JFK TAPE DETAILS HIGH-LEVEL VIETNAM COUP PLOTTING IN 1963; DOCUMENTS SHOW NO THOUGHT OF DIEM ASSASSINATION; U.S. OVERESTIMATED INFLUENCE ON SAIGON GENERALS.
For more information: John Prados 301/565-0564
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm
Washington DC, November 5, 2003 – A White House tape of President Kennedy and his advisers, published this week in a new book-and-CD collection and excerpted on the Web, confirms that top U.S. officials sought the November 1, 1963 coup against then-South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem without apparently considering the physical consequences for Diem personally (he was murdered the following day). The taped meeting and related documents published on the National Security Archive web site (www.nsarchive.org) show that U.S. officials, including JFK, vastly overestimated their ability to control the South Vietnamese generals who ran the coup 40 years ago this week.
The Kennedy tape from October 29, 1963 captures the highest-level White House meeting immediately prior to the coup, including the President’s brother voicing doubts about the policy of support for a coup: “I mean, it’s different from a coup in the Iraq or South American country; we are so intimately involved in this….� National Security Archive senior fellow John Prados provides a full transcript of the meeting, together with the audio on CD, in his new book-and-CD publication, The White House Tapes: Eavesdropping on the President (New York: The New Press, 2003, 331 pp. + 8 CDs, ISBN 1-56584-852-7), just published this week and featuring audio files from 8 presidents, from Roosevelt to Reagan.
To mark the 40th anniversary of the Diem coup, a critical turning point in the Vietnam war, Dr. Prados also compiled and annotated for the Web a selection of recently declassified documents from the forthcoming documentary publication, U.S. Policy in the Vietnam War, to be published in spring 2004 by the National Security Archive and ProQuest Information and Learning. Together with the Kennedy tape from October 29, 1963, the documents show that American leaders discussed not only whether to support a successor government, but also the distribution of pro-and anti-coup forces, U.S. actions that could be taken that would contribute to a coup, and calling off a coup if its prospects were not good.
“Supporting the Diem coup made the U.S. responsible for the outcome in South Vietnam in exactly the way Bobby Kennedy feared on October 29,� said Dr. Prados. “Ironically, though, as the conversation continued, he and the other doubters abandoned these larger considerations and concentrated only on whether a coup would succeed – nothing else mattered.
The posting today also includes the transcript of Diem’s last phone call to U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, inquiring “what the attitude of the U.S. is � towards the coup then underway; Lodge dissembled that he was not “well enough informed at this time to be able to tell you.
Click on the link below for the audio clip, documents and analysis:
http://www.nsarchive.org/NSAEBB/NSAEBB101/index.htm _________________________________________________________________________ THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.
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