JFK and the fall of Diem
 | By eliminating the command responsibilities of his best generals, President Diem's approach to coup prevention only encouraged coup attempts. |
By Ken Hughes
November 2, 1963, 9:35 to 10:05 a.m., the White House Cabinet Room.
The Roman Catholic president of the United States dismisses the official account of the death of the Roman Catholic president of South Vietnam.
"It's hard to believe he'd commit suicide," John Kennedy says, "given his strong religious career." Ngo Dinh Diem's spiritual career included years in a New Jersey seminary, daily Mass and Communion, and a commitment to sexual abstinence. Suicide is a mortal sin in Catholic theology - warrant for eternal damnation. Diem's death was not Diem's choice.
One of sm JFK's advisers, Roger Hilsman, clings to the suicide story. "He's a Catholic," Hilsman says, "but he's an Asian Catholic."
"He's what?"
"He's an Asian Catholic. Suicide, and, and not only that, he's a, a mandarin. It seems to me not at all inconsistent with Armageddon."
As assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, Hilsman is supposed to be the administration's expert on Asia, but he's talking nonsense.
That's understandable. Hilsman is in a tough spot. The press has been writing about a "Hilsman cable" to the US embassy in Saigon, described in one newspaper as "kind of an invitation to the Vietnamese Army to get rid of President Ngo Dinh Diem." Now that a junta of South Vietnamese generals has accepted the invitation, Hilsman is the only man in the Cabinet Room willing to take their word that Diem swallowed poison before they found him in Saint Francis Xavier Church in the Saigon suburb of Cholon. The alternative explanation - assassination - would further stain Hilsman's reputation. And would make the Kennedy administration an accessory to murder.
As President Kennedy secretly recorded this meeting, he could not know that by the end of the day he would launch a coverup that would last more than 35 years. The facts that he was about to learn were damning enough to threaten public support for his Vietnam policy - and his presidency. For millions who view JFK as a hero, his decision to deceive the American people may seem out of character. But newly declassified tapes from the last two months of his presidency reveal that JFK's last coverup grew out of a series of deceptions by and within his administration. All the White House conversations in this story come from these tapes, which are held at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston.
In 1963, Vietnam was a place President Kennedy wanted to get out of - after winning reelection in 1964. JFK approached Vietnam with the same tough-minded political JFK approached Vietnam with the same tough-minded political realism that he brought to all major decisions. "If I tried to pull out completely now from Vietnam, we would have another Joe McCarthy Red scare on our hands," one aide recalled Kennedy saying, "but I can do it after I'm reelected. So we had better make damned sure that I am reelected."
No matter what he may have said in private, President Kennedy maintained a hard line in public. "I am concerned ... that Americans will get impatient and say ... we should withdraw," Kennedy said on television. "I think we should stay." A majority of Americans, far from impatient (yet) with the progress of the war, told pollsters they favored escalation if the communist Viet Cong gained too much ground.
If Kennedy was planning to withdraw after the election, he could not let Diem's government fall to the Viet Cong before then. Pope John XXIII unwittingly upset Kennedy's timing. Smelling politics in the lobbying efforts to have Diem's brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, made archbishop of Saigon, the pope sent Thuc miles away to the city of Hue, the center of Buddhism in South Vietnam.
Pope John couldn't have known that Thuc's arrival would inspire Hue's civic authorities to new heights of sucking up. South Vietnamese law prohibited the display of religious banners, but when Hue's Catholics violated it, authorities looked the other way. Three days later, when Buddhists tried to display their own religious banners, the police moved in. By the end of the day, nine Buddhists were dead, and a national political movement was born.
Diem blamed the Buddhists' deaths and demonstrations on the communists. An aged monk delivered the Buddhist response in unforgettable style. He assumed the lotus position at a busy Saigon intersection and bowed his head while another monk covered him with gasoline. In a moment, orange flame enshrouded his body. His example inspired other self-immolations. Diem's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, dismissed them all as "Buddhist barbecues." Since South Vietnam was 80 percent Buddhist, Americans could only wonder how Diem could muster the popular support necessary to win a guerrilla war.
The United States urged Diem to unite, not divide, his people. Instead, Diem declared martial law. His Special Forces, bearing lists of "Communists in Disguise," entered Buddhist pagodas and arrested hundreds, mostly monks and nuns. Diem's attempts to destroy his opposition threatened to destroy his own regime. His foreign minister resigned to become a Buddhist monk. His ambassador to the United States, who also happened to be Madame Nhu's father, denounced Diem for "copying the tactics of totalitarian regimes" and wrecking the South's chances against the Viet Cong. Vietnam saw its first large-scale student demonstrations. The jails filled with college students, then high school students, then grade-school children. Middle-class military and government officials spent their evenings visiting their children in jail. Diem had transformed his regime into the Viet Cong's most powerful recruiting tool. It looked as if Diem's regime might collapse well before the 1964 election.
The weekend following the pagoda raids, Roger Hilsman and other State Department officials drafted secret instructions to the US embassy in Saigon to "tell appropriate military commanders we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown [of the] central government." President Kennedy personally signed off on the Hilsman cable.
October 8, 1963, 5:30
to 6:15 p.m., the Oval Office.
"Big Minh has come forward," the president of the United States says, "and asked what the United States would do if they had a coup." Americans called South Vietnamese General Duong Van Minh "Big Minh," because he stood 6 feet tall in a land where most men did not.
General Maxwell Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, says, "Mr. President, we're wasting our time with Big Minh." Taylor and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had just seen Big Minh while on a fact-finding tour of Vietnam. Big Minh baffled them both. "One day, I went out and played tennis with him," Taylor says, "for the primary purpose of allowing him to talk." The Vietnamese general revealed nothing but his ability to defeat the American general.
"Two people on Big Minh for an hour," McNamara says, "and I couldn't get a damn thing out of him."
Big Minh was wise to remain silent. The strongest opposition to the coup plot was not in South Vietnam but in the Pentagon. Diem's fraudulent military statistics had encouraged US military officials to believe they were winning the war. Thus, they thought a coup would help no one but the Viet Cong.
"This is a very, very unsophisticated approach to overthrowing a government," McNamara says, "and I think it's cost us a lot already. It's all become known to the press. It's really disgraceful, when you look back on what happened [with the Hilsman cable.] It's - it's taken as gospel by now that this government tried to overthrow Diem's government."
Listening to McNamara's lament, you might forget that one of McNamara's subordinates leaked the cable to advance McNamara's policy position and wound the defense secretary's bureaucratic adversaries. If JFK were to accept Big Minh's offer, the same thing might happen again.
"I don't know Big Minh at all," Kennedy says. "Who is he?"
"He's now military adviser to the president," Taylor says. He doesn't mention that Big Minh is South Vietnam's best general. Big Minh crushed the Binh Xuyen, a criminal syndicate that controlled Saigon's gambling casinos, opium trade, and police force. Afterward, Diem threw his arms around Big Minh and kissed him on the cheek, a gesture of betrayal the general would have understood if he had read the Christian gospels. Diem viewed successful generals as potential rivals. To eliminate the possibility of military rebellion, he eliminated the command responsibilities of his best generals. Diem's approach to coup prevention only encouraged coup attempts. As a powerless, futureless, duty-free "military adviser to the president," Big Minh had a strong motive to plot Diem's overthrow - and plenty of free time. Big Minh, backed by other generals whom Diem had purged for overcompetence, approached a CIA agent with a proposal:
"General Minh made it clear that he did not expect any specific American support for an effort on the part of himself and his colleagues to change the government, but he stated he does need American assurances that the US government will not attempt to thwart this plan. ... General Minh insisted that his only purpose is to win the war. He added emphatically that to do this, continuation of American military and economic aid at the present level (he said one and one half million dollars per day) is necessary."
Big Minh understood South Vietnam's history. Years ago, the United States thwarted the first coup attempt against Diem by threatening to cut off all aid to the country if he were overthrown. The threat worked because an end to US aid would have meant an end to South Vietnam. The government was too weak to withstand the Viet Cong and the North on its own. Before Big Minh would even try to overthrow Diem, he needed guarantees that US aid would continue to flow if the coup plot succeeded. JFK oversaw the drafting of a secret cable to Saigon with the answer Big Minh wanted:
"While we do not wish to stimulate coup, we also do not wish to leave impression that US would thwart a change of government or deny economic and military assistance to a new regime if it appeared capable of increasing effectiveness of military effort, ensuring popular support to win war, and improving working relations with US."
JFK accepted the risk that the coup plot could backfire. Intelligence reports indicated a growing risk that Diem would make a deal with the North and ask America to get out of his country. Diem would rather have lost some power in a settlement than lose all power in a coup. In American eyes, settlement would have meant defeat. JFK would get the blame for losing Vietnam. He may have been willing to risk withdrawal after the 1964 election, but not before. (An aide later recalled that when asked how he would engineer a withdrawal, JFK said: "Easy - put a government in there that will ask us to leave.")
As the political necessity of the coup increased, so did the political danger. Someone in JFK's government violated his direct order and told The New York Times that the administration had cut off certain types of aid to Diem's government. The public could easily put this fact together with Time magazine's report that the coup plotters "want Washington to announce cessation of aid to the Diem regime." Madame Nhu, on a speaking tour in Chicago, called the aid cutoff a "betrayal." (To keep the too quotable Madame Nhu out of the United States, JFK considered sending his ambassador to talk to her husband. "I'll tell him to keep his wife home," Kennedy said. "He must be scared. Or he must be stupid.")
Compounding Kennedy's problems was the opposition of CIA leaders to the coup plot. The CIA understood the South Vietnamese government's problems much better than did the Pentagon but feared that a coup would produce a civil war, political instability, and a government no better than Diem's. So JFK set up his own covert-action apparatus. The unlikely instrument of his will was Henry Cabot Lodge, ambassador to Vietnam.
Lodge and Kennedy were both named after their grandfathers, rivals in Massachusetts politics. Newspaper boy Johnny Fitzgerald's ambitions for his family crystallized in 1879 when an Irish cook gave him a surreptitious tour of the home of her employer, the first Henry Cabot Lodge. The children's playroom was Toyland. According to Doris Kearns Goodwin's The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys, Fitzgerald never forgot the "beautifully carved miniature wooden soldiers and horses, hand-painted boats with movable parts, wood-burning locomotives, and bright red fire engines with tall ladders." Fitzgerald vowed to give his children the same.
Years later, when Lodge was in the US Senate and Fitzgerald was in the House of Representatives, the senator told the congressman, "You are an impudent young man." In 1916, Fitzgerald challenged Lodge for his Senate seat and lost. In 1952, their grandsons staged a rematch, and John Fitzgerald Kennedy defeated Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy beat Lodge again in 1960, when Lodge was Richard Nixon's vice presidential running mate. By 1963, Lodge's ambition was to occupy the house where Kennedy lived - 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
So Kennedy sent Lodge to Vietnam. As US ambassador, Lodge showed almost as much disrespect for Diem as his grandfather had for Kennedy's grandfather. Lodge thought comparisons of Diem to Hitler were unfair - since Hitler, in Lodge's eyes, was at least an effective dictator. Lodge believed the United States not only had the right to overthrow Diem but the duty: "Our help to the regime in past years inescapably gives us a responsibility that we cannot avoid." Lodge lunched with muckraking reporters, solicited their criticisms of Diem, and expressed his complete agreement. (He soon enjoyed better press than Kennedy did.) Masterfully, the ambassador managed to convince the pro-Diem press that he opposed the coup plot - even as he became its most fervent supporter.
With Lodge in Saigon, JFK could bypass the coup opposition within his own government. White House instructions went directly to the ambassador, who gave them directly to the CIA liaison to the coup plotters: Lucien Conein, an experienced spy who first parachuted into Vietnam in World War II. Sometimes, Lodge didn't even bother telling Conein what to do. He just held the latest White House cable in front of the CIA agent: "Those are your instructions. Do you understand them?"
"Yes, sir."
"All right. Go carry them out."
October 25, 1963,
11:05 to 11:55 a.m., the White House.
CIA director John McCone commands the president's respectful attention. Kennedy once ignored McCone's hunch that the Soviet Union was going to put nuclear missiles in Cuba. Now he listens.
The star of McCone's new disaster scenario is General Paul Harkins, the highest-ranking US military official in Vietnam. Three days earlier, Harkins told one of Big Minh's co-conspirators, General Tran Van Don, that it was the wrong time for a coup: The war was going too well. Since the coup was scheduled to take place by November 2, the Vietnamese generals needed to know where the United States stood.
So, apparently, did the American general. Lodge reminded Harkins of the president's orders, and Harkins promised to correct the error. If only he had left it at that. The next day, Conein reported that Harkins had, again, said too much:
"General Don stated that General Harkins had reiterated the fact that he had misunderstood a presidential directive, that Ambassador Lodge was aware of and controlling Conein's contacts with Don, and that Conein was the proper person with whom to speak."
Afterward, Harkins denied having divulged the president's personal involvement in the coup plot. Too late. Conein had already confirmed it.
McCone's latest hunch is that General Don is a double agent working for Diem. "If such is the case," McCone says, "the manner in which the contacts have been made - and the attribution to you, and to General Harkins, and to Lodge - put us in a situation where the government just cannot plausibly deny implication." In other words, Diem might have proof that Kennedy was plotting to overthrow him.
The president's brother and attorney general, Robert Kennedy, thinks the situation is dangerous even if General Don is not a double agent: "If some of these people are caught, and they talk about the conversations they had with the United States ... you're in a good deal of trouble."
McCone doesn't criticize Harkins, who may have irreparably compromised the president. He makes no mention of the suspicion among some of the generals that Harkins has betrayed them to Diem. The coup opponents stick together. McCone, with McNamara's help, takes this opportunity to blast the two men carrying out the president's orders, Ambassador Lodge and CIA agent Conein.
McCone complains that Conein is "perfectly overt. ... He was not an undercover person at all." The Diem regime and the generals all know Conein is CIA, despite his fake military ID and uniform.
McGeorge Bundy, JFK's national security adviser and a coup supporter, says, "What we've got to find is a man that really is regarded as highly professional by the agency ... that also Lodge will take and use as his own. And that man doesn't exist."
"We're just like a bunch of amateurs," McNamara says. "I hate to be associated with this effort, uh, dealing with Conein. He's an unstable person. ... We're dealing through a press-minded ambassador and an unstable, uh, uh, Frenchman."
This is either an attempt to play on the president's emotions - specifically, JFK's recent irritation with the French for advocating a Vietnam settlement and with Lodge for getting better press coverage than his boss - or the secretary of defense has just revealed a hitherto unnoticed aversion to good press and Frenchmen.
McNamara usually argues with statistics. He produces a startling one: Conein has been "five times divorced!" Actually, McNamara is inflating Conein's marriage count. According to a memo on Conein's marital status prepared on this day for McCone's principal coup adviser, Conein's "present wife (his third) was born in Vietnam of French parents."
Bobby Kennedy thinks it's dangerous to have anyone from the American embassy communicating with the coup plotters.
John Kennedy sees little choice: "They want to have a conversation with an American, uh, to understand what the American governmental policy will be."
Bobby says, "Somebody should really find out where it's going."
John says, "How they gonna find out unless they have a conversation?"
Bobby says, "Well, somebody can have the conversation initially."
John says, "Well, then, he will be the representative of the American government."
Bobby says, "Well, I don't know that that's necessarily true. [The representative of the coup plotters] doesn't have to know where he's from or who he's from."
Bundy jumps in on the president's side, as is his custom: "They really do have to know if they're gonna tell him the coup plans." The conspirators are not going to hand their plans to a perfect stranger.
Bobby says, "Well, I don't know. A person comes in and ... he's not seen around the embassy all the time. ..."
Bundy asks, "But who do [the plotters] think they're talking to?"
Bobby says, "Well, they just, they think they're talking to somebody that's, uh, probably somehow associated with the United States. But they're not sure. And they can't identify who it is, exactly."
Former Harvard dean that he is, Bundy can't resist a put-down: "They've got security problems, too."
"Well, I'll tell you this: If having somebody at the embassy running around ... "
"No, I see the disadvantage of that," Bundy interrupts, breaking into laughter. "It's one of the disadvantages of your plan." If he were wise rather than just intelligent, Bundy might recall that Joseph Kennedy raised his sons not to get mad but to get even.
When McCone and McNamara finish denigrating JFK's coup operation, the president appears to give ground. He directs McCone to devise a reorganization proposal for the Saigon CIA station, though, he says, "I don't think we can set up any satisfactory contact other than Conein between now and November 2d." Lodge will soon return to America for new instructions. "There's this reservation about Lodge's conduct," Kennedy says, "but he's there. ... We can't fire him."
The president remains open to criticism and willing to change course. After the coup.
October 29, 1963, 4:25
to 5:15 p.m., the Cabinet Room.
CIA Far Eastern division director William Colby - McCone's top coup adviser, the man with the facts on the Conein marriage - uses a pointer and maps to paint a woeful picture of political division within the Saigon military.
Anti-Diem troops number 9,800. Pro-Diem troops number 9,800.
"The key units come out about even," Colby says. "There's enough, in other words, to have a good fight."
"Thank you," Bundy says, "for your decisive point." This gets a laugh.
Bobby Kennedy is not amused. He says Diem "has sufficient forces to protect himself from key figures against him in any kind of coup."
"I think he has," Colby says.
The other Kennedy in the room thinks otherwise. As far as the president is concerned, an equal balance between pro- and anti-Diem forces does not necessarily mean that the coup will fail. "I'm sure that's the way it is with every coup," he says. "It always looks balanced, until somebody acts."
Now it is brother against brother. "I may be in the minority," Bobby says. "I just don't see that this makes any sense, on the face of it. We're putting the whole future of the country - and, really, Southeast Asia - in the hands of somebody we don't know very well. ... [Diem]'s a determined figure who's gonna stick around and, I should think, go down fighting. If [the coup]'s a failure, I would think Diem's gonna tell us to get the hell out of the country. ... He's gonna have enough, with his intelligence, to know that there's been these contacts and these conversations, and he's gonna capture these people. They're gonna say the United States was behind it. I would think that we're just going down the road to disaster."
Secretary of State Dean Rusk says, "I ... share this concern with the attorney general."
General Taylor says, "I must say that I agree with the attorney general, Mr. President."
CIA director McCone says, "I think our opinion is somewhat the same as General Taylor's, Mr. President." McCone can't say he agrees with the attorney general, since Bobby Kennedy merely repeated what McCone had told him the last time they had lunch.
McCone's words are more convincing in Bobby Kennedy's mouth than in his own. The president changes his mind. "With, with our correlation of forces, uh, th-they're almost even in the immediate Saigon area. If that is true, then, of course, it wouldn't make any sense to have a coup," the president says. "Unless [Lodge] has information - and he can produce information - which would indicate that the balance of force quite easily is on the side of the, uh, rebels, then it seems to me that he should discourage it at this time."
The president has Bundy draft a cable to Lodge. With Saigon's military equally divided, JFK says, "There is a substantial possibility that there [will be] a prolonged fight."
"Or even defeat," Bundy says.
"Or even defeat," the president agrees. "This being true, we think it would be disastrous to proceed unless they can give us evidence that, uh, indicates" the coup will succeed. Failure "could in one blow defeat our whole effort in South Vietnam."
JFK's fate lies in the hands of his oldest political adversary.
The ambassador replies a day later:
"We must, of course, get best possible estimate of chance of coup's success and this estimate must color our thinking, but do not think we have the power to delay or discourage coup."
"I'm not satisfied with his answer," Kennedy says, "or the attitude."
November 1cp8, 1963cp8, noon, Saigon.
Things did not go according to plan. General Don's aide de camp, Captain Hoa, showed up unexpectedly at Conein's home and told him to go to Joint General Staff headquarters immediately. Conein asked why the generals were not adhering to the previously agreed-upon security arrangements. The captain said he was just carrying out his orders and left.
Conein brought a .38 revolver - short-nosed, not very good for hitting a target more than a few feet away, but OK for self-defense at close range. By the time he reached Joint General Staff headquarters, the coup had started. The generals chose All Saints' Day, a Catholic holiday officially honored by the Diem government, so there would be fewer civilians on the streets.
The generals hosted a lunch for all the top military officials at the JGS officers' club. Once they were seated, Big Minh rose and announced the coup. Military police with submachine guns fanned out across the hall. Big Minh asked all those in favor of the coup to stand. All opposed were arrested.
Conein brought about 5 million piasters in cash, about 70,000 US dollars, in a diplomatic pouch for the generals. This was not, technically, a payoff. It was aid - the aid that the United States cut off from Diem and promised to the junta. The money would provide the coup forces with money for food, medical expenses, and death benefits - and, as McCone would put it, "rally the support of other competing military factions." There weren't many competing factions left. The rebels commanded the support of most of the armed forces. All that stood in their way was Diem's Praetorian Guard at the presidential palace.
The generals told Conein to keep a phone line open to Ambassador Lodge, who cabled the CIA agent's reports to Washington as he received them. The cables read as follows:
"From: Conein at JGS HQS from Gens Big Minh and Don and eye witness observation: ... Gens attempting to contact [the presidential] palace by telephone but unable to do so. Their proposition as follows: If the president will resign immediately, they guarantee his safety and the safe departure of the president and Ngo Dinh Nhu [Diem's brother and Madame Nhu's husband]. If the president refuses these terms, the palace will be attacked within the hour by Air Force and Armor."
"Conein at JGS reports Big Minh called president on telephone but president allegedly not present and Big Minh spoke to Nhu. ... Big Minh stated to Nhu that if the president and Nhu did not resign, turn themselves over to the coup forces within five minutes, the palace will sustain a massive airborne bombardment. At this, Gen Minh hung up."
"From reliable source at JGS from Gen Big Minh: The moment of decision has arrived, troops are moving on Gia Long [the presidential palace] and expect to take possession of the palace by 1900 hours. ... Gens are very hopeful for early recognition of their new government by the United States and other Western powers."
November 1, 1963,
10 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., the Cabinet Room.
"The prospect seems to be," Secretary Rusk says, "that the coup will succeed." Not one of the president's aides admits having been wrong about the coup's chances. No matter. Success heals the divisions within the US government. They all realize that the only way to support the war now is to support Big Minh.
First, they must hide their role in his rise to power. "I think our press problem is likely to be pinpointed on US involvement," Rusk says.
The president, who must leave in the middle of the meeting for All Saints' Day Mass, says, "I think we have to make it clear this is not an American coup."
"Right," says McCone. "Sure."
A State Department spokesman issues a one-sentence statement for the American public: "I can categorically state that the US government was not involved in any way."
November 2, 1963,
6:40 a.m., JGS headquarters in Saigon.
"Get the hell out," General Don tells Conein. "We're bringing in the press." The generals want to announce Diem's surrender and do not wish to be seen with the Saigon CIA station's least-secret agent.
Conein heads home for bed, but the embassy calls with a new order: Find Diem. Conein wants to know who gave the order. The president of the United States.
Conein finds Big Minh in the officers' club at JGS headquarters and asks about Diem and his brother, Nhu.
"They committed suicide," says South Vietnam's new leader. Somehow they escaped from the palace to Saigon's suburbs. "They were in the Catholic church in Cholon, and they committed suicide."
"Look," Conein says. "You're a Buddhist. I'm a Catholic. If a priest holds Mass for them tonight, everybody is going to know that he didn't commit suicide. That story won't hold water." It is now All Souls' Day, when Catholics pray for all who have died without atoning for their sins.
"Where are they?" Conein asks.
The bodies are behind a nearby building. Would Conein like to see them?
"No."
"Why not?"
Conein knows something about military killings in Vietnam. The killers don't always stop when the victim expires. They leave lots of marks. If Conein examines the bodies, he will be unable to deny that they were assassinated.
November 2, 1963,
4:30 to 5:35 p.m., the White House Cabinet Room.
One by one, Kennedy's aides try to tell him something without telling him too much. "About this, this suicide," Hilsman says. "There is some question in some of our minds as to how much we want to know about this. It's becoming more and more clear that it is assassination. At least I think it was." Someone has drafted a cable directing Conein to get the truth out of Big Minh. "There's some, uh, doubt in some of our minds whether we want to do this. Maybe we oughta just let it alone."
McCone says, "I would su-suggest that we not get into, into this story."
Bundy says, "What happens if we now ask to see the bodies, and there were a couple of bullets in the back of the, in the back of this kind? We don't gain much by that."
"I don't think we gain anything by it," McCone says.
The president understands: "If Big Minh ordered the execution, then, then, uh, I don't know. Do we think he meant to?"
"There's some suspicion," Hilsman says.
"Some think he did," Bundy says.
Hilsman repeats Bundy's words: "Some think he did."
Just above a whisper, the president says, "Pretty stupid."
Hilsman starts talking about something, but Kennedy interrupts: "We haven't got any report on what public reaction was to the assassination, have we?"
"The only reports we've had are jubilance in the streets," Hilsman says. Saigon crowds have cheered for Lodge. Undersecretary of State W. Averell Harriman has been joking that Lodge might finally get a chance to become president - of Vietnam. Hilsman tries to tell the president the joke, but he screws it up: "Harriman says if there was an election tomorrow, and Lodge ran, he'd undoubtedly win."
"I'm not so sure about that," Kennedy says. Somebody chuckles, a few others join in, then everyone laughs, long and loud.
"I think," Kennedy says, before another burst of laughter drowns him out, that it would be "interesting to know what reaction is, public reaction is. We'll hear all about this, and the assassination, and whether it will be popular or not." The room falls silent. After a while, a few men rearrange their papers. Eventually, some muted conversations begin, but no one raises his voice above a hush. The president remains silent.
The coup opponents failed to prevent Diem's overthrow, but they succeeded in exposing the Kennedy administration's role in it. The morning newspapers quoted Madame Nhu (alive in Los Angeles, because she ignored the US government's suggestion that she stay home) as saying, "No coup can erupt without American incitement and backing."
Reporters believe her. That morning, The New York Times said, "The United States Government had created the atmosphere that made the coup possible." Time magazine will be more blunt, calling US denials "misleading" and stating that "there could be no question that the U.S., in the policies and in the pressures it brought to bear, had effectively encouraged the overthrow of the Diem regime." If Americans find out that Big Minh is a murderer, they will view Kennedy as an accessory.
In the Cabinet Room, the president breaks the hush: "What are we gonna say about the, uh, death of Diem and Nhu? We're not gonna say anything, right?"
One aide has told reporters simply that the government is receiving conflicting reports.
"We've already got an unfortunate event," the president says. "Nonetheless, it'd be regrettable if it were ascribed, unless the evidence is clear, if it were ascribed to Big Minh and the responsible council of generals. I don't want it wrapped around him if we can help it."
"What I'd recommend, sir," Hilsman says, "is that we wait a little while, and see. The information's gonna come out. It's gonna come out in the next 48 hours."
"His role may not," Kennedy says. "I'm sure Lodge must be aware that this is an unfortunate matter, and I suppose next they're gonna make every effort to disassociate Big Minh and Conein." The president works on a cable for Lodge, expressing concern about the effects of the assassination and interest in "any extenuating circumstances which develop."
"If there was not responsibility on his part," Kennedy says, "that should be made clear."
"In other words," Hilsman says, "get a story and stick to it."
"Got it," Bundy says.
"It ought to be a true story," Kennedy says, "if possible."
It wasn't, so the administration leaked half-truths to the press, like this one in the November 6, 1963, New York Times: "High authorities here [in Washington] do not believe the military committee that seized power in South Vietnam planned or ordered the assassinations of President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu." True enough. The junta as a whole did not order the assassinations; Big Minh did.
The coverup worked because no one who knew the truth had an incentive to disclose it. The truth would have undermined public support for Big Minh, the South Vietnamese government, and the war.
So, less than a month before his own assassination, President John F. Kennedy engineered a coverup in the assassination of another president. Following Kennedy's funeral, Senator Hubert Humphrey visited President Lyndon Johnson. According to Humphrey, as they passed a portrait of Diem, Johnson said, "We had a hand in killing him. Now it's happening here."
Conein revealed the truth to the Senate Church Committee in June of 1975, just two months after Big Minh surrendered to North Vietnam. "This is something I swore I would never tell," Conein testified. "We knew ... within a matter of hours exactly what happened, and I reported it, and it was reported back here [in Washington] at headquarters exactly what happened. ... I have it on very good authority of very many people that Big Minh gave the order." The government declassified his testimony just last year.
The success of the coup and coverup enabled JFK to avoid three political calamities: North and South Vietnam did not negotiate a settlement to end the war; South Vietnam did not request the withdrawal of American troops; the government in Saigon did not collapse. But the fate that Kennedy avoided awaited his three successors. Lyndon Johnson entered settlement negotiations. Richard Nixon withdrew American troops. Gerald Ford watched Saigon fall. In those years, it was common for people to say that America had not really had a good president since Kennedy.
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