The 1963 Saigon Putsch: JFK's CIA Run Amok

Jack Cheevers’ “Kennedy’s Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America’s Descent into Vietnam” (2026) is a serious and exhaustively researched account — which reads like a spy novel — of the events of early November 1963 in Saigon. The book’s account of the overthrow and murder of South Vietnam’s president, Ngô Đình Diệm, three weeks before Kennedy’s own assassination, also claims that the killing of Diệm opened the door to the full-scale American war that followed, an argument stamped on its front cover.

The title says the coup was Kennedy’s: That a president who could have stopped it instead let it happen, and that the tragedy of Vietnam begins with that failure. Cheevers’ reviewer in AIR Mail, Clifford Krauss, appears to heartily agree. I spent much of my life among the men who were in those rooms, and I believe the title is misleading.

Since graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1974 alongside my friend Zachary Sklar — who edited Jim Garrison’s “On the Trail of the Assassins” and co-wrote Oliver Stone’s “JFK” — I have met, interviewed and often befriended more than 400 people in New York, Washington and Paris: men and women who worked with John and Robert Kennedy, members of the Kennedy family, former presidents and vice presidents, key figures in seven U.S. administrations, world leaders, CIA, FBI and Secret Service agents, senior military officers, leading journalists and authors, the foremost Kennedy researchers and investigators, members of Congress, and others connected to the events. They gave me information no other journalist had.