When Fritz Nolting reached Washington on Tuesday morning, August 27 [1963], he found in the mail piling up for him at the State Department the customary letter from the president of the United States accepting his resignation as ambassador to South Vietnam. The brief letter was warm and congratulatory about his service. He had only just read it, Nolting recalled, when he got an urgent telephone call from the White House: “A public relations staff member asked me to give the letter no publicity. I said that I had no intention of doing so. ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘The President would find it awkward and embarrassing because of his references to the close relations you established between the Government of South Vietnam and the United States.’”

Nolting could smell what was up. A few minutes later he stood in [assistant secretary of state Roger] Hilsman’s office and for the first time read the famous telegram to Saigon that had gone out over the weekend. As Nolting saw it, “a plot had been launched to overthrow the constitutional government of President Diem, and President Kennedy was aware of it, if not entirely sympathetic. Naturally, he did not want to be caught in the contradiction between his former policy and the emerging one.”

This was, of course, the contradiction in which Nolting himself had been caught.

Although he doesn’t mention it in his memoir, he had another jarring encounter that first day back at the State Department. When Nolting appeared at his open office door, [Under Secretary of State] Averell Harriman looked up sharply from his desk.

“What are you doing in here?”

“Well, I came to say hello.”

“Get out!”

About to mark his fifty-third birthday, Fritz Nolting was in the end times of his diplomatic career. But on that first day back, seemingly in ignominious defeat, Nolting was the man President Kennedy wanted to see.

These were first discussions yet of such thoroughness, constituting so many powerful officials, under the pressure of an imminent coup and a chain of events they couldn’t control. 

When Kennedy gathered his advisers on Monday to thrash out the consequences of the August 24 Telegram, the can-kicking decision was to go back and ask [Nolting’s successor in Saigon, Henry Cabot] Lodge and [the US military commander in Vietnam, General Paul] Harkins what they thought, again. Then Kennedy suddenly asked, Where’s Nolting? “At his farm in Virginia,” someone said. “Let’s get Nolting back here tomorrow,” Kennedy decided. Then Averell Harriman drawled to life to say scornfully that Nolting thought that “if Diem goes, we’re finished. He’s very emotional about this.” Kennedy snapped, “Maybe logically so. I’d like to hear what he thinks.” Hilsman persisted, “He’s a man deeply shocked. Diem double-crossed him.”

At the White House the next day—he’d come from Danville, actually, because he no longer had a farm in Chantilly—Nolting was surrounded by the most powerful men in the United States government. Spurred by the August 24 Telegram, they were holding the very deliberations that should have preceded it. These were first discussions yet of such thoroughness, constituting so many powerful officials, under the pressure of an imminent coup and a chain of events they couldn’t control. Were the stakes comparable, these meetings could be compared to those during the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis the year before. The White House tapes were rolling.

The former ambassador seemed to have seen the handwriting on the wall about the Diem regime’s fate, as anyone could, but he put on a brave performance, day after day, all week.

On Tuesday, after listening to [CIA official] Bill Colby’s rundown of the Vietnamese generals involved in the coup planning, President Kennedy asked, “Do you know these generals, Mr. Ambassador?”

“Yes,” Nolting replied, and none of them had “the guts or the sang-froid or the drive of either Diem or Nhu.”

On these scratchy recordings, Nolting sounds more than subdued. His words come slowly, but he doesn’t shrink from his stubborn fondness for Diem. “I’d give him an E for effort on everything, on most things. I never considered him a liar, but a man of integrity.” Reaching back to his last full day in Saigon, August 14, one week before the disastrous pagoda raids, Nolting described the “categoric assurances” both Diem and Nhu gave him of their commitment to reconciliation with the Buddhists, which was “irreversible” again.

His words come slowly, but he doesn’t shrink from his stubborn fondness for Diem.

Then, as two dozen important pairs of eyes look on, Nolting picked up from his papers a long account of these Diem-Nhu conversations that he himself set down after he left Saigon. Startlingly, he said, “If you have the time I’ll read it to you,” and proceeded to do so without interruption while four agonizing minutes tick by.

(…)

Kennedy remained skeptical. He asked if the Ngos “changed their minds” between August 14 and the raids, or “were they just covering up what they were already planning?”

Nolting: “This is the $64[,000] question.” Although it had been answered in telegrams from Saigon.

Kennedy pressed him on Madame Nhu—why have there been no efforts to curb her?

Nolting is audibly weary, worn out from making excuses for her. “There’ve been efforts, Mr. President, over and over. She’s a strong-willed woman.”

Kennedy: “Is she under Nhu’s domination?”

Nolting: “I don’t think she’s under anybody’s domination.”

Kennedy also wanted to know more about Nhu: “Is he anti-American?” 

Nolting: “No, I think he’s pro-Vietnamese.”

Kennedy inquired about rumors that Nhu wants to take over the government. Nolting’s extraordinary answer: “I asked them, and they both said no. . . . They both looked me straight in the eye and categorically denied it.”

On this day Nolting had the floor for about thirty-five minutes, offering his judgments on the separability of the Ngo brothers and the Nhu couple. He was wary of ultimatums. Nolting even brought a laugh from President Kennedy and everyone else when he reminded them that the last time an American ambassador tried to order Diem to exile Brother Nhu, it was the ambassador—Elbridge Durbrow—who got quickly exiled. Someone joked about that kind of a quick round-trip for Lodge.

Nolting had the floor for about thirty-five minutes, offering his judgments on the separability of the Ngo brothers and the Nhu couple.

Overall, Nolting stuck to his main point: Lodge should have it out with Diem, “all cards on the table,” and give persuasion another try.

Averell Harriman had been silent throughout, acting the crocodile who seems to slumber until he snaps. Finally, after [Under Secretary of State] George Ball made a forceful case for removing Diem, Harriman came to life. Interrupting, he declared himself “utterly convinced we can’t win with the combination of Diem and Nhu.” He spoke an uncomfortable truth: “We created them, after all . . . and they have betrayed us and double-crossed us.”

The next day, as the deliberations resumed and Nolting continued to advise prudence, the recordings from the National Archives and Records Administration indicate (as they often do) an excision “on grounds of national security.” Usually, by inference, these are references to CIA assets, or information gleaned from “sources and methods” that remain privileged decades after the fact. But not every excision.

It’s no secret that during one of them, abruptly, Averell Harriman broke into something Nolting was saying and lit into him—“Shut up! Nobody cares what you think!”—with a brutality no one at the table forgot. Roswell Gilpatric, the deputy defense secretary, said it was “the only time I remember in the presence of a president where anybody took the tongue-lashing that Nolting did from Harriman. . . . [I]n effect [he] was charging Nolting with having been taken in by Diem and not really adequately representing the interests of the United States. . . . I don’t think from anybody else it would have been tolerated by the president.” Indeed, President Kennedy pushed back at Harriman, saying he, for one, cared what Nolting thought, and let him go on.

Overall, Nolting stuck to his main point: Lodge should have it out with Diem, “all cards on the table,” and give persuasion another try.

The momentum in these sequential meetings is toward abandoning Diem, but Nolting was persistent to the point of redundancy. This may be because Kennedy encouraged him, repeatedly turning back to hear his views. After one meeting, when the president gathered just four of the principals for a private huddle without the others, [Secretary of State Dean] Rusk told Kennedy grimly that “Fritz is in a state of minor shock. He keeps coming full circle, answering his own arguments, and comes out with zero.” Kennedy disagreed and said Nolting’s record in Saigon had been pretty good until the Buddhist crisis.

The president was there through Thursday, until he left for a long Labor Day weekend in Hyannisport, but the meetings of the Diem-era Wise Men went on without him (and without recordings). At the last one, on Saturday, an FSO named Paul Kattenburg was asked to speak about the situation in Saigon, whence he had returned the night before. As he listened to “men at the top of our government like Rusk, [defense secretary Robert] McNamara, [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Maxwell] Taylor, and [attorney general] Robert Kennedy, who simply did not know Vietnam, its recent history, or the personalities and forces in contention . . . I finally, and imprudently for such meetings, blurted out that I thought we should now consider ‘withdrawal with honor.’ Dean Rusk and Lyndon Johnson’s responses, cavalier dismissals of this thought, were indicative of precisely what I felt: that these men were leading themselves down a garden path to tragedy.” Kattenburg saw this moment as “the last best chance the United States had to examine in a concerted and systematic way whether or not it ought to continue in Vietnam,” and punted.

Excerpted from Diplomats at War published by University of Virginia Press ©2024