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

by David Halberstam

Nolting was, above all, a man of the surface. If Diem could have designed an ambassador for his country and his regime, he would have come up with Fritz Nolting. He was a fine example of the foreign service officer who commits himself only to the upper level of the host government and the society, not to the country itself. If you get along with the government and pass on its version of reality, then you are doing your job. It was not his job to ask questions; it was his job to get things done. There was no doubt that Nolting believed in what he was doing and saying. He had looked and listened, and had decided that Diem was the best anti-Communist around (there was, of course, no one else; Diem had systematically removed all other opposition—Communist, neutralist, anti-Communist). People who worried about the regime’s lack of appeal, of the growing isolation of the regime, were, in his words, taking their eyes off the ball. Stopping Communism was having your eyes on the ball. If civilians in Saigon discussed growing political resentment and repression he would assure all, including Washington, that he knew nothing of it, which was true, of course; no Vietnamese other than the family trusted him. He had forbidden members of the embassy staff to talk to any Vietnamese dissidents; if one did not hear it, it did not exist; if one did not see it, it never happened.