Joseph’s review of Kennedy's Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America's Descent into Vietnam > Likes and Comments

“Nothing new”? You’re very much mistaken, Mr. Case.

I believe “Kennedy’s Coup” is the most complete, most detailed account of the anti-Diem coup of 1963 ever published. I filed scores of freedom of information requests and extracted about 1,100 pages of formerly secret documents from the CIA, National Security Agency, and State Department. (These documents were all declassified in 2016 or later; none were “declassified documents from the 1990s.”)

In addition, one of my interview subjects, James D. Rosenthal, who served in the Saigon embassy in the early 1960s, gave me hundreds of State Department cables he painstakingly acquired under the Freedom of Information Act. These documents formed a pile of paper two feet high. Rosenthal hoped to write his own account of the coup, and the role of the Buddhist militant Tri Quang in it, but wasn’t able to, and generously turned his materials over to me.

Thus my book significantly expands what’s publicly known about the coup. Here are some of its revelations:

=Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s betrayal of Diem’s youngest brother, Ngo Dinh Can, the unofficial governor of Hue and surrounding provinces. After Diem was killed, the State Department ordered that Can be granted asylum at the U.S. consulate in Hue. The White House separately instructed Lodge to make sure he and his nonagenarian mother got safely out of South Vietnam. (Can wanted to go to Tokyo.) After the U.S. consul in Hue bravely refused a South Vietnamese general’s demand to turn over Can, he was flown to Saigon aboard a CIA aircraft. There Lodge turned him over to the South Vietnamese military. Can was put on trial and executed six months later, with Lodge denying to the press that he gave up Can to the military.

This story, Mr. Case, has never been told before. In other words, it’s new.

=Since the South Vietnamese generals plotting the coup mistrusted their American allies and revealed few details of their plans, the U.S. began secretly eavesdropping on them. Young Vietnamese language experts assigned to the Army Security Agency sat in electronics-jammed trailers outside Saigon listening to phone calls among the plotters. I interviewed three of these linguists about what they heard.

The National Security Agency, meanwhile, was secretly intercepting cables from the Saigon government to its embassies in Washington, Paris, Bangkok, and elsewhere, trying to find out what Diem was up to. I obtained NSA documents detailing these actions. (One of the intercepts shows the mother of Madame Nhu, Diem’s sister-in-law, begging her to get herself and her four children out of South Vietnam before they’re all killed. The cable from the mother, then living in Washington, is signed “Love, mamma.”)

This information, Mr. Case, has never been published before. In other words, it’s new.

=State Department officials tried to use Madame Nhu’s three youngest children as bait to lure her out of the United States, where she’d become a high-profile critic of the Kennedy administration during a speaking tour just prior to the coup. The three kids, who’d disappeared during the coup, were found in the Central Highlands afterwards. Madame Nhu wanted them flown to Los Angeles to be with her, but the State Department instead sent them to Rome to be with her brother-in-law, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc. When JFK found out about the scheme, he put an end to it, ordering subordinates to give the children U.S. visas if requested. But Madame Nhu later rejoined her kids in Italy anyway.

This episode, which I pieced together from various sources, has never been published before. In other words, Mr. Case, it’s new.

=The story of how and why Lodge fired John Richardson, the CIA station chief in Saigon has never been told before with the level of detail presented in “Kennedy’s Coup.” That’s because I obtained several CIA documents related to Richardson’s dismissal, including McGeorge Bundy’s heated discussion of it with Frank Wisner, a retired CIA executive, at a dinner party at Wisner’s home. Richardson’s abrupt ouster, less than a month before the coup, limited the CIA’s ability to gather intelligence on what the Diem regime as well as the coup plotters were up to just before Diem was assassinated.

Through my declassification requests, I obtained some very revealing individual government documents. They included CIA agent Lucien Conein’s after-action report on the coup, and a lecture on the coup that CIA deputy station chief David R. Smith gave to the Foreign Service Institute (revealing, among other things, that Diem’s brother Nhu had been viciously bayoneted more than 30 times by coup troops).

I also got hold of an 84-page chronology of the CIA’s actions in South Vietnam in 1963-64. This extraordinary document, written by CIA Inspector General J. S. Earman, contains many previously secret details of the spy agency’s operations during that time period.

I can provide more examples. But I believe the ones I’ve listed here will lead any fair and objective reader of my book to conclude that it contains a great deal that’s new. –Jack Cheevers

Mr. Cheevers, I respect the response. I looked at your sources and didn't see filed included in Selverstones 2022 account that were more recent tranche releases. I should have been more specific in my write up, I was saying specifically about the historiographical debate around Kennedy's intent to withdraw and what the counters of that debate looked like internally.

I’m not in the habit of arguing with people who ding my books, Mr. Case, but your critique of “Kennedy’s Coup” stands out as remarkably off-base and unfair.

“Kennedy’s Coup” is 615 pages long. Perhaps five paragraphs are devoted to JFK’s thinking about whether to withdraw U.S. forces from Vietnam. The other 614-and-a-half pages are about the people and motives that drove the anti-Diem coup, and the grave consequences that flowed from it for South Vietnam as well as our country.

Why did I devote so much more text to the coup rather than to your favored issue? Because my book is ABOUT the coup, not the withdrawal debate, which has little, if any bearing on the coup.

Trashing my book with a 1-star rating because it doesn’t contain “what you were looking for” is like burning down a department store because it doesn’t stock the exact type of plaid socks you wanted.

I don’t question your right to critique my book or anyone else’s, Mr. Case. But at least be fair about it and critique the book I actually wrote, rather than the book you think I should have written.

One last point: unlike you, the Booklist reviewer who characterized my book as “paradigm shifting” was clearly referring to the book in its entirety.

Within the Coup discussion the withdrawal question is more important and relevant than you give it credit for. It's what dominates the historiographical debate. They are not as separate as you make them out to be, will all due respect.

Here’s the significance of the “withdrawal question” prior to the coup:

Bobby Kennedy asked his brother’s advisers at one point why the US shouldn’t “grasp the nettle” and withdraw from South Vietnam if the war seemed unwinnable. His query was met with silence from JFK’s other advisers. JFK told Walter Cronkite in a Labor Day interview that he opposed cutting off US aid because that was likely to cause South Vietnam to fall into communist hands. JFK told his aide Kenny O’Donnell that he wanted to withdraw from Vietnam if he was reelected in 1964; he feared a Red Scare-level backlash from conservatives if he tried to do it before then. The president instructed Michael Forrestal to do an in-depth review of US involvement in Vietnam and to suggest options for proceeding, including a possible US pullout. Shortly before his assassination, JFK announced plans to withdraw 1,000 US advisers from South Vietnam by the end of 1963 (although that didn’t happen after LBJ took over.)

My book covers all of those points. The “withdrawal question” received little attention from Kennedy and his men in the fall of 1963 because they were much more focused on the coup and whether the rebel generals could topple Diem. The “withdrawal question” became more significant in early 1965, as LBJ weighed a massive US escalation in the war and George Ball, his undersecretary of state, argued forcefully against it. My book describes this debate as well.

If you think the “withdrawal question” deserves more attention, write your own book. But beware of critics who feel it’s their mission to trash your book simply because it doesn’t place as much emphasis as they think it should on their hobbyhorse issue.

If you read McNamara's IN RETROSPECT as well as the Selverstone book I mentioned you might think differently about the significance of the withdrawal question especially during the fall of 1963. I do think in a book about the coup it deserves more attention and I am not trashing your book. A book review I read hyped it up and altered my expectations as well as the fact that there is a new release of files related to this that has yet to be properly examined. The timing of this publication and the reviews that claim it is paradigm shifting suggested it would likely touch on one of the central debates around the coup.

You give a book one star and you're not trashing it? Please. And of course I read McNamara's book. You'd know that if you bothered to check my bibliography. Again, I gave the withdrawal issue exactly the weight I thought it deserved. If you think there should be more emphasis on it, write your own book. Then you can ride your hobbyhorse issue to your heart's content.