A Memory of Ambassador Matthew J. Matthews

A Memory of Ambassador Matthew J. Matthews
Anthony A. Hutchinson
May 21, 2020

I read today of the sudden death of Ambassador Matthew J. Matthews. The news made me very sad, since I have always considered Matt a brother and comrade since he and I shared a couple of life-or-death experiences over the course of a week in Beijing in June 1989. We were both junior officers at the U.S. Embassy: I was in the Cultural Affairs Section (Coordinator of Academic Exchanges) and he was a first tour political officer doing his required initiatory two years in visas and consular affairs. We were assigned to staff the overnight operations of the Press and Cultural Section, what we called the United States Information Agency in China during those days. After the imposition of martial law on May 20 and the military crackdown and Tian’anmen Massacre on Sunday June 4, the Embassy had gone on 24-hour coverage because so many communications would come in over night while China slept and the U.S. worked on the other side of the world.

 Monday June 6, Matt and I were assigned to staff one of the cars in the motorcade sent by the Embassy on the morning of June 6 to the universities on the other side of Beijing (about 20 miles away) to retrieve American students and professors and take them to the airport. The city roads were a shambles: demonstrators had erected barricades at all major intersections, and the People’s Liberation Army was only gradually taking them down. They too had set up road blocks: we had to stop and be cleared at three separate security points, all manned by teenaged Chinese soldiers from the remote provinces, all speaking barely recognizable Mandarin, holding their AK-47s pointed in our faces as they queried us, and visibly shaking from too little sleep and too many amphetamines. Matt, with his easy and colloquial Chinese from his pre-foreign service studies in Taiwan, talked us through all the checkpoints, schmoozing and empathizing with these poor guys tasked with a dirty and impossible job. The U.S. Ambassadorial flags on the cars that Ambassador James Lilley had ordered on the motorcade even though he did not accompany us seemed to help us clear the security blockades. When we saw bodies of demonstrators killed near the Square and retrieved and laid out on tables at the entrance of one of the universities (with big character posters “MOURN THE DEAD. REMEMBER,” I saw Matt frown, pause, and then silently wipe away a tear from his face before he schmoozed us into the campus to retrieve our compatriots there.

Two leading dissidents who had been put onto death lists by the Chinese Communist Party leadership sought refuge in our Embassy: they came in through me, on my first day in the Fulbright Coordinator Chair. After a delay for Washington to weigh in, they were sheltered in a hastily arranged apartment in the medical unit behind the Ambassador’s Residence that shared the compound with the Press and Cultural Section. Matt and I were assigned night duty there. Chinese security had placed hostile helmeted guards with AK-47s looking inward every two meters around the compound. A large angry crowd gathered, clearly at the behest of the leadership, since at that time any group of more than two people were being shot at on the streets to disperse possible demonstrators. They chanted, screamed, and threw garbage, rocks, and bottles full of vile liquids, breaking a couple of our windows.

Matt and I, hunkered down in the USIS office, tried to call for guidance, to no avail. Our radios were not working either. At that time, there was a safe room with highly classified files in the office. Remembering the great loss of classified materials from when the U.S. Embassy in Tehran had been overrun, and how even shredded documents had been painstakingly put back together by those who wished the U.S. ill, Matt and I started to discuss what we needed to do in anticipation of the angry mob coming over the walls. We both agreed that one of us needed to stay in the safe room and shred everything, while the other needed to go back an be with the dissidents. Matt said, “that way, we will have a U.S. witness if they murder Dr. Fang and Dr. Li and a dead U.S. diplomat if they kill everyone there.” We drew straws: Matt went back to the dissidents, and I started shredding. The mob continued to rage until 2 or 3 in the morning. Matt came back to help with the shredding around 4.

By the time my boss, Minister Counselor McKinney Russell, arrived at work at 7 the next morning, I was finishing shredding the last classified file. He looked at the heap of shredded bits of paper, and asked. “Tony, what have you done? Who gave you authority to destroy this archive?” Matt chimed in before I could answer, “We didn’t want a repeat of Tehran, sir. They told us in A-100 (foreign service basic training) that we had the authority to do the obvious and necessary when defending our national security materials. And that’s what we did.” McKinney took a breath, relaxed his hands, and then said quietly, “What about the dissidents?” We explained. When he understood that both of these Junior officers in front of him had been willing to die to help defend the refugees and protect the classified, he shrugged and said, “Of course, you were right. Shredding that material is going to make my life and work much harder, but it was necessary. And I am proud of both of you for level headed action while in harm’s way.”

Months later, over beers, Matt joked with me about the experience, and winkingly laughed when he said: “Hey—getting kudos from the boss--that’s why we joined the Foreign Service, isn’t it?”
Matt was a brother and comrade, and I am thankful to have served with him in those hard times.