Reading the papers one Saturday morning in 1989, Charles Trueheart, a reporter at The Washington Post, was startled to see a familiar name on the obituary page. Frederick “Fritz” Nolting had died of an aneurysm at age 78. The Washington Post’s obit called him a professor, banker, and “retired foreign service officer” who’d served as “U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam from 1961 to 1963.”
Trueheart had spent those same years in Saigon as a not-yet-teenager. His father, Bill Trueheart, had served as Nolting’s deputy in the U.S. mission. In those days, the younger Trueheart had known Nolting by a slew of less formal titles: godfather, family intimate, and, most importantly, his father’s closest friend.
But the friendship had ended in the troubled final months of Nolting’s ambassadorship. It was the casualty of a brutal battle within John F. Kennedy’s administration over what to do about Ngo Dinh Diem, the incompetent autocrat serving ineffectually as the American-backed president of South Vietnam.
More than two decades had passed since the two men’s falling-out, but when, on that Saturday in 1989, Charles mentioned Nolting’s death to his father, Bill’s bitterness was still fresh. Charles said he was thinking of attending Nolting’s memorial service. His father’s reply came quickly: “Not if you care what I think you won’t.”
What creates a grievance like that, one so strong it survives beyond the grave? That’s the question at the heart of Charles Trueheart’s magnificent book, Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict. To answer it, Trueheart masterfully blends family memoir and geopolitical history, two genres more closely linked than they appear. For if “friendship and betrayal” accurately describes what transpired between Trueheart and Nolting, it also neatly captures the grisly fate of Diem, who was assassinated in November 1963 in a U.S.-sponsored coup. And the Nolting and Trueheart families were mixed up in all of it.
What creates a grievance so strong it survives beyond the grave?
Fritz Nolting and Bill Trueheart’s friendship was born in 1939 at the University of Virginia, where both were graduate students in philosophy. Each man entered the foreign service following World War II, and, during European postings in the late 1950s, their two young families grew close. After Kennedy named Nolting as his envoy to South Vietnam, Nolting informed Trueheart of his choice for deputy chief of mission: “the person I would most want to have—you.”
In Saigon, Nolting, a self-important Virginia gentleman, formed an affectionate bond with the imperious Diem. His stance was at odds with an emerging consensus in the Kennedy administration that the deteriorating situation in South Vietnam was a product not of misguided American policy toward the Communist Vietcong insurgency but of Diem’s ineffective rule. Ignoring instruction to rein in Diem and his family, Nolting earned a host of Washington enemies, including Averell Harriman, the legendary Cold Warrior then serving in the upper echelons of Kennedy’s State Department.
Things came to a head in late spring of 1963, when dissident Buddhist monks and nuns rose up in protest against the Catholic Diem’s repressive regime. Their tactics, which included self-immolation, put South Vietnam’s troubles on the front pages of American newspapers. But as the crisis bloomed, Nolting inexplicably elected to leave the country on a six-week vacation.
Trueheart was left to run the U.S. mission in his friend’s absence. The deputy, who had long harbored doubts about the South Vietnamese government, quickly brought the embassy in line with its Washington overlords, applying hard pressure on Diem.
When, in July, Nolting finally returned, he was appalled by how thoroughly his friend had repudiated his policy. He was particularly stung that Trueheart had not once tried to reach him during his time away.
Later that summer, Nolting was finally relieved of his Saigon posting. Making his way back to Washington, he drafted an addendum to Trueheart’s “efficiency report,” midcentury bureaucrat-ese for “performance review.” Trueheart’s actions during the contested period, Nolting wrote, were “not in keeping with the responsibilities and loyalties of a Deputy Chief of Mission.” Even those less fluent in diplomat-speak than Trueheart and Nolting could see what the ousted ambassador was doing—attempting to torpedo his erstwhile friend’s career.
In late August, the new U.S. ambassador to Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, received instructions from the Kennedy administration: “If, in spite of your efforts, Diem remains obdurate … we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” Just over two months later, the South Vietnamese president would be shot and stabbed to death in the back of a U.S.-supplied personnel carrier.
The history that followed is well known: Kennedy’s own death, a few weeks later, in Dallas; his successor Lyndon Johnson’s aggressive escalation of the war in Vietnam; the loss of 58,000 American lives. Next to those events, the demise of Trueheart and Nolting’s friendship can seem small, and in recounting it, Charles Trueheart is careful not to overstate its significance. Even his assessment of his ability to capture his own father is modest: “I knew Bill Trueheart only as a son knows a father—that is, intimately, but not all that well.”
But children have a unique ability to see the truth, even in places where adults are fully committed to a lie. In detailing his Saigon boyhood, Trueheart has given readers, and history, a gift. Through his eyes, we see well-intentioned men felled by hubris, ambition, and self-deception. These same forces explain the Vietnam tragedy and so many American misadventures that have followed in its wake.
Jonathan Darman is the author of Landslide: LBJ and Ronald Reagan at the Dawn of a New America and Becoming FDR: The Personal Crisis That Made a President