One November
Two Catholic Presidents. Two Assassinations. Three Weeks Between Saigon and Dallas.
I. The News from Saigon
Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu was eight thousand miles from Saigon when the government around which she had built her adult life collapsed.
For weeks she had been traveling through the United States, giving speeches, granting interviews, sparring with reporters and defending South Vietnam against what she considered a campaign of American misunderstanding. She had left Saigon with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Le Thuy, while her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, remained beside his older brother, President Ngo Dinh Diem. The tour had become a spectacle in its own right. Madame Nhu was already one of the most recognizable — and polarizing — women in international politics.
Then, on November 1, 1963, the story changed.
South Vietnamese generals moved against the presidential palace. Diem and Nhu escaped during the night, making their way to Cholon, the largely Chinese district roughly four miles southwest of central Saigon. There they took refuge with a friend before going the following morning to St. Francis Xavier Church — better known as Cha Tam Church — where eyewitness accounts place the Catholic brothers at Mass and in prayer. They surrendered soon afterward and were taken into custody, their hands bound, and placed inside an armored personnel carrier for the journey back toward military headquarters. They never arrived alive. Both men were killed inside the vehicle en route.
In California, Madame Nhu initially received confused reports. Suicide was announced; assassination was rumored. By November 4, an American aide traveling with her, William K. Eliscu, told reporters that a senior Vietnamese general had telephoned Madame Nhu directly and confirmed that her husband and brother-in-law had been killed. Contemporary reports identify Eliscu simply as her aide; a later account described him more specifically as having served as her security officer. He was a former OSS man who had gone on to work in film and television, an intriguing figure but, for the moment, a supporting character in a much larger drama.
Madame Nhu did not respond quietly.
A State Department cable summarized the statement she issued after the coup as holding the United States responsible and using phrases including “cruel treachery,” “treason” and “dirty crime.” Washington officials were sufficiently concerned about the reaction to the deaths that they pressed the new authorities in Saigon for clarification and worried about the safety of the surviving Ngo children.
In Los Angeles the reaction around Madame Nhu was also substantial. A November 5 report in the Midland Reporter-Telegram said that more than 3,000 telegrams and messages had poured into her hotel suite since the coup and that most were sympathetic. Eliscu told reporters that some referred to her personal loss while others supported her anti-Communist position.
The numbers matter. Madame Nhu had not merely acquired a few eccentric admirers during her American tour. There was an audience for what she represented — and, following November 2, for what had happened to her family.
But to understand why her accusation struck such a nerve in the United States, it is necessary to return briefly to Saigon.
The catastrophe had not appeared from nowhere.
The Road to November
American memory, shaped by hasty schoolbook curricula and by a half-century of Vietnam War movies centered on American disillusionment — tends to begin with the Gulf of Tonkin, the arrival of combat troops and the helicopter war that followed, leaving the long years of American involvement before 1964 in a kind of historical fog.
But by the summer of 1963, relations between Washington and the Diem government had deteriorated dramatically.
The Buddhist crisis had exposed profound political tensions inside South Vietnam. The crisis worsened after the August 21 raids on Buddhist pagodas carried out by forces associated with Nhu. Three days later, Washington sent Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge a telegram that became one of the pivotal documents of the Kennedy administration’s Vietnam policy.
Cable 243 declared that the United States could no longer tolerate a situation in which effective power rested with Nhu. Diem was to be given an opportunity to remove his brother and Nhu’s circle from power. If he would not do so, the cable continued, Washington would have to confront the possibility that Diem himself could not be preserved.
The significance of that message has been debated ever since. It was not an American order to murder Diem, nor did it lay out the November coup that eventually took place. But it unmistakably opened the question of replacing a government the United States had spent years supporting.
Within the Kennedy administration, the question produced bitter division. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Gen. Maxwell Taylor, Attorney General Robert Kennedy and CIA Director John McCone were among those wary of abandoning Diem without a credible successor. State Department officials including Averell Harriman and Roger Hilsman were increasingly convinced that the regime itself had become an obstacle. Lodge, who had only recently arrived in Saigon, was less reluctant than his predecessor to contemplate political change.
When at some point during those arguments Kennedy reportedly exclaimed, “My God, my administration is coming apart,” the line captures something the documentary record makes unmistakable: Washington was not operating with a single mind.
Meanwhile, the French-born, Kansas-raised CIA officer Lucien Conein became the American channel to the Vietnamese generals. Washington’s position settled into an awkward formulation: the United States would not initiate a coup, but neither would it necessarily thwart one. By October 29, officials were assessing the generals’ attempt as imminent; Lodge warned that Washington might receive as little as four hours’ notice.
This was the political climate hanging over Saigon while Madame Nhu crossed the United States.
On October 27 she spoke with her husband by telephone for the last time. They discussed mundane details of her return journey. Yet Nhu apparently understood that the situation around him was becoming hopeless. By then the family itself had begun to scatter. Archbishop Thục had been maneuvered out of Vietnam weeks earlier, after Dean Rusk’s State department pressed the Vatican to remove him from the political scene — coinciding exactly with the Second Vatican Council — while the Nhus’ three younger children were away from Saigon in Dalat under guard. Madame Nhu was preparing to go home. Events in Saigon were making it increasingly unlikely that there would be a home to return to.
II. Madame Nhu Finds Her Americans
The irony of Madame Nhu’s October tour was that, while official Washington was steadily losing confidence in the Ngo family, she was finding Americans outside the administration who regarded that same family as a bulwark against Communism. To some on the anti-Communist right, there was even the faint suggestion of another Madame Chiang Kai-shek: a glamorous, outspoken Asian woman carrying her country’s case directly to the American public.
The Diệm presidency had once enjoyed remarkable support in the United States. President Eisenhower praised his achievements; Vice President Richard Nixon visited him in Saigon; and Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts emerged as one of the most prominent voices championing the new South Vietnamese state. Kennedy himself was a member of the American Friends of Vietnam, an organization created in 1955 to build American support for Diệm and his government.
And so when Madame Nhu arrived in American at the moment American support for her family’s government was collapsing, her supporters formed a loose and sometimes unlikely coalition of Catholics, businessmen, anti-Communists, academics, journalists, conservative activists and political personalities. Some belonged unmistakably to the American right. Others did not fit so neatly.
One of the most colorful was Dudley Dougherty.
A wealthy South Texas rancher, former state legislator and political figure, Dougherty entertained Madame Nhu and 18-year-old daughter Le Thuy at his ranch outside Beeville on October 23. Newspaper coverage treated the visit as something between diplomacy and celebrity tourism. Madame Nhu spoke to the press; Le Thuy went skeet shooting. Dougherty later said that he had invited Madame Nhu so that she could speak freely. Contemporary Beeville and San Antonio newspapers gave the visit prominent coverage.
Then the visit acquired an almost comic subplot — if it wasn’t for there being more than meets the eye.
Dougherty’s twenty-four-year-old nephew Bruce Baxter III took an interest in Le Thuy. Baxter was not entirely unfamiliar with Vietnam. He later told reporters that he had been in Saigon once before, in either 1959 or 1960, with a television company attempting to film a series there, although he said he had not known the Nhu family at the time.
Baxter followed the Nhu party west to California, appearing with Le Thuy around the Beverly Wilshire, taking her to Hollywood nightspots and accompanying the entourage north to San Francisco. An Associated Press account called him her only “real” boyfriend of the American trip. On at least one outing Le Thuy’s chaperones included Vietnamese representative To Ngoc Thac and William Eliscu.
The episode might seem trivial, but it gives the tour its human scale. While Washington and Saigon were moving toward a coup, a Texas oil heir who had already passed briefly through South Vietnam was pursuing the daughter of the woman whose family stood at the center of the crisis.
Another figure at Dougherty’s ranch is more puzzling.
During a press interview on October 23, a man from Fort Lauderdale named Paul A. Reddam stepped in to end the questioning as guests began arriving for dinner. The Associated Press described him only as being “associated with” Dougherty.
That description conceals an interesting political wrinkle that one must dig deep to uncover: a study of the 1960 campaign identifies Paul Reddam as a Kennedy advance man involved in preparations for the Johnson-Kennedy campaign trip through Texas. His association with the Kennedys apparently went back much further. Reddam had been active around John Kennedy’s early political campaigns in Massachusetts, attended the 1961 inauguration, and was reportedly a guest at RFK’s wedding in 1950.
Reddam, therefore, complicates any simple picture of Madame Nhu being passed from one Kennedy-hating conservative to another. The social and political world through which she traveled contained people with quite different relationships to the administration. It begs the question: was Reddam there on behalf of Dougherty, which the papers said he was, or was he there as a kind of spy for the Kennedys?
And then there was Eliscu.
For the purposes of this story he should remain what contemporary readers would have seen: Colonel William K. Eliscu of New York, the former OSS figure traveling with Madame Nhu and later described as her security officer. His presence is worth noting precisely because he illustrates how eclectic her American entourage had become. But whatever brought Eliscu into her orbit — and that remains an interesting unanswered question — he was one of several Americans who had attached themselves to Madame Nhu’s journey before the journey became a bereavement tour.
By the final days of October she had left Texas for California.
Across the Pacific, the generals were finishing their plans.
III. From Political Defeat to American Accusation
When Diem and Nhu died, the American argument changed almost instantly.
Until November 2, it had been possible to debate whether Washington should withdraw support from Diem, pressure him, encourage alternative leadership or simply tolerate a coup carried out by Vietnamese generals.
A corpse or two creates a different argument.
Madame Nhu supplied its most uncompromising version. Whatever Washington’s exact role in the coup, she treated the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law as the consequence of American policy.
She was not alone in asking where political responsibility ended and moral responsibility began.
Journalist Marguerite Higgins, who had been sympathetic to the Diem government, contacted Assistant Secretary of State Roger Hilsman after the coup. The bitterness of her reaction became part of the immediate Washington aftermath. Meanwhile members of Congress and columnists began publicly asking how far American responsibility extended. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield mourned the collapse of a government he had once regarded with considerable hope and called for a broad reassessment of American policy in Southeast Asia; Senators Claiborne Pell and J. Caleb Boggs rose to endorse his remarks. Senator Frank Lausche went further, questioning the rush to recognize a military government that had overthrown the government in Saigon.
On the anti-Communist right, the reaction was sharper still. Clare Boothe Luce attacked the American treatment of Madame Nhu and explicitly invoked the earlier abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek. At its November gathering, Young Americans for Freedom condemned American participation in the overthrow of the South Vietnamese government. And by November 19, National Review was still litigating the meaning of what had happened: William F. Buckley Jr. eulogized Diệm while James Burnham examined the coup under the ominous title “The Revolution on the Mekong.”
What had begun as a crisis within the Diệm government was becoming something else: an argument among Americans over whether the United States had merely witnessed the destruction of an ally — or helped bring it about.
Kennedy himself confronted the question privately.
On November 4 he dictated an extraordinary memorandum for his own record. The coup, he said, had culminated months of discussion that had divided the government both in Washington and Saigon. He acknowledged that the United States had to bear “a good deal of responsibility” for what had happened, beginning with the August cable. But he also emphasized his horror at the killing of the two brothers and his concern about what would replace them. The National Archives preserves the recording and transcript.
This distinction is important. Kennedy’s admission of responsibility for the political process that helped create conditions for the coup is not evidence that he ordered the murders. His own recording shows him distinguishing between the two: he regretted the decision-making process, accepted substantial American responsibility for encouraging the coup, and described himself as shocked by the deaths.
Outside the administration, however, distinctions were already collapsing.
To some of Madame Nhu’s American sympathizers, it was no longer enough to say that Washington had helped undermine Diem. The Kennedy administration had betrayed an anti-Communist ally, and the deaths followed.
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That interpretation found particularly fertile ground among elements of the American right.
One of the more interesting bridges was the Belgian-born Catholic priest Raymond de Jaegher, a longtime anti-Communist activist in Asia who had known and supported the Diem government. Later research into his activities indicates that after the overthrow he remained loyal to the Ngo family and provided Madame Nhu with financial assistance.
Then there were Kent and Phoebe Courtney of New Orleans, the husband-and-wife publishers of The Independent American. They were well established in conservative anti-Communist politics; both were associated with the John Birch Society, while Kent chaired the Conservative Society of America.
On November 20, according to a Times-Picayune report, Kent Courtney explicitly connected Madame Nhu’s bereavement to Kennedy. Courtney said that responsibility for the “bloodshed of her kin” lay “on the hands of the Kennedys.”
The language is significant not because Courtney represented mainstream American opinion — he did not — but because it shows how quickly Madame Nhu’s interpretation had entered a recognizable American political vocabulary.
It had taken eighteen days.
Meanwhile Madame Nhu herself had moved from the hotel into the Bel Air home of financier Allen Chase, who had business interests in Asia and Australia and told reporters that he had met Diem in Saigon. Chase and his wife opened their home to Madame Nhu, Le Thuy and her secretary as she contemplated her future.
Thus, in the first weeks of November, a peculiar constituency gathered around the fallen Ngo family: old Asian anti-Communists, Catholic allies, wealthy hosts, conservative publishers and people acquired almost accidentally during Madame Nhu’s American tour.
Not all of them blamed Kennedy. Not all of them even shared the same politics. Richard Nixon would later make the connection more explicitly, arguing that Kennedy had not intended Diem’s murder but that his administration had set in motion the events that led to it.
But among some of them a narrative was taking shape.
America had abandoned Diem.
Diem had been overthrown.
Diem and Nhu had been murdered.
And someone in Washington had blood on his hands.
IV. “Blood on Our Hands?”
That phrase, or variations of it, began appearing almost immediately.
It is worth lingering on because the question was not confined to people normally dismissed as extremists.
The coup had left the administration in an uncomfortable position. Washington had clearly encouraged conditions conducive to political change, maintained contact with the generals and decided not to intervene to save Diem. Yet the killing of Diem and Nhu had not been the declared objective of American policy.
But such hair splitting becomes difficult to explain after bodies appeared.
Kennedy’s November 4 recording is perhaps the clearest evidence of his own discomfort. It is not the voice of a president celebrating an accomplished plan. He worried that he should never have approved the August cable as he had, lamented the lack of a full meeting beforehand and wondered whether the generals could construct anything more stable than the government they had destroyed.
Madame Nhu did not grant Washington those nuances. Because for her, the United States had helped make the catastrophe possible and therefore could not escape the consequences. That judgment was personal before it was ideological. She had lost her husband. Her children had lost their father. Her brother-in-law — the president whose government she had defended across America — was dead beside him. And she warned that the consequences would not end with the Ngo family. If the United States had blessed their destruction, she told reporters, “the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning.”
It was less a political analysis than a prophecy of consequences.
And it was an accusation with legs. It could be repeated by a reporter, a member of Congress, an anti-Communist activist or a newspaper publisher without requiring agreement over every detail of how the coup had been conceived.
As evidenced by the 3,000 messages to her hotel room, sympathy for Madame Nhu after November 2 demonstrated that the death of the Ngo brothers produced an American response considerably larger than the familiar caricature of Madame Nhu as a despised “Dragon Lady” might suggest. If her October tour had created an audience, the November turmoil transformed it.
And then the language of Diem’s death traveled somewhere else.
Dallas.
V. Welcome Mr. Kennedy
On the morning of November 22, 1963, readers of the Dallas Morning News encountered a full-page advertisement enclosed in a heavy black border.
The headline read:
WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS.
Kennedy had seen the morning’s advertisement before leaving Fort Worth. “We’re heading into nut country today,” he told the First Lady.
Below it appeared a series of hostile questions concerning the president’s policies toward Communism, Cuba, the United Nations and the actions of his administration.
One question was unusually relevant to an event only twenty days old. It asked why American foreign policy had reached the point at which the CIA was arranging coups and having staunch anti-Communist allies “bloodily exterminated.”
When the Warren Commission questioned Bernard Weissman, whose name appeared on the advertisement as chairman of the American Fact-Finding Committee, Representative Gerald Ford asked him directly what the passage meant. Weissman said it referred specifically to Vietnam: the overthrow of Diem and the subsequent killing of Diem and his associates.
Weissman testified that he had not wanted it in the advertisement. Someone contributing money to the project insisted upon it. According to Weissman, Dallas activist Joseph Grinnan handed him the additional language at the last moment and told him simply: “This has to go in.” Weissman himself said he had supported the coup.
- On November 2, Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were murdered in Saigon. Madame Nhu, stranded in America, accused the United States of betrayal. Americans began arguing over responsibility. Some of her political sympathizers converted that responsibility into an accusation against the Kennedy administration.
- On November 20, Kent Courtney publicly placed the bloodshed of Madame Nhu’s family “on the hands of the Kennedys.”
- And on the morning of November 22, before the presidential motorcade entered Dealey Plaza, a black-bordered advertisement greeting Kennedy in Dallas asked why his government had permitted an anti-Communist ally to be overthrown and “bloodily exterminated.”
Three weeks had passed since the coup. Eighteen days had passed since Kennedy privately recorded his own troubled assessment of America’s responsibility.
The two events that would forever dominate November 1963 had not yet merged in historical memory.
For a brief interval, the assassination Americans were arguing about was not Kennedy’s.
It was Diem’s.
And Madame Nhu, moving across an America that had received her first as a curiosity, then as a controversial foreign dignitary, and finally as a widow, occupied the strange space between them.
By nightfall on November 22, the accusation that the Kennedy administration had helped unleash an assassination overseas would belong to another world.
President Kennedy was dead.
And the meaning of November had changed again.
CODA: DIVINE RETRIBUTION
In the years that followed, the strange proximity of the two assassinations continued to haunt Lyndon Johnson.
Johnson had opposed removing Diem. And after becoming president, he increasingly spoke of the November coup not as an unfortunate episode in somebody else’s administration, but as a catastrophic American mistake.
The most startling expression of that belief concerned Kennedy himself.
According to several people who heard him, Johnson sometimes described the murder in Dallas as “divine retribution” for what had happened to Diem.
Pierre Salinger later recalled Johnson saying that Kennedy’s death might have been divine punishment for American involvement in the deaths of Diem — and of Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Robert Kennedy subsequently repeated the story to Arthur Schlesinger. Former CIA director Richard Helms remembered the same idea. In a 1975 deposition, Helms testified that Johnson used to say Kennedy had been killed because he had been responsible for Diem’s death: in Johnson’s formulation, it was a kind of justice.
One president had allowed forces to be set in motion that ended with another president murdered.
Three weeks later, violence came home.
God — or history — had balanced the account.
By 1966, with Vietnam consuming his own presidency, Johnson was recorded speaking to Senator Eugene McCarthy about Diem.
His language was no longer cautious.
“We killed him,” Johnson said.
The United States, he complained, had gathered up a group of Vietnamese generals and helped create the circumstances in which Diem was assassinated. And ever since, Johnson said, South Vietnam had known no political stability. The surviving presidential recording leaves little doubt about how Johnson himself had come to narrate the event.
