This is Later with Lee Matthews the Lee Matthews Podcast More of what You Here
Weekday Afternoon's on the Drive. Beer was nineteen seventy three. Ralph White had
been working for Chase Manhattan Bank in some exotic locations like Hong Kong and Thailand,
but then his boss asked him to do something that would end up not
only changing his life, but the lives of one hundred and thirteen other souls.
And he's written all about it in his new book, Getting Out of
Saigon. Everywhere you get books and Ralph, I wanted to start with your
reaction when the boss asked you to go to Saigon as a banker. Thanks
for having me on. Yeah. I was twenty seven years old in April
of nineteen seventy five and I was working for the Chase Manhattan Bank and they
sent me to Bangkok, which was my first choice of a foreign assignment,
and I thought I was just going to do my job, and they about
two months after I arrived, they came to me and said, look,
we'd like for you to take over Saigon branch. And because our manager there
is Dutch and he doesn't think that the American embassy will help him when things
get bad and we need an American year, and preferably one who's young,
single and expendable. I said, yeah, that's me. Yeah. Did
it occur to you that that's why they were sending you there? I knew
exactly why they were. Okay, they asked They asked the perfectly rational,
mature guy to do it before they asked me, and he just laughed at
I can imagine, said, I said, yes, sent me back into
that briar patch. Ralph White. The book is Getting Out of Saigon How
a twenty seven year old American banker saved one hundred thirteen Vietnamese Vietnamese civilians.
So everybody at your firm, Chase Bank, knew something was about to happen,
they just didn't know what and on what timeline. How did you prepare
for what you had to do? Basically, you knew you had to go
get the assets out of the country, right. Yes, there wasn't much
time for me to prepare. It took a week for me to get a
visa, and I didn't really I talked to the manager of Saigon branch,
came to Bangkok, and I chatted with him quite a bit. So I
knew. I knew the lay of the land a bit. I'd worked in
Saigon four years earlier for American Express when I was very young, twenty two,
and so I did know a little bit of the lay of land as
far as preparation. And I don't mind telling you and your listeners. I
had twenty five thousand dollars in my in my briefcase in order to grease the
wheels if I had to, And and I had a loaded thirty eight special
in case twenty five thousand dollars wasn't enough. Nowadays, you'd have been stopped.
I imagine with a thirty eight I was flying on. Yeah, yeah,
nobody. I mean the bank didn't I The bank knew I had the
money, Yeah, they gave it. They didn't know that I had a
little backup plan. So you arrive inside God, and what is step one?
Well, step one was meet all of the characters. At the embassy.
I met the ambassador, the deputy chief of mission. Ambassador was Graham
Martin. Deputy Chief of Mission Wolfgang Lehman. And right on down the chain
of command, I met the fairly senior not the not the head of the
CIA station, but the number two guy. I met the senior political officer
at the embassy, the senior economics officer, the commercial attache, the mission
warden, and I met the Commanding General, Homer Smith. So we went
out to the airbase and and had a meeting with him. So the first
order of business was meeting the people who were supposed to be helping me.
And what was was what was there some of their h What were they telling
you at that point? Did things look pretty bleak? You know? To
the contrary, it was, Oh, everything's fine, Ralph, but don't
worry about a thing. Let's not talk about closing the branch. That's premature.
And as far as getting Vietnamese out, that's not in the cards union
special permits that you'll never be able to get. So don't even think about
getting your your employees out. That was what I was hearing from the get
go. Yeah, because that occurred to you right away. Wait a minute,
when this all falls apart, I got a bunch of great people working
for me, it was. And then I would walk into the bank the
next day, you know, and and all these hard working people and the
only reason you think about it, why would you go to work? Yeah,
if you thought you your your country was going to disappear, and your
bank was going to disappear. Your employer what you know, why would they
even show up to work? Why wouldn't they try to get on a boat
and go down the Saigon River? And the and the reason is the only
reason I had a bank to run. The only reason employees kept coming in
was that they had confidence that the Chase Manhattan Bank was going to to help
them get out, and that and that the the expatriate manager me was was
going to was going to achieve it. And and I had zero plan,
and and and you know that I was the Chase Manhattan Banks plan. So
you know, Chase was just hoping that I would find a way to get
them out. So I was just scurrying around different offices. I was in
the embassy every day, talking to different officers. I was out at the
airbase every day. I spent more time with the embassy and the military people
than I did with the employees. By the time I took them out thirteen
days later, I didn't I didn't know most of their names. Talking to
Ralph White, he's the author of Getting Out of Saigon, how a twenty
seven year old American banker saved one hundred thirteen Vietnamese civilians. I don't want
to give away the book because you go into detail about how all this happened.
But what took you so long to write the book? This happened back
in nineteen seventy five, and and you've had a lot of time to mull
things over. You know, the story is. You might imagine, the
story has been locked in my brain for for a long time, So why
now? I didn't know how to say it. You know. I would
be in conversations, sort of casual conversations with people about the fall of Psycho.
Oh, you're the guy who was in in you know, in Psigon
during the fall of Pigon, or my chaseman at in bank. Colleagues would
say, oh, how was that? And I would explain that. I
would start off. I formed a thesis that we wouldn't have the phrase the
fall of Saigon in our language if it hadn't been for the psychopathology of the
of the US ambassador. And that's a kind of hard argument to be making
extemporaneously in conversation. So I wrote the book to set out all the reasons
that I felt that way, and I think what I did was I wrote
a book that explains why the fall of Saigon was as traumatic as it was,
why there was no contingency planning at the senior level at the embassy and
UH, and why why do we why do we picture helicopters off of roofs
when we think about the fall of Saigon. That's a that's a not the
optimal way to get people out. No, it isn't, And it's probably
a story that hasn't been told. Of all the things that I've seen and
read about the fall of Vietnam and the fall of Saigon, very little is
said about the actual ambassador himself. You know, you have to look,
you have to look hard to see it. I've I have seen references to
his sanity and his emotional state in UH in three or four books, but
it's it's it's not really out there for everybody to see. I wanted to.
I wanted to go on record and and blow him up, and I
hope I did a good job. Well, you can read about it yourself.
And getting out of Psigon, how a twenty seven year old American banker
saved one hundred and thirteen Vietnamese civilians Ralph White, thank you for sharing your
story and thank you for joining us today kind to have me on, Lee,
Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to Later with Lee Matthews,
the Lee Matthews Podcast, and remember to listen to The Drive Live weekday afternoons
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