Diplomat Jim Patterson at International Student House Global Leadership Awards Gala 2014

Diplomat Jim Patterson with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel at the Great Hall of International Student House (ISH) DuPont Circle, Washington , DC. Oct. 16, 2014.  The event was ISH's Global Leadership Awards. Defense and security issues aside, we talked about Nebraska politics. During the Reagan administration, I was often sent to farm states to discuss farm and foreign policy. One of my destinations was Grand Island, Nebraska, for Husker Harvest Days. Hagel told me his grandmother lived in Grand island for 50 years. "As a politician in Nebraska," Hagel said, "I never missed attending Husker Harvest Days." 

Hagel's "job" at the event was to introduce Vice President Joe Biden. Hagel and wife, Lilibet, were Honorary Chairs of the event. Hagel, a former GOP senator, was a controversial nominee for Secretary of Defense because he was slow to "evolve" on LGBT issues. Log Cabin Republicans spent considerable resources to convince Senators not to confirm him for SecDef. Others were critical of him for perceived anti-Israeli views. He has largely avoided controversy as SecDef and is seen as an "outsider" of the John Kerry-Susan Rice-Obama "brain" trust.

Hagel served Nebraska in the US Senate from 1996-2008 and he served on the Foreign Relations Committee. He is a Vietnam vet and a double Purple Heart recipient. He supported fellow Vietnam vet Arizona Senator John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000. When George W. Bush was nominated and elected, Hagel was a critic of Bush's claim Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Vice President Joe Biden who spoke of his long friendship with Senator Richard Lugar on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.  Vice President Biden said there were "not enough Dick Lugars [in the Senate] to  face our global challenges." (Jim Note: I applauded and the audience joined in.)

Concerning America's changing demographics, Biden said being America is a value set based on the what we hold as self evident life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. He noted that many of today's world crises are about ethnicity, religion, and other life circumstances. Biden called Lugar a global citizen and an exceptionally intelligent man and a man of simple truths. 

Biden credited Lugar and former Democratic Georgia Senator Sam Nunn with eliminating 7,6000 nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, which may have prevented a nuclear war between Ukraine and Russia during their 2013/14 conflict. The Vice president said Lugar's contributions across the board on food security, foreign policy will reverberate for generations. He urged all to continue to engaged in global citizenship. He told the audience that when they stand next to Dick Lugar they will never stand next to a man of greater character. Biden read a congratulatory letter to Lugar from President Barack Obama.

Of Irish descent, Biden, a native of Scranton, PA who served 36 years as a US Senator from Delaware, looked at Lugar and quoted William Butler Yeats, "Think where man's glory most begins and ends, and say my glory was I had such friends." 

Diplomat Jim Patterson with former US Senator Richard Lugar, Republican-Indiana, recipient of the Global Leadership Award from ISH for "advancing international dialogue, intercultural exchanges, and peaceful global citizenship."  

Lugar represented Indiana in the U.S. Senate from 1977-2013. During this time, he served as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1985-87, and from 2003-2007. From 2007 until his retirement in 2013, Senator Lugar was the Ranking Member of the Committee. Additionally, he twice served as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry. Prior to his election to the Senate, he was mayor of Indianapolis from 1968-1976. (Patterson lived in Indianapolis from 1982-84 and worked for the State of Indiana and held an elected Lawrence Township position with the Marion County Republican Party.) 

Senator Lugar is respected globally as an international statesman. He has been an exceptional leader in efforts to reduce  the threat of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. In 1991, he forged a bipartisan partnership with then Senator Sam Nunn, D-Georgia) to destroy these weapons of mass destruction in the former Soviet Union. To date, the Nunn-Lugar program has deactivated more than 7,600 nuclear warheads that were once aimed at the United States.

   

After leaving the Senate, Senator Lugar created the Lugar Institute, a nonprofit organization that focuses on food and energy security, the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and effective bipartisan government. He also serves as a Senior Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Fund. 

In his remarks, Lugar mentioned graduating Oxford, serving in the Navy and being Mayor of Indianapolis. He spoke of his pride in working on a bipartisan basis with his Senate colleagues and his peaceful constructive engagement with world leaders. He mentioned his Lugar Center is based in Washington DC. He said President Obama is a global leader. Being a global citizen, Lugar said, means a commitment to public service in the world, water, food security, fuel, governance, and human rights. He said leaders must listen and learn together whether they seek elected or appointed office. Those who reject ideas, with the mindset and character of "my way or the highway"will create disaster time and gain. (Jim Note: I led the applause on this.) 

Lugar said when he first when abroad he marveled at how the big the world is and how extraordinary the problems were. It is still true and he said he was happy to see so many in the room looking forward to meeting global challenges.

 Diplomat Jim Patterson with Lt. General Brent Scowcroft, a partner of the ISH Global Leadership Gala. Scowcroft served as National Security Adviser to Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H. W. Bush. Scowcroft is a prolific author and among his books is A World Transformed, co-authored with Bush, received wide acclaim upon publication in 1999. The New York Times Book Review called it, "The most important book yet written about the end of the Cold War."  Eugene V. Rostow, in the Wall Street Journal, called it "Among the finest expositions of modern American foreign policy. . . . An excellent book."  Scowcroft is the subject of a new January 2015 book.

Reading a few pages from Time and Chance (University of Michigan, 1998) in the Borwick Room, International Student House. Author "James Cannon, formerly national affairs editor at Newsweek and Ford's domestic policy adviser, has written a superbly provocative and arresting biography that traces Ford's life from his July 4, 1913, birth in Omaha, Nebraska, to his September 8,1974, decision to pardon Nixon of the Watergate conspiracy." --Washington Post Book World.

The ISH bestowed its Global Citizen Award to the family of family of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, epresented by son Bahaa Hariri. The Hariri family has acheived international prominence in the fields of statesmanship, business and philanthropy.

The ISH Distinguished Alumni Award went to Abraham Akoi, an ISH resident, named Policy and management Officer in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development of South Sudan. His Excellency The Ambassador of Italy and Mrs. Claudio Bisogniero served as Diplomat Chairs for the event.

The International Student House of Washington DC began 78 years ago as an inspiration of the American Friends Service Committee (Quakers) seeking greater peace though community among young people from across the globe. ISH has had over 10,000 residents, including me, since its founding.   

Diplomat Jim Patterson at DACOR Annual Meeting 2014

This posting is still in editing.

Diplomat Jim Patterson on "Last Days of Vietnam"

The Last Days of Vietnam

Film Documentary 2014

A nail bitter of a documentary, about the fall of Saigon 40 years ago. President Richard Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger successfully negotiated the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 to find peace with honor, an end to the conflict, and withdrawal of US troops. The North Vietnamese agreed to the accords because Nixon was a tough negotiator whom they feared.

Of the Paris Peace Accord, Dr. Kissinger, now 91 with a new book “World Order,” recalls on film: “We who made the agreement thought it would be the beginning, not of peace in the American sense, but the beginning of a period of coexistence which might evolve, as it did in Korea, into two states.”

In August 1974, when Nixon resigned for Watergate crimes and Gerald R. Ford became president, the North Vietnamese saw it as their opportunity to invade South Vietnam, force Americans out and control the country. The North’s full scale military invasion began in early 1975. The communists had no mercy for the South Vietnamese and executed thousands.

Much of the exciting news footage in this film has been widely available in the public domain for years. It is expertly and excitingly edited to tell the story of a major human effort to save as many South Vietnamese as possible as Saigon fell.

The dramatic news footage of the communist takeover of South Vietnam is supplemented with various surviving ground personnel speaking of their efforts to evacuate Americans, and the thousands of South Vietnamese who fought with US troops, worked for US contractors and the US embassy, as well as American dependents.

At one point, Dick Armitage, a Navy officer and, alter, an official in the George W. Bush administration, gave orders without permission from his superiors. “I figured it was better to beg forgiveness later than to seek permission,” he said of saving South Vietnamese lives.

The last US Ambassador to South Vietnam, Graham Martin, who succeeded Ellsworth Bunker in the position, was a hawk from North Carolina who held the unrealistic belief Saigon could be successfully defended from the massive invasion of North Vietnamese communists. Martin’s staffers and military personnel  imitated an early secret evacuation of  some South Vietnamese without Martin’s or Washington’s knowledge.

As reality sank in, the US embassy was opened to as many South Vietnamese as could gain access to the embassy compound. The mad rush of South Vietnamese for the safety of the embassy caused me an unpleasant flashback to Washington DC on the morning of September 11, 2001. When we leaned Washington was under attack from Middle Eastern terrorists, government agencies were ordered closed and personnel ordered home. Chaos ensued.

I saw people running frantically from the White House and from Capitol Hill offices. No one knew for sure what the next target would be. The faces of Americans were faces of fear and desperation to find no taxis and many subway stations closed. In the documentary, the location is Saigon 1974 but the fear and desperation on the faces of the South Vietnamese was the same as I saw in Washington on September 11.

Audiences will see many dramatic scenes in this film as it reaches its end. In another scene, a South Vietnamese Navy official was ordered by Americans to begin evacuation of and move all  operational ships out to sea. The old man remembers such an order as “beyond my position.” He said he ignored military rules and followed his heart.

The scene of a South Vietnamese military vessel being denied entry to post in the Philippines is touching. The South Vietnamese flag is lowered and replaced with an American flag so the vessel could safely dock. The scene is startlingly realistic as the South Vietnamese aboard sang their national anthem as their flag came down at the same time their country ceased to exist.

Scenes from Washington, depict intense Oval Office photographs of President Ford, Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and Dr. Henry Kissinger as events in South Vietnam came to a close. Ford asked Congress for $722 million as a last resort to help evacuees. Congress turned its back on South Vietnam and refused any more money for what they saw as a lost cause.

The US war in Vietnam, which began in 1950 under President Dwight Eisenhower and escalated under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, came to an end under President Ford, who sought to leave the country with as little extra bloodshed as possible.

Evacuation and repatriation of South Vietnamese to America was also a credit to Mr. Ford’s leadership and human compassion. Here are some passages from various books on the challenges Vietnam posed in the 1970s. 

“The domestic disputes [between North and South Vietnam] that had characterized the war continued into the postwar period, and the Watergate crisis prevented enforcement of the argument. The controversy began with a debate over whether the United states had the right to defend an agreement for which over 55,000 Americans had died. And then, within six months, Congress in June 1973 prohibited any U.S. military action or military deployment in Indochina. It was the first time that the United States had deprived itself of the ability to enforce an agreement [Paris Peace Accords] for which American forces had fought and died,” Dir. Kissinger wrote in “Crisis” The Anatomy of Two Major Foreign Policy Crises.

James Cannon, in 2013’s “Gerald R. Ford: An Honorable Life,” wrote, “To his great credit, he (Ford) ended the Vietnam War, which three Presidents before him had mismanaged. It was a humiliating ending to the war, but Congress, having cut off money for Vietnam, gave Ford no choice. The withdrawal he managed well, pulling out the last U.S. forces, saving American lives, and rescuing thousands of Vietnamese who had supported the American effort.”

Dr. Yanek Mieczkowski in his 2005 book “Gerald Ford and the Challenges of the 1970s,”  wrote, “On April 23, he [Ford] addressed students at Tulane University and declare, ‘Today, America can regain a sense of pride that existed before Vietnam. But it cannot be achieved by re-fighting a war that is finished as far as the American people are concerned.’”

“The speech was a milestone in contemporary American history. Ford did something no America president had been able to for thirty years: He spoke of the Indochina war in the past tense,” wrote  Ron Nessen, press secretary to President Ford.

In sum, “Last Days in Vietnam”  contains voices of old soldiers who aided humanity on a large scale in a chaotic time. Also, voices of South Vietnamese happy to have made better lives for themselves in America. Also, the voices of children who speak proudly of their lost parents efforts to get to safety in America. Instead of fighting a lost cause to the end, in the last days US personnel in South Vietnam realized their job was to save lives rather than continue to kill. 

Jim Patterson
JEPDiplomat@gmail.com