DIPLOMATS AT WAR: Charles Trueheart and Cullen Murphy

About the Book:

Before it spread into a tragic war that defined a generation, the conflict in Vietnam smoldered as a guerrilla insurgency and a diplomatic nightmare. Into this volatile country stepped Frederick “Fritz” Nolting, the US ambassador, and his second-in-command, William “Bill” Trueheart, immortalized in David Halberstam’s landmark work The Best and the Brightest and accidental players in a pivotal juncture in modern US history.

Diplomats at War is a personal memoir by former Washington Post reporter Charles Trueheart—Bill’s son and Nolting’s godson—who grew up amid the events that traumatized two families and an entire nation. The book embeds the reader at the US embassy and dissects the fateful rift between Nolting and Trueheart over their divergent assessments of the South Vietnamese regime under Ngo Dinh Diem, who would ultimately be assassinated in a coup backed by the United States. Charles Trueheart retells the story of the United States’ headlong plunge into war from an entirely new vantage point—that of a son piecing together how his father and godfather participated in, and were deeply damaged by, this historic flashpoint. Their critical rupture, which also destroyed their close friendship, served as a dramatic preface to the United States’ disastrous involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

About the Author:

Charles Trueheart was director of the American Library in Paris from 2007 to 2017. Most of his earlier career was in journalism, including 15 years at The Washington Post, first covering book publishing and literary topics, then as a correspondent in Canada and France. Before joining the Post, Trueheart was associate director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and director of the Kennedy School of Government’s Public Affairs Forum. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar, where he is a contributing editor. His book on Vietnam during the Kennedy years, Diplomats at War, will appear in winter 2024. Trueheart was educated at Exeter and Amherst. He and his wife, Anne Swardson, live in Paris and Staunton, Virginia.

About the Moderator:

Cullen Murphy is the editor at large of The Atlantic. Previously, from 1985 to 2006, he served as The Atlantic's managing editor. Starting in 2007, for more than a decade, he was the editor at large of Vanity Fair. For 25 years he wrote the comic strip Prince Valiant, which was drawn by his father, the illustrator John Cullen Murphy. Murphy's most recent book is Just Passing Through: A Seven-Decade Roman Holiday (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2022), built around the diaries and photographs of the correspondent, critic, artist, and confidant Milton Gendel.  The American Crisis: What Went Wrong, How We Recover (Simon & Schuster, 2020), a collection, which he edited, of articles by Atlantic writers, was published in 2020.