In November 1963, a conspiracy at the highest levels of the United States government orchestrated a coup d’état that culminated in the assassination of the President. The victim of this conspiracy wasn’t President John F. Kennedy. It was President Ngô Đình Diệm of South Vietnam, assassinated in Saigon on 2 November 1963. For six decades, Kennedy’s role in the overthrow and assassination of his fellow president has been obscured by detractors and defenders alike. That role is now clearer, thanks to the declassification of extraordinary evidence.

JFK created the best evidence himself. He secretly tape-recorded 23 White House meetings weighing the pros and cons of regime change in Saigon. In the second year of his presidency, Kennedy had a Secret Service agent conceal microphones in the Oval Office and the Cabinet Room and hook them up to a Tandberg reel-to-reel tape machine hidden behind locked doors in the White House basement. The President could activate the tape recorder at the press of a button that looked like a buzzer. One button was under the surface of the Resolute Desk, another on the coffee table by his rocking chair in the Oval Office, and a third on the Cabinet Room table in front of his chair. The microphones were hidden under the desktop, on the coffee table in what looked like a buzzer box, and in a pair of light fixtures behind the curtains over the Cabinet Room windows. Kennedy held the secret of his taping system close, limiting knowledge of its existence to the Secret Service agents who changed out the tapes; his personal secretary, Evelyn M. Lincoln, who wrote the date and the time on each tape box; and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, who was the President’s closest adviser and the Attorney General of the United States.^⁠1

A second source of extraordinary evidence was the JFK Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB). The President John F. Kennedy Records Collection Act of 1992 empowered an independent board of impartial private citizens to declassify U.S. government documents related to the JFK assassination.2 The JFK ARRB used that power to open files that would ordinarily stay closed to the public. In its final report, the board said it “cast a broad net” to “release valuable documents from the early 1960s that enhance the historical understanding of that era, and the political and diplomatic context in which the assassination occurred.”^⁠3 That context included the overthrow and assassination of Diệm. The JFK ARRB declassified the records of a congressional investigation of the coup by the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, better known as the Church Committee, after Chairman Frank F. Church [D–Idaho]. The evidence and testimony collected by the Church Committee paint a fuller picture of President Kennedy’s role in the coup and assassinations than the committee’s 1975 interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders.4

Growing Instability

The two U.S. presidents who succeeded Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, blamed the coup for their most controversial decisions: Johnson’s choice to send American combat troops to Vietnam and Nixon’s to keep them there for four more years. Both Johnson and Nixon blamed the coup for the subsequent instability of the South Vietnamese government, which they shored up with American troops.

That view downplayed the growing instability in Saigon before the coup, during the so-called Buddhist Crisis of 1963. The world was shocked by the sight of Buddhist monks burning themselves to death in protest of the Diệm regime.^⁠5 What began as a protest of religious discrimination against Buddhists by the Catholic Ngô family quickly became a protest of Diệm’s entire authoritarian government, which rigged elections, imprisoned dissenters, and adopted police-state tactics.^⁠6 Protests focused less on Diệm than on the perceived power behind the throne, his brother Ngô Đình Nhu, who was his President’s closest adviser, as well as the head of the regime’s secret police. Newsweek called Nhu “an arrogant, anti-American intellectual who has been described as ‘an Oriental Richelieu.’”^⁠7 His wife, Madame Nhu, became notorious for inflammatory public statements like “I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show.”8 When college students joined the protests, Diệm not only arrested them but also closed their schools. When high school students protested, Diệm arrested them and closed their schools as well.^⁠9 When a cabal of South Vietnamese generals overthrew the regime, Saigon celebrated with dancing in the streets.10 None of this signaled stability.

“You don’t see how the situation can go on without disintegrating further in this place,” President Kennedy said months before the coup.11 He was concerned that the Ngô regime’s deterioration would affect South Vietnam’s war against the Vietcong, the Communist insurgency backed by North Vietnam. Kennedy had already increased the number of American military advisers in Vietnam from 600 to over 16,000, and more than 100 American service members had been killed.12

The President expressed his foreboding to Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the man he had chosen to take charge of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Lodge was a remarkable choice, given the political rivalry between their families. Kennedy and Lodge had run against each other twice—in 1952 when Kennedy won Lodge’s seat in the U.S. Senate, and in 1960 when Lodge was Nixon’s vice presidential running mate. Benjamin C. Bradlee, a Newsweek reporter and close friend of JFK in 1963, said, “I’m not so sure how noble Kennedy’s motive was in sending Cabot Lodge to Vietnam . . . Cabot Lodge was of the Boston aristocracy that had lifted its leg on the Kennedys for years.” Picking a Republican to handle the crisis gave the Democratic President political cover if things went badly. “It meant that the Republicans were partly responsible for it,” said Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith.^⁠13

“They’re All Going to Be Assassinated”

Assassination was the first subject Ambassador Lodge raised with President Kennedy on the morning of Thursday, 15 August 1963, the last time they met before Lodge went to Saigon. (They would not meet again; Kennedy would die exactly 100 days later.) Lodge broached the subject in personal terms. The night before, he had met with the mother and father of Trần Lệ Xuân, better known to the world as Madame Nhu. The father, Trần Văn Chương, had been Diệm’s ambassador to the United States for nine years. He had resigned in protest of the regime’s repressions during the Buddhist Crisis. Madame Nhu’s mother, Thân Thị Nam Trân, had been Saigon’s permanent observer at the United Nations until she, too, resigned in protest.

Lodge sat on one of the two white sofas in the Oval Office, describing the mother’s fears for her daughter’s family, as Kennedy, in his rocking chair, leaned over the coffee table and pushed the button activating his hidden tape recorder.

Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.: —they’re all going to be assassinated: her daughter, son-in-law Nhu, and the president, Diệm. And she says their four grandchildren are all going to be assassinated. She doesn’t believe there’s any question about it. The only hope they have is to get out. And she said, “I hope you, Lodge, will advise them to get out.”

President Kennedy: Oh, she doesn’t think it can be saved, is that it?

Lodge: No, it cannot be saved. And she said, “If you’ve advised them to go out, and they refuse to take your advice, let me know, and I will come out and try to talk with my daughter.”^⁠14

On the subject of assassination, President Kennedy was silent. The two men discussed other aspects of the crisis until Lodge returned to the subject.

Lodge: But if they all get assassinated, then you’re going to have to . . .

President Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lodge: Then you’re going to really have to be on top of it all.

President Kennedy: What about Madame Nhu? Is she a lesbian or what? She seems like an awful[ly] masculine woman.

Lodge: Well, I think she probably is a lesbian. [President Kennedy acknowledges.] I think she also was very promiscuous, sort of a nymphomaniac, too.15

Once again, the President was silent on the subject of assassination. He would remain silent on that subject in all of his instructions to Lodge.

But the President was not silent on the subject of regime change. “It may be that he ought to—they ought to go, but it’s just a question of how skillfully that’s done,” Kennedy said.16^⁠

American presidents had the power to overthrow South Vietnamese presidents or keep them in office, to trigger coups or thwart them, without having to resort to direct military intervention. The power stemmed from Saigon’s dependence on American military and economic aid, which paid for most of the South Vietnamese government’s budget. Without it, the government could not survive: no American aid, no South Vietnam.^⁠17

Kennedy’s predecessor, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, had used the power of American aid to thwart a coup plot in 1954, a short time after the Việt Minh, led by Communist Hồ Chí Minh, forced France to abandon its Vietnamese colony. The Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam, with Hồ’s forces regrouping in the North, and the French, with the Vietnamese who worked for them, regrouping in the South. The Eisenhower administration wanted to turn the Vietnamese remnants of the French colonial regime into an anti-Communist bulwark. To lead this experiment in nation-building, the administration settled on Diệm, who once held high positions in the French colonial government, later left the country to lobby in America for Vietnamese independence, and always opposed Communists and communism. Diệm was better at generating political support in America than in South Vietnam. In 1954, less than a year into Diệm’s tenure, the chief of staff of the South Vietnamese Army, Gen. Nguyễn Văn Hinh, began plotting a coup, but the Eisenhower administration thwarted his plot before a shot was fired. It was easy. Eisenhower simply threatened to cut off aid to Saigon if the South Vietnamese military overthrew Diệm.^⁠18 “Nothing could have opposed the army. But the Americans let me know that if that happened, dollar help would have been cut off. . . . [T]he country cannot survive without American help,” Hinh said.19

The power the Eisenhower administration used to thwart a coup in 1954 was the same power the Kennedy administration used to arrange a coup in 1963. President Kennedy had a free hand to suspend American aid to Saigon. During the Buddhist Crisis, Senator Frank Church introduced a resolution urging President Kennedy to cut off aid to South Vietnam and withdraw American soldiers if Diệm didn’t end his repressions.20 (This was the same senator who later chaired the Church Committee, which investigated the Central Intelligence Agency’s involvement in assassination plots.) Twenty-one other senators of both parties signed on to Church’s resolution.21 Congress did not make the decision itself to cut off aid to the Diệm regime, but deferred to the President.

On 15 August, Kennedy let Lodge know he was considering a coup, but he didn’t see any better alternative to Diệm.

President Kennedy: It’s just really—[Lodge tries to interject] can’t get anybody else to run it. Just this bitch, of course. Well, she’s made it—she’s made—Well, as I say, I just—I think we have to leave it almost completely in your hands, in your judgment. [A police siren rises in the background.] I don’t know whether we’d be better off—whether the alternative would be better. Maybe it will be. If so, then we have to move in that direction. But I think I’d take a good look at it before I’d come to that conclusion.22

This was not the last time the President referred to Madame Nhu this way. He later said, “I never saw a—any more feather-headed dame in my life than that bitch.”23 While White House aides often adopt a president’s language as their own, no one else on the Kennedy tapes referred to Madame Nhu this way. She was an active member of the South Vietnamese legislature and led her own female militia.24 When Madame Nhu announced a speaking tour of the United States, President Kennedy said, “Silence, I think, is what we want.”25 She came to America over the administration’s behind-the-scenes objections. That probably saved her life.

Cable 243

Before Ambassador Lodge arrived in Saigon, Diệm tried to end the Buddhist Crisis with a massive crackdown, dispatching thousands of police and soldiers to raid Buddhist pagodas in cities and towns throughout South Vietnam. They broke down doors, dragged monks and nuns from their rooms, and arrested roughly 1,400 of them in one night.26 Saigon looked like an armed camp when Lodge arrived. The Ambassador cabled Washington on Saturday, 24 August 1963: “Suggestion has been made that U.S. has only to indicate to ‘generals’ that it would be happy to see Diệm and/or Nhus go, and deed would be done.” Lodge recommended against it: “Action on our part in these circumstances would seem to be a shot in the dark.”^⁠27

That day, the New Frontier’s big guns were out of town—the President in Hyannis Port, the Secretary of Defense in the Tetons, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director at his San Marino estate, and the Secretary of State in New York at a Yankees game.^⁠28 While they were away, a pair of second-tier State Department officials, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs W. Averell Harriman and Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger Hilsman Jr., located a third, Under Secretary of State George W. Ball, on a golf course just outside Washington, D.C., where they asked him to help mount a coup.29 Ball moved the discussion from the golf course to his home, where he read the cable they had drafted with a second-tier White House official, Deputy National Security Adviser Michael V. Forrestal.^⁠30 The cable would be described as “kind of an invitation to the [South] Vietnamese army to get rid of President Ngô Đình Diệm and his brother and sister-in-law” in an exposé published on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune exactly one month later.^⁠31

The Herald Tribune was not wrong. Cable 243 would instruct Ambassador Lodge to quietly inform key South Vietnamese generals that, if President Diệm failed to resolve the political crisis, release the Buddhist prisoners, and remove “the Nhus from the scene,” then the “U.S. would find it impossible to continue [to] support” Saigon “militarily and economically.”32 Cable 243 was an attempt to solicit a coup by threatening an American aid cutoff. It, too, was silent on the subject of assassination.

Forrestal telexed Cable 243 to Hyannis Port. President Kennedy gave his approval by phone, provided the highest-ranking civilian Defense official available that day cleared it.33

What happened next remains in dispute. Deputy National Security Adviser Forrestal said he got Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric’s approval, but Gilpatric said he decided not to take a position.34 Forrestal claimed that Major General Victor H. Krulak told him the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell D. Taylor, approved of the cable.35 But Krulak said he told Forrestal that “the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff won’t touch it.” Taylor wrote, “On reading the cable, my first reaction was that the anti-Diệm group centered in State had taken advantage of the absence of the principal officials to get out instructions which would never have been approved as written under normal circumstances.”36 Either way, the State Department sent Cable 243 to Ambassador Lodge that Saturday night.37

Taylor called this “an egregious ‘end run’ around normal departmental concurrences.”38 By Monday, the administration had started to split into factions, with top officials at State and the NSC (National Security Council) in favor of a coup, and top officials at the Pentagon and CIA against. President Kennedy then presided over a week of White House meetings where the two sides dug in: coup supporters argued that Diệm couldn’t win the war, and opponents maintained there was no evidence any of the alternatives would do better. (Hindsight suggests both were right.) By the second day of deliberations, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara asked President Kennedy to revive the Executive Committee of the National Security Council, better known as the ExComm, the elite team of advisers he first assembled for the Cuban Missile Crisis.39 As he had done during that earlier crisis, Kennedy gave all perspectives in the Cabinet Room a hearing but made all the decisions himself.

On Wednesday, 28 August 1963, President Kennedy asked about the fate of Diệm and Nhu.

President Kennedy: Diệm and Nhu, the proposal would be [to] exile them, is that it? That’s what we would favor [unclear].

Roger Hilsman Jr.: We no—we have no information.

President Kennedy: But I think it would be important that nothing happen to them, if we have any voice in it.40

These statements put Kennedy on the (classified) record in favor of safe passage to exile for Diệm and Nhu. But the President didn’t instruct his aides to inform the U.S. embassy or tell Ambassador Lodge to ensure the safety of the Ngôs. (The first time Washington sent Lodge any instructions about exile for the Ngôs was at 6:53 p.m. on 1 November 1963, when the coup was all but over: “We realize this [is a South] Vietnamese affair and generals appear to know where and how they wish to proceed and may not seek advice or take it if requested. Nevertheless for guidance following are points we hope generals will bear in mind.” One point was “safe passage for family to exile.”41 Lodge had no chance to meet with the rebels before Saigon radio announced that Diệm and Nhu were dead. The new junta claimed it was suicide.42)

At the White House, secrecy was paramount from the start. “We leave here with a very unusual enterprise, in that we never want it to surface,” said National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, a coup supporter, on Thursday, 29 August 1963. Bundy said the White House was recalling the coup cables “because this is not a matter which is going to be a matter of public record at any point, to the degree that we can prevent it. And in drafting cables from now on, we ought to try to draft them so that they do not indicate where the basic decisions and impetus for this enterprise has come from.”43

That day in Saigon, the CIA secretly approached General Dương Văn Minh. Six feet tall and almost 200 pounds, he was known as Big Minh. His other distinguishing feature was his one tooth, all that Japanese torturers had left him with when they pried out the others during World War II. “He is considered to be as close to an authentic hero as South Vietnam now has,” the New York Times reported. Big Minh had helped Diệm consolidate power, leading the fight against the Bình Xuyên, a criminal syndicate, and the Cao Đài, an anti-colonial, anti-Communist religious sect with its own army. For his service, Diệm made Big Minh his “military adviser,” a title as meaningless as it was powerless.44

When CIA agents approached him in August, Big Minh couldn’t tell if it was a trap. The agency had a long, close working relationship with Nhu, the head of the secret police. When agents asked Big Minh about overthrowing the government, he didn’t know if they were making a serious inquiry or identifying disloyal generals for Nhu to imprison and torture.

The agents asked Big Minh how the United States could prove it really wanted a coup. His answer was clear, simple, and obvious: cut off American economic aid. “We all . . . know that South Vietnam cannot fight without USA aid,” Big Minh said.45^⁠

That day, President Kennedy authorized Ambassador Lodge “to announce suspension of aid through Diệm government at a time and under conditions of your choice.”46 Lodge had already suggested that Kennedy announce an aid cutoff.47 The Ambassador didn’t want to do it himself: “I greatly dislike the idea of cutting off aid in connection with the generals’ operation, and, while I thank you for giving me the authority to make an announcement, I hope we will never have to use it.”48 He never did. By the end of August the coup plot had stalled.

Divided on Coup, United on Cuts

If President Kennedy wanted to suspend American aid, he would have to do it himself or with the help of his advisers in Washington. In September, he called Assistant Secretary of State Hilsman and said, “We now should have some sort of economic program—things we could do that would not have material effect immediately, but which would give them the word.”49

Kennedy’s advisers remained divided on a coup, but he managed to unite them around a single policy: aid cuts. In September, President Kennedy convinced the two most outspoken opponents of a coup—Defense Secretary McNamara and JCS Chairman Taylor—that aid cuts could serve as incentives for Diệm to reform. He dispatched McNamara and Taylor to Saigon, tasked with finding ways to pressure the Diệm regime to improve. At the same time, President Kennedy sent Ambassador Lodge a cable for his eyes only.

We see no good opportunity for action to remove present government in immediate future. Therefore, as your most recent messages suggest, we must for the present apply such pressures as are available to secure whatever modest improvements on the scene may be possible. We think it likely that such improvement can make a difference, at least in the short run. Such a course, moreover, is consistent with more drastic effort as and when means become available . . .50

McNamara and Taylor returned from Saigon recommending a full menu of aid cuts.51 Coup opponents and coup supporters both supported the aid cuts, if for opposite reasons. Aid cuts were an alternative to a coup for those opposed and a precondition for a coup to those in favor. President Kennedy presided over some relatively harmonious White House meetings and approved the aid cuts on Saturday, 5 October 1963.52

Technically, Kennedy was suspending aid to Diệm’s regime, not cutting it off entirely. But aid came to a halt. The White House did not announce the cuts, but reporters found out soon enough. “The United States has lighted the fuse of an economic time bomb under Diệm’s regime,” Associated Press correspondent Malcolm W. Browne reported from Saigon. He had learned about the suspension of a single aid program that indirectly “pays about 70 percent of the defense budget.” If the suspension kept up, it “could mean a general economic collapse and possibly the end of the Diệm government.”53^⁠

The aid suspension was the single step most likely to promote a coup that President Kennedy had taken so far. The day he made the cuts, he also made a change in policy: “President today approved recommendation that no initiative should now be taken to give any active covert encouragement to a coup. There should, however, be urgent covert effort with closest security under broad guidance of Ambassador to identify and build contacts with possible alternative leadership as and when it appears.”54 At that point a coup proposal came to him.

Cable 1445: Big Minh’s Coup Proposal

In October, Big Minh reached out to the CIA. He did this through his liaison, General Trần Văn Đôn, the aristocratic, unusually handsome chief of staff of the South Vietnamese army.55 General Đôn contacted Lieutenant Colonel Lucien E. Conein, who wore a military uniform and carried a military ID but worked for the CIA.56 He and the South Vietnamese generals went way back, starting when he had parachuted into Hanoi in 1945 to help the French reclaim their colony.57 After the Việt Minh overthrew the French for good in the 1950s, the CIA sent Conein back to help build an anti-Communist government from the remains of the colonial regime. Conein recruited Vietnamese colonels from the French Expeditionary Force into the South Vietnamese military, where Diệm made them generals.58

On Saturday, 5 October 1963, Big Minh revealed to Conein that he was leading a cabal of South Vietnamese generals who were willing to overthrow their government. For an hour and ten minutes, Big Minh outlined their plans. When he finished, Conein took the proposal back to the CIA’s Saigon station, which boiled it down to a single telegram, Cable 1445, transmitted to CIA headquarters that day and distributed to top officials at the Pentagon, State Department, and White House. As conspiracies to overthrow governments go, it was pretty simple. The whole thing fit into a telegram of less than 800 words, shorter than a newspaper column.

Big Minh was clear about what he did and didn’t need. He did need to know the U.S. government’s position on a coup. He didn’t need the U.S. government to take part in the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. He needed to know that the United States wouldn’t thwart his coup plot and would provide his new regime with American aid. In other words, General Minh needed to know that the Kennedy administration wouldn’t do to him what the Eisenhower administration had done to General Hinh.

General Minh outlined three possible plans for the accomplishment of the change of government:

a. Assassination of Ngô Đình Nhu and Ngô Đình Can keeping President Diệm in office. Gen. Minh said this was the easiest plan to accomplish.

Can was another Ngô brother, one who might conceivably replace Diệm or Nhu. Can already governed part of South Vietnam. The Washington Post called him “the generally recognized viceroy of all of Central Vietnam.” Can was also rumored to have his own secret police.59

Big Minh’s other plans did not involve assassination, but could result in more deaths:

b. The encirclement of Saigon by various military units . . .

c. Direct confrontation between military units involved in the coup and loyalist military units in Saigon, in effect, dividing the city of Saigon into sectors and cleaning it out pocket by pocket. Gen. Minh claims under the circumstances Diệm and Nhu could count on the loyalty of 5,500 troops within the City of Saigon.

Assassination, encirclement, and street fighting—those were the three plans Big Minh was considering with his cabal of South Vietnamese generals.

The CIA agent was noncommittal.60 He had to be. Conein was basically a messenger between the U.S. government and the South Vietnamese generals.

He was also a cutout. If he got caught, Ambassador Lodge could plausibly deny knowledge of his actions.61 But Lodge had detailed knowledge of them. The Ambassador sent his recommendations to Washington the same day.

My recommendation . . . is that Conein when next approached by Minh should:

1. Assure him that U.S. will not attempt to thwart his plans.

2. Offer to view his plans, other than assassination plans.

3. Assure Minh that U.S. aid will be continued to Vietnam under government which gives promise of gaining support of people and winning the war against the Communists.62

President Kennedy would accept two of Lodge’s recommendations, but not the other.

Off-the-Record White House Meeting, 8 October 1963

All the ExComm meetings on the coup plot were highly secure, but the one on Big Minh’s coup proposal was unusually secret. ExComm members wrote “memcons,” memorandums of their conferences with the President, for earlier and later meetings on the coup, documenting what was said and decided. That was not the case on Tuesday, 8 October 1963, when President Kennedy held an off-the-record roundtable conference at the White House to consider his reply to Big Minh’s proposal. No written records of this meeting have emerged. The American people would have no record of this pivotal discussion if Kennedy had not secretly tape-recorded it.63

The highest level of secrecy was understandable. The President had gathered his top advisers to discuss a specific proposal to overthrow an allied government—one that contemplated assassination. Although no one on the tape mentioned assassination, all participants in the discussion demonstrated familiarity with the contents of Cable 1445, the only source of information on Big Minh’s plot at that point. The CIA, Pentagon, State Department, and White House all had copies of Cable 1445, which mentioned the assassination plan explicitly.64

President Kennedy did not record the entire meeting, which began at 5:30 p.m. and continued until 6:15 p.m., according to the White House Daily Diary.65 The recording captured at most 25 of those 45 minutes before senators started arriving for a 6:30 p.m. meeting on foreign aid. What was said before the President started recording is unknown.

After Kennedy pressed the record button, Secretary of Defense McNamara said, “This is a very, very unsophisticated approach to overthrowing a government, and I think it’s cost us a lot already. It’s all become known to the press, there and here. It’s really disgraceful, when you look back on what happened to the message 243 and the actions that we took to carry that out.” He didn’t mention that the leak came from the Pentagon.

JCS Chairman Taylor made the point that united all the opponents of the coup: no matter how grave the flaws of the Ngôs, the United States had not identified anyone who could succeed where so far they had failed. Big Minh had demonstrated some skill as a military leader, not as a political one. Taylor said, “To give him the U.S. assurances that he asked for, I would say, is dignifying his position way beyond what it’s entitled to have.”

No one opposed the coup more than Director of Central Intelligence John A. McCone. His passion as CIA director was disaster prevention. He got the job after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, a covert operation that became an overt debacle, plunging the CIA’s reputation to its lowest point. What novelist John le Carré wrote of fictional spymaster George Smiley could honestly be said of John McCone: he “got himself appointed captain of a wrecked ship.”66 McCone was a Republican and Kennedy a Democrat, but both were determined to avoid another Bay of Pigs. In 1961, when JFK had wanted to stimulate a revolution in Cuba, McCone warned him that the Communist government would crush it quickly.67 In 1962, McCone warned JFK that Russia might put nuclear missiles in Cuba.68 And in 1963, McCone warned JFK that the plot to overthrow Diệm would not solve America’s problems in Vietnam and could compound them.69

McCone came to the 8 October 1963 meeting prepared. He had drafted a reply cable instructing Conein to tell Big Minh he was “unable to present Minh’s case to responsible policy officials with any degree of seriousness,” and that he would need more detailed information about the cabal’s plans before those officials would even consider his proposal to overthrow his government. McNamara endorsed McCone’s approach.70

After considering the arguments of his Secretary of Defense, JCS Chairman, and CIA director, President Kennedy decided to give Big Minh’s coup plot a green light: “I don’t know whether Big Minh’s going to do it or not. The only thing is, as I understand our position is, well, if he does it, all right, and if you don’t do it, all right. We’re not now—all this—the only difference is, we’re not now going to him and asking him to do it.”71

Lodge had recommended assuring Big Minh that the U.S. would not thwart his plot. Kennedy agreed. Lodge had recommended assuring Big Minh that the U.S. would provide aid to the South Vietnamese government after the coup. Kennedy agreed to that as well. Lodge recommended putting conditions on American aid—that the new government “give promise” that it could rally the people and win the war. Kennedy took those two conditions and added a third: the new government also had to look like it could work better with the United States.

Cable 74228 authorized a coup in the blandest bureaucratic language:

We have following additional general thoughts which have been discussed with President. While we do not wish to stimulate coup, we also do not wish to leave impression that U.S. 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 U.S.72

President Kennedy had thrown the coup opponents a bone. Cable 74228 suggested that Lodge “seriously consider” doing what McCone and McNamara wanted. That left the final decision up to the Ambassador. Lodge was certain to decide against the coup opponents, since he had recommended giving Big Minh the assurances he sought, and President Kennedy had just agreed.

Lodge had also recommended that Conein offer to look at Big Minh’s coup plans—except the assassination plans. President Kennedy didn’t quite accept that recommendation. Cable 74228 made no exception for assassination plans:

We would like to be informed on what is being contemplated but we should avoid being drawn into reviewing or advising on operational plans or any other act which might tend to identify U.S. too closely with change in government.73

Cable 74228 was silent on the subject of assassination. It didn’t mention the word. How were Ambassador Lodge and CIA agent Conein to interpret that silence?

“Best Line Is No Line”

The answer came in a cable from CIA director McCone. It couldn’t have been easy for him to write. McCone didn’t want Diệm dead; he wanted him to continue as president of South Vietnam. He didn’t consider Diệm a great leader, just better than any alternative on the scene, including Big Minh.

McCone’s cable was the only one that provided explicit guidance for assassination discussions, so it’s surprising that no author has published its full text yet. In 1998, the JFK ARRB declassified it as part of McCone’s testimony before the Church Committee, whose 1975 interim report, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, left out the most important parts.74 The complete declassified text of the cable McCone sent to the CIA’s Saigon station in October 1963 reads:

Believe assassination discussions need most careful handling. In general, best line is no line so that it clear that we are sticking to position of having no responsibility for actions of any of various contending Vietnamese groups. We certainly cannot be in position of stimulating, approving, or supporting assassination, but on other hand, we are in no way responsible for stopping every such threat of which we might receive even partial knowledge. We certainly would not favor assassination of Diệm. We believe engaging ourselves by taking position on this matter opens door too easily for probes of our position re others, re support of regime, et cetera. Consequently believe best approach is hands off. However we naturally interested in intelligence on any such plan. This message has been cleared with State Department.75

McCone instructed CIA agents to take no position on assassination when they talked to the South Vietnamese coup plotters. They were not to take a position in favor of assassination (“we certainly cannot be in position of stimulating, approving, or supporting assassination”), and they were not to take a position opposed to assassination (“we are in no way responsible for stopping every such threat of which we might receive even partial knowledge”). They were not to take any position on assassination at all: “In general, best line is no line.”

The words “in general” suggest there might have been some exception, but the CIA director did not identify any. Even when McCone said that “we certainly would not favor assassination of Diệm,” he immediately provided reasons for the CIA not to say this to the South Vietnamese generals: “We believe engaging ourselves by taking position on this matter opens door too easily for probes of our position re others, re support of regime, et cetera.” (Note that McCone’s guidance said nothing about favoring, or not favoring, the assassination of Nhu, Can, or Madame Nhu.) For all of these reasons, McCone concluded, the best approach to assassination was “hands off.” When it came to assassination plans, the CIA agents were just supposed to collect information.

The “best line is no line” was in line with Cable 74228. Both cables instructed American officials to gather information about the South Vietnamese generals’ coup plans; both cables instructed them not to take any position on those coup plans. The “best line is no line” cable made explicit the position on assassination that was implicit in Cable 74228.

McCone’s cable said he had discussed it with the State Department. It did not say whether he had discussed it with President Kennedy.

McCone under Oath

When McCone testified before the Church Committee in executive session (closed to press and public) on 6 June 1975, the chairman and the chief counsel pinned the former CIA director down on the exact meaning of the “best line is no line” cable.

John A. McCone: Well, this was a very troublesome period in Vietnam, various groups of Vietnamese military plotting to overthrow Diệm, and we had—the station had those groups pretty well infiltrated, and every now and then the question of assassination would come up. I felt that we under no conditions should be part of it, and that’s why telegrams were sent. I was very firm in that position.

Chief Counsel Frederick A. O. Schwarz: In stating that the CIA should not be part of it, and that is assassinations, was it your position that the CIA should take steps to prevent assassinations, or that the CIA should take a hands off attitude as far as assassinations are concerned?

McCone: I think our role was to assemble all information on intelligence as to what was going on and to report it to the appropriate authorities, but to not to attempt to direct it.

Chairman Frank F. Church: In other words, it was a hands off attitude?

McCone: A hands off attitude, yes. Serious internal problem. Parenthetically I might add, about the time those telegrams were sent, I was called over by President Kennedy and met privately with President Kennedy and the Attorney General [Robert Kennedy], and I took substantially that position.

Church: And what was the attitude of the President and the Attorney General in response?

McCone: I felt that the President agreed with my position, despite the fact that he had great reservations concerning Diệm and his conduct. I urged him to try to bring all the pressure we could on Diệm to change his ways, to encourage more support throughout the country.76^⁠

By testifying that he “substantially” discussed the “hands off” position on assassination with President Kennedy, and that he “felt” JFK agreed, McCone all but stripped away the fig leaf of plausible deniability. A few minutes later, however, he placed it back on.

McCone: The question of assassination did not come in my discussion with the President.77

No one on the committee or staff asked McCone about this apparent contradiction, and the Church Committee report said only that “McCone stated that he did not discuss assassination with the President.”78

Apart from that apparent contradiction, McCone’s testimony was clear. The “hands off” position meant gathering information about coup plans, including assassination plans, while not trying to “direct” those plans in any way.

McCone’s testimony was in line with the plain meaning of the “best line is no line” cable and with the plain meaning of Cable 74228. It was also in line with all of the contemporaneous records in the declassified paper trail of the Diệm coup. After each secret meeting with Big Minh (or his liaison, General Đôn) CIA agent Conein reported back to the Saigon station, which then sent Washington a cable detailing what the South Vietnamese general and the agent had said to one another. Copies went to the White House, and the ExComm discussed them with President Kennedy.79

These cables show that the CIA agent complied with the instructions in Cable 74228 and the “best line is no line” cable. Conein took no position on coup plans in general, as JFK instructed. He took no position on assassination plans specifically, as McCone instructed. He sought information about all coup plans, as both instructed.80

William E. Colby’s testimony to the Church Committee supported McCone’s. In 1975, during the Church Committee investigation, Colby was director of Central Intelligence. Critics faulted him for being too forthcoming about CIA misdeeds. Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger privately called Colby “the psychopath who’s running the CIA. You accuse him of a traffic violation, and he confesses to murder.”81

In 1963, Colby was director of the CIA’s Far East Division. Colby’s testimony spelled out what Cable 74228 meant regarding the three coup plans Big Minh had outlined—assassination, encirclement, and fighting in the streets between rebels and loyalists.

William E. Colby: The general made the proposal, described how he would go at it, the three alternate positions, and the reply which came from Washington to that was that the U.S. would not stimulate a coup but it wouldn’t thwart it and it would continue the assistance thereafter. The option as to which course of action was left to the generals.82

The Acting CIA Station Chief

The day Big Minh presented his coup plans to the CIA happened to be David R. Smith’s first day as acting chief of the Saigon station. At 36 years old, Smith was not a complete babe in the woods; he had been deputy chief of station. So he was not utterly unprepared when, on his first day in his new position, a coup plot with an assassination plan came across his desk.

Smith sent a cable to McCone, pointing out the obvious problem with Big Minh’s assassination plan: “Any plan to eliminate Ngô Đình Can and Ngô Đình Nhu and retain President Diệm is naive, since under these conditions Diệm probably would not cooperate with the perpetrators of those acts.” This was not hypothetical. After the Việt Minh buried Diệm’s oldest brother alive, Diệm became the most powerful Vietnamese enemy of their leader, Hồ Chí Minh.83

Smith also pointed out the obvious problem with opposing the assassination plan, when the other two plans were encirclement and fighting in the streets of Saigon: “I have recommended to Ambassador Lodge that . . . we do not set ourselves irrevocably against the assassination plot, since the other two alternatives mean either a bloodbath in Saigon or a protracted struggle which could rip the army and the country asunder.”84

As the above evidence shows, McCone did not set the U.S. government against the assassination plan. Instead, he advised the Saigon station not to take any position on assassination. In other words, McCone’s “best line is no line” cable did what Smith recommended.

Smith’s cable, however, was not in line with McCone’s “position of having no responsibility for actions of any of various contending Vietnamese groups.”85 CIA headquarters cabled the acting station chief the next day: “McCone directs that you withdraw recommendation to Ambassador concerning assassination plan under McCone instructions, as we cannot be in position [of] actively condoning such course of action and thereby engaging our responsibility therefor.”86

Smith complied immediately: “Action taken as directed. In addition, since [Deputy Chief of Mission William C.] Trueheart was also present when original recommendation made, specific withdrawal of recommendation at McCone’s instruction was also conveyed to Trueheart. Ambassador Lodge commented that he shares McCone’s opinion.”87

The withdrawal of Smith’s recommendation did not change the meaning or impact of the “best line is no line” cable. That cable set the policy for the U.S. government’s communications with the South Vietnamese coup plotters. The “withdraw recommendation” cable only affected a single communication between two parts of the U.S. government: the CIA’s Saigon station and the U.S. embassy in Saigon. It was an internal matter.

The Church Committee report said:

Conein, the CIA official who dealt directly with the Generals, testified that he was first told of McCone’s response to the assassination alternative by Ambassador Lodge around October 20. (Conein, 6/20/75, p. 35) Conein testified (but did not so indicate in his detailed After-Action Report) that he then told General Đôn that the United States opposed assassination, and that the General responded, “Alright, you don’t like it, we won’t talk about it anymore.” (Conein, 6/20/75, p. 36)88

Conein did testify that Lodge instructed him to tell the South Vietnamese generals that the United States opposed assassination.89 He didn’t produce any contemporaneous evidence that this happened. It’s not in his After-Action report, and it’s not in any of the contemporaneous reports the Saigon station sent Washington on Conein’s secret meetings with the South Vietnamese generals.90 It would have violated the instructions in both Cable 74228 and the “best line is no line” cable. The Church Committee didn’t call Lodge as a witness to ask him whether it happened, though he was alive and well in 1975 and testified about the coup in July of that year before a House subcommittee.91 There’s nothing to back up Conein’s story, and the declassified paper trail is against it.

The Phantom Cable

Some historians blame the coup on the State Department. The worst argument in favor of that theory is built on a mistake. Deputy Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson, who was one of the State Department officials on the golf course on Saturday, 24 August 1963, told the story two decades after the fact in his memoirs, but he gave the wrong date.

On Saturday, October 27, when I was playing golf with Undersecretary Ball at the Falls Road public course, Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman interrupted our game, and they gave him a telegram to sign. . . . Ball signed the telegram, the two departed, and we continued our game. It turned out that this was the “green light” telegram authorizing Ambassador Lodge to signal that we would not oppose a coup against Diệm.92

Historian William Conrad Gibbons checked out Johnson’s story. Under Secretary Ball and Deputy Assistant Secretary Hilsman told him that Johnson got the date wrong. Gibbons checked with the Kennedy Library to see if there was a “green light” cable with that date, and there wasn’t. Gibbons published Johnson’s mistake in a history he wrote for the Congressional Research Service and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, consigning all the problems with the story to a footnote.93

In Camelot’s Court, Robert Dallek turned Johnson’s mistake into a false lesson about the coup.

On the twenty-seventh [of October 1963], the divide among the advisers in Washington and Saigon grew more pronounced. Harriman and Hilsman convinced Ball, who was acting secretary of state while Rusk was out of the country, to sign a “green light” cable to Lodge telling the generals that Washington approved a coup. U. Alexis Johnson, who was excluded from their three-way exchange, believed that he was purposely kept out of the conversation because he opposed any such instruction. In telling Lodge to facilitate the coup, Harriman and Hilsman were taking advantage of Kennedy’s ambivalence. He had neither approved nor opposed a coup, but simply said he didn’t want it blamed on the United States. Kennedy’s uncertainty about what to do about Vietnam allowed advisers to fill the policy vacuum.94

It was inaccurate to say that JFK “had neither approved nor opposed a coup,” since at that point he had already decided to give Big Minh’s coup a green light and cabled that decision to Lodge.95 Cable 74228 also put in writing Kennedy’s decision not to oppose a coup. There was no “ambivalence” for JFK’s advisers to take advantage of and no “policy vacuum” for them to fill, since the President had already made a decision and set the policy. Hilsman, Harriman, and Ball didn’t have any reason to give the coup a green light (since JFK had already done so) and didn’t have any power to do so (since JFK had already given Big Minh all he asked for).

Dallek misrepresented the evidence:

The details about the cable on the twenty-seventh [of October] are noticeably absent from the FRUS volume; and the Kennedy Library, as Gibbons, the author of The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, points out, has no record of this directive. We only have the recollections of Ball, Hilsman, and Johnson that such a cable was sent, but its date is in dispute.96

Ball and Hilsman recalled that Cable 243 was not sent on 27 October 1963, and that it was sent on 24 August 1963. The fact of Cable 243’s existence doesn’t depend on anyone’s recollection. There’s no mystery here, just a simple mistake spun into a myth.

The Congressman’s Tale

Representative Torbert H. “Torby” Macdonald [D–Massachusetts] told intimates that JFK sent him on a mission to save Diệm’s life. This story didn’t become public until seven years after Macdonald’s death, when Herbert Parmet recounted it in JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy. Parmet withheld the name of his main source, identifying her only as “Torby’s closest friend during his final years, who desires to remain anonymous.”97 In 1997, Seymour Hersh identified her as “Macdonald’s longtime mistress, Eleanore Carney.”98 This is how Parmet presented the congressman’s tale:

When [JFK] heard that Big Minh and his group were planning to assassinate Diệm, he wanted to make a direct contact. He was hesitant about using the embassy in Saigon because he could not trust his own people there. Nor did he have enough confidence in Lodge, who had maintained a distant relationship with Diệm. Finally, there was no South Vietnamese he could trust. So he called on Torby, who then carried the President’s personal plea, which was to get rid of his brother and take refuge in the American embassy. As Macdonald later explained it, he told Diệm: “They’re going to kill you. You’ve got to get out of there temporarily to seek sanctuary in the American embassy and you must get rid of your sister-in-law and your brother.” But Diệm refused. “He just won’t do it,” Macdonald reported to the President. “He’s too stubborn; just refuses to.”99

Only one former Kennedy administration official corroborated the story. “Mike Forrestal remembers briefing Macdonald for the trip,” Parmet wrote.100 Neither Parmet nor any historian since uncovered any physical evidence supporting the congressman’s tale. “As far as is known, there are no written records,” Parmet wrote in 1983.101 That remains true four decades later.

What would count as a written record of the rescue attempt? Any cable instructing Ambassador Lodge to grant Diệm asylum, for example.

Lodge raised the question of asylum two days before the coup, in a cable he sent on 30 October 1963. The U.S. embassy had granted asylum to Thích Trí Quang, a Buddhist monk wanted by the South Vietnamese government, and Lodge thought it would probably have to do the same for others in the event of a successful coup:

If senior Vietnamese personalities and their families requested asylum in the Embassy or other American installations. We would probably have to grant it in light of our previous action with respect to Trí Quang. This will undoubtedly present later problems but hopefully the new government might feel disposed to help us solve this problem. Naturally asylum would be granted on the same basis as the Buddhists, i.e., physical presence at the Embassy or other location.102

Lodge’s reference to “the new government” made it clear he was thinking about people seeking asylum after the Ngôs were overthrown. They would be the people ousted from power, first and foremost Diệm and Nhu, but also their families.

The White House reply authorized the Embassy to grant asylum “in the event of imminent or actual failure of coup.”103 The people who would need asylum then would be the rebels, not the Ngôs.

What if a coup succeeded, and people seeking asylum were Diệm, Nhu, and their families and supporters? On that subject, JFK was, once again, silent.

If the congressman’s tale were true—if President Kennedy had really sent Macdonald to tell Diệm “to get out of there temporarily to seek sanctuary in the American embassy”—then Kennedy would have needed, at the very least, to make sure the embassy let Diệm in. He didn’t do that.

Hesitation

Many authors have accused President Kennedy of vacillating. He did go back and forth about whether a coup would succeed or fail. His doubts peaked three days before the coup, 29 October 1963, when the CIA warned him (incorrectly) that rebel and loyalist forces were about evenly matched. Robert Kennedy said, “If [the coup]’s a failure, I would think Diệm’s going to tell us to get the hell out of the country.” Either way, the United States would be blamed: “I would think that we’re just going down the road to disaster.”

President Kennedy was shaken: “Well, isn’t it that our correlation of forces are—that they’re almost even in the immediate Saigon area? If that is true, then, of course, it doesn’t make any sense to have a coup. Unless he has information, or they can produce information, which would indicate that the balance of force quite easily is on the side of the rebels, then it seems to me that he should discourage it at this time.”104

The President had changed his mind about the feasibility of a coup, not its desirability. The next day he cabled Lodge that “once a coup under responsible leadership has begun . . . it is in the interest of the U.S. government that it should succeed.”105 He was against an unsuccessful coup and for a successful one. Those weren’t two different positions; they were one position expressed two different ways.

Plausible Deniability Illustrated

The White House tapes provide listeners with a rare opportunity to observe plausible deniability in action. On Saturday, 2 November 1963, the coup was complete, and President Kennedy was following through on the assurances he had given to Big Minh, arranging to resume the flow of American aid to the new South Vietnamese government.

At the same time, the ExComm had bad news to deliver. It did so in a way that would allow President Kennedy to plausibly deny that he had received it, and his advisers to plausibly deny they had given it to him.

Officials were discussing a draft cable that would have suggested Conein ask Big Minh if Diệm and Nhu were assassinated. “There’s some doubt in some of our minds whether we want to do this or not,” Hilsman said.

McCone said Big Minh had already offered to let Conein see the bodies, and Conein refused: “Conein is probably pretty conscious of the fact that it was assassination and didn’t want to get involved in it. And I would suggest that we not get into this story.”

Bundy asked, “What happens if we now ask to see the bodies? If there were a couple of bullets in the back of—in the back. God. We don’t gain much by that.”

It didn’t take long for the President to understand.

President Kennedy: If Big Minh ordered the execution, then I don’t know. Do we know that? Do we think he did?

Unidentified Speaker: We don’t [unclear]—

Roger Hilsman Jr.: There’s some suspicion.

McGeorge Bundy: Some think he did.

Hilsman: Some think he did.

President Kennedy: Pretty stupid . . .106

Hilsman immediately said that some thought the assassination order came from another general, Mai Hữu Xuân. That wouldn’t exonerate Kennedy. Xuân was part of the cabal. Big Minh had informed the U.S. of its assassination plan in advance. Kennedy had done nothing to stop it. The paper trail was clear.

President Kennedy: We haven’t got any report on what public reaction was to the assassination, do we, from Lodge?

McGeorge Bundy: No, sir.

Hilsman: No, sir. The only reports we’ve had are jubilance in the streets.

Dean Rusk: Yeah, but that was about the coup.

Hilsman: As Governor [W. Averell] Harriman says, if there was an election tomorrow and Lodge ran, he’d undoubtedly win.

President Kennedy: [deadpan] I’m not so sure about that.

Laughter starts slowly, then grows louder.

Hilsman: [struggling to be heard over the laughter] In Vietnam! An election in Vietnam! In Vietnam!

President Kennedy: But I think that [burst of laughter from others in the room] it’d be interesting to know what the reaction is, the public reaction is. Well, we’ll hear all this about this assassination. I’m sure it will be popular, but—107

At that point, someone groaned, and the room fell silent. The tape didn’t cut off; shuffling papers are audible. Everyone in the room stopped talking for 13 seconds. Slowly, ExComm members began quiet conversations among themselves, but the President’s voice remained absent from the meeting for over five minutes.

Then the room fell silent again. “So I guess we’re all—thank you,” President Kennedy said. “What are we going to say about the death of Diệm and Nhu? We’re not going to say anything about . . .”

Someone said they told the press, off the record, that the reports coming in were as varied as the ones reporters were receiving.

“It’d be regrettable if it were ascribed—unless the evidence is clear—if it were ascribed to Big Minh or the responsible council of the generals,” Kennedy said.

Hilsman said the information would come out in the next 48 hours.

“His role may not be . . . it may well at this point,” Kennedy said. He wanted to wire Lodge: “If there are any extenuating circumstances, they should be developed [unclear], and if there was not responsibility at the top, that should be made clear.”

“In other words, get a story and stick to it,” Hilsman said.

“Well, it ought to be a true story, if possible,” Kennedy said.108

This was plausible deniability in action. Some of the President’s advisers had informed him that Big Minh had ordered the assassinations, but without using those exact words. The President had told them to cover up Big Minh’s involvement, if possible, again without using those exact words. Everyone in the room could deny they had done these things without, technically, lying.

The ExComm had a compelling motive to join in the cover-up. Even opponents of the coup plot had acquiesced to the President’s decisions. Within a few years, one adviser had crafted a tale that made President Kennedy—and, by implication, himself—appear innocent.

The JCS Chairman’s Tale

In his 1972 book, Swords and Plowshares: A Memoir, General Taylor told a story that’s too good to check. The scene: the White House Cabinet Room, 1 November 1963, 10:00 a.m.

When the meeting opened, the fate of Diệm and Nhu was unknown. But, shortly after we had seated ourselves around the cabinet table, a member of the White House staff entered and passed the President a flash message from the situation room. The news was that Diệm and Nhu were both dead, and the coup leaders were claiming their deaths to be suicide. Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before. He had always insisted that Diệm must never suffer more than exile and had been led to believe, or had persuaded himself, that a change in government could be carried out without bloodshed.109

The JCS Chairman’s tale is almost perfect. Its structure is classic: a herald enters bearing grave news, and a ruler reacts in a way that reveals his deepest character. It worked for Shakespeare and Sophocles, and Taylor made it work for him. What the tale seemed to reveal—Kennedy’s innocence and good intentions—was comforting. It was also relatable: Kennedy’s “shock and dismay” (a phrase Taylor borrowed from the Pentagon Papers) reminded Americans of what they felt when they learned of Kennedy’s death. The JCS Chairman’s tale gave people JFK as they’d never seen him before, the famously cool Kennedy losing his composure, but it also gave them Kennedy as they wanted him to be. The JCS Chairman’s tale was pure Camelot.

It has a few problems. The first is the timing. During the ExComm meeting in question, Diệm and Nhu were both still alive. This problem is so basic it’s hard to believe. Could it be explained by the difference in time zones? Saigon was 13 hours ahead of Washington. The meeting Taylor described ran from 10:00 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. at the White House, so it was 11:00 p.m. in Saigon when the meeting started and 1:15 a.m. when it ended. At that time, the presidential palace was surrounded by rebel forces. The brothers Ngô were in trouble, but not in the least bit dead. Not even wounded. A memcon of the ExComm meeting shows that the President and his advisers were still discussing Diệm and Nhu in the present tense.110

Timing was the most obvious problem with the JCS Chairman’s tale but not the biggest. Taylor’s most important claim was that JFK “always insisted that Diệm must never suffer more than exile.”111 Evidence disproving that, in the form of copies of Cable 243 and Cable 74228, had already appeared in the Pentagon Papers.112

As obviously false as the JCS Chairman’s tale is, no author has ever debunked it. For over 50 years, in over 50 books, his story has been repeated as history by liberals and conservatives, journalists and academics, best-selling authors and Pulitzer Prize winners.

The first liberal, academic, best-selling, and Pulitzer Prize–winning author to repeat the JCS Chairman’s tale as history was Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. A Harvard historian, cofounder of the liberal Cold War group Americans for Democratic Action, and speechwriter for John and Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger wrote authorized biographies of both Kennedys. He included the JCS Chairman’s tale in one of these, 1978’s Robert Kennedy and His Times. Note the careful editing:

When the President heard about Diệm’s murder, he leaped to his feet and, as Taylor recalled it, “rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.”113

Schlesinger omitted the parts that make it easy to prove the tale false—the date, the time, and the claim that JFK always insisted on Diệm’s safety. A transparent ploy, but no one called him on it. Instead, over the next decade, half a dozen authors followed Schlesinger’s bad example, repeating the JCS Chairman’s tale without the three red flags. The Schlesingerized tale appeared in a biography of a CIA director by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, a best-selling biography of JFK, a book on Kennedy in Vietnam, an account of the Diệm coup, and the standard college text for the next five decades, America’s Longest War.114 All six editions of the latter publication repeated the JCS Chairman’s tale uncritically.

In the 1980s, the tale grew more inaccurate when two books, a popular biography of the Kennedy family and a study conducted by the Congressional Research Service for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both switched the date to 2 November.115 It was an easy mistake to make, since it was 2 November 1963 in Saigon when the Ngô brothers were assassinated, but still 1 November 1963 in Washington, D.C.

In the 1990s, the tale grew more inaccurate still, when the State Department’s Office of the Historian moved it to the first ExComm meeting held after the Ngôs’ assassinations. That meeting ran from 9:35 to 10:05 a.m. on Saturday, 2 November 1963.116 In 1995, former Defense Secretary McNamara published In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, in which he presented the JCS Chairman’s tale, with State’s revised date and time, as his own eyewitness account:

At 9:30 a.m. on November 2, we met again with the president to resume our discussions of events in Saigon. When the meeting began, Diệm’s and Nhu’s fate remained unknown. Midway through the meeting, Mike Forrestal burst into the room with a flash message from the Situation Room. The CIA station in Saigon reported it had been informed by its South Vietnamese counterparts that the brothers had committed suicide “en route from city to Joint General Staff headquarters.” . . . When President Kennedy received the news, he literally blanched. I had never seen him so moved.117

McNamara was obviously not telling the truth. President Kennedy must have known the Ngô brothers were dead before the meeting began.

First, the deaths were all over the news. The front page of the 2 November 1963 New York Times said: “Rebels in Vietnam Oust Diệm, Report Him and Nhu Suicides.”118

Second, it was the top item in the President’s Intelligence Checklist: “The deaths of Diệm and Nhu just about wrap up the generals’ coup.”119

Third, McNamara discussed the deaths before Kennedy arrived. The memcon said National Security Adviser Bundy raised the subject:

With regard to what should be said about the death of Diệm and Nhu, we should express our regrets. [White House Press Secretary] Mr. [Pierre E.] Salinger would express our regret about death by violence, but the President himself should make no statement.

Secretary Rusk felt that we would have to say something lest we be accused by [sic] cynicism about the Diệm and Nhu deaths.

Secretary McNamara asked why we had to say anything.120

Fourth, President Kennedy brought up the subject himself shortly after he arrived and pushed the button to start his hidden tape recorder.121

President Kennedy: Can I say, here’s the thing that’s of concern is the—what’s happened to Diệm and Nhu. That’s the bothersome thing about this. I think if we can—I don’t know what the circumstances are, but that does seem—it seems to me—I’m sure Diệm has some support in the country, and this is bound to cause a reaction [unclear].122

Fifth, the date and time stamped on the first cable from Saigon informing Washington of the deaths was 10:43 p.m., 1 November 1963. State passed the cable on to the White House at 10:50 p.m.—more than ten hours before the ExComm meeting the next morning.123

The Defense Secretary’s tale is as false as the JCS Chairman’s.

In the twenty-first century, another Kennedy aide wrote a new version. JFK’s chief speechwriter, Theodore C. Sorensen, published it in his 2008 memoir, Counselor:

Perhaps he should have guessed that, in that part of the world, the overthrow of Diệm by the South Vietnamese army could well lead to Diệm’s death. But I could see from the look of shock and dismay on JFK’s face when he heard the news of Diệm’s assassination that he had had no indication or even hint that anything more than Diệm’s exile was contemplated.124

Like Taylor and McNamara, Sorensen presented the tale as his own eyewitness account. He even used the same phrase as Taylor, “shock and dismay.” Sorensen also omitted the details that make it easy to disprove the others’ tales. Four years after Sorensen published Counselor, however, the National Archives declassified evidence that proved the President did have more than a hint that the Ngôs might be assassinated—Kennedy’s tape of his 15 August 1963 meeting with Ambassador Lodge.125

The JCS Chairman’s tale clearly has legs, despite being provably false in its sundry forms. The tale is as popular with conservatives as it is with liberals.126 It even made it through peer review.127 It has been repeated as fact by three past presidents of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.128 It has become settled history, though it was never history at all.

Conclusion

Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon exaggerated John F. Kennedy’s role in the assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm. Johnson said, “I do think that one of the greatest mistakes that this country ever made was when we encouraged the South Vietnamese to assassinate this President.”129 LBJ had no evidence that JFK encouraged Diệm’s assassination, nor has any evidence come to light since.

“How about the fact that Lodge and Kennedy conspired in the murder of Diệm? How about putting that little morsel out?” President Nixon asked his aides in the Oval Office.130 They looked for evidence to prove it and couldn’t find any. One aide went so far as to create a fake cable—using a razor blade, a typewriter, and a Xerox machine—that instructed Ambassador Lodge not to grant Diệm or Nhu asylum.131

While Kennedy’s detractors exaggerated his role, his defenders minimized it. His JCS Chairman fabricated the claim that Kennedy always insisted on Diệm’s safety, wrapping the falsehood in an equally false eyewitness account.132 Kennedy’s Defense Secretary and speechwriters tailored Taylor’s tale for their own books, but every version they published is provably false.133

In Swords and Plowshares and In Retrospect, Taylor and McNamara didn’t mention Cable 1445, which summarized Big Minh’s coup proposal, including his assassination plan; or Cable 74228, in which JFK gave Big Minh’s plot a green light and instructed American officials in Saigon not to take a position on any of the coup plans. By minimizing JFK’s role in Diệm’s assassination, Taylor and McNamara minimized their own roles. While they opposed the coup, they accepted President Kennedy’s decisions and kept them secret until long after Diệm and Nhu were dead. They were complicit. In their books, McNamara and Taylor focused on Cable 243, the August green-light cable that went out without their prior knowledge.134 But Cable 243 didn’t produce a coup; Cable 74228 did.

Many writers blame that result on Ambassador Lodge. In America’s Longest War, Herring called Lodge the coup’s “primary architect,” a judgment others have echoed.135 Surveying the literature, Seth Jacobs wrote that it was “a conclusion drawn by virtually all studies: that Lodge, more than any other American, was responsible for the deposal and assassination of Diệm and his brother, Ngô Đình Nhu.”136

Ambassador Lodge played a prominent role in the coup, but he didn’t make it happen. He didn’t have the power. He could have played a larger role if he used the authority President Kennedy had given him to cut American aid to the regime.137 But Lodge urged Kennedy to do that himself, and the President did.138

Big Minh would not have overthrown Diệm without assurances from the U.S. government that it would not thwart his coup and that it would provide his new regime with American aid. Ambassador Lodge could not make those assurances on his own. Only the President could decide whether to withhold or bestow American aid, since at that point Congress deferred the decision to him. Lodge recommended that Kennedy give Big Minh the assurances he wanted, but the decision was ultimately the President’s to make. Once Kennedy took Lodge’s recommendation, the Ambassador made sure the CIA conveyed those assurances to Big Minh. Lodge was an active and influential participant in the coup, but only Kennedy could make the decisions that made the coup happen.

Lodge was also complicit in Kennedy’s decision not to take any position on assassination. Lodge raised the possibility of assassination face-to-face with the President, and he accepted Kennedy’s silence on the subject, both in the Oval Office and in his subsequent instructions to the Ambassador.139 Lodge did not recommend that the CIA tell Big Minh that the U.S. government opposed assassination, and Kennedy did not instruct him to do so. Although CIA agent Conein testified under oath that Lodge gave him this instruction himself and that he carried it out, none of the contemporaneous evidence supports his claim and some of the evidence contradicts it.140^⁠ Telling the South Vietnamese generals that the United States opposed assassination would have violated the President’s instructions in Cable 74228 and CIA director McCone’s instructions in the “best line is no line” cable.141

Lodge was Kennedy’s coconspirator, not his puppet master. The President, not the Ambassador, was the architect of the coup. While a case can be made that JFK didn’t give Cable 243 his full attention, the same cannot be said of his decision-making process before giving Big Minh’s coup a green light in Cable 74228. In August, Kennedy took less than a day to decide. In October, he took at least three days after receiving Big Minh’s coup proposal. In August, he approved Cable 243 without holding a single meeting with any of his advisers. In October, he didn’t approve Cable 74228 until he held a roundtable with almost all of his top advisers. Before 24 August 1963, he did not mobilize his administration to study and debate the questions surrounding a coup. By 9 October 1963, his administration had studied and debated them for seven weeks. In August, Kennedy relied on second-tier officials. In October, he heard from the stars on his team. None of his top advisers could call this process “an egregious ‘end run’” around them. The administration officials who objected to Cable 243 had multiple opportunities to make their case before President Kennedy decided on Cable 74228. The difference in President Kennedy’s process led to a difference in outcome. Where Cable 243 failed, Cable 74228 succeeded.

President Kennedy had multiple opportunities to insist on the safety of Diệm, Nhu, and the rest of the Ngô family—with Lodge in the Oval Office on 15 August 1963, in Cable 243 on 24 August 1963, after he expressed a desire for the Ngôs’ safety on 28 August 1963, when Big Minh revealed his coup plans (including a plan to assassinate two of Diệm’s brothers but not Diệm himself), and when President Kennedy gave Big Minh the green light for a coup and set his conditions for providing American aid to the new government. On each of these occasions, President Kennedy set no prohibition or limits on assassination.142^⁠

McCone testified that as CIA director he “substantially” discussed the “hands off” position in his “best line is no line” cable with Kennedy and “felt” the President agreed.143 That makes sense, since the cable aligns with Cable 74228 and President Kennedy’s silence on assassination in all of his instructions to Lodge. McCone also testified under oath that the subject of assassination did not come up in their discussion.144^⁠ That makes less sense. Either way, President Kennedy could have insisted on safe passage for the Ngôs out of Vietnam. The declassified record shows that he did not.

In The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power, Garry Wills wrote, “Though America did not engineer Diệm’s assassination, we allowed it, hoping for better things.”145^⁠ That one sentence is the most accurate account of JFK’s role in Diệm’s assassination in the existing literature.

Other authors have combined facts with fictions. In three editions of America’s Longest War, Herring wrote: “The United States refused even to intervene to ensure the personal safety of Diệm and Nhu. Kennedy did send an old crony to try to persuade Diệm to get rid of Nhu and seek refuge in the Embassy. When Diệm refused, however, the administration all but abandoned him.”146^⁠ This made it sound like Kennedy tried to save Diệm, but “the administration” did not. Historians can be unequivocal: the contemporaneous evidence, taped and written, indicates that President Kennedy did nothing to ensure the safety of Diệm or Nhu.

More than any other official of the U.S. government, President Kennedy was responsible for the overthrow and assassination of Ngô Đình Diệm and Ngô Đình Nhu. In November 1963, a conspiracy at the highest levels of the United States government orchestrated a coup d’état that culminated in the assassination of the President. John F. Kennedy was not the victim of that conspiracy. He was its leader.