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Bush Hat, Black Tie: Adventures of a Foreign Service Officer
“When it comes to recounting his adventures on four continents, Howard Simpson is the David Niven of Foreign Service officers.” ––GEORGE STEVENS, JR., filmmaker and founder of the American Film Institute
Howard R. Simpson, a much-published author, specialized in public affairs from 1951 to 1979, starting in Vietnam as a USIA correspondent, psy-war operative, and press advisor to Ngo Dinh Diem. In the U.S. Foreign Service he returned to Saigon, after postings in Nigeria and France, as advisor to Prime Minister Nguyen Khanh. Other assignments included Canberra, Algiers, Marseille (as consul general), Paris, the Naval War College, the State Department, and the University of South Carolina. In this, his fifteenth, book, he offers a lively narrative of his experiences as a witness to the end of the colonial era and a frontline practitioner of public diplomacy during the Cold War.