Coming to Terms with John F. Kennedy by Stephen F. Knott

Author:Stephen F. Knott [Stephen F. Knott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700633661
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2022-08-17T00:00:00+00:00

“No Nhus is Good News”

On August 21, 1963, President Diem declared martial law, which his brother enforced with a level of alacrity seldom seen in combat operations against the Viet Cong. Several Buddhist monks were killed during these raids and hundreds were arrested. The Diem administration persisted in conducting these raids despite American protests, and even over the objections of Madame Nhu’s own father, who served as the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States. Madame Nhu’s father resigned in protest, arguing that there was no chance to save the republic while the Diem brothers controlled his country.

Ambassador Nolting had been a consistent supporter of Diem, but his pleas for restraint were rebuffed by the South Vietnamese president, who persisted in following the advice of his brother and sister-in-law. Diem had assured Nolting that he would halt his crackdown against the Buddhists, but instead the crackdown intensified.67 The president removed Ambassador Nolting the same month the crackdown against the Buddhists began, replacing him with Kennedy’s former senatorial opponent from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., who was Richard Nixon’s running mate in 1960. The new ambassador was selected because of his known hostility to Diem’s “police state administration,” as he described it, and to give American policy in Vietnam a bipartisan character.68

Ambassador Lodge and other high-ranking administration officials concluded that Diem was not salvageable, that he was an authoritarian and, to make matters worse, an incompetent one at that. The key proponents of the “anybody but Diem” coalition were Averell Harriman; Harriman’s protégé Michael Forrestal, the son of the nation’s first secretary of defense, who served as an Asian specialist for the National Security Council; and Roger Hilsman, the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. The latter became the driving force behind the effort to convince Diem to expel the destructive husband-and-wife team from his inner circle and, if Diem balked at this, to remove Diem as well.

On Friday, August 23, 1963, a group of South Vietnamese generals informed the US embassy that they were planning a coup against Diem. The next day, Harriman, Forrestal, and Hilsman made their move, contacting the president in Hyannisport and reaching out to other senior officials seeking approval for a message to Lodge to withdraw American support for Nhu and if necessary Diem as well. The cable stated that the American government could not tolerate a “situation in which power lies in Nhu’s hands.” It added, “Diem must be given a chance to rid himself of Nhu and his coterie,” but if he remained “obdurate and refuses,” then “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” Ambassador Lodge responded quickly to the cable, noting that the chances of Diem meeting the American demands were “virtually nil” and suggesting that his embassy team begin to “go straight to [the] Generals with our demands, without informing Diem. Would tell them we [are] prepared [to] have Diem without Nhus but it is in effect up to them whether to keep him.”69

The president discussed this information and the broader situation in Vietnam with his national security team that Monday.

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