Lionel Rosenblatt Dies at 82; Led Daring Rescue of Vietnamese Refugees

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Lionel Rosenblatt Dies at 82; Led Daring Rescue of Vietnamese Refugees

In an unsanctioned mission, the Foreign Service officer helped evacuate about 200 South Vietnamese citizens from Saigon days before the city fell in 1975.

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Lionel Rosenblatt in an undated photo. Richard C. Holbrooke, the troubleshooting American diplomat, once described him as “the most dynamic person I knew in the refugee field.”

Credit...

via Rosenblatt family

By

Jeré Longman

April 25, 2026,

11:05 a.m. ET

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Lionel A. Rosenblatt, a U.S. Foreign Service officer who helped roughly 200 South Vietnamese citizens evacuate Saigon days before it fell in 1975 with a daring and unauthorized mission that prefaced a career advocating for refugees in Southeast Asia and other global hot spots, died on April 11 at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 82.

The cause was leukemia, his wife, Ann Rosenblatt, said.

On April 20, 1975, Mr. Rosenblatt, then 31, flew out of Washington bound for Saigon, the South Vietnamese capital, which would be captured by the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong on April 30 and renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

Traveling with him was a colleague, Larry Craig Johnstone. They belonged to a small group of Foreign Service officers who met daily over lunch in Washington, concerned about the fate of the Vietnamese who had worked with the United States during the war, tens of thousands of whom could be vulnerable to retribution by the communist North Vietnamese regime.

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.

Image

On March 28, 1975, South Vietnamese refugees waited at the port city of Da Nang and watched as a boat loaded with refugees approached the dock.

Credit...

Associated Press

“These were people we had worked with hand in glove,” Mr. Johnstone said in an interview. “Our lives depended on their ability to help us. To up and leave them was unthinkable.”

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