Forty-nine years ago, David Halberstam told a young Charles Trueheart that there was a great novel in the story of how Vietnam ended the warm friendship between his father and his godfather. Bill Trueheart and Fritz Nolting (I’ll call them Bill and Fritz to avert père–fils confusion and preserve parity between the two combatants) were career foreign service officers posted to Saigon during John F. Kennedy’s administration. Fritz, the ambassador, hand-picked Bill to be his deputy. They’d known each other since 1939 when they were graduate students in philosophy at the University of Virginia. For two years, Bill and Fritz worked in close harmony. Their families were already close—their wives dear friends, Fritz godfather to both of Bill’s sons—but they drew closer in Saigon. It didn’t last.
The rift that made Bill and Fritz enemies—they never again spoke—concerned what to do about Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, America’s imperious and unpopular partner in the twilight struggle against communism. On November 2, 1963, that question was resolved with Diem’s assassination in a CIA-assisted coup. Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, initiating a sequence of events that led to the massive escalation of U.S. troops in Vietnam. The full-scale war that ensued tore the country apart just as it tore Bill and Fritz apart. In the end, nothing was achieved, really, except the death of 58,000 American soldiers, 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers, and 2 million Vietnamese civilians—and the death, too, of the Cold War liberal consensus.
Halberstam was friendly with Bill in Vietnam and not especially friendly with Fritz, who shunned reporters. As a result, when Halberstam gave Bill and Fritz’s story a few pages of The Best and the Brightest, his narrative about how America stumbled into the Vietnam quagmire, he mostly took Bill’s side. But Halberstam well understood that the falling-out was complex and cried out for a larger stage. So, he handed the assignment to Bill’s son, a precocious young author (Charles Trueheart wrote his first published book at 17), then working as an editorialist at the Greensboro Daily News and later an accomplished feature writer and Paris correspondent for The Washington Post. Half a century later, Trueheart has produced not a novel but a work of nonfiction, Diplomats at War, so deeply researched, thoughtfully considered, and elegantly crafted that it should sit comfortably beside The Best and the Brightest, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, and Frances FitzGerald’s Fire in the Lake, the three most acclaimed books about the Vietnam War.