20 APRIL-MAY 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL When Hồ learned that Prunier was from Massachusetts, he told stories of his time as a pastry chef at the Parker House hotel in Boston. Hồ requested a copy of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which the OSS arranged to be air-dropped into the camp. In August 1945, after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the OSS helped protect Hồ as he traveled to Hanoi to announce Vietnam’s independence. In Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square, he declared, “All men are born equal: the Creator has given us inviolable rights, life, liberty, and happiness!” I repeated these words in Vietnamese to the press in Tan Trao, near the spot where Allied planes had dropped the Declaration of Independence for Hồ to study. Hồ had told the United States something important with his use of Thomas Jefferson’s words to announce Vietnam’s independence from France on Sept. 2, 1945, but by then America was too alarmed by encroaching communism in Europe to listen. The OSS argued against President Harry Truman’s decision to support France in its war against the Vietnamese nationalists. Invoking the “Spirit of 1945”—referring to when the United States had been the prime supporter of Vietnam’s independence—Hồ sent a telegram to President Truman on Feb. 28, 1946: “FRENCH POPULATION AND TROOPS ARE MAKING ACTIVE PREPARATIONS FOR A COUP DE MAIN IN HANOI AND FOR MILITARY AGGRESSION STOP I THEREFORE MOST EARNESTLY APPEAL TO YOU PERSONALLY AND TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE TO INTERFERE URGENTLY IN SUPPORT OF OUR INDEPENDENCE AND HELP MAKING [sic] THE NEGOTIATIONS MORE IN KEEPING WITH THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ATLANTIC AND SAN FRANCISCO CHARTERS RESPECTFULLY HOCHIMINH.” Hồ’s message to President Truman did not reach the president and went unanswered. Vietnamese leaders told me that Hồ wrote seven times, but he never received a response. In 1946, the United States was already obsessed with communism. That obsession had only increased by 1950, when Senator Joseph McCarthy announced that he had a list of supposed Communists working in the State Department. By decimating the team of Foreign Service Asia experts—people who would have known about 11 centuries of enmity between Vietnam and China—McCarthy left the State Department unprepared for the coming conflict in Southeast Asia and contributed to the debacle of America’s engagement in the Vietnam War. Fifty Years Ago Graham Martin became ambassador to South Vietnam in June 1973. Accredited to the Republic of Vietnam, that part of the country below the 17th parallel, Martin was chosen for the job of ambassador by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who correctly believed that Martin would refuse to depart from Saigon until the bitter end. By March 1975, the North Vietnamese were advancing quickly and overtaking the south. In April 1975, Saigon was a city under siege, and although Martin had not yet ordered a general evacuation, U.S. Marines began assisting thousands of Vietnamese employees of the U.S. government to leave from Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat Airport in the 12 days before South Vietnam surrendered. Some of these Vietnamese had worked for the U.S. government over the past decade and a half, and they knew that the invading North Vietnamese would treat them brutally as enemies. Most of the Vietnamese employees were evacuated with their immediate families, flying out on U.S. military transport aircraft and chartered jetliners. Vietnamese personnel working for the Defense Department (nearly all of whom worked for the Central Ambassador Ted Osius chats with a local woman while taking a break during the bike ride from Hanoi to Hue. COURTESY OF TED OSIUS
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