Diplomats at War
Douglas Dillon Award, (2024, Winner)
For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime
Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William “Bill” Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam’s landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history.
Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting’s godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States’ headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.
Winner of the American Academy of Diplomacy Douglas Dillon Award
A work of nonfiction . . . so deeply researched, thoughtfully considered, and elegantly crafted that it should sit comfortably beside The Best and the Brightest, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, the three most acclaimed books about the Vietnam War.- Washington Monthly
[Trueheart] has achieved something rare in the annals of diplomatic history, mining family letters, federal archives and oral history to craft a tale both riveting and revelatory, a brisk drama that toggles between Saigon and Washington to offer an inside tour of the secret diplomacy — the cajoling and conniving — as the coup fuse burned.- Andrew Meier · Washington Post
Diplomats at War is a gem. It is a wonderfully written story – or, to be more accurate, stories: the father-son tale along with the son’s view of his parents and their world, Saigon, the what-to-do-about-Diem debate, the larger Vietnam saga. I enjoyed this book and learned from it—and strongly recommend it.- Richard Haass, President Emeritus, Council on Foreign Relations
An engaging narrative, an evocative memoir, and an important contribution to understanding a critical moment in America’s descent into the quagmire.- Anthony Lake, American diplomat and former National Security Advisor to the President
How do you write about a tragedy that is both personal and global? Charles Trueheart shows us with an elegant, moving memoir—at once feeling and judicious—of his father’s involvement in the coup d’etat in Saigon in the fateful year of 1963. It is, on several levels, a story of friendship and betrayal, at once unavoidable and wrenching.- Evan Thomas, journalist, historian, and New York Times bestselling author of The Very Best Men: The Daring Early Years of the CIA and Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II
What a marvelous book! Part memoir, part authoritative history, Diplomats at War is a beautifully written, gripping account of Saigon in the early 1960s. Others have examined these portentous years in the long struggle for Vietnam, but few with the sagacity and fluency that Trueheart does here.- Fredrik Logevall, Harvard University, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam
Diplomats at War is an amazing read -- so sure and tonally perfect, it’s almost an act of diplomacy in itself … One of the things that made the story so immediate was the implied vulnerability of these powerful, or at least empowered, players. And the sense of regret they carried, on the personal level, is fascinating as an account of two bright, talented men who really wanted to do good.- Ann Beattie, author of Onlookers, The State We’re In, More to Say, and other books
This ground has been covered before, most famously in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, but Trueheart brings a personal vantage and renewed diligence to the task, admirably culling from memoirs, dossiers and telegrams. Most of all, Trueheart understands that statecraft is a matter of loyalties that are almost always in conflict over what is best for the country.- New York Times
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 1962 in a U.S.-sponsored coup. And the Nolting and Trueheart families were mixed up in all of it. . . . . 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.- Air Mail
Trueheart does a terrific job of focusing on this period from both the perspective of an adolescent and the insights of an accomplished journalist and scholar. The result is a kind of bi-focal view of events, in which we see both the near and the far. . . U.S. Foreign Service Officers today will find many of the diplomatic experiences familiar, including contradictory instructions from Washington, political-military disagreements, rifts in the embassy, rocky relations with the press, and the danger of talking only to the upper echelon in the country. Historians, students, as well as readers with an interest in the U.S.-Vietnam War also will benefit from the uniquely personal perspective that the author brings to his subject.- American Diplomacy
Trueheart blends solid history and revealing first-person storytelling in this riveting account . . . . Filled with telling family stories and revealing portraits of all the players involved, this is an important and unique contribution to the early history of the American war in Vietnam.- Publishers Weekly
Few events of the Vietnam War are more contentious than the Kennedy administration’s role in the fatal coup d’état against South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu. In Diplomats at War, Charles Trueheart provides the most detailed account yet of Embassy Saigon’s angle in America’s 1963 decision to oust the Ngo regime . . . The story of Nolting and Trueheart’s falling out is wrenching. Policy disagreements about the Ngo brothers and U.S. interests destroyed their friendship, close relations between their families and the diplomatic careers of both men . . . If anyone believes history emerges through great impersonal forces, Diplomats at War is a necessary curative.- The Wall Street Journal
