SIWPS "WHY VIETNAM MATTERS: ITS RELEVANCE TO AFGHANISTAN"iApril,2009j@Mitsuru Fukuda, Columbia University
The Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies(SIWPS), Columbia University Presents
Mr.Rufus Phillips
Author, "Why Vietnam Matters: An Eyewitness Account of Lessons Not Learned"
"WHY VIETNAM MATTERS: ITS RELEVANCE TO AFGHANISTAN"
Friday, April 24, 2009
12:15pm - 2:00pm
Room 918, 9th Floor
School of International and Public Affairs
420 West 118th Street, New York City
This event is free and open to the public
Rufus Phillips served as an Army officer detailed to the Central Intelligence Agency
in Vietnam from 1954 until the end of 1956, working as a pacification advisor to
the Vietnamese Army. For his service, he received the CIA's Intelligence Medal
of Merit. Phillips also served as an advisor to Vietnamese civilian civic action
and subsequently in Laos until 1959. From 1962 to 1963, as Assistant Director
in USAIDfs Saigon Mission, Phillips was responsible for counterinsurgency and
rural development. Subsequently, from 1964 through 1968, he worked as a consultant
on Vietnam to USAID, then to the State Department, making five trips to Vietnam
and acting as an advisor to Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Richard Holbrooke,
in his Foreword to Why Vietnam Matters, writes that for several crucial years
in the 1960s Phillips was "probably the best informed American on events in [Vietnam]
as a whole and perhaps the American most trusted and listened to by the Vietnamese."
Most recently, Phillips served as an outside, informal consultant to the group
working for the U.S. Army Central Command on a plan for Afghanistan
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