WASHINGTON
POLITICAL ASSASSINATION IS AN INAPPROPRIATE option for the president of the United States. Richard Helms, deputy director of the CIA under President Kennedy, knew a thing or two about erasing America’s enemies. In secret testimony before Senate investigators, he said the CIA sought to keep the dirty details from the Oval Office. “I think that any of us would have found it very difficult to discuss assassinations with the president,” Helms said. “I just think we all had the feeling that we were hired to keep those things out of the Oval Office.”
For President Kennedy, details of the CIA efforts to kill Cuban president Fidel Castro were hard to ignore. His brother Bobby, the attorney general, was directing the Castro assassination program from an office in the White House. And the likelihood of the assassination of the president of South Vietnam became apparent as Kennedy pursued the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem’s government. Diem and Castro were painful reminders of Kennedy’s inability to control events in Havana and Saigon. If they survived, both could become poster boys for the Republican presidential campaign of 1964. Castro was a nasty sliver beneath Kennedy’s fingernail. Diem was a very different matter. The president had a long relationship with Diem and admired his record and integrity. Now Diem’s assassination was very likely, according to CIA reports crossing the president’s desk.
A September 16 CIA report from Saigon discussed ideas underlying the plot. “They generally pivot around the thought of a quick, violent attack on the palace, assassination, and then hope for substantive action,” the report said. The distinct possibility that Diem and Nhu would be put to death was sprinkled through other Saigon cables. Agent Conein summed up General Big Minh’s options after an October meeting with the coup leader about plans after the overthrow. “One of the options was that they would be able to allow Diem to go into exile,” Conein said. “The other was that they would opt to kill Diem [and] Nhu. I reported this immediately.” McCone, the CIA director, quickly told Conein that assassination would not be tolerated. Conein was ordered to go back to General Don saying there would be no U.S. support for killing Diem, Nhu, and their brother in Hue, Ngo Dinh Can. General Don brushed off the CIA’s concerns. “If you don’t like it, we won’t talk about it anymore,” Don told Conein. “We’ll do it our own way.”
Killing the little man with the fiery dark eyes was a worry for Kennedy. Assassination—the killing of politicians and potentates—is a fundamental part of a coup d’etat. Once he approved the military overthrow of President Ngo Dinh Diem on August 24, Kennedy was concerned about keeping Diem and his brother Nhu alive. “What about Diem and Nhu?” Kennedy asked at a meeting on August 27. “I think it is important that nothing happen to them.” Initially, Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary for the Far East, told Kennedy that the generals wanted to decide the fate of the Ngo brothers. As events progressed, Kennedy knew that this was a death warrant.
Former ambassador Nolting and other experts on the Saigon scene foresaw certain death for Diem and his brother at the hands of the generals. While Nhu was widely hated, Diem was still a national hero with the majority of South Vietnamese who lived outside of Saigon. Diem’s reputation for hard work, celibacy, and integrity could quickly propel him back in office once the generals produced the inevitable political chaos. Even from abroad, Diem could stage a countercoup that would send Big Minh and his coconspirators to the guillotine or tiger cages at Con Son Prison. Killing Diem was the only way for the plotters to ensure their own safety. These men were former French colonial army sergeants made colonels and generals by Diem. Leading the coup were a band of staff officers who shared a reputation for hard drinking and sex parties. Lansdale of the CIA dismissed them as “playboys.” Big Minh was the front man for army officers who deeply distrusted one another. Conein often sat at a table with two of them. When one left, the remaining general would unleash a stream of slander on his brother officer, Conein said. As a rule, Vietnamese looked down their nose at soldiers. As a regular practice, when soldiers appeared in villages, they would quickly steal all available chickens.
There is evidence that Kennedy personally reached out to Diem to avoid his assassination. Instead of acting through official channels, the president asked a personal friend to act without notifying Lodge. He recruited Congressman Torbert Macdonald, a lifelong friend from Massachusetts and a former Harvard roommate, for a top secret mission to Saigon. “Kennedy told him that there were plans to kill Diem,” said Torbert Macdonald Jr. “He wanted my father to tell Diem of the assassination plans. [My father] delivered the message. He warned Diem that he would be killed. He told Diem to go—at least temporarily—to the U.S. embassy for safety.” Kennedy’s key aide on Vietnam, Forrestal, briefed Macdonald before the trip, his son said. All evidence of the secret mission was later erased. “He cut out the Vietnam visa from his passport,” Macdonald said.
At the same time, refusing U.S. help for Diem once the coup started became one of Kennedy’s last orders to Lodge. “If we give Diem help at that point, the jig is up,” Rusk said. He drafted and Kennedy approved an order to Lodge that both sides be refused American support, including U.S. aircraft. That order would lead the CIA to reject a request by Saigon generals for a U.S. plane to fly Diem to exile on the second day of the coup. Lodge anticipated the ban on aircraft might cause problems in sending Diem out of the country. “The [new] government might request aircraft … for the evacuation of key personalities,” Lodge cabled Kennedy. “I believe that there would be immediate political problems in attempting to take these personalities to another neighboring country.” If Diem requested asylum in the U.S. embassy, “we would probably have to grant it.” There was a precedent. Lodge had granted asylum in the U.S. embassy to leaders of the Buddhist protest.
Rusk was just one of his top advisers giving Kennedy conflicting advice seventy-two hours before the coup was launched in Saigon. Some hoped for a last-minute breakthrough agreement between Lodge and Diem. This hope stemmed from Kennedy’s order to suspend U.S. commodity imports for Saigon, a decision that would quickly bring Diem’s economy to its knees. The suspension resulted in Diem’s invitation to Lodge, his wife Emily, and Dunn to spend the weekend in Da Lat on October 27. The mountaintop retreat, built around an artificial lake, was famous for its cool air and fresh salads. They dined in a oval-shaped house originally built by the French for Emperor Bao Dai. Emily would later remark on the silk furnishings.
In his official cable to Washington, Lodge said the session “perhaps marks a beginning. But taken by itself, it does not offer much hope.” This attitude did not offer much support for any compromise as the coup loomed. But Mike Dunn saw Diem fishing for an understanding that would halt the suspension of imports. When Dunn chimed in on the discussion, Diem smiled at Lodge. Pointing to Dunn, Diem said, “Him, me—we understand each other.”
In an unpublished memoir, Lodge had a more upbeat recollection of the Da Lat session. “For the first time in all of my many contacts with him, [Diem] said he was willing to discuss the matter that we wanted to discuss,” Lodge wrote. “The most important of which was to have his brother, Mr. Nhu, take a vacation.” That perception never reached Kennedy.
With no deal in sight, Kennedy and his senior advisers took a close look at what they were getting into at a series of meetings in the Cabinet Room. The White House tape recording system picked up a background of shrieks and laughter from John-John, Caroline, and their friends playing in the Rose Garden seeping through the French doors. The October 29 meeting left the president in turmoil. He groaned, sighed, and joined the others in sardonic laughter. William Colby, the CIA expert on Vietnam, led off with the order of battle for opposing forces in Saigon. The generals leading the coup had assembled 9,800 troops, but the charts showed Diem also had 9,800. “There is enough, in other words, to have a good fight,” Colby told Kennedy.
“Thank you for your decisive…” said a chortling Kennedy. The laughter grew louder. The words triggered the vocal exasperation at the secret meeting. “If that is true,” Kennedy said of the troop alignments, “then of course it doesn’t make any sense to have a coup.” Up until Colby’s briefing, Kennedy and his senior advisers had expected a swift ouster of Diem with little bloodshed. Colby’s prediction of a stalemate rekindled the split among Kennedy’s advisers. That stuck the president with all the tough decisions. Kennedy’s brother Bobby poured ice water on the plot that had been hatched without his approval on August 24.
“I just don’t think this makes any sense on the face of it,” Bobby said. Pointing to the CIA order of battle, he foresaw Diem as determined to put up a fight. “We are so intimately involved in this. If it’s a failure, I would think he’s going to tell us to get the hell out of the country.” Bobby evoked the image of global humiliation that so wounded the president after the Bay of Pigs invasion. The attorney general predicted Diem’s capture of the plotters, who would then finger the White House. “They’re going to say the United States did it,” Bobby said. “I think we are going down the road to disaster.”
His outburst opened the door for the director of the CIA, John McCone. He told Kennedy that the coup was a lose-lose proposition. “We think an unsuccessful coup would be disastrous, Mr. President,” McCone said. “A successful coup will create a period of political confusion that will seriously affect the war for a period of time which is not possible to estimate. It might be disastrous.” He feared the rebel generals were too inept to run the embattled country. McCone was tutored by Colby, who had served as CIA station chief in Saigon. Colby had convinced McCone that Diem’s removal would produce a political collapse that would only weaken Saigon’s war effort and bolster Communist North Vietnam’s gains. Colby had persuaded McCone to urge retaining Diem but without his troublesome brother and sister-in-law. “If I was manager of a baseball team,” McCone told Kennedy at another meeting, “and I had one pitcher, I’d keep him in the box whether he was a good pitcher or not.” The Saigon generals made for a hopeless bullpen. Without stable leaders in Saigon and faced with Hanoi’s successes, the United States would be forced to increase its military commitment—even to the extent of sending American troops into combat—or withdraw from the ideological battlefield.
Colby’s projection of a bloody Battle of Saigon created nightmare images for the president. He saw television footage and accounts of chaos by reporters Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan, and David Halberstam. The president sought to counter Colby’s prediction of a stalemate by noting past coups where insurgent momentum wins over neutral forces. “It depends on what others will do,” Kennedy said. Colby agreed, but he then gave an answer Kennedy did not want to hear. Diem had outwitted a military coup three years earlier. Reactions by others, Colby noted, foiled a military coup attempt against Diem in 1960. Rebel paratroopers seized and held Saigon for a whole day. “But they did not get the [presidential] palace,” Colby noted. “Then troops from outside moved in and supported the palace.” Diem called for help inside the palace and outmaneuvered his opponents, as he had continued to do since assuming the presidency in 1954.
“What does the 1960 experience tell us about this?” Kennedy asked Colby.
“It has taught Diem a lot,” Colby said. The South Vietnamese president had increased his immediate defenses in Saigon and had provided troops outside the city with better radio equipment. “He has the same forces he has always maintained for his own protection,” Colby said.
Bobby Kennedy hit a nerve with everyone when he argued there was progress against the Viet Cong insurgency. The president had bolstered Saigon forces with 16,000 American soldiers, including pilots of helicopters and fighter-bombers. “The war, as I understood from Bob McNamara, was going reasonably well,” the attorney general said.
A central argument in favor of the coup was that Diem’s army was losing the guerrilla war to the North Vietnam–backed Viet Cong. Harriman, the chief proponent of the coup, argued that retaining Diem meant a loss to the communist North Vietnam. “I feel that way very strongly,” Harriman said, “I don’t think Diem has the leadership to take his country through to victory.”
General Taylor, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, echoed Bobby Kennedy’s view that there was progress against the Viet Cong. But the old paratrooper took the issue a step further by flatly opposing the overthrow of Diem. “I agree with the attorney general,” Taylor said. “I have found absolutely no suggestion that the military didn’t have its heart thoroughly in the war and not in politics. If we have a successful coup, it will have an adverse effect on the war. First you will have a completely inexperienced government. These provincial chiefs so essential to combat—all will be changed,” Taylor said.
Taylor’s concern about the replacement of the provincial chiefs puzzled the president. “Why do we have to change all the provincial chiefs?” Kennedy asked. Taylor explained they were handpicked by Diem and crucial to the government’s frontline infrastructure. Taylor foresaw gains for Hanoi.
Colby’s nightmare scenario also fazed the secretary of state, who represented the hard-core supporters of the Diem overthrow—Harriman, Ball, and Roger Hilsman. Dean Rusk had seen the coup as installing a military government that would improve the conduct of the war against the South Vietnamese guerrillas and infiltrators who made up the Viet Cong. Now Rusk began thinking out loud about the ramifications of a civil war in Saigon. “If there is a change of government that can be carried out quickly with a minimum loss of life, that is one thing,” Rusk said. “A protracted civil war is quite different.” Diem and his chief adviser, his brother Nhu, were likely aware of the military plot in Saigon. “Coup talk is pretty rampant there,” Rusk said. “If the fighting goes on for two days, both sides will almost certainly ask us for help,” Rusk predicted. “What do we do there?
“If we refused to help either side, it will make a big difference to Diem. If we say we give insurgents help, we’ve got to make sure it will be successful.” Everyone in the Cabinet Room knew an American Marine battalion could be ferried to Saigon from offshore ships by helicopter by day 2 of the coup. Ostensibly, the Marines were standing by to extract 4,300 Americans to safety. But they could end up bolstering the military coup—as Rusk implied. “If we give Diem help at that point, the jig is up and we can do nothing but support the government,” Rusk said.
Rusk’s projected scenario led the president to outline what was at stake. “If we miscalculate, we could overnight [lose] our position in Southeast Asia,” Kennedy said. Bobby Kennedy argued that the president’s knowledge of the plan was based on a flimsy connection between a single CIA agent and a single Saigon general, Tran Van Don, who refused to reveal details of the uprising. There were misgivings in the Cabinet Room about Conein.
“We are working pretty much in the dark here, and we’re not going to get much more light,” Rusk said. “I don’t think we should put our faith in anybody on the Vietnamese side—Don or anyone else.” Nevertheless, Rusk said there was a relative chance of quick success by the generals. “The leadership we have been in touch with in a relatively short time would greatly improve the situation and the war.” That might have been a hint about bribing the powerful but erratic General Dinh.
The main purpose of the October 29 meeting was to draft instructions to Lodge on what to do when the coup started. Now Kennedy was vacillating. McGeorge Bundy, who always regretted urging Kennedy to go ahead with the Bay of Pigs invasion, was now reinforcing the president’s second thoughts. “We don’t want to have regimental combat teams making a mishmash of a three-day war,” said Bundy, Kennedy’s adviser on national security affairs. His job was to help Kennedy pick the right path through the conflicting advice. On the checklist he gave Kennedy before the meeting, Bundy had scrawled: “Should we cool off the whole enterprise?”
Bundy said Kennedy’s goal was to avoid another fiasco. “He [the president] wanted a successful coup. He didn’t want an unsuccessful coup,” Bundy said. On October 25, Bundy spelled out Kennedy’s fear for Lodge. “We are particularly concerned about [the] hazard that an unsuccessful [coup], however carefully we avoid direct engagement, will be laid at our door by public opinion almost everywhere.… We would like the option of judging and warning on any plan with poor prospects of success.”
The group was trying to find just the right words to reflect Colby’s prediction of street fighting for a final pre-coup cable to Lodge. “Unless he [Lodge] has information that forces could take over quite easily,” Kennedy said, “we should discourage it at this time. We should close [the cable] with reiterating new evidence from the coup planners otherwise it would be a mistake to proceed.”
To Rusk, however, Kennedy was trying to stop a boulder that was rolling downhill too fast. It was time Rusk told Kennedy to fulfill his role as chief executive. “I think we are on a downward slope there, Mr. President,” Rusk said. “We do not have the power to delay or discourage a coup. We have to make a judgment.” Rusk was echoing Eisenhower’s lecture to the young president after the failure of the Bay of Pigs: There were times when there must be a success.
Still, Kennedy continued to hedge. “It would be disastrous to proceed,” Kennedy said. The president sought to regain a sense of balance by citing the uncertainty surrounding past coups in South Korea and other countries. “I am sure that’s the way it is with every coup,” Kennedy said. “It looks foul until somebody acts.”
But Taylor warned against wishful thinking. “I think it’s unrealistic to line this up as if it’s a football game,” Taylor told Kennedy. “It all depends on a few key people. A few key people,” he repeated.
Kennedy’s misgivings were made clear in the final cable to Lodge, which noted the balance between the forces. There was a “substantial possibility of serious and prolonged fighting or even defeat. Either of these could be serious or even disastrous for U.S. interests.” Unless Conein could get assurances of the military superiority of the opposition to Diem, “we should discourage them from proceeding since a miscalculation could result in jeopardizing U.S. position in Southeast Asia.” The cable ended with a reluctant green light: “But once a coup, under responsible leadership, has begun and within these restrictions, it is in the interest of the U.S. government that it should succeed.”
Lodge fired back that the coup was a Vietnamese affair. “Do not think we have the power to delay or discourage coup. It is theoretically possible for us to turn over the information, which has been given to us in confidence, to Diem and this would undoubtedly stop the coup and would make traitors of us. Heartily agreed that a miscalculation could jeopardize position in Southeast Asia. We also run tremendous risks by doing nothing.” Kennedy was just as testy in reply. “We have never considered any betrayal of [the] Generals to Diem,” Lodge was told. “We do not accept as a basis for U.S. policy that we have no power to delay or discourage. If you should conclude there is not clearly a high prospect of success, you should communicate this doubt to the Generals in a way calculated to persuade them to desist at least until chances are better.”
Lodge agreed to do the best he could and signed off with a snarky “Thanks for your sagacious instruction.” Bobby read it when he was alone in the Oval Office with his brother. “He sounds amused,” Bobby said. “I told you he was going to be trouble.”
“You know what’s terrific about you,” the president said. “You always remember when you’re right.”
Lodge had the bit in his teeth, but Kennedy had provided the bridle. In the end, the exchanges underlined the reality that events in Saigon were beyond Kennedy’s control and had been since he approved the coup against Diem two months earlier while drifting along Cape Cod on the Honey Fitz. He was manipulated by Harriman on August 24, and now Lodge bordered on contempt as he blew off the president’s queasiness.
It “looks to be his ass,” Kennedy said of Lodge. “He’s for the coup. For what he thinks are very good reasons. He is much stronger for it than we are here.
“I admire his nerve, if not his prudence.”