Word: ambassador
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...military while putting cronies from Shanghai into top positions. Lately he has also shown a willingness to punish his enemies, real and potential, turning one of the country's periodic anticorruption drives into a purge. "The anticorruption campaign and the succession struggle are intertwined," says James Lilley, former U.S. ambassador to China and now an American Enterprise Institute fellow, "and both are heating up." Many analysts in Beijing see Jiang's hand behind a series of corruption arrests targeted at top officials in the Beijing city government. Thus far the highest victim was a vice mayor, who committed suicide...
Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger nonetheless argued that Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, should begin evacuating the remaining Americans in Saigon and sympathetic Vietnamese. So little was done, though, that Lionel Rosenblatt and Craig Johnstone, two mid-level State Department officers in Washington, made a desperate effort to short-circuit the bureaucracy. They requested leave and hopped a commercial flight to Saigon to organize an unofficial rescue mission. Arriving at the embassy on April 22, they learned that orders were out for their arrest. They posed as French businessmen, holing up in an empty apartment found...
...Ambassador Martin, who died in 1990, was a strange combination of Pollyanna and paranoid. He often seemed to regard the Washington bureaucracy rather than the Vietnamese communists as his main enemy. In a just-declassified and previously unpublished cable, he ranted that State Department foes were calumniating him in the U.S. press: "The sly, anonymous insertions of the perfumed ice pick into the kidneys in the form of the quotes from my colleagues in the Department are only a peculiar form of acupuncture indigenous to Foggy Bottom against which I was immunized long ago." If the "mattress mice" in Washington...
...once confided to White House photographer David Hume Kennerly, Martin feared even whispering the word "evacuation" would set off a Danang-style panic. But the ambassador also believed more fervently, and longer than almost anyone else, in the possibility of an accommodation with the communists. As late as April 28 he was cabling Kissinger that he foresaw Americans staying in Saigon for "a year or more." By then, Gotterdammerung was well under...
...April 26 NVA forces had surrounded Saigon. That night ex-President Thieu was persuaded to leave while he still could; Ambassador Martin organized a group of cars to spirit him out of the city to Tan Son Nhut. Snepp, who went along on the ride, half expected Thieu and his American escorts to be hauled out of their cars and shot at some checkpoint by ARVN soldiers incensed at being abandoned. Nothing happened, but the little caravan took the precaution of racing onto the air base with lights out and braking to a skidding stop alongside a runway. Thieu...