Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, Charles Trueheart, University of Virginia Press, $34.95

Call me a convert. Given the voluminous literature, more than 100 books and counting on the November 1963 coup that toppled South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, it seemed we already knew everything there was to know. I myself spent over 150 pages on Kennedy-era Vietnam policy in my book, The Last Brahmin: Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. and the Making of the Cold War, from the vantage point of Lodge, the two-time US Ambassador to Saigon in 1963-64 and 1965-67, and participant in the coup that set America on the path to military intervention in Vietnam – the ‘break it, you buy it’ moment for the United States, to paraphrase what Secretary of State Colin Powell said about Iraq four decades later. But I was wrong.

Charles Trueheart, with the access he gives readers to the behind-the-scenes personal relationships and intriguing new details, not to mention memories as a boy growing up in Saigon at the time, demonstrates why.

In Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict, Trueheart traces the careers and friendship of two American diplomats, his father, William Trueheart, and godfather, Fritz Nolting. They each joined the Foreign Service in the 1950s, were posted at critical Cold War outposts such as Paris, NATO, and, finally, Saigon in South Vietnam – Nolting as ambassador, and Trueheart as deputy chief of mission, which is the heart of the book’s story – and shared the New Frontier optimism common at the start of the administration of John F. Kennedy. However, the coup that toppled South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem on 1 November 1963, also put paid to their friendship. Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were assassinated by the plotters, and Trueheart and Nolting never spoke again because of their divergent views on the coup, a betrayal that Charles Trueheart concludes was ‘sanctioned and encouraged by the Kennedy administration.’

Spread out over a dozen chapters, written more like diplomatic dispatches than academic history, this readable page-turner is part memoir, part hidden history of the Diem coup, and part detective story to document the events that shattered the once-close relationship between the Trueheart and Nolting families. A journalist by training, Trueheart has done the spadework in the archives – especially drawing on the Nolting papers at the University of Virginia. The book is the latest synthesis of works on the Diem coup and offers numerous suggestions for further reading. But it is the work’s focus on the private side of diplomacy, the personal relationships between officials, along with the author’s reflections on living in Saigon, that are its most unique contributions. No accounting of JFK policy towards Vietnam, a more innocent period during which the diplomats reigned supreme before the LBJ-era of major troop buildups began in mid-1965, is complete without this book. William Trueheart and Fritz Nolting died without resolving their differences, thus it has been left to the next generation, and readers, to piece together what went wrong.

It is a story compelling for its own sake, but what elevates it to important history is the fact that it occurs against the backdrop of a major shift in US policy towards Southeast Asia. We can see how the Vietnam War, a conflict that became known as Lyndon Johnson’s war, and later Richard Nixon’s war, took root in the Kennedy years. It was JFK who sanctioned more direct involvement in Vietnamese affairs and publicly established Southeast Asia as a new frontier of the Cold War. It was Lyndon Johnson, as Kennedy’s vice president and emissary on a visit to Saigon in 1961, who declared his country’s unwavering support for Diem and Vietnam.

The removal of Diem, ‘a messiah without a message’, shattered the constitution and established the Republic of Vietnam as something closer to a French client state, like Algeria, for the United States. However, even the French, as brutal as colonial Indochina could be, tended to exile inconvenient leaders, not assassinate them. The American government, which had plenty of experience with state-sponsored coups going back to Iran in 1953, found that toppling an ally was something different. Replacing Diem with someone more responsive to American demands sounded like a good idea at the time, except there was no one to replace him. A revolving door of leaders continued until Nguyen Van Thieu – himself a member of the 1963 coup – came to power in 1967. In that span of years, the American public lost confidence in the war, just as the Republic of Vietnam gained its footing. It was too late, as George J. Veith documents in his excellent recent book on the Thieu presidency, Drawn Swords in Distant Land: South Vietnam’s Shattered Dreams.

Charles Trueheart’s story is also one of caution: despite what our newsfeeds regularly remind us, there is almost always more going on behind the scenes that we do not know, a world we do not have access to, and important events and actions that are not reduced to personal papers are left in an archive for us to discover later. The Manichean rhetoric of anticommunism and the Cold War, leaves little room for context and nuance, the kind that is a major feature of this book. Neither Fritz Nolting nor William Trueheart wrote a proper memoir. Thankfully, Charles Trueheart seized the opportunity, but even he was not able to answer every question he set out to address. His book is a reminder that at its core, an embassy, a diplomatic mission, or a government, is not composed primarily of buildings but people. And the personal relationships those people have with each other can be a critical – although often less documented – part of the story.