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Two encounters with a man who shaped a university and a peninsula
I learned this week that Ambassador James T. Laney, President Emeritus of Emory University, passed away at the age of 98. Over the years, my camera crossed paths with his twice — and both times, I came away with a deeper sense of just how much history one person can carry into a room.
On the Set of Faith and the City
The first photo here is from the set of Faith and the City, a TV forum my wife Dorie Griggs produced on the AIB network in Atlanta. On July 8, 2003, we brought Ambassador Laney together with fellow Korea ambassador Andrew Young, host Steen Miles, Rev. Dr. Insik Kim of the Presbyterian Church USA, and Dr. Han Park of the University of Georgia for a conversation on North and South Korea and the global community.
It was cutting-edge content for its time — two men who had each represented the United States on the Korean peninsula, sitting across from each other, unpacking the tangled relationships among North Korea, South Korea, China, and the U.S. Ambassador Laney had served as U.S. Ambassador to South Korea from 1993 to 1996, and he was there for the fraught moment in 1994 when tensions over North Korea’s nuclear program escalated to the brink — working alongside Presidents Clinton and Carter to help pull the region back from conflict. Hearing him talk through that history in the studio, with the calm authority of someone who had actually lived it, is a memory I still carry.
Founder’s Day Symposium, 2006
The second photo comes from March 15, 2006, at the Founder’s Day Symposium honoring Jesse Hill Jr., held at the Biltmore in Atlanta. Jesse Hill Jr. was himself a giant of Atlanta’s civil rights and business history — longtime president of Atlanta Life Insurance Company, the first African American to lead a major city’s chamber of commerce, and a man whose fingerprints were on nearly every major civic movement in the city for half a century. That Ambassador Laney was there to help honor him says something about the circles Laney moved in and the respect he commanded across Atlanta’s civic life.
A Life That Shaped Institutions
Before diplomacy, Laney spent 16 years as Emory’s 17th president, from 1977 to 1993 — a tenure Emory credits with the most significant transformation in the university’s history, from a regional teaching college into a major national research university. On his watch, Emory received the landmark $105 million gift from Robert W. Woodruff and his brother George, at the time the largest philanthropic investment ever made in an American university. He recruited President Jimmy Carter to the faculty, launched a new school of public health, and helped set Emory on the path to national prominence. In 2009, Emory renamed its graduate school in his honor — the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies.
His connection to Korea ran even deeper than his ambassadorship. He first went there in 1947 as a young Army officer, returned in the late 1950s as a Methodist missionary and professor at Yonsei University, and spent decades as one of America’s most trusted voices on U.S.–Korea relations, right up through a Building Bridges Award he received earlier this year from the Pacific Century Institute.
I’m grateful my camera was in the room for even a small piece of that story. Rest well, Ambassador.