Rufus Phillips, the CIA operative who had met with Diem but a few days before the coup, was deeply saddened and distraught when he entered Gia Long Palace on the day after the overthrow: “I wanted to sit down and cry. And I was so upset when I heard that he’d been killed. . . . That was a stupid decision and, God, we paid, they paid, everybody paid.”1 Vice President Johnson had argued against the coup plotting; by all accounts, he genuinely liked Diem and thought him a good leader of his country. He was livid over the murder of Diem and did little to hide his contempt for those who had a hand in it. In 1966, when he was president, he confided in a telephone conversation with Senator Eugene McCarthy the truth of what the Kennedy administration had done to President Diem back in 1963: “[W]e killed him. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability since then.”2 William Colby stated nearly the same thing to this writer in 1996, when he confided that after Diem had been killed, South Vietnam never got back on track. On November 5, 1963, Madame Nhu stated at a press conference: “Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need any enemies. . . . I can predict to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning.”3 Her words proved to be prescient.
The coup almost immediately destroyed any harmony there had been amongst the Vietnamese generals who had launched it; in killing Diem, they had also killed their own chances at governing as any sort of cohesive body. General Tran Van Don took an instant loathing to his fellow conspirator General Minh for ordering the murders. He knew full well, however, the petty and vicious motivations of Minh, and he later admitted that he knew the man would most likely order the murders of Diem and Nhu. He told historian George McTurnan Kahin that if Diem and Nhu had been left alive, in about three months’ time the Americans would have “fired” him (Don) and the other generals, and would have returned Diem and Nhu to power, probably with a sigh of relief.4 And for good reason: soon after the coup Don and Minh had their daggers drawn at each other, and each had a following as considerable as the other.5 Their rancour spilled over into all of the ruling junta’s appointments and dealings, thus leaving it weak and vulnerable. The situation invited an overthrow, which occurred in 1964.
Also in 1964, Frederick Nolting resigned from the State Department in protest over the coup in South Vietnam. Here is an excerpt from his brief February 25 letter to President Johnson:
I have today sent to the Secretary of State a request to be granted retirement from the Foreign Service, in order to accept an offer in private business. That my decision has been influenced by my strong disapproval of certain actions which were taken last fall in relation to Vietnam, with predictable adverse consequences, I do not deny. Nor do I deny that I have been uncomfortable in my association with the Department of State since returning from Vietnam six months ago.6
One of the last public comments Nolting made about the coup illustrates the long-term strategic costs of President Kennedy’s pursuit of short-term tactical gains:
Now the young president was caught in a dilemma; there was no question about it. There were several things he could have done, but the worst alternative was what he opted to do. Even worse than the practical consequences of the coup were the moral effects. I will not go into the sequence of events here because I believe it is now clear that after the revolution things went from bad to worse, regardless of the number of troops that we put in and regardless of the fact that the cost went up dramatically: 57,000 American lives, eight years of dissension in our country, huge increases in public debt, and the inflation that afflicted us throughout the 1970s. The actions of the Kennedy administration set the stage for all this.7
General Harkins and the former ambassador, in correspondence between the two of them after the coup, tended to be harder on Hilsman, Harriman, and the American press than on the president for what went wrong in South Vietnam. For example, on March 27, 1964, in a letter Harkins wrote to Nolting in sorrow over the latter’s resignation, the general claimed that the removal of Diem had set the counterinsurgency back about ten months, and he apportioned a good deal of the blame to the press: “As you know, the press took the sails out of Diem starting last June and July to make him practically ineffective.”8 Nolting replied to Harkins on April 7, 1964, and informed him that he and his wife, Lindsay, had gone over the tragedy of what had happened to Diem and Nhu so many times that it was driving them crazy. He wrote that he wished he had been allowed to stay longer in Saigon; however, in the final analysis, he had come to believe that the destruction of Diem’s government was inevitable given the players inside DOS: “Among other things, these people were feeding to the press the very line that you and I were instructed to counteract—i.e., the ‘can’t win with Diem’ line. . . This is a most unsavory story, but some day the facts will be publicly known. They already are known around Washington, but not admitted, and the press doesn’t like to eat crow.”9 In a letter handwritten to Nolting in 1971, Harkins enumerated the people and actions that alienated President Diem, resulted in his murder, and destroyed effective U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Harkins listed Harriman, Hilsman, Senator Mansfield, and the American press corps, in descending order, as those he believed were most responsible.10
When Nolting started to go public with his views on the coup, he maintained that the ultimate responsibility for America’s actions lay with President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. Rusk claimed that he had asked Nolting to stay on in Saigon and that Nolting was the one who insisted on going home. Rusk’s implications were clear: Nolting had deserted his post during a crucial and tough period. Rusk’s position, however, cannot be sustained by the facts, and the weight of evidence is on Nolting’s side. First, as previously noted, the cable traffic and memoranda from the State Department’s files show that Harriman and Hilsman wanted Nolting out of Saigon as rapidly as possible, even if this meant that there would be no ambassador at the post. Hilsman had been given the authority by President Kennedy to determine the departure date of Nolting, and he acted upon this authority in short order. Second, at the time that Nolting placed a request to stay on as ambassador, his request was denied. Nevertheless, Nolting found himself engaged in a battle to defend his honour, which lasted for many years.
Nolting went to work for Morgan Guaranty Trust in Paris as its vice president. He worked at this post in from 1964 until 1969, when he became assistant to the chairman in New York City. In 1973 he became a consultant to the company and was able to maintain this position until 1976. All along and simultaneous with his business career, he reestablished his academic contacts.
From 1971 to 1973 Nolting served at the University of Virginia as diplomat-in-residence. He went on to hold teaching and administrative posts as the Olsson Professor of Business Administration in the Darden School of Business from 1973 to 1976. He became professor in the Woodrow Wilson Department of Government and Foreign Affairs and helped found the Miller Center of Public Affairs, of which he became the first director. He retired from his full-time academic commitments at the University of Virginia in 1982 and began the painstaking process of compiling documents for his critical analysis of the Kennedy administration’s blunders in Vietnam. This work produced his political memoirs, From Trust to Tragedy. Frederick Nolting died on December 14, 1989, at the age of seventy-eight, only a year after From Trust to Tragedy was published.
As for Ngo Dinh Diem, General Nguyen Khanh told this writer that most of the Buddhists he knew who were in full support of the coup—and even of the subsequent killing of the man—changed their minds in the intervening decades and came to regard his murder as a mistake of unparalleled proportion for South Vietnam.11 Catholic Vietnamese, as noted in the beginning of this work, venerate the memory of President Diem. They affirm what Josef Cardinal Frings, the archbishop of Cologne, stated in 1965: “The greater part of the world has not given just recognition of this noble man.”12