Author Talk with Ralph White and D. Z. Stone

In the final two weeks of the Vietnam War, Chase Manhattan Bank sent Ralph White, a 27-year-old bank officer working in Bangkok, to Saigon. His assignment: keep the Saigon branch open as long as possible. With the North Vietnamese Army approaching, the Chase Vietnamese employees faced dire consequences for having worked for Americans. Asked if he were leaving them behind, Ralph committed to getting all the 113 Chase Saigon employees and their families out of the country. Getting Out of Saigon is Ralph’s eyewitness account of this illegal effort as tension in the doomed city built to the breaking point.

Post-9/11, Ralph traded his corporate finance career for public service and writing. He founded and, for ten years, served as the president of the Columbia Fiction Foundry, a writing workshop for alumni of Columbia University. He currently serves as its chairman.

D. Z. Stone (No Past Tense, A Fairy Tale Unmasked) is an author and journalist whose non-fiction books focus on the Holocaust and its aftermath. Her articles have appeared in The New York Times and Newsday. She previously interviewed author Ralph White and wrote about him for The Foreign Service Journal. She resides in Sparkill.