James Sasser, a three-term Democratic senator from Tennessee who, with no background in diplomacy or Chinese affairs, thrived as President Bill Clinton’s ambassador to China in the late 1990s until a bombing in Europe left angry mobs besieging his embassy, died Tuesday at his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He was 87.

Never a charismatic senator, from 1977 to 1995, Sasser found his niche as Clinton’s envoy to the People’s Republic of China from 1996-99, when he helped turn around a long period of eroding relations between the two superpowers. But his tenure ended badly when NATO bombs intended for a Serbian dictator mistakenly hit China’s embassy in Belgrade, setting off violent protests in Beijing.

After nearly 18 years in the Senate, Sasser seemed to be coasting to a fourth term in 1994. But on the threshold, he lost his seat to a political novice, Bill Frist, a Nashville heart- and lung-transplant surgeon.

Shortly after Sasser’s return to private life, the U.S. ambassador to Beijing, J. Stapleton Roy, asked to be relieved in early 1995, and the president picked Sasser to succeed him.

“Clinton offered me a number of positions, but I was only interested in being ambassador to China,” Sasser said in an interview for this obituary in 2021. “I thought that the relationship between China and the United States was the most important thing in the world.”

James Ralph Sasser was born in Memphis on Sept. 30, 1936, one of three children of Joseph and Mary Sasser.

James and his sisters, Jo Marilyn and Phyllis, attended public schools in Nashville. He graduated from Hillsboro High School in 1954. After a year at the University of Tennessee, he transferred to Vanderbilt University and received a bachelor’s degree in history in 1958. He earned his juris doctor from the Vanderbilt Law School in 1961.

In 1962, he married Mary Gorman, a teacher he met as a fellow student at Vanderbilt. They had two children, a son, Gray, and a daughter, Elizabeth.

Active in Democratic politics since 1960, when he joined the last campaign of Sen. Estes Kefauver, of Tennessee, Sasser was chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party from 1973-76. That year, he won a Senate seat on his first try, defeating the one-term incumbent, Sen. Bill Brock. Sasser easily won reelection in 1982 and 1988 against lesser- known opponents.

In the Senate, he championed affirmative action and foreign aid programs and was chair of the Budget Committee from 1989 to 1995.

After retiring as the ambassador, Sasser was a visiting professor at George Washington University for a year, then became a Washington-based business consultant to American and Chinese companies for a decade. He later taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he and his wife settled.

Asked in the interview for this obituary to assess his work as a senator and ambassador, Sasser said: “I always felt that I made a greater contribution to United States interests in three years in China than in 18 years in the Senate. My first love was the Senate, except for that disastrous 1994 election, when I lost to Dr. Frist. But I can laugh about it now.”