Henry Cabot Lodge interview

Q: Ambassador, you first visited Vietnam or Indo China as it was called in those days back in the 1920s. Could you reminisce about that first trip and the impressions it made on you?

A: I was a reporter for the New York Herald Tribune and they wanted me to do a series of articles comparing the colonial system of the French in Indochina with the British system in Malaysia with the Dutch system in the Dutch East Indies and with the American system in the Philippines. So I was making a tour of those four countries. It was in 1929 by the way and we came up on the train from Bankok to Badembang in Cambodia, then we drove across Cambodia and across South Vietnam to Saigon. The thing that I remember [10:07 13 20] I remember cause it was a long time ago now, was the tremendous peace and quiet, there was no uproar, there were no problems for the police, there was nothing of that kind. The only act of violence that I witnessed was one which my party committed against an enormous black snake. It must have been 12 feet long who started across the road and we ran over it. So as far as he was concerned the presence of Americans in Vietnam was not something welcome.