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The coup against Diem has been a much-debated passage in the history of the American war in Vietnam. The National Security Archive has participated in these debates by introducing important new evidence and interpretation. In 2003 we posted an electronic briefing book with one of the first-released Kennedy tape recordings of a key White House deliberation on the final go-ahead for the coup. That post included a selection of essential documents, including the CIA briefing where the agency's director, John McCone, informed the president of the initial approaches by South Vietnamese plotters to CIA officers. The South Vietnamese demands for American support became more insistent in the second half of August, 1963, and the posting presented the National Security Council (NSC) and State Department records of a series of White House meetings and other U.S. deliberations over a coup in Saigon. A big issue, then and since, has been the so-called "Hilsman Telegram," or, more formally, Department Telegram (DepTel) 243, which instructed U.S. Ambassador to Saigon Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. to proceed in a fashion that made clear to Diem that he needed to end nepotism and curtail the activities of his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and other family members, whose efforts were impeding the counterinsurgency war then in progress. The E-book contained a selection of documents that showed how Washington considered South Vietnamese who might be alternative candidates for leadership, and jumped ahead to the final days before the coup.
In 2009 the Kennedy Library made a release of the tapes that actually covered the White House conversations of late August. The Archive built an E-book around those audiotapes, too, starting with DepTel 243 and then permitting the reader/listener to make extensive comparisons, by pairing the White House tapes with the NSC and State Department memoranda recording those same conversations. In one case we also had a record made by a senior Pentagon participant, Major General Victor Krulak. This supplemented the earlier electronic briefing book.
