Diplomats at War

[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 PostA 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 MonthlyFew 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 JournalThis 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 TimesTrueheart 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 WeeklyTrueheart 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 DiplomacyTrueheart 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

Charles Trueheart is a former foreign correspondent of the Washington Post, a former Associate Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and a former Director of the American Library in Paris.