Next U.S. envoy to Vietnam picked by Bush
HANOI - President Bush plans to nominate Michael W. Marine, the No. 2 diplomat in China, to be the next ambassador to Vietnam, the U.S. Embassy announced today.
If confirmed by the Senate, Marine, a Vermont native and career Foreign Service officer, would replace Ambassador Raymond Burghardt, whose three-year term ends in December. Embassy officials said they did not know when the president would submit Marine's nomination.
Marine would be the third ambassador to Vietnam since the United States normalized relations with its former enemy in 1995.
President Clinton appointed the first ambassador, former Florida Rep. Pete Peterson, who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam during the war. Peterson served as ambassador from 1997 to 2001, when he was replaced by Burghardt after Bush was elected.
The embassy did not say what Burghardt, a former U.S. liaison with Taiwan, would do next.
Before becoming the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in 2000, Marine held the same post at the embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, for three years, beginning in 1997. He was the chargé d'affaires in Kenya after terrorists blew up the embassy in August 1998.
From 1985 until 1991, he held various jobs at the State Department, where he served as deputy director of the Bureau of East Asia and the Pacific's Office of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodian Affairs. In that capacity, he made several trips to Vietnam to work on the POW/MIA issue.
Marine is a graduate of the University of California-Santa Barbara, where he received a bachelor's degree in Chinese history in 1974. He speaks French, Mandarin Chinese and German. He is married and has two daughters.
By Ben Stocking - The Mercury News - April 02, 2004.
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