When Graham Martin, the U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, suggested that most Vietnamese refugees should head to coastal points, where American ships would attempt to pick them up, Mr. Rosenblatt and Mr. Johnstone, both of whom had served in diplomatic postings in Vietnam, grew alarmed at his seeming indifference toward the Vietnamese who were not high-ranking officials. So they secretly devised their own evacuation plan to assist former colleagues and their families.
1/n
The two Americans arrived on April 22 amid chaos at Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Saigon, aboard one of the last scheduled Pan Am flights into the country. From a colleague at the American Embassy, they learned that their mission had been discovered by higher-ups, and that they were to be sent home.
Fearing arrest, Mr. Rosenblatt said in a 2013 oral history, he and Mr. Johnstone “ran away as fast as we could” and went underground.
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Mr. Rosenblatt shaved his bushy mustache and wore a hat to disguise himself. Also concerned with being detected by the South Vietnamese police, they used false IDs and drove a 30-year-old Citroën, and other cars that friends had abandoned upon leaving Saigon, to rendezvous with Vietnamese colleagues. Both spoke Vietnamese, and Mr. Rosenblatt was fluent in French.
“Everybody thought we were Corsican gangsters,” he said in the oral history ... “So nobody messed with us.”
3/n
To prepare documents for Vietnamese colleagues to leave aboard U.S. military aircraft, Mr. Johnstone found a typewriter in a friend’s apartment. He and Mr. Rosenblatt also obtained departure forms, stamps and consular seals from sympathetic embassy colleagues.
The two men set up in a bowling alley on the military side of the airport ... then shepherded their Vietnamese friends to planes... After five tense days with little food or sleep, the two Americans left Saigon.
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Once home, ... Mr. Kissinger scolded but did not punish them, and even said that they had done a “wonderful, heroic job,” Mr. Rosenblatt recalled in the oral history, adding that Mr. Kissinger also told them, “We left Vietnam without much honor, but you two guys acted honorably.”
... Mr. Rosenblatt’s father told The Washington Post..., “My son must be guided by the Talmudic teaching: ‘He who saves a human life is as if he saved the whole world.’”
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/world/asia/lionel-rosenblatt-dead.html
5/n
Colin Rowat