When LBJ Admitted to Killing a President

The architecture of surrender and its longstanding implications for U.S. foreign policy

In the film All the Way, the Lyndon B. Johnson character is shown signaling to record one of his phone calls using a Dictaphone machine. While comprising a small piece of the film, in real life LBJ recorded over 643 hours of his telephone conversations. Over of the course of a few seconds of this documentary record later released to the public, LBJ admits to participating in a murder conspiracy. No, it was not about John F. Kennedy, though several authors later accused him of that act. Instead, in a February 1, 1966 phone call he recorded of himself speaking with Senator Eugene McCarthy (who would later run in 1968 unsuccessfully for his job), LBJ admitted the U.S. role in the political assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. He laid out the situation, in his typical blunt and concise fashion, that the administration’s hand had been forced by war critics in light of the Buddhist crisis in Vietnam:

President Johnson: They started with me on Diem, you remember.

Eugene McCarthy: Yeah.

President Johnson: That he was corrupt and he ought to be killed. So we killed him. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability since then.

Eugene McCarthy: Yeah.

Unbeknownst to many in the American public, the Vietnam War had been ongoing for over a decade when this call was recorded. The U.S. Department of Defense later in 1998 reclassified the start date of the war as November 1, 1955, when the Military Assistance Advisory Group was established in Vietnam. The first U.S. service member of this group to die in the line of duty was U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Richard Bernard Fitzgibbon, Jr. on June 8, 1956. Nearly ten years later, his son, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Richard Fitzgibbon III was killed in action on September 7, 1965, making them the only American father and son military service members to die in Vietnam.

In 1955, Diem was installed as President of South Vietnam in a fraudulent election where he garnered 98.2% of the vote. As Vice-President of the United States, LBJ visited him in 1961, proclaiming Diem to be the “Winston Churchill of Asia” and “the only boy we got out there.” The U.S. government believed it could dictate terms to this asset in their client state, but Diem disagreed. Newly appointed U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. presented Diem with a list of demands, including the dismissal of his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, from government. Lodge described the meeting on August 26, 1963, in which Diem’s attitude sealed his fate from the U.S. government’s perspective:

I could see a cloud pass across his face when I suggested that he get rid of Nhu and improve his government. He absolutely refused to discuss any of the topics that President Kennedy had instructed me to raise, and that frankly jolted me. He looked up at the ceiling and talked about irrelevant subjects. I thought it was deplorable.

Diem was unaware of the fact that a month prior to this meeting, South Vietnamese generals had approached the CIA requesting support to conduct a coup to replace him and that the support had already been signaled two days before the meeting. Beginning in August 1963, JFK began to discuss this possibility with his senior staff. Johnson himself only participated in two of the many meetings that month on the coup project. The South Vietnamese generals’ sought-after greenlight arrived on August 24 in the form of Cable 243 to Lodge from the State Department, which allowed for the removal of Diem and offered material support to the South Vietnamese generals: “You may also tell [the] appropriate military commanders [that] we will give them direct support in any interim period of breakdown [of the] central government mechanism.” Months later as plans progressed, Lodge wrote on October 29 that there was nothing the Kennedy administration could do to stop the coup, except warn Diem, which they never did. A CIA report provides the details in Lodge’s own words sent in a cable:

In summary, it would appear that a coup attempt by the generals’ group is imminent . . . and that no positive action by the [U.S. Government] can prevent a coup attempt short of informing Diem and Nhu. . . . Although there have been no requests to date by the generals for material or financial support, we must anticipate that such request may be forthcoming. . . .

The CIA report further recounts the details of Diem and Nhu’s assassination, which was initially falsely reported as a suicide:

A lengthy argument took place on the night of 1-2 November as to the ultimate disposition of Diem and Nhu, with most of the generals favoring their execution. The ultimate decision was to kill them. A Captain Nhung was designated as executioner.

On the morning of 2 November, the [Military Revolutionary] Committee received a phone call from a casual informant telling where Diem and Nhu could be found. A force was dispatched to apprehend them… Shortly after 10:00 a.m., Diem and Nhu entered the [M-113 armored] personnel carrier with Captain Nhung.

Upon arrival at the JGS headquarters, Diem and Nhu were dead. Nhu had been stabbed 21 times in the back with a carbine bayonet and shot five times. Diem had been shot twice in the chest. Nhung leaped from the M-113 with the bayonet in hand and proudly displayed it to all observers. His arms were soaked with blood. From the photos, it looks as if Diem and Nhu had their hands tied behind their backs.

Missing from most accounts of the assassination was the money the CIA provided to the coup leaders immediately after: $65,000 (approximately $580,000 today accounting for inflation) to reward the participants and placate the opposition. Lucien Conein, a CIA officer and the U.S. liaison with the coup planners, delivered the funds:

At 1315 hours, the Aide de Camp to General Don came to Conein’s house, told him that the coup was in progress, and said that General Don wanted Conein at Joint General Staff (JGS) headquarters. The aide also asked Conein to bring with him as much money as Conein could readily lay hands upon. The station had stored five million piasters (about $68,000 at the official rate) in a safe in Conein’s house against such a contingency. Conein took three million with him. General Don used the money to reward opposition military units who joined the coup group. On 2 November, General Don informed Conein that he needed money to pay the families of persons killed during the coup. Conein gave General Don an addition 1,750,000 piasters. One bundle of 250,000 piasters was overlooked and was found later in Conein’s safe.

What LBJ said slightly earlier in the call contains lessons and implications for military operations that followed in the ensuing decades. Johnson cited journalist Walter Lippmann and Senator J. William Fulbright by name as critics of the Vietnam War who were attempting to force U.S. withdraw from Vietnam and described his counterview:

What they really think is we oughtn’t to be there and we ought to get out. Well, I know we oughtn’t to be there, but I can’t get out. I just can’t be the architect of surrender. And don’t...see, I’m trying every way in the world I can to find a way to end the thing. But they, they don't have the pressure that will bring them to the table as of yet. We don’t know whether they ever will. I’m willing to do damn near anything. If I told you what I was willing to do, I wouldn’t have any program. [Senate Minority Leader Everett] Dirksen wouldn't give me a dollar to operate the war. I just can’t, can't operate in a glass bowl with all these things. But I’m willing to do nearly anything a human can do, if I can do it with any honor at all.

This is an incredible admission, that it was wrong for the U.S. to be involved in the conflict, but that in his mind the political fallout would to too grave for him to ever withdraw U.S. presence in Vietnam. And so, while each President in succession attempted to secure “peace with honor,” the Vietnam War was passed from Eisenhower to JFK to LBJ to Nixon and finally to Ford, who withdrew the final U.S. forces from Saigon in 1975. In much the same fashion, the Afghanistan War was passed from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden from 2001-2021, another 20-year war where presidents did not want to be seen as the architect of surrender, to lose a war where the ultimate outcomes were obvious. In the case of Afghanistan, the U.S. followed in Russia’s footsteps, occupying the country and removing the Taliban from power, only to have the Taliban retake control after 20 years of war. Similarly, the U.S. followed in France’s footsteps in 1954 of occupying Vietnam where rival forces were equally willing to wait however long it took for U.S. withdrawal.

In the 1954 Geneva Accords, an election was scheduled for July 20, 1956 to reunify South and North Vietnam. This never occurred, however, due to opposition from Diem and the U.S. and their prediction of an almost certain electoral victory of Ho Chi Minh. Kennedy in the early 1960s also believed “Ho Chi Minh would win any nationwide election.” The U.S. government’s attempts over 20 years to prevent this eventuality resulted in the same outcome regardless: while Ho Chi Minh himself died in 1969, his forces took South Vietnam in 1975. In between, there were two decades of immense suffering and death: an estimated 1.5 million to 3.6 million casualties from all countries involved in the conflict. Kennedy escalated the war in 1961-1962 and by the time of LBJ’s call with McCarthy in February 1966, the human costs were clear. That month Senator Fulbright held hearings, which LBJ declined to attend. Fulbright instead asked U.S. General Maxwell Taylor about the American bombings of Vietnam, comparing them to the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II, lamenting the “millions of little children, sweet little children, innocent pure babies who love their mothers, and mothers who love their children, just like you love your son, thousands of little children, who never did us any harm, being slowly burned to death.”

The Vietnam War, coupled with other revelations of government misconduct from that era, has meant that since the 1970s, the American public’s trust in their government fell sharply and never fully recovered. That level of trust is currently near historic lows. For Vietnam, with an estimate of up to 3 million military and civilian dead, the effects of the war are felt to this today, in aspects such as the lasting chemical effects of Agent Orange. For the United States, with nearly 60,000 casualties and 300,000 wounded by the war’s end in 1975, there was a sentiment among the public and officials of not repeating their involvement in Vietnam. The last CIA cable out of Saigon in 1975 sent a warning to future generations that went unheeded: “This will be final message from Saigon station. It has been a long fight and we have lost. . . . Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it. Let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing off.”