Nguyen Ngoc Bich, who directed the Vietnamese service of Radio Free Asia, dies at 78
Nguyen Ngoc Bich, who fled Vietnam during the fall of Vietnam, looks through an old album of pictures and Vietnamese government passes with his picture on them. (Frank Johnston/The Washington Post)
By Bart Barnes April 11, 2016
“Nguyen Ngoc Bich, a Vietnamese emigre who directed the Vietnamese service of Radio Free Asia, translated and wrote about Vietnamese poets, and taught Vietnamese culture and literature, died March 2. He was 78.He died of a heart attack while on a flight from Washington to Manila, where he was scheduled to participate in a conference, said a brother-in-law, John Schwankhaus.
Mr. Bich fled Vietnam after the 1975 fall of Saigon to the Communists. In the period immediately before the fall, he was director general of the Vietnam Press Agency and a special envoy of South Vietnam President Nguyen Van Thieu to the U.S. Congress in a last-ditch campaign for more war aid in the face of the Viet Cong’s last offensive.
Nguyen Ngoc Bich translated the poem Eulogy for Nguyen Hue, by Le Thi Ngoc Han, according to the late Thomas Barnes’s friend, Dr. Andre Van Chau.