How the Vietnam War Came Between Two Friends and Diplomats

Forty-nine years ago, David Halberstam told a young Charles Trueheart that there was a great novel in the story of how Vietnam ended the warm friendship between his father and his godfather. Bill Trueheart and Fritz Nolting (I’ll call them Bill and Fritz to avert père–fils confusion and preserve parity between the two combatants) were career foreign service officers posted to Saigon during John F. Kennedy’s administration. Fritz, the ambassador, hand-picked Bill to be his deputy. They’d known each other since 1939 when they were graduate students in philosophy at the University of Virginia. For two years, Bill and Fritz worked in close harmony. Their families were already close—their wives dear friends, Fritz godfather to both of Bill’s sons—but they drew closer in Saigon. It didn’t last.

The rift that made Bill and Fritz enemies—they never again spoke—concerned what to do about Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, America’s imperious and unpopular partner in the twilight struggle against communism. On November 2, 1963, that question was resolved with Diem’s assassination in a CIA-assisted coup. Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, initiating a sequence of events that led to the massive escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The full-scale war that ensued tore the country apart just as it tore Bill and Fritz apart. In the end, nothing was achieved, really, except the death of 58,000 American soldiers, 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers, and 2 million Vietnamese civilians—and the death, too, of the Cold War liberal consensus.

Halberstam was friendly with Bill in Vietnam and not especially friendly with Fritz, who shunned reporters. As a result, when Halberstam gave Bill and Fritz’s story a few pages of The Best and the Brightest, his narrative about how America stumbled into the Vietnam quagmire, he mostly took Bill’s side. But Halberstam well understood that the falling-out was complex and cried out for a larger stage. So, he handed the assignment to Bill’s son, a precocious young author (Charles Trueheart wrote his first published book at 17), then working as an editorialist at the Greensboro Daily News and later an accomplished feature writer and Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. Half a century later, Trueheart has produced not a novel but a work of nonfiction, Diplomats at War, so deeply researched, thoughtfully considered, and elegantly crafted that it should sit comfortably beside The Best and the Brightest, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, the three most acclaimed books about the Vietnam War.

Our story begins in 1954, with the French colonial defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Because the rebellious Viet Minh were communist, President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress had extended financial support to France to prevent further dominoes from falling in Southeast Asia. But as the French began to falter, Ike wisely ruled out further commitment.

France’s surrender divided Vietnam in two. In the north was a communist regime under Ho Chi Minh’s leadership. The south was ruled nominally by Emperor Bao Dai (“a quisling of long-standing,” Trueheart writes acidly, “who spent much of his life in dissolution on the Côte d’Azur”), but in fact ruled by the president Trueheart introduces, with a Joycean flourish, as “stately, plump Ngo Din Diem.” Diem, in his youth, had been a high-ranking civil servant in French Vietnam, but he became disaffected with the colonial government and went into exile, refusing offers by the French and later the Japanese, who occupied Vietnam during World War II, to become prime minister. Asked a third time after Dien Bien Phu, Diem said yes, accepting what he believed to be the “mandate of heaven.” This, FitzGerald explains in Fire in the Lake, was a Confucian conception of leadership in which “political change did not depend entirely on human effort.” If a ruler’s judgment “accorded with the will of Heaven,” the people were destined to follow. In practice, this meant that Diem (who, to complicate matters further, was a Catholic who disdained Buddhists) isolated himself from the public, remained serenely impervious to internal dissent, and dismissed all American pleas for reform.

I said above that Diplomats at War is a family story. The families number not two but four. In addition to the Truehearts and the Noltings, there are the Kennedys (a grouping that here includes Kennedy administration officials making Vietnam policy from Washington) and the Diems. The Diems were a funhouse-mirror distortion of the Kennedys. Like the Kennedys, the Diems were a big Catholic family; like the Kennedys, they made government a family affair. President Kennedy hired his brother Robert to be chief adviser and attorney general. President Diem hired brother Ngo Dinh Nhu to be chief adviser and also put him in charge of various security agencies “with extrajudicial powers to arrest, imprison, or execute.” Brother Nhu (as the Americans called him) exercised these powers with ghastly abandon. He was also “mixed up in criminal syndicates,” Trueheart writes, “and probably addicted to opium.” Brother Nhu’s wife, Madame Nhu, was a strikingly beautiful woman who issued “screeds and harangues” regularly, earning her the nicknames “Dragon Lady” and “the Vietnamese Lady Macbeth.” Among the many people Madame Nhu made enemies of were her own parents, then South Vietnam’s ambassadors to Washington. Camelot, this was not.

Fritz Nolting and Bill Trueheart arrived in Saigon with no particular knowledge or experience of Asia. In The Best and the Brightest, Halberstam explains that the “Who Lost China” hysteria had sidelined a generation of Asia experts at the State Department. “Those who knew most about Asian nationalism,” Halberstam writes, “were not allowed to serve in their chosen area (they were contaminated by their past), and if they had not left the foreign service, they had at least switched to another desk.” Bill and Fritz’s sole credentials were that they were fluent in French.

Their instructions from Washington were vague because Kennedy didn’t know what to do. Reports from the battlefield were favorable but unreliable because neither the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) nor General Paul Harkins, who ran the U.S. military assistance command, would report bad news. Even legitimate victories couldn’t erase the reality that the Viet Cong had infiltrated villages throughout the south. Daily reporters like Halberstam at The New York Times, Sheehan at UPI, and Malcolm Browne at the AP delivered brutal assessments that made the Kennedy administration squirm.

In retrospect, Kennedy should have followed Eisenhower’s lead and washed his hands of Vietnam. Some historians believe that Kennedy ultimately would have taken that course had he lived, but that isn’t the Kennedy we encounter in Trueheart’s book. Trueheart’s Kennedy was paralyzed by fear that another communist domino would fall on his watch. Again and again, he delayed making decisions by sending one adviser after another on fact-finding missions to Vietnam. Eventually, a State Department chorus led by Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman effectively made the decision for him. A Saigon-based CIA operative named Lucien Conein, part French and part American, set about assisting disaffected Vietnamese generals to mount a coup.

In Saigon, Bill and Fritz knew that Washington was losing faith in Diem, but they were left to figure out how to deal with him on a daily basis. Bill’s instinct was to keep his own counsel; Fritz’s was to reassure Diem cheerfully that all would be well. The two friends worked collaboratively and agreeably until June 1963, when Fritz left for a long-delayed vacation, leaving Bill in charge. This had happened before, uneventfully, but shortly after Fritz departed, protests from Buddhists against Diem’s pro-Catholic policies turned into a full-blown rebellion. In public squares, Buddhist monks immolated themselves to protest Diem’s regime. Bill, in consultation with Hilsman and Harriman, threatened Diem with an end to U.S. support unless the president addressed the Buddhists’ grievances. The ultimatum was promptly leaked (probably by Harriman) to Max Frankel in The New York Times.

In effect, Bill altered the Saigon embassy’s policy toward Diem from accommodation to confrontation. He did it at the prodding of his superiors in Washington but also out of his own conviction—one he hadn’t shared with Fritz—that Diem’s time was up. That gratified Washington, but Fritz saw it, not unreasonably, as a personal betrayal. Kennedy, meanwhile, was furious that Hilsman, Harriman, and Bill acted without his personal approval.

Was Bill pleasing Washington to advance his own career at Fritz’s expense? Fritz thought so. Bill did end up (after a few years’ exile inside the State Department bureaucracy) as ambassador to Nigeria, whereas Fritz, somewhat sooner, left the foreign service altogether. Trueheart weighs judiciously all possible motives, some flattering and some not, but comes to no conclusions. (We never make up our minds about our parents, and there’s no reason we should.) He also puzzles over why Bill and Fritz had never aired their diverging opinions about Diem before. “Working ten paces from one another on the top floor of the embassy,” Trueheart writes, “going to the same appointments and diplomatic parties, on the same inspection trips, they had nothing but opportunities. And they were old friends!”

For his part, Bill later said in an oral history: “I think Fritz felt that my responsibility during his absence was to him, whereas I felt my responsibility was to Washington when I was in charge during his absence. I did not feel I should be guided, in his absence, by doing what I supposed he would do.” Where did patriotism reside? Where did friendship? These aren’t easy questions to answer.

Complicating this ethical labyrinth still further, Bill’s alteration of embassy policy advanced, by one small step, the coup in which Diem and Brother Nhu were murdered—murdered without direct American knowledge or involvement, to be sure, but only because the United States expressly told coup plotters to keep such details to themselves. There followed coup after coup and eventually a sort of patchwork South Vietnam government until, in 1973, President Richard Nixon declared peace with honor, creating a face-saving decent interval of two years before Saigon fell.

I haven’t done justice here to the more novelistic aspects of Trueheart’s narrative, which include the author’s own adolescent detour, as the Diem regime slowly unraveled, into making Molotov cocktails and tossing them about in alleys for sport. Harriman (nickname: “the Crocodile”) would make a fine Dickensian villain; in one Oval Office meeting, he tells Fritz nobody wants to hear his opinion, leaving Kennedy to reply firmly that the president does. Do people really behave like that in front of the president of the United States? Apparently, some do.

Nor have I made sufficiently clear what a page-turning read Diplomats at War is. At a concise 300 pages, the narrative builds suspensefully toward Bill and Fritz’s falling out and then to Diem’s killing, two events we know from the beginning will come. And, of course, knowing the coup against Diem, far from solving the United States’s problem in Vietnam, will draw it further into an unending war, lending a powerful retrospective irony.

A close friendship was ended, more than three million people died, and two presidents were assassinated. Last September, the United States and Vietnam announced a comprehensive strategic partnership drawn together by China’s rising power. If this was the mandate of heaven, someone should have told us six decades ago.

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