Joseph Buttinger (30 April 1906, Reichersbeuern, Germany – 4 March 1992, Queens, New York) was an Austrian politician and, after his immigration to the United States, an expert on East Asia.
After being imprisoned for several months in 1934, he became chairman of the Socialist underground and its leader of covert activities against the newly founded Federal State of Austria and Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss.
When Germany occupied Austria in 1938, he and his American-born wife Muriel Gardiner[1] fled to Paris, where he was the chairman of the exiled Austrian Social Democrats.
In 1939, several months before the fall of France, the couple moved to the United States with Gardiner's daughter from a previous marriage, Connie, whom Joseph later adopted.
In opposition to early critics of US intervention like Graham Greene, and the later conclusions of the Pentagon Papers, Buttinger refused to concede that Ho Chi Minh's popularity in the South, and the unpopularity of the Saigon government, had created a civil war situation.