34 APRIL-MAY 2025 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL to Ho Chi Minh City as U.S. ambassador, I attended a concert sponsored by the U.S. government at the conservatory. During the intermission, a man walked up to me and said, “Good to see you again.” He looked vaguely familiar. I asked if we had met when I was there in the 1970s. He asked if I remembered when Vice President Spiro Agnew met with President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu of the ill-fated southern government. I said I did: it was in late 1972. I had come as the notetaker with Agnew and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. My friend, now smirking broadly, said he was there as special assistant for public affairs to President Thiệu. What did he do now? He was editor in chief of Thanh Niên, the main Communist Party newspaper in Ho Chi Minh City, he said. When I returned to Hanoi and asked my friend Deputy Foreign Minister Bang about this unusual guy, Bang collapsed in laughter. “Ray,” he said, “let’s put it this way. No one can ever be that rehabilitated.” My new old friend had been on the other side all along, right in the inner circle of the presidential palace. No wonder the Saigon government lost. n Traveling by punt boat in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta on July 16, 2002, Ambassador Raymond Burghardt (second from right) observed U.S.-funded disaster relief projects in the U Minh Thuong National Park. Also pictured: Bành Văn Đởm (far left), director of the U Minh Thuong National Park, and Nguyễn Hữu Thiện (second from left), field project manager for the U Minh Thuong Nature Reserve Conservation and Community Development Project, CARE International in Vietnam. U.S. CONSULATE GENERAL HO CHI MINH CITY
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