One afternoon in the summer of 2019, Rufus Phillips, 89, a Vietnam hand and legendary former CIA officer, was casting six decades back to recall how the quagmire had begun. We sat in a modest apartment on a low floor of a tall building in Northern Virginia, surrounded by art and books, bounty of his years in Asia.
“We faced more turning points in Vietnam than you could count, but that was a point of no return,” he said of the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his shadowy brother Ngo Dinh Nhu in a 1963 coup coyly blessed by the Kennedy administration. To Phillips, the toll of that moment was clear: U.S. officials, even the most enlightened ones who had come to Saigon in hopes of doing good, would never find a stable course to anything approximating democracy, let alone a military victory.
Phillips is among the Saigon staffers who play small but significant roles in Charles Trueheart’s book “Diplomats at War.” The two men at the heart of the book — the diplomats of the title — are Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador in Vietnam from 1961 to 1963, and Nolting’s No. 2, William Trueheart. In the final months of the Diem regime, as the noose tightened, Nolting and Trueheart, Virginian gentlemen of the Foreign Service and friends since their graduate school days studying epistemology in Charlottesville, parted ways.
“Diplomats” reprises a drama first depicted 52 years ago in David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest,” but what makes this telling so enthralling is that Trueheart is the author’s father and Nolting his godfather. The question of what caused the two men to fall out — was it a policy breach, a personal betrayal or both? — drives the son’s quest and the fast-paced narrative. For the rest of their lives, Nolting and the elder Trueheart exchanged nary a word. (Nolting died in 1989, Trueheart in 1992.) In Trueheart’s family, the rupture would become taboo — roped off by his father as “the business with Fritz.” To Nolting, it remained an unforgivable sin. And to the son and godson, on the cusp of adulthood, the break engendered a “lifetime of stewing about the whole thing.”
Trueheart the son, a former Paris bureau chief for The Washington Post and longtime director of the American Library in Paris, has written a “work of memory hiding inside a work of history” — a tricky endeavor. To be sure, moments of awkward ice-dancing arise: Trueheart père morphs from “William Trueheart” to “Bill” to “my father” and, only occasionally, “Daddy.” But the son has achieved something rare in the annals of diplomatic history, mining family letters, federal archives and oral history to craft a tale both riveting and revelatory, a brisk drama that toggles between Saigon and Washington to offer an inside tour of the secret diplomacy — the cajoling and conniving — as the coup fuse burned.
It was Nolting who in 1961 — when the Geneva Accords still restricted the number of U.S. military personnel to 685 — wrote his old friend encouraging him to “get some realism into the heads of some over-idealistic Americans who seem to think the Communists won’t swallow up an infant democracy tenderized a la Rousseau.” But from the first, Trueheart pushed the harder line and would eventually side with those back in Washington who had lost faith in the Diem regime.
Throughout it all, young Charlie is present, a preteen fixated on, in order of import: cars (the family Ford Fairlane; the Mercedes 220S, shipped in from London; the state cars, “flags flying”), expat would-be street gangs, Boy Scouts and judo lessons at the Cercle Sportif. Fifty years after the war, we are increasingly enlightened by an emerging literature that revisits the Vietnamese side. Not here. Charlie’s closest relationship with a Vietnamese person was with the family chauffeur. And yet, as witness and researcher, he has curiosity on his side.
In exploring what went wrong, the story centers on the fateful summer of 1963. Ambassador Nolting went on holiday. For six weeks, Trueheart ran the Embassy. The explosion that led to the friendship’s end — and in time, as Trueheart the son notes, “the demise of American prudence and clear thinking — came out of nowhere.” The Buddhists of South Vietnam staged an uprising, catching the Americans unaware. The regime cracked down, and the CIA, the State Department and the White House began to plot. Throughout it all, Trueheart, as the ambassador’s chargé d’affaires, made no effort to contact his absent boss. Nolting would forever insist he might have saved the day, had he been recalled.
Yet Nolting did himself no favors that summer, giving an interview to journalist Neil Sheehan in which he downplayed the monks’ complaints: “I have never seen any evidence of religious persecution.” The Buddhists sent a plea to JFK: “The Ambassador would probably want to be presented with nearly 6,000,000 corpses of Jews before being convinced of religious discrimination.” But the coup that followed was, indeed, an ugly affair: As Washington closed its eyes (“not stimulate, not thwart,” in Trueheart’s parsing of the CIA cables), the Ngo brothers imagined themselves gaining safe passage, only to end up “bound and gagged” by insurrectionist generals, “sprayed with machine gun bullets” and “stabbed for good measure.”
Trueheart expertly reprises the drama, but an undertow pervades. “I knew Bill Trueheart only as a son knows a father,” the author writes, “that is intimately, but not at all well.” We learn the contours — the father “worked seven days a week,” “he was more of a distant example” — but Bill Trueheart is felt more by his absence than his presence. Even years later, when the son asked for his father’s thoughts on the murders of the brothers Ngo, the reply seemed to him “rather bloodlessly analytical.”
In the end, it is not Nolting but the author’s father who stands as a cipher. “My father never spoke a meaningful word to me about the summer of 1963.” Author and reader wait to see and hear the fireworks of contretemps, but instead what we hear from the senior Trueheart, three times, is: “Mea culpa.” Trueheart’s son makes no excuses, leaving the record blank — “It would be so interesting to know in his own words what he was feeling” — and instead poses the essential questions: “I have to ask, here and throughout this tragic fracture: did these two close friends of twenty-five years never sit down together in the winter and spring of 1963 and speak frankly to one another? Air their doubts, test their analyses, explore their differences?” As it turns out, it is not the drama of father and son, but of matters of state, that takes on sharper, trenchant focus.
If Trueheart’s father remains remote, his mother, Phoebe, offers her son a proximate witness with an acerbic tongue and emotional intelligence. The diplomat’s wife, to be sure, played hostess. She oversaw seating charts and proffered cocktails at all hours, but as the screws tightened that summer, Phoebe also observed — and acted. We are grateful for the narrative ballast. “To look at me,” Phoebe wrote in a letter that summer, “I am the picture of calm and tranquility. Inside I am churned up. When I do sleep, I have horrible dreams of blood, soldiers, and little children torn apart. … The only time I sleep is when I’ve had lots to drink or taken Seconal.” In the rush to the coup, as the father recedes, or the record fades to black, we hear Phoebe tally the toll on her husband: “He is running on nerves.”
The coup, like all coups, did little to better the lives of the local populace. Rufus Phillips, who died in 2021, was one of the last Americans to see Diem alive. “Do you think there will be a coup?” Diem asked the American. “I looked him in the eye,” Phillips recounted. “I couldn’t lie to him. ‘I am afraid so, Mr. President.’ I felt like crying.” After Diem, there followed “a half-dozen nonviolent coups by fractious Vietnamese generals.” Above all, his removal ended hope for a settlement with Hanoi and, as Trueheart writes, “an off-ramp for the United States from the road to a wider war.” Nolting would remain bitter, and righteous, to the end. “The albatross of Diem’s murder,” he wrote years later, “still hangs heavy around our country’s neck, and especially around the neck of those who plotted his downfall.”
Andrew Meier is the author, most recently, of “Morgenthau: Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty” and is at work on a book about two friends — one American, one Vietnamese — caught in the crossfire of the Vietnam War’s secret counterintelligence battles.
Diplomats at War
Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict
By Charles Trueheart
University of Virginia. 343 pp. $34.95
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