The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 31 Kenneth Quinn, right, and his wife, Le Son, center, with former Representative Leonard Boswell (D-Iowa) on Jan. 19, 2009, when Quinn received the Army Air Medal for flying/commanding more than 100 hours of helicopter combat operations in Vietnam in 1970 during his assignment as an FSO to the CORDS program. He is the only civilian to have received this medal. would be needed to deal with the huge number of refugees—as many as a million people—who could seek to flee the country. Dated April 5, 1975, the two memos spelled out that the South could be lost in as little as three weeks. By mid-April, even as the NVA moved closer and closer to the capital, Amb. Martin still felt that any sign of evacuation activity by the United States would cause what little remained of the South Vietnamese political and military fabric to completely rend, with mass chaos ensuing. I feared that if this inaction continued, the opportunity to evacuate at least some Vietnamese would be lost completely. So, one evening, when most of the staff had departed, I walked from my third-floor office in the Old Executive Office Building across West Executive Avenue, in the side door of the White House, and up to Deputy National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft’s office. Always the last person to leave, Brent was engrossed in one of the multiple red-tagged memos that were stacked on what was technically still Henry Kissinger’s desk. He beckoned me in and, with just the two of us there, I World Food Prize