In the wake of the aborted coup against South Vietnamese president Ngô Đình Diệm, President Kennedy dispatched a fact-finding team to evaluate the state of the war and political climate in South Vietnam. Reports from the State Department’s Joseph A. Mendenhall and the Pentagon’s Major General Victor H. Krulak reached wildly different conclusions. Kennedy, in turn, asked aides to negotiate their disagreements in private rather than through the press.