Joseph A. "Joe" Mendenhall was a U.S. State Department official during the 1960s; a policy adviser for Vietnam and Laos during the Kennedy administration; a leader of the Krulak-Mendenhall fact-finding mission in September 1963; director of the State Department's Vietnam Working Group from January to July 1964; director of the Office of Far Eastern Regional Affairs from July 1964 to 1965; director of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Mission in Laos from 1965 to 1968; deputy director and later head of the USAID Vietnam Bureau in 1968; and U.S. ambassador to Madagascar from 1972 to 1975.