Pentagon Papers

The key plotting group consisted of three South Vietnamese generals who only "confide among themselves." The triumvirate consulted with Allied Generals only "as need arises." (The link takes you to a September 17, 1963 CIA report from Saigon to Washington.)

Led by General Duong Van Minh, the generals "would under no condition go along with Nhu should he make any step toward the North or even toward neutralization a la Laos." In other words, Minh's approach was consistent with U.S. interests.

On November 1st, an hour or so before his assassination, Diem talked with Cabot Lodge. Reading the transcript of their telephone conversation, one gets the sense that Cabot Lodge didn't know what was about to happen. A memo he sent to the President a few days later, however, tells a different story.

The Kennedy Administration had given up on Diem. Recognizing he and his brother were in serious political trouble, Diem told General Minh he would surrender power in exchange for safe passage out of the country for himself and his brother Nhu. (Madame Nhu, at the time, was in the States.) When Minh agreed, Diem disclosed his location. He and his brother were at the Saint Francis Xavier Church in Cholon, a suburb of Saigon. (Diem and his brother were Catholics.)

An M-113 armored personnel carrier was dispatched to the church under the command of Captain Nhung, General Minh's bodyguard. By all accounts, after the brothers were inside the vehicle, General Minh raised two fingers, signaling to Captain Nhung that Diem and Nhu should be killed. Nhung took care of that job himself when he riddled both brothers with bullets.

The day after Diem's assassination, a "Draft Circular Telegram on Internal Guidance on Change of Regimes in South Vietnam? attempted to distinguish the coup in South Vietnam from normal U.S. government policy against such actions.

Three days after the Diem assassination, President Kennedy dictated a memo in which he expressed regret about his August memo. With sadness in his voice, he said:

I feel that we must bear a good deal of responsibility, in part beginning with our cable of early August, in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted, it should never have been sent on a Saturday...I was shocked by the death of Diem Ngo. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a 10-year period he held his country together.

Eighteen days later President Kennedy was also dead - killed by a different assassin's bullet.