The Foreign Service Journal, December 2020

64 DECEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL belief that America would prevail where France had not. “In retrospect, we were breathtakingly naive,” he says. As a vice consul, Lake spent his first months on the job assist- ing American citizens. On learning that one of his predecessors had botched the repatriation of the remains of a deceased Ameri- can by sending the wrong body home, he acquainted himself with the local morgue and watched the staff embalm a cadaver. In the local jails, he visited Americans who had been arrested on the streets of Saigon. At the embassy, he certified marriages between American soldiers and Vietnamese women. Though the work could at times be seamy, he loved it nonetheless. “It was one of best jobs I’ve ever had,” Lake says fondly of the experience. Halfway through his first year at post, Lake was called to serve as staff assistant to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. “He was a towering figure, both in stature and manner—thoroughly patri- cian and almost professionally affable,” Lake recalls. Lodge, who had fought in World War II and served as a senator, ambassador to the United Nations and Republican nominee for vice presi- dent, possessed one of the most impressive résumés in American diplomatic history. His selection as President Kennedy’s envoy to South Vietnam signaled the increasing geopolitical importance of the country as a new front line in the Cold War. Working for Lodge, Lake would later write, offered “the exhilaration of being present at great events.” In the fall of 1963, Lake would witness an event that was to become a watershed moment in the history of America’s involvement in Vietnam. On Nov. 1 he and his wife were having lunch inside their villa when they heard bursts of machine gun fire erupt outside. After taking shelter in a bedroom closet, Lake crawled to a nearby window and peered out at the gun battle unfolding on the street; a coup against South Vietnamese Presi- dent Ngo Dinh Diemwas underway. As bullets sporadically flew, he relayed developments in real time to the U.S. military attaché over the phone. After midnight, Lake watched a column of rebel tanks roll by the house, heading in the direction of the presiden- tial palace: “At that moment, I knew that it was over for Diem.” Many of Saigon’s residents, jubilant over Diem’s demise, believed the coup had been orchestrated by the United States. While the Pentagon Papers were to later charge that senior Amer- ican officials in Washington and Saigon had been complicit in the removal of the Vietnamese president, Ambassador Lodge would maintain that he had faithfully followed orders from President Kennedy to “not help in the planning” of Diem’s ouster. How- ever, when South Vietnamwas rocked by a second coup barely three months later, U.S. support was immediate and unambigu- ous; Washington swiftly dispatched Secretary of Defense Robert U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., at right, with his staff assistant, FSO Anthony Lake, at Embassy Saigon in 1963. These days, Lake shows little enmity toward his erstwhile boss, while still disagreeing with his policies and methods. “Kissinger was brilliant, but just as important, he was sufficiently confident in his own opinions to encourage his staff to challenge him,” Lake remembers. Instead of embittering him, Lake’s time in the Nixon White House affirmed his view that dissent is an act of loyalty, not only to one’s country, but also to one’s boss. “Officers have a responsibility to raise their concerns over policies they see as detrimental to the national interest,” he asserts emphatically. “Smart bosses will solicit alternative perspectives and hear all the facts; in the end, it is they who have the biggest personal stake in getting their decisions right.” Starting Out on the New Frontier The arc of Anthony Lake’s career began in 1962, the year he joined the Foreign Service. The son of a New Deal Democrat father and an Eisenhower Republican mother, Lake had ideas and aspirations that were influenced by John F. Kennedy, whose campaign message of a “new frontier” imbued himwith a sense of possibility for America’s role in the world. Lake volunteered to go to Vietnam because it was “a chance to be a part of something important.” When he completed language training and arrived in Saigon in the spring of 1963, the U.S. diplomatic and military presence was a small fraction of what it would become, with life more closely resembling a scene fromGrahamGreene’s The Quiet American than a set from Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.” On the trip to his new post, Lake read Greene’s histori- cal fiction about intrigue, hubris and betrayal amid the collapse of French colonial rule in Vietnam. He arrived unshaken in his COURTESYOFTONYLAKE