For two Americans in Saigon in 1963, the personal and the political combine to spark the drama of a lifetime Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick "Fritz" Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William "Bill" Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam's landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history. Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart-Bill's son and Nolting's godson-who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States' headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point-that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, contains the kernel of how the United States became inextricably embroiled in the Vietnam conflict.
Charles Trueheart is a former foreign correspondent of the Washington Post, a former Associate Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard, and a former Director of the American Library in Paris.
[Trueheart] has achieved something rare in the annals of diplomatic history, mining family letters, federal archives and oral history to craft a tale both riveting and revelatory, a brisk drama that toggles between Saigon and Washington to offer an inside tour of the secret diplomacy - the cajoling and conniving - as the coup fuse burned." - Andrew Meier Washington Post "This ground has been covered before, most famously in David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, but Trueheart brings a personal vantage and renewed diligence to the task, admirably culling from memoirs, dossiers and telegrams. Most of all, Trueheart understands that statecraft is a matter of loyalties that are almost always in conflict over what is best for the country." - New York Times "Trueheart masterfully blends family memoir and geopolitical history, two genres more closely linked than they appear. For if 'friendship and betrayal' accurately describes what transpired between Trueheart and Nolting, it also neatly captures the grisly fate of Diem, who was assassinated in November 1962 in a U.S.-sponsored coup. And the Nolting and Trueheart families were mixed up in all of it. . . . . In detailing his Saigon boyhood, Trueheart has given readers, and history, a gift. Through his eyes, we see well-intentioned men felled by hubris, ambition, and self-deception. These same forces explain the Vietnam tragedy and so many American misadventures that have followed in its wake." - Air Mail "Trueheart does a terrific job of focusing on this period from both the perspective of an adolescent and the insights of an accomplished journalist and scholar. The result is a kind of bi-focal view of events, in which we see both the near and the far. . . U.S. Foreign Service Officers today will find many of the diplomatic experiences familiar, including contradictory instructions from Washington, political-military disagreements, rifts in the embassy, rocky relations with the press, and the danger of talking only to the upper echelon in the country. Historians, students, as well as readers with an interest in the U.S.-Vietnam War also will benefit from the uniquely personal perspective that the author brings to his subject." - American Diplomacy "Trueheart blends solid history and revealing first-person storytelling in this riveting account . . . . Filled with telling family stories and revealing portraits of all the players involved, this is an important and unique contribution to the early history of the American war in Vietnam." - Publishers Weekly
