Graham Martin; Last U.S. Ambassador to S. Vietnam

Graham A. Martin, the courtly, white-haired career diplomat who was the United States’ last ambassador to South Vietnam, has died of complications from emphysema.

The envoy, who directed the chaotic airlift of Saigon in which the United States was criticized for abandoning hundreds of Vietnamese employed by the U.S. government, was 78.

Martin, a North Carolina native who had lived in Winston-Salem since 1976, died Tuesday at a hospital.

In April, 1975, Martin was in charge of the helicopter airlift from the U.S. Embassy compound that ferried about 900 Americans and thousands of Vietnamese to the 7th Fleet in the South China Sea as the city fell to the invading North Vietnamese.

Photographs and TV footage shown around the world showed South Vietnamese clinging to the skids of the last helicopter as it took off.

It was Martin who determined that helicopters would have to be used for the evacuation because of the danger to planes at the landing strips near Saigon.

He also was faulted for aggravating a perilous situation by not ordering American troops out of Saigon earlier and for ignoring intelligence reports that North Vietnam wanted nothing less than a total victory.

After the airlift, President Gerald R. Ford cabled Martin to commend him for his “courage and steadiness.”

Martin, in a 1985 interview with The Winston-Salem Journal, said: “In doing it my way, we got out every American who wanted to come out alive. That’s the key point in the end. We didn’t send in the troops. I was right in my judgment.”

Before taking the post in Saigon, Martin was ambassador to Thailand and Italy.

He was a 1932 graduate of Wake Forest University, worked as a free-lance journalist in Washington, then began a career as a public servant. He worked for the National Recovery Administration, was a colonel in the Army during World War II and joined the foreign service in 1947.

After serving in the diplomatic corps in Paris, Washington, Geneva and Bangkok, he was assigned as ambassador to Thailand by President John F. Kennedy in 1963. There he negotiated for the use of secret airfields by American warplanes.

In 1969 President Richard M. Nixon assigned him to Italy, where he figured in a plan that sent millions of dollars in secret aid to Italian political parties opposing the Communists.