The Best and the Brightest: Kennedy-Johnson Administrations (Modern Library)

by David Halberstam

Nolting returned in mid-July for one last chance as ambassador. Those were very unhappy days. Nolting found Diem uncommunicative and unresponsive; Nolting, who had acquiesced to Diem on so many things in order to have money in the bank for just such an occasion as this, now found that he had little influence after all. If he was alienated from Diem, so he was separated from his own embassy. Trueheart he accused of disloyalty, but not just Trueheart, also Rufus Phillips in the strategic hamlet program, Mecklin at USIA, the AID (Agency for International Development) people, and many of the CIA people. His only allies now were the military people. The others in the embassy were sympathetic: they liked him personally, they knew how hard he had worked and the odds that had been against him, the personal sacrifice he had made, but it no longer worked, if indeed it had ever worked. Now that it had failed, everyone but Nolting accepted it, and there was a certain pain for him in watching his unwillingness to let go. His last days there were particularly painful; the Nhus, exploiting his loyalty, involved him in a bogus ceremony designed to identify them with the Americans. It was an Orwellian scene: all the strategic hamlets in the country had allegedly competed for the honor of being named after Nolting; they had written essays, describing what the ambassador had done for their country. The winning hamlet had been chosen. Nolting would now visit it. He tried to get out of it; the...