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

by David Halberstam

Before he went to Saigon, Lodge had prepared himself fully in Washington, including long talks with Madame Nhu’s parents, who were highly critical of their daughter’s politics (her father, Tran Van Chuong, was ambassador to the United States and had resigned, along with the embassy staff, after the crackdown on the pagodas). Lodge felt that all the charges against the Ngo family were true, that Nhu could not be separated from Diem, that the war was being lost, that since there was going to be a coup anyway, the U.S. position should be to neither encourage it (except perhaps slightly; that is, by not discouraging it) nor thwart it. He predicted, accurately, to Washington, that Diem would make a request for U.S. help, and that the U.S. attitude should be that its capacities were far less than Diem’s. By mid-October Lodge had convinced the White House, which was in a receptive mood, that a coup was going to take place, led by the generals, unless the Americans openly betrayed them. He thought that it was all for the better, that the chances of a new government being far more effective than the old were at least even. In that he was right; in Saigon at least three major plots were still brewing, plus a counterplot by Ngo Dinh Nhu; it was no longer a question of a coup, but of which coup.