Profile in Deception: Assassin Ambassador - by Bill Carico
(15 minute read)
Primary Source:
"JFK and the Unspeakable : Why He Died and Why it Matters," by Douglass, James W
Publication date- 2010
James Douglass has written an exceptional book that will be used to profile the deceptions of an ambassador during the JFK administration. The stories are very relevant today because political gridlock and secrets still permeate Washington, DC suggesting a political uniparty is really in control. Therefore, it is important to highlight stories like this one about Republican presidential hopeful Henry Cabot Lodge working as Ambassador to South Vietnam for both Presidents Kennedy and LBJ.
Thank you, James W Douglass, for providing such a detailed account of how the assassination of South Vietnam’s President Diem and his brother Nhu on Nov 2, 1963, was facilitated by US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the CIA, accomplished against the wishes of JFK, who "wanted to save Diem's life from the looming generals' coup." I have known of the CIA's treasonous acts, but never connected Lodge as a traitor to President Kennedy and the American people. Also noteworthy is the timing of JFK's assassination in light of well documented facts that prior to leaving on his fateful trip to Dallas, JFK had informed those close to him (e.g. his brother RFK and his secretary Evelyn Lincoln) of his plans replace both LBJ and Lodge, which would likely strike a death blow to the political careers of both men. Just a few days before departing for Texas, JFK told his secretary he would be replacing LBJ in his reelection bid, and he had come to agreement with his brother, RFK, that it was time to replace Lodge as Ambassador to South Vietnam. Douglass reveals on page 375 that Lodge and LBJ were good friends from their years in the Senate, and it was LBJ who met in person with Lodge on the Sunday following the assassination of JFK, and kept him on as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, which also kept Lodge's ambitions intact to run for President in 1964.
According to RFK, the president in consultation with the Attorney General had already made the decision to fire Lodge: “We were going to try to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.” It was only a matter of “trying to work out how he could be fired, how we could get rid of him.” and "It was his successor as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who instead presided over the Sunday, November 24, meeting with returning ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. As New York Times reporter Tom Wicker described the relationship between the two men, LBJ had a much less critical view of Lodge than did JFK, who planned to fire him: “Lodge [was] an old friend of Johnson’s from their Senate days, whom Johnson once had recommended to Eisenhower for Secretary of Defense, and who was thus close enough to the new President to speak his mind.” Johnson, a firm believer in anticommunist theology, put faith in the counsel of his old friend Lodge, who was among the Cold War elite."
A key excerpt regarding Lodge's acts of treason is found on page 202: "...A milestone had been reached. [South Vietnam's President] Diem had finally responded to Kennedy in a hopeful way through a reluctant ambassador, and Lodge had conveyed the message to Washington with a supportive comment. However, Lodge buried Diem’s message to Kennedy near the end of his report. Moreover, he did not send the report on his breakthrough conversation with Diem until 3:00 p.m., an hour and a half after the coup had started. He also chose to send this critical cable by the slowest possible process rather than “Critical Flash,” which would have given it immediate attention in Washington. As a result of Lodge’s slow writing and transmission of Diem’s urgent message to Kennedy, it did not arrive at the State Department until hours after the rebel generals had laid siege to the presidential palace.' It was too late."
Research Sidebar: Before putting the above two passages into the broader context of what Douglass has written, here is a brief explanation to help with names: In Asia, the family's name comes first. President Diem is Ngo Dinh Diem. He had two brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu and Ngo Dinh Can. Diem and Nhu were assassinated together three weeks prior to JFK’s assassination. Can was the youngest brother and was killed by firing squad the following May.
These longer excerpts provide the broader context of how Henry Cabot Lodge undermined Kennedy :
Research Sidebar: Years later these mysterious explosions were traced to an advanced explosive material that only the CIA had access to, and eventually a CIA agent admitted to rigging the explosions, proving Kennedy’s own CIA was working against a sitting US President to prevent withdrawal plans. Consequently, after Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ escalated military activity in Vietnam and approximately $350 million dollars in defense contracts were awarded to his close friend George Brown, co-founder of little-known construction company Brown and Root that had supported LBJ since the early 1940's. Over the next few decades, both Kellog Brown and Root and Haliburton, who had their own decades-long close ties to Dick Cheney, became gigantic private military contractors to the U.S. Government. LBJ's close ties to the Brown brothers dated back to the 1940's and his days as a Texas congressman. In his best-selling book, “Blood, Money and Power,” author and former lawyer representing LBJs interest, Barr McClelland, explained how George Brown’s paying kickbacks in cash to LBJ totaling millions of dollars. On page 118, McClelland wrote, "On October 1, 1948…The standard way to pay for elections was cash. Well aware of the trouble Brown & Root had with checks in 1941, with three years needed to get out from under an IRS criminal investigation, the untraceable medium of cold, hard cash was the standard operating procedure. Even with Scofield in place as the IRS district director, caution was required."
Back to the excerpts from
"JFK and the Unspeakable:"
(15 minute read)
Primary Source:
"JFK and the Unspeakable : Why He Died and Why it Matters," by Douglass, James W
Publication date- 2010
James Douglass has written an exceptional book that will be used to profile the deceptions of an ambassador during the JFK administration. The stories are very relevant today because political gridlock and secrets still permeate Washington, DC suggesting a political uniparty is really in control. Therefore, it is important to highlight stories like this one about Republican presidential hopeful Henry Cabot Lodge working as Ambassador to South Vietnam for both Presidents Kennedy and LBJ.
Thank you, James W Douglass, for providing such a detailed account of how the assassination of South Vietnam’s President Diem and his brother Nhu on Nov 2, 1963, was facilitated by US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and the CIA, accomplished against the wishes of JFK, who "wanted to save Diem's life from the looming generals' coup." I have known of the CIA's treasonous acts, but never connected Lodge as a traitor to President Kennedy and the American people. Also noteworthy is the timing of JFK's assassination in light of well documented facts that prior to leaving on his fateful trip to Dallas, JFK had informed those close to him (e.g. his brother RFK and his secretary Evelyn Lincoln) of his plans replace both LBJ and Lodge, which would likely strike a death blow to the political careers of both men. Just a few days before departing for Texas, JFK told his secretary he would be replacing LBJ in his reelection bid, and he had come to agreement with his brother, RFK, that it was time to replace Lodge as Ambassador to South Vietnam. Douglass reveals on page 375 that Lodge and LBJ were good friends from their years in the Senate, and it was LBJ who met in person with Lodge on the Sunday following the assassination of JFK, and kept him on as U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam, which also kept Lodge's ambitions intact to run for President in 1964.
According to RFK, the president in consultation with the Attorney General had already made the decision to fire Lodge: “We were going to try to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.” It was only a matter of “trying to work out how he could be fired, how we could get rid of him.” and "It was his successor as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who instead presided over the Sunday, November 24, meeting with returning ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. As New York Times reporter Tom Wicker described the relationship between the two men, LBJ had a much less critical view of Lodge than did JFK, who planned to fire him: “Lodge [was] an old friend of Johnson’s from their Senate days, whom Johnson once had recommended to Eisenhower for Secretary of Defense, and who was thus close enough to the new President to speak his mind.” Johnson, a firm believer in anticommunist theology, put faith in the counsel of his old friend Lodge, who was among the Cold War elite."
A key excerpt regarding Lodge's acts of treason is found on page 202: "...A milestone had been reached. [South Vietnam's President] Diem had finally responded to Kennedy in a hopeful way through a reluctant ambassador, and Lodge had conveyed the message to Washington with a supportive comment. However, Lodge buried Diem’s message to Kennedy near the end of his report. Moreover, he did not send the report on his breakthrough conversation with Diem until 3:00 p.m., an hour and a half after the coup had started. He also chose to send this critical cable by the slowest possible process rather than “Critical Flash,” which would have given it immediate attention in Washington. As a result of Lodge’s slow writing and transmission of Diem’s urgent message to Kennedy, it did not arrive at the State Department until hours after the rebel generals had laid siege to the presidential palace.' It was too late."
Research Sidebar: Before putting the above two passages into the broader context of what Douglass has written, here is a brief explanation to help with names: In Asia, the family's name comes first. President Diem is Ngo Dinh Diem. He had two brothers, Ngo Dinh Nhu and Ngo Dinh Can. Diem and Nhu were assassinated together three weeks prior to JFK’s assassination. Can was the youngest brother and was killed by firing squad the following May.
These longer excerpts provide the broader context of how Henry Cabot Lodge undermined Kennedy :
- Page 128 -
As of mid-April 1963, Diem and Nhu were suddenly steering the South Vietnamese government in a more independent direction, asking that Americans of every stripe be withdrawn from Vietnam. The Pentagon had already become aware of Diem’s resistance to a widening of the U.S. military presence in Vietnam. Diem had been telling more and more people that he would never agree to the new air and naval bases the United States wanted to establish in his country. In July 1962, during an inspection of Cam Ranh Bay, he pointed to a mountain and said to his aides, “The Americans want a base there but I shall never accept that.” Diem also shared his rejection of U.S. military bases with the French ambassador. But by April 1963, Diem wasn’t just resisting more bases. Now he wanted the U.S. to withdraw thousands of its people who were already in South Vietnam.
The military and the CIA were alarmed at the Ngo brothers’ change of course. On the other hand, the Ngos’ turn toward autonomy held the hope for JFK of facilitating his decision to withdraw from Vietnam, shared with Mike Mansfield and understood by the Ngos in response to the Mansfield report. A Kennedy withdrawal policy had now become more feasible, if done in conjunction with Diem’s desire that Vietnam “not become a U.S. protectorate.” Diem and Nhu had decided they wanted their government and army back, in sudden response to JFK’s desire to give them back. It was a ripe and dangerous moment.
On May 6, Kennedy began to implement his withdrawal policy through the order McNamara gave the generals at the Honolulu conference that one thousand U.S. military personnel be pulled out of South Vietnam by the end of the year. For a few days, the time seemed hopeful for a convergence of interests between Kennedy and Diem leading toward a U.S. withdrawal. Then on May 8, 1963, mysterious explosions set off in the South Vietnamese city of Hue began a chain reaction of events that in the next six months would obliterate the hope of a Kennedy-Diem alliance for peace, overthrow the Diem government, and result in the November 2 assassinations of Diem and Nhu…
Research Sidebar: Years later these mysterious explosions were traced to an advanced explosive material that only the CIA had access to, and eventually a CIA agent admitted to rigging the explosions, proving Kennedy’s own CIA was working against a sitting US President to prevent withdrawal plans. Consequently, after Kennedy was assassinated, LBJ escalated military activity in Vietnam and approximately $350 million dollars in defense contracts were awarded to his close friend George Brown, co-founder of little-known construction company Brown and Root that had supported LBJ since the early 1940's. Over the next few decades, both Kellog Brown and Root and Haliburton, who had their own decades-long close ties to Dick Cheney, became gigantic private military contractors to the U.S. Government. LBJ's close ties to the Brown brothers dated back to the 1940's and his days as a Texas congressman. In his best-selling book, “Blood, Money and Power,” author and former lawyer representing LBJs interest, Barr McClelland, explained how George Brown’s paying kickbacks in cash to LBJ totaling millions of dollars. On page 118, McClelland wrote, "On October 1, 1948…The standard way to pay for elections was cash. Well aware of the trouble Brown & Root had with checks in 1941, with three years needed to get out from under an IRS criminal investigation, the untraceable medium of cold, hard cash was the standard operating procedure. Even with Scofield in place as the IRS district director, caution was required."
Back to the excerpts from
"JFK and the Unspeakable:"
- Page 151:
In the summer of 1963, Edmund Gullion’s anticolonial diplomacy, as practiced already in the Congo, held the promise—or threat to some—of opening new doors to Kennedy in Vietnam. However, Secretary of State Dean Rusk told the president he was opposed to Gullion as the new Saigon ambassador. In a decision JFK would live to regret, he then went along with Rusk’s veto of Gullion and chose instead as ambassador his old Republican rival from Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge. Kennedy wound up agreeing with Rusk’s view that to choose a distinguished Republican as his ambassador would take the air out of the Republican right’s demands for an escalated war.”’ But in forgoing Gullion, whose views were in harmony with his own, for the Republican Lodge, the president was not only giving up the appointment of a trusted colleague but also surrendering power to a political enemy.
In 1952 Kennedy had been elected to the Senate over the heavily favored incumbent senator, Henry Cabot Lodge. From 1953 to 1960, Lodge served the Eisenhower administration as UN ambassador, squashing UN opposition to CIA coups carried out in Iran and Guatemala under the direction of Allen Dulles. When JFK defeated Nixon for the presidency in 1960, Lodge as Nixon’s vice-presidential candidate lost to Kennedy again. Lodge had then been hired by anti-Kennedy media magnate Henry Luce as his consultant on international affairs. The struggle for power between the two dueling Massachusetts dynasties, the Fitzgerald Kennedys and the Cabot Lodges, continued. In 1962 Ted Kennedy, like JFK, began his Senate career by beating a Cabot Lodge. In that midterm election of the Kennedy presidency, JFK’s youngest brother defeated George Cabot Lodge, Henry Cabot Lodge’s thirty- five-year-old son.”
For a decade, Henry Cabot Lodge (and his son) had been trying unsuccessfully to beat John Kennedy (and his brother) in an election. Lodge was no Kennedy man. Yet he had taken the curious step in 1963 of letting it be known in Washington that he would like to become the president’s Saigon ambassador. Why did Lodge offer to become the ambassador of a man he so often opposed?
Henry Cabot Lodge was a major general in the U.S. Army Reserves. He had spent a month at the Pentagon in January 1963 being briefed on Vietnam and counterinsurgency. Author Anne Blair, who was given access to Lodge’s private papers for her book Lodge in Vietnam, determined that it was probably during his Pentagon tour of duty “that Lodge began to float his name as a possibility for Vietnam.” Blair concluded from her reading of Lodge’s confidential journal that he wanted to use a Vietnam appointment as the basis for a late run for the presidency in 1964. Several of Lodge’s close associates in South Vietnam, including his special assistant, John Michael Dunn, confirmed to Blair that Lodge “had accepted the South Vietnam post to increase his chances of gaining the Republican nomination.” Henry Cabot Lodge wanted to represent his longtime opponent, John Kennedy, in Vietnam in such a way that he would be able to replace him in the White House.
With a sense of having just added one more shark to those already swimming around him, Kennedy joked to his aides Kenny O’Donnell and Dave Powers about his own motives for the appointment: “The idea of getting Lodge mixed up in such a hopeless mess as the one in Vietnam was irresistible.” Kennedy had in fact taken a magnanimous risk in appointing his political adversary to an influential post. Lodge would not return the favor by obeying the president’s orders. Kennedy had made a mistake that would dog him that fall in Vietnam. By appointing Henry Cabot Lodge as his ambassador rather than holding out against Rusk for Edmund Gullion, Kennedy had lost a critical degree of power over Vietnam. Once Lodge took up residence in Saigon in August, it would not be Kennedy but his old political enemy, Lodge, who would be in control of the situation on the ground…
- Page 162
... John F. Kennedy was trying to begin his withdrawal from Vietnam. He was being obstructed by military officials—and by his own hasty support of a coup d’etat against the South Vietnamese government. In the early summer, Kennedy had kept his military and CIA advisers out of his discussions on Vietnam. This significant fact was mentioned years later by his Assistant Secretary of Defense William P. Bundy in an unpublished manuscript. According to Bundy, during the early part of Kennedy’s final summer in office, he consulted on Vietnam with just a few advisers in the State Department and White House, thereby leaving out representatives of the Defense Department, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the CIA. But this is hardly surprising. The dysfunctional relationship between Kennedy and his Cold War hierarchy had already reached the point where he kept his thinking on controversial subjects to himself—and a tight circle of friends with whom he shared that thinking sporadically. By leaving the Pentagon and the CIA out of the Vietnam loop, he wasn’t fooling them. They knew he planned to withdraw from Vietnam. They also knew they’d been left out of other key decisions. At precisely the same time, the early summer of 1963, besides sidestepping the Pentagon and the CIA on Vietnam, the president had also left them out of consultations for his American University address and the test ban treaty. The reason was simple. Kennedy knew the military- intelligence elite was opposed to all his efforts to end the Cold War. They wanted to win it. - Page 163
At the Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were dragging their heels on the Vietnam withdrawal plan. The chiefs used the Buddhist crisis as a rationale for bogging down McNamara’s May order that a specific plan be prepared for the withdrawal of one thousand military personnel by the end of 1963. On August 20, the chiefs wrote to McNamara that “until the political and religious tensions now confronting the Government of Vietnam have eased,” “no US units should be withdrawn from the Republic of Vietnam.” The chiefs argued, for the same reason, that “the final decision to implement the withdrawal plan should be withheld until late October”—one month before Kennedy would be assassinated. But Kennedy and McNamara sped up the process. The decision for withdrawal would in fact be made in early October.
Even the select few in the State Department whom Kennedy was consulting on Vietnam did not serve him well. In late August, Averell Harriman, who had returned triumphantly from the test ban negotiations in Moscow, and Roger Hilsman, now in charge of the Vietnam desk, precipitated a decision for U.S. support of a coup against Diem. On August 24, during a weekend when Kennedy was in Hyannis Port, Hilsman, working with Harriman and Kennedy’s aide Michael Forrestal, drafted an urgent telegram to newly appointed Saigon ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. The telegram authorized U.S. support of a looming coup by rebel South Vietnamese generals, if Diem refused to remove from power his brother Nhu and sister-in-law Madame Nhu... - Page 164
At the Saigon Embassy, Henry Cabot Lodge interpreted this condition in terms of a diplomatic strategy he had worked out with someone other than the president. After his appointment by Kennedy and before his move to Vietnam, Lodge had consulted his old friend and employer Henry Luce at Time on how he should deal with Diem.By his decision to look to Luce for guidance in Saigon, Lodge was already indicating where his real allegiance lay. It was not to the president who had just given him his appointment as ambassador. Lodge was meeting in the enemy’s camp. Henry Luce was, first of all, a longtime CIA ally. As Graham Greene pointed out, it was Luce’s Life magazine that worked with the CIA to scapegoat “Viet Minh Communists” for the CIA’s terrorist bombings of Saigon in 1952. Besides being CIA-friendly, Henry Luce was an enemy to Kennedy. In the wake of the April 1962 steel crisis, Luce’s Fortune magazine had implicitly warned the president, on behalf of America’s business elite, to beware “the ides of April” for his dominant role in settling the crisis. The Fortune editorial was a corporate declaration of war against the Kennedy administration and a veiled personal threat to the president. Henry Luce and his media empire epitomized the corporate, military, and intelligence forces that wanted to stop Kennedy. For Henry Cabot Lodge to consult Henry Luce on how Lodge should act as Kennedy’s Vietnam ambassador was asking for trouble for the president. Luce was happy to oblige... - Page 166
Kennedy was becoming exasperated, at both Lodge’s mulishness and at his own folly in not having heeded his brother Robert’s warning against his appointing Lodge ambassador. Thanks to that appointment, he now had not only a stubborn South Vietnamese president to deal with but an equally stubborn American ambassador. Lodge was even resistant to the suggestion that he take the obvious diplomatic step of talking with Diem. JFK knew the chances of Diem sidelining the Nhus or reforming his government were miniscule. But the president had another objective in mind in his eleventh- hour efforts to appeal to Diem, an objective he realized Henry Cabot Lodge was not going to facilitate. He wanted to save Diem’s life... - Page 167
...Kennedy wanted to save Diem’s life from the looming generals’ coup that had picked up a steamrolling momentum not only in South Vietnam (with Lodge pushing it) but also from opposite sides of the U.S. government in Washington. As a senator, John Kennedy, like Mike Mansfield, had helped bring Diem to power in South Vietnam. Regardless of Diem’s downward path since then, Kennedy did not want to see him killed in a coup, especially one he was condoning. Because he was surrounded by people he couldn’t trust, Kennedy called in an old friend to help him try to save Diem’s life...
...Kennedy commissioned Macdonald to go to Saigon to appeal personally to Diem on behalf of the president. Macdonald was to bypass the CIA, the State Department, and Henry Cabot Lodge, in order to make an urgent personal appeal to the South Vietnamese president to take the steps necessary to save his life. Macdonald would fly in and out of Saigon on military, not civilian, planes to maintain as much secrecy as possible, with the assistance of the one arm of Kennedy’s government, the military, whose command still maintained a lingering (though lessening) support for Diem. Macdonald’s preparations for his mission and the trip itself were carried out in total secrecy, with no known written records. Kennedy’s biographer, Herbert S. Parmet, discovered the hidden story after Macdonald’s death in 1976. It was revealed to Parmet by Macdonald’s lover, Eleanore Carney, identified in Parmet’s JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy only as a confidential source. Her report was confirmed by Torbert Macdonald, Jr., who said his father told him about the secret journey, and by Macdonald’s administrative assistant, Joe Croken. Kennedy’s aide Michael Forrestal provided further confirmation. He had briefed Macdonald for the trip. - Page 183
Not the least of Kennedy’s obstacles in Vietnam from September on continued to be the noncooperation of his coup-pushing ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge. After Kennedy’s and Rusk’s persistent appeals, Lodge had finally met with Diem on September 9 to appeal to him to send his brother Nhu away and thereby lift the worst government repression. The meeting had gone poorly, and Lodge’s patrician attitude toward Diem had not helped. The ambassador’s report back to the State Department dismissed Diem for “his medieval view of life.” Following the failed meeting, Lodge reverted to his strategy of “chicken” with Washington’s client ruler, refusing to communicate with Diem. Thus, the South Vietnamese ruler had to surrender to U.S. demands or he would be run over by the coup Lodge wanted and thought inevitable. - Page 185
The McNamara-Taylor mission was designed by Kennedy to meet his “very great need indeed” of not only forestalling the coup that Henry Cabot Lodge, Richard Helms, and even the president’s more liberal State Department advisers sought. It was also meant to lay the foundation for the beginning withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam that fall, which only John Kennedy sought... - Page 186
Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge’s response to the CIA’s ominous seizure of power in Vietnam was to harness that power to his own ambition to overthrow Diem.
On September 13, 1963, Lodge sent a letter to Secretary of State Dean Rusk asking him to send longtime CIA operative Edward Lansdale to Sai-gon “at once to take charge, under my supervision, of all U.S. relationships with a change of government here.” Lodge wanted Lansdale’s expertise in “changing governments” so as to facilitate, “under my supervision,” the stalled coup. For Lansdale to be effective, Lodge wrote, he “must have a staff and I therefore ask that he be put in charge of the CAS [“Controlled American Source,” meaning the CIA] station in the Embassy, relieving the present incumbent, Mr. John Richardson.”
Although CIA director McCone denied Lodge’s request for Lansdale, Richardson, whom Lodge thought too close to Diem, was recalled to Washington, just as Lodge wished. The ambassador then became in effect his own CIA station chief in Saigon. He could now supervise directly Lucien Conein, the CIA’s intermediary to the South Vietnamese generals plotting against Diem.
Lodge’s commitment to engineering a coup against Diem was no problem to the CIA’s chief of covert operations, Richard Helms, who had the same goal. When Helms allied the CIA to the State Department circle pressuring Kennedy for a coup, he told Harriman, “It’s about time we bit this bullet.” Helms could only welcome Lodge’s and the State Department’s enthusiasm for a coup as additional cover for company business. Whether knowingly or not, Henry Cabot Lodge, in his push to carry out a Saigon coup that was facilitated by the CIA, was helping to provide the impetus for a Washington coup as well. - Page 190
Kennedy’s mistaken judgment in appointing Lodge his ambassador began his downward path toward a Saigon coup. Once the president was manipulated by his advisers into approving the August 24 telegram, he never succeeded in reversing a policy that favored a coup, reinforced by an ambassador determined to have one. Lodge was methodical in pursuing his goal. On September 14, Lodge invited his old friend, influential journalist Joseph Alsop, to dinner in Saigon. Lodge then became the unacknowledged source for Alsop’s sensational column, “Very Ugly Stuff,” which appeared in the September 18 Washington Post and other newspapers... - Page 191
On September 19, Lodge sent a telegram to Kennedy rejecting once again the president’s suggestion that the ambassador “resume dialogue” with Diem and Nhu (a dialogue never really begun). Lodge told Kennedy that such a dialogue was hopeless: “Frankly, I see no opportunity at all for substantive changes.” He continued to think his silence was better than dialogue: “There are signs that Diem-Nhu are somewhat bothered by my silence.” By this time, Kennedy had realized that he could not rely on his newly appointed ambassador to carry out his wishes... - Page 195
Only five days before Lodge’s telegram, Washington Daily News reporter Richard Starnes’s alarming article on the CIA’s “unrestrained thirst for power” in Vietnam had appeared. Starnes had cited a “very high American official” in Saigon who “likened the CIA’s growth to a malignancy, and added he was not sure even the White House could control it any longer.” President Kennedy had read Starnes’s article closely. He was so disturbed by it that he brought it up in the October 2 meeting of the National Security Council, asking the NSC members, “What should we say [in a public statement] about the news story attacking CIA which appeared in today’s Washington Daily News?”!°® Kennedy decided to say nothing about the article,'”’ but it had shaken him. Starnes had also cited an unnamed U.S. official who spoke of a possible CIA coup in Washington. The official had said prophetically, the month before John Kennedy’s assassination, “If the United States ever experiences a Seven Days in May [the novel envisioning a military takeover of the U.S. government], it will come from the CIA, and not the Pentagon.” In the light of Lodge’s telegram five days later, the president may have wondered if Starnes’s unnamed U.S. official in Saigon who gave that warning was Henry Cabot Lodge.
- Page 198
...on October 24, President Diem invited Ambassador Lodge to spend the day with him three days later. Apparently Diem wanted to talk. Lodge accepted the invitation.
The State Department in a telegram encouraged Lodge in his upcoming dialogue with Diem: “Diem’s invitation to you may mean that he has finally decided to come to you... As you know, we wish to miss no opportunity to test prospect of constructive changes by Diem.”
Lodge’s October 27 talk with Diem turned into another confrontation. Lodge reported back to Dean Rusk what he had told the South Vietnamese president on behalf of the United States: “We do not wish to be put in the extremely embarrassing position of condoning totalitarian acts which are against our traditions and ideals.” ''* “Repeatedly,” Lodge reported, “I asked him, ‘What do you propose to do for us?’ His reply several times was either a blank stare or change of subject or the statement: ‘je ne vais pas servir’ which makes no sense. He must have meant to say ‘ceder’ rather than ‘servir’, meaning: ‘I will not give in.’ He warned that the Vietnamese people were strange people and could do odd things if they were resentful.”
Lodge was fluent in French. Diem’s repeated statement, “Je ne vais pas servir,” “I will not serve,” made no sense to Lodge not because he didn’t understand the language but because he didn’t understand Diem. From Diem’s point of view, he was refusing in principle to serve American interests—what he thought the patrician American statesman, Henry Cabot Lodge, was ordering him to do. To Lodge’s incessant question, “What do you propose to do for us?” Diem’s very genuine response was: “I will not serve.” He was not going to bow and scrape in front of the Americans.
Lodge was convinced that Diem was “simply unbelievably stubborn,” as he told Rusk earlier in his report. Lodge was like a Southern landowner dismissing a nonconforming black sharecropper as “stubborn.” So Lodge thought Diem must have meant to say, “I will not give in,” rather than “I will not serve.” Stubbornness, not principle, was what Lodge was prepared to deal with in terms of the “chicken” metaphor, or head-on crash sce- nario, that he was following in his strategy toward Diem. He thought the United States’ client ruler was being “simply, unbelievably stubborn” in not backing down from “totalitarian acts which are against our traditions and ideals.”Yet Diem was in fact preparing to back away from just such acts, as shown by his government’s surprising reception of the UN Fact-Finding Mission. Nevertheless, he refused to serve unconditionally the imperial interests of the government Lodge represented. He might even kick it out of Vietnam, as Lodge feared. Diem was refusing to be a Vietnamese servant obedient to Lodge’s wishes. That is why he told Lodge that the Vietnamese people could do odd things if they were resentful (an attitude Diem had increasingly in common with Ho Chi Minh)—which Lodge again failed to understand. He thought Diem could only have meant all along that he would not give in, not that there was something deeper at stake.
- Page 199
Even in Lodge’s own description of their conversation, it was Diem who spoke more to the point. Diem said bluntly, “The CIA is intriguing against the Government of Vietnam.”
Lodge, who was directing the CIA’s communications with the generals plotting against Diem, said in response (presumably with a straight face): “Give me proof of improper action by any employee of the U.S. Government and I will see that he leaves Vietnam.”
Lodge concluded, in his report to Rusk, that the conversation with Diem, taken by itself, “does not offer much hope that [his viewpoint] is going to change.”
Nor, more momentously, did the conversation offer much hope that Lodge was going to change his viewpoint on Diem. That would have required a radical change of heart for Lodge. For the coup he had striven to bring into being was now about to begin.
On Wednesday, October 30, the four generals who were plotting together, Minh, Don, Dinh, and Khiem, met secretly at a private club in Cholon, Saigon’s Chinese quarter. The generals then made their final decision to go ahead with the coup against Diem that would begin two days later.
Also on October 30, Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge wired the State Department that, contrary to what President Kennedy was saying, Lodge did “not think we have the power to delay or discourage a coup. [General] Don has made it clear many times that this is a Vietnamese affair. It is theoreti- cally 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 out of us.” 7° For Lodge to imagine his becoming “a traitor” only to the coup leaders, and not Diem, he apparently had become already in his mind an ambassador to the generals.
Lodge was explicitly rejecting Kennedy’s statement at a White House meeting the day before: “We can discourage a coup in ways other than telling Diem of the rebel Generals’ plans. What we say to the coup Generals can be crucial short of revealing their plans to Diem.” ! Bundy wired Kennedy’s position to Lodge.' Kennedy was insisting on his prerogative to block a coup by intervening with the generals. Lodge, as the man who would have to do the intervening, was claiming it would be futile to try. Yet only two days before, Lodge reported that General Don had sought him out at the Saigon airport to get confirmation that the CIA’s Lucien Conein “was authorized to speak for me [and the U.S. government].” The nervous generals needed last-minute reassurance that the United States would not thwart them—as Kennedy was telling Lodge he still might do, in spite of Lodge’s counterarguments that it couldn’t be done.
The generals were also acutely aware that Kennedy had already committed himself to a total withdrawal from Vietnam by the end of 1965. They were even using JFK’s withdrawal order as a reason for their coup.
Page 200
Lodge reported that General Don “stated flatly [at the airport] the only way to win before the Americans leave in 1965 was to change the present regime.” On a more practical note, Lodge told the State Department: “As to requests from the Generals, they may well have need of funds at the last moment with which to buy off potential opposition. To the extent that these funds can be passed discreetly, I believe we should furnish them . . .” - Page 201
In Saigon on Friday morning, November 1, Ambassador Lodge and Admiral Harry Felt, Commander in Chief of the Pacific, met with President Diem, as rebel troops were gathering outside the city. Lodge noticed that Diem spoke to them “with unusual directness.” Lodge did not reciprocate the directness.
Felt took note of a particular exchange between Diem and Lodge (that could be seen in retrospect as having happened three hours before the coup began):
Diem said, “I know there is going to be a coup, but I don’t know who is going to do it.”
Lodge not only knew there was going to be a coup but also who was going to do it. He reassured Diem by saying, “I don’t think there is anything to worry about.”
When Felt had departed, Diem spoke with Lodge for another fifteen minutes. Diem had asked Lodge in advance to spend this time alone with him. After Lodge heard Diem once again make a series of charges against the United States, the ambassador got up to go. This was the last moment for Diem to speak his mind. He knew the coup was imminent (that he hoped to survive.) He also knew Lodge was scheduled to leave that weekend on a trip to Washington to consult with President Kennedy. As Lodge stood up, Diem spoke up: - Page 202
“Please tell President Kennedy that I am a good and a frank ally, that I would rather be frank and settle questions now than talk about them after we have lost everything.”
In his report to the State Department, Lodge added here parenthetically, “This looked like a reference to a possible coup,” then continued quoting Diem’s parting words to him:
“Tell President Kennedy that I take all his suggestions very seriously and wish to carry them out but it is a question of timing.”
This was the response from Diem that Kennedy had been waiting for, and Lodge recognized it. In his comment on Diem’s statement, Lodge cabled: “If U.S. wants to make a package deal, I would think we were in a position to do it. The conditions of my return [to Washington] could be propitious for it. In effect he said: Tell us what you want and we’ll do it.”
A milestone had been reached. Diem had finally responded to Kennedy in a hopeful way through a reluctant ambassador, and Lodge had conveyed the message to Washington with a supportive comment.
However, Lodge buried Diem’s message to Kennedy near the end of his report. Moreover, he did not send the report on his breakthrough conversation with Diem until 3:00 p.m., an hour and a half after the coup had started. He also chose to send this critical cable by the slowest possible process rather than “Critical Flash,” which would have given it immediate atten- tion in Washington. As a result of Lodge’s slow writing and transmission of Diem’s urgent message to Kennedy, it did not arrive at the State Department until hours after the rebel generals had laid siege to the presidential palace.' It was too late. - Page 209
Diem and Nhu had escaped from the palace in the Friday night darkness, eluding the soldiers surrounding the grounds. They were then driven by an aide to Cholon, where a Chinese businessman gave them overnight refuge in his home. It was from Cholon on Saturday morning that Ngo Dinh Diem made his last phone call to Henry Cabot Lodge. In his descriptions of the coup over the years, Lodge never mentioned his Saturday morning call from Diem. The two men’s final exchange was revealed by Lodge’s chief aide, Mike Dunn, in an interview in 1986, the year after Lodge’s death.
General Tran Van Don in his circumspect memoir of the Saigon coup reveals another, more urgent mandate that CIA operative Conein passed on to the generals. When General Don told Conein that he suspected the Ngo brothers might no longer be in the presidential palace, Conein said to him with irritation, “Diem and Nhu must be found at any cost.” !”Diem and Nhu had escaped from the palace in the Friday night darkness, eluding the soldiers surrounding the grounds. They were then driven by an aide to Cholon, where a Chinese businessman gave them overnight refuge in his home.!” It was from Cholon on Saturday morning that Ngo Dinh Diem made his last phone call to Henry Cabot Lodge. In his descriptions of the coup over the years, Lodge never mentioned his Saturday morning call from Diem. The two men’s final exchange was revealed by Lodge’s chief aide, Mike Dunn, in an interview in 1986, the year after Lodge’s death.
Diem had decided to take seriously the ambassador’s parting words to him Friday afternoon: “If I can do anything for your physical safety, please call me.” Diem did so Saturday morning.
“That morning,” Mike Dunn said, “Diem asked [in his call] if there was something we could do. Lodge put the phone down and went to check on something. I held the line open... Lodge told Diem he would offer them asylum and do what he could for them. I wanted to go over—in fact, I asked Lodge if I could go over and take them out. I said, ‘Because they are going to kill them.’ Told him that right flat out.”
Dunn thought if Lodge had forced the issue by sending him over to bring Diem and Nhu out of Cholon, their lives would have been saved—as the man whom Lodge represented, President Kennedy, wanted to happen.
Lucien Conein has said in an interview of his own that Diem also made three final calls to the generals on Saturday, ultimately surrendering and “requesting only safe conduct to the airport and departure from - Page 210
Vietnam.” Conein said he then called the CIA station. The CIA told him “it would take twenty-four hours to get a plane with sufficient range to fly the brothers nonstop to a country of asylum.” '°? The CIA had made no plans to evacuate Diem and Nhu to avoid their assassinations. Nor, according to the CIA, did the U.S. Air Force in Vietnam have a plane available then with sufficient range to fly Diem and Nhu to asylum, although a plane had apparently been standing by to fly Lodge to Washington. The Ngo brothers would have to remain in Saigon while the generals decided their fate. It did not take long for that to happen.
At 8:00 a.m. Saturday, Diem and Nhu left the house in Cholon to go to a nearby Catholic church. It was All Souls Day. Although the early morning Mass had ended, the brothers were able to receive communion from a priest shortly before a convoy of two armed jeeps and an armored personnel
carrier pulled up in front of the church.
After learning the Ngos’ location, General Minh had sent a team of five men to pick them up. Two of the men in the personnel carrier were Major Duong Hieu Nghia, a member of the Dai Viet party that was especially hostile to Diem,*°° and Minh’s personal bodyguard, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, described as a professional assassin who had killed forty people. Diem and Nhu were standing on the church steps. From what Lodge and the generals had told him on the phone, Diem thought he was being taken to the airport for a flight to another country. He asked if he could go by the palace to pick up some of his things. The officers said their orders were to take him at once to military headquarters. As Diem and Nhu were led to the armored personnel carrier, they expressed surprise that they wouldn’t be riding in a car. According to a witness, “Nhu protested that it was unseemly for the president to travel in that fashion.” 7° They were shown how to climb down the hatch into the semidarkness of the armored vehicle. Captain Nhung went down with them. He tied their hands behind their backs. Major Nghia remained over them in the turret with his submachine gun. The convoy took off.
When the vehicles arrived at 8:30 at Joint General Staff headquarters, the hatch of the personnel carrier was opened. Diem and Nhu were dead. Both men had been “shot in the nape of the neck,” according to Lodge’s report two days later. Nhu had also been stabbed in the chest and shot many times in the back.” Years later, two of the officers in the convoy described the assassinations of Diem and Nhu: “Nghia shot point-blank at them with his submachine gun, while Captain Nhung... sprayed them with bullets before using a knife on them.”
Saturday, November 2, at 9:35 A.M., President Kennedy held a meeting at the White House with his principal advisers on Vietnam. As the meeting began, the fate of Diem and Nhu was unknown. Michael Forrestal walked in with a telegram. He handed it to the president. It was from Lodge. - Page 211
The message was that “Diem and Nhu were both dead, and the coup leaders were claiming their deaths to be suicide.” 7°” But Kennedy knew they must have been murdered. General Maxwell Taylor, who was sitting with the president at the cabinet table, has described JFK’s reaction:
“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 Diem 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.”
As in the Bay of Pigs, Kennedy accepted responsibility for the terrible consequences of decisions he had questioned, but not enough. In the case of the coup, he had submitted to the pressures for the August 24 telegram and the downward path that followed, while trying to persuade Lodge to negotiate with Diem, and Diem to change course in time. Both had refused to cooperate. He had sent Torby Macdonald to Saigon to appeal personally to Diem to save his life. Diem had again been unresponsive. When Diem did finally say in effect to Kennedy through Lodge on the morning of November 1, “Tell us what you want and we’ll do it,” !° it was the eleventh hour before the coup. Lodge’s delayed transmission of Diem’s conciliatory message to Kennedy made certain that JFK would receive it too late.
Kennedy knew many, if not all, of the backstage maneuvers that kept him from reaching Diem in time, and Diem from reaching him. But he also knew he should never have agreed to the August 24 telegram in the first place. And he knew he could have thrown his whole weight against a coup from the beginning, as he had not. He had gone along with the push for a coup, while dragging his feet and seeking a way out of it. He accepted responsibility for consequences he had struggled to avoid, but in the end not enough—the deaths of Diem and Nhu.
But again, as in the Bay of Pigs, he blamed the CIA for manipulation, and in this case, assassination. In his anger at the CIA’s behind-the-scenes role in the deaths of Diem and Nhu, he said to his friend Senator George Smathers, “T’ve got to do something about those bastards.” He told Smathers that “they should be stripped of their exorbitant power.” He was echoing his statement after the Bay of Pigs that he wanted “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds.” - Page 213
His response to the news of Diem’s murder was even more pronounced. In the case of Diem, he held himself especially responsible because of his cooperation, albeit reluctant, with the coup. Had he thrown presidential caution to the winds and spoken up decisively, he might have saved Diem’s life. A badly compromised Vietnamese leader, with whom he might once have negotiated a withdrawal from the war, was now dead. All of this entered into his disgust with the Vietnam War and the strength of his deci-sion to withdraw from it.
- Page 374
The first was the question of how to deal with his rebellious ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, who wanted to escalate and “win” the war the president had decided to withdraw from.
Robert Kennedy has commented on his brother’s loss of patience with an ambassador who would not carry out his instructions or even give him the courtesy of a response to those instructions: “The individual who forced our position at the time of Vietnam was Henry Cabot Lodge. In fact, Henry Cabot Lodge was being brought back—and the President discussed with me in detail how he could be fired—because he wouldn’t communicate in any way with us... The President would send out messages, and he would never really answer them. . . [Lodge] wouldn’t communicate. It was an impossible situation during that period of time.” - Page 375
According to RFK, the president in consultation with the Attorney General had already made the decision to fire Lodge: “We were going to try to get rid of Henry Cabot Lodge.” It was only a matter of “trying to work out how he could be fired, how we could get rid of him.”
It was his successor as president, Lyndon B. Johnson, who instead presided over the Sunday, November 24, meeting with returning ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. As New York Times reporter Tom Wicker described the relationship between the two men, LBJ had a much less critical view of Lodge than did JFK, who planned to fire him: “Lodge [was] an old friend of Johnson’s from their Senate days, whom Johnson once had recommended to Eisenhower for Secretary of Defense, and who was thus close enough to the new President to speak his mind.” Johnson, a firm believer in anticommunist theology, put faith in the counsel of his old friend Lodge, who was among the Cold War elite. - Page 431
Henry Cabot Lodge died on February 27, 1985. - Page 443
Note 169. General Fabian Escalante, director of Cuba’s investigation into the assassination of President Kennedy, his assistant Arturo Rodriguez, and former Cuban ambassador Carlos Lechuga met with a group of JFK historians on December 7-9, 1995, in Nassau, Bahamas. Escalante told the group that the original source of the CIA’s information that Kennedy had “a plan to dialogue with Cuba” was none other than Henry Cabot Lodge, who learned of JFK’s consideration of a détente with Cuba as early as December 1962, half a year before Lodge became Kennedy’s ambassador to Vietnam. When CIA operative Felipe Vidal Santiago informed the Miami exile community of Kennedy’s plan, Escalante said, “it was almost like a bomb in those meetings,” infuriating the exiles against a president they already hated because of what they regarded as his betrayal of their cause at the Bay of Pigs. “Transcript of Proceedings between Cuban Officials and JFK Historians: Nassau Beach Hotel, December 7-9, 1995,” (published by JFK Lancer, 332 NE Sth Street, Grand Prairie, TX 75050), p. 33.