William Gleysteen, 76; Former Ambassador to South Korea

William Gleysteen, 76, a career Foreign Service officer who was ambassador to South Korea during a turbulent period beginning in the late 1970s, died Friday in Washington, D.C., of leukemia.

Gleysteen was ambassador from 1978 to 1981, a period marked by the assassination of President Park Chung Hee in 1979, the imposition of martial law, and violent confrontations between the military and anti-government demonstrators.

He wrote about these events in his book “Massive Entanglement, Marginal Influence: Carter and Korea in Crisis,” which won an award in 2000 from the American Academy of Diplomacy.

Gleysteen retired from the Foreign Service in 1981 and became director of the Asia Society’s Washington Center. Later he was director of studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and president of the Japan Society.

Gleysteen, the son of Presbyterian missionary-educators, was born in Beijing and was interned by the Japanese with his family in 1943. When he was released, he joined the Navy and served until the end of World War II. Fluent in Mandarin, he studied international relations at Yale University before joining the Foreign Service in 1951.