JFK’s Fatal Mistake

A veteran journalist takes another look at President Kennedy’s ambivalent role in the overthrow and assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem

In the 1950s Ngo Dinh Diem was a U.S. favorite, the man who would save South Vietnam from the communists. A few years later, JFK decided he had to go.

John F. Kennedy is today rightly remembered for his firm and steady resolve that averted nuclear catastrophe during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But nine months later, Kennedy was torn with indecision as he faced another, very different foreign policy crisis.

In the summer of 1963, Kennedy was at a loss about what to do about the increasingly repressive behavior of South Vietnam’s president, Ngo Dinh Diem. A cabal of State Department officials was pushing for a U.S.-backed military coup and got the president, who was on a weekend getaway with his family in Hyannis Port, to hastily sign off on a cable essentially green lighting one.

But Kennedy was filled with doubts. Barely five days later, he dispatched a follow-up cable whose wording should ring through the ages.