory created a school of public health, doubled its endowment and increased the number of faculty. It also credited numerous chaired professorships and a merit-based scholarship program for undergraduates, attracting top-notch students from around the world.

Joni says she and her siblings would joke about how on trips, their dad would stop the car, find a phone booth and call someone he wanted on the faculty. Among his hires was biographer and critic Richard Ellmann, and law professor Harold Berman.

Jimmy Carter’s grandson, Jason Carter, head of the Carter Center, says Laney “sat together with my grandfather and they tried to figure out what the Carter Center was really going to look like. He was my grandfather’s thought partner.”

The Carter Center is housed in Atlanta, Jason Carter says, because of Emory and Laney. “He was one of the people who made this city the global health center that it is.”

In October 1993, Laney left Emory to become the U.S. ambassador to South Korea. Things were tense: North Korea had withdrawn from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.

In 1994, tensions with North Korea escalated, “and it was one of the closest times they came to going to war,” says Jason Carter. Laney, along with Presidents Carter and Clinton, helped establish the 1994 Agreed Framework, which stopped the North’s nuclear weapons program.

In 1997, James and Berta Laney returned to Atlanta, but his expertise on and affinity for South Korea were valuable enough for him to become a special envoy in Asia. He co-chaired the Council on Foreign Relations’ Task Force on Korea.

Shaplen says he was a lowly diplomat on the task force when he became Laney’s writing partner and friend, co-authoring books, op-eds and numerous articles for publications such as Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, among others.

“Along with my father, Ambassador Laney was the wisest man I ever knew,” says Shaplen. “He helped me make sense of the world. He was a blessing to me.”