This coming Friday, our nation marks the anniversary of the day John F. Kennedy was struck down by an assassin’s bullet. Fifty years after Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger, many Americans still ache from memories of the terrible moment they learned their charismatic president had been cut down in his prime.
But President Kennedy’s was not the only assassination that month that would have huge consequences for Americans. Scarcely three weeks earlier, Ngo Dinh Diem, president of South Vietnam, was murdered along with his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, by generals leading a coup.
The coup and assassination did not show America at its best. Our Republican ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, had his fingerprints all over this coup. In Diem’s last call to Lodge, he asked ,“What the attitude of the US is.” Lodge falsely professed he was not “well-enough informed” to say.
There were many others who had a hand. These include diplomats Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman. The now-infamous Hilsman cable effectively became a death warrant when it made clear to rebel generals the US would look kindly on a coup against Diem.
And when Diem and his brother were shot in the backs of their heads, their hands tied behind their backs, Hilsman also argued to a highly doubtful JFK that the two brothers had committed suicide — as the coup leaders had falsely put out.
Records of those conversations show there was also wisdom that went unheeded. When JFK asked Fred Nolting what he thought, the former US ambassador to Saigon said none of the generals had the guts or leadership of Diem. He also advised Kennedy not to give in to pressure from US newspapers stoking public opinion over Diem’s brutal suppression of Buddhist protests.
He urged President Kennedy to concentrate on the main issue — defeating the Communist Viet Cong — and recognize that Vietnam’s internal problems would continue with or without the Diem regime.
So what was the result of the coup?
Ho Chi Minh said: “I can scarcely believe the Americans could be so stupid.” Later one of Kennedy’s advisors, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, would say the assassination encouraged a more aggressive Hanoi and “set in motion a series of crises” that would lead to tens of thousands of American combat forces being sent to fight in Vietnam.
Kennedy was shaken when he learned of Diem’s murder, which he had never intended. But the US encouragement of a coup against a strong Vietnamese leader would carry a high price in both American and Vietnamese life. The lessons of this other November assassination remain ripe today, when the United States again faces hard choices involving imperfect allies and determined enemies.