The Foreign Service Journal, September 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2017 93 football teams, and was editor of the school newspaper. He entered Stanford University in 1950, graduating summa cum laude with a B.A. in international relations in 1953. Mr. Rosenthal served for two years as a Marine Corps officer. He was particu- larly proud of his time in the Marine Corps, which he said introduced him to the “real” world and honed his leader- ship skills. He participated in various Marine Corps events throughout his lifetime. In 1956 Mr. Rosenthal joined the U.S. Foreign Service. His first overseas post was Port of Spain, where he was admin- istrative officer. He then studied French and Vietnamese at the Foreign Service Institute, and went on to become a noted Vietnam expert. Mr. Rosenthal was first posted to Saigon as a political officer in 1961. During the next four years, he was the embassy’s chief contact officer for the politically minded Buddhists, and he also headed up a unique provincial report- ing unit designed to assess conditions in the countryside. He was wounded in the communist attack on the embassy in March 1965. Mr. Rosenthal’s next tour, in 1965, was as assistant professor on the faculty of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. He was the first State Department repre- sentative and civilian on the faculty, and taught comparative politics and interna- tional relations. In 1967 he returned to the Vietnam desk in Washington, assisting in dealing with the tumultuous political situation in South Vietnam, including the famous Tet Offensive of 1968. In 1970 he was assigned to Paris, where in he helped backstop Secretary of State Henry Kiss- inger’s efforts to negotiate an end to the VietnamWar in the Paris Peace Talks. His next assignment was as deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in Bangui, where his responsibilities included handling a volatile African leader, Central African Republic Presi- dent Jean-Bédel Bokassa. After completing a year at the National War College in 1975, Ambassador Rosen- thal returned to take charge of the Indo- china desk at the State Department in the wake of the fall of Indochina to commu-