The Foreign Service Journal, April 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2015 25 From the vantage point of both the field and the National Security Council, one FSO shows the critical role the Foreign Service played in a difficult environment. BY KENNETH M . QU I NN Kenneth M. Quinn, the only three-time winner of an AFSA dissent award, spent 32 years in the Foreign Service and served as ambassador to Cambodia from 1996 to 1999. He has been president of the World Food Prize Foundation since 2000. Ambassador Quinn spent the first six years of his Foreign Service career in Vietnam, as a rural development adviser in the Mekong Delta and, later, as a political reporting officer along the Cambodian border. That was followed by three years at the National Security Council working on Indochina, including serving on the Weyand Mission to Saigon sent by President Gerald Ford, and acting as the president’s interpreter in Vietnamese at the White House. I t would be difficult to overstate the pure joy exhib- ited by my Vietnamese employees on Advisory Team 65 in Chau Doc province, in a remote corner of the Mekong Delta, on Jan. 27, 1973, when word reached us that the Paris Peace Accords had been signed. Holding hands, they danced in a circle singing “Hoa Binh oi”—loosely translated, “Hello, peace!” or “Wel- come, peace!” None of them likely could have imagined that, just two short years later, the South Vietnamese government would collapse and many of themwould be fleeing down the Mekong River, hoping to escape the approaching North Vietnamese Army. In 1973 I was a rural development adviser on my fourth consecutive tour in Vietnam. I’d been seconded by State to the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1967, right after completing the A-100 orientation course. All of my time “in country” had been as part of the U.S. Military Assistance Com- FromWhitehouse to the White House FOCUS ON THE FOREIGN SERVICE IN VIETNAM mand, Vietnam’s Civil Operations and Revolutionary Develop- ment Support program, known as CORDS, part of the unified military-civilian chain of command of the pacification effort. That would now change dramatically, as the U.S. military pre- pared to completely leave the country and the State Department established four consulates general, including one in Can Tho, the largest city in the Mekong Delta. It also began a personal odyssey that would allow me, first, to be part of what I call the “Whitehouse Interlude” in Vietnam, a brief but remarkable period in Foreign Service history that deserves to be recalled with considerable pride. This would be followed by a front-row seat at the White House in Washington to the tragic denouement of the South Vietnamese government and America’s epic involvement in Indochina. I believe that the provincial assignments had a significant impact on many of the FSOs who would shape foreign policy over the next three decades, as they came in direct contact with large numbers of war victims. For example, I always felt that Ambassador Richard Holbrooke’s passion to alleviate the suffer- ing of refugees and his focus on agriculture in Afghanistan both came from his assignment as a provincial adviser in Vietnam. Indeed, the very existence of the Bureau of Population, Refu- gees and Migration in the State Department can be traced to Vietnam. Our work there also showed that the Foreign Service could be an invaluable early warning system. In my own case, a decade after writing the first-ever reports on the genocidal nature of the Khmer Rouge, my “provincial instincts” took me in