John Wilson Lewis

A native of King County, Washington, Lewis graduated from Deep Springs College in 1949 before earning a bachelor's degree at University of California, Los Angeles. He returned to UCLA after serving in the United States Navy from 1954 to 1957. Lewis received a master's degree in 1958, and completed a Ph.D. in 1962. He specialized in China–United States relations and the Korean conflict, inspired to research those topics by relatives who worked as missionaries in China and his time in the military, respectively. He began teaching at Cornell in 1961, and left for Stanford in 1968.^[2][3] At Stanford, Lewis became founding director of the Center for East Asian Studies,^[4] serving until 1970 when he started the Center for International Security and Arms Control,^[5] which later became the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in 1983.^[6][7] From 1983 to 1990, Lewis led what became the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center.^[2][1]

Lewis shared his experience of arriving at Stanford University as a specialist on the sensitive topic of China during a time of significant public unrest related to the Vietnam War. He described how this context affected his relationships with both students and faculty, and spoke about the challenges of working in a field that required confronting deep cultural and political viewpoints. Lewis also recounted being invited to Stanford and his role in founding the Center for East Asian Studies.^[8] He also co-founded the National Committee on North Korea in 2004,^[9] and was awarded a plaque by the organization for his long-standing efforts to promote peace and reconciliation in Northeast Asia.^[10]

Lewis and Xue Litai's 1988 text China Builds the Bomb is a seminal text on the development of China's nuclear weapons program.^[11]: 1 It relied on Chinese sources released in the 1980s and has some limitations as a result.^[11]: 1 For example, Lewis and his co-author had limited information about the inception of China's program (including the USSR's early provision of some information on the RDS-2 device) and erroneously believed China's first bomb included a source similar to that of the American Fat Man (in fact, it and most of China's first generation warheads used uranium deuteride sources).^[11]: 1

Lewis married his wife Jacquelyn in 1954, with whom he had three children. He lived on the Stanford University campus, where he died at the age of 86 on September 4, 2017.^[2]