Like many other Americans at the time, I spent the afternoon of the bicentennial — July 4, 1976 — at a cookout. In my case the cookout was in a park in Lisbon, Portugal, hosted by the American ambassador, who read to us a special message from Gerald Ford. I’ve always wondered how the embassy managed to find hot dogs — not exactly a Portuguese staple — for the occasion.

There were few Americans in Portugal at the time. Lisbon in 1976 was a sleepy backwater — not the tourist and mobile worker hotspot that it is today. And the U.S. deliberately kept a low profile. Portugal had overthrown its fascist dictator only two years earlier, and many people there were obsessed with the idea that Henry Kissinger, who had warned that Portugal might go Communist, would try to engineer a coup like the one that overthrew Chile’s Salvador Allende in 1973. There were graffiti on the walls saying “Morte ao CIA” (death to the CIA) although some of them added, in fresher paint, “e o KGB.”

So America tried to stay out of the limelight. In fact, there were so few official representatives of the U.S. government around that the cookout had to be filled out with lots of staffers from other Western embassies.