Kennedy’s Coup: How Diem’s Assassination Became Our Foreign Policy Albatross
In a stunningly detailed new book, ex-Los Angeles Times reporter and author Jack Cheevers pieces together heretofore unseen government cables and memos gleaned from dozens of Freedom of Information requests, eyewitness accounts, and the rich history of Vietnam to bring the story of how the Vietnam War became a killing fields for millions and the worst US foreign policy failure of the 20th Century. Focusing on the key years of 1961-1963, Cheevers pinpoints the exact moments where the Kennedy Administration could have made the right decisions but due to factionalism in his own administration and among agencies, including the CIA, the US Military, and State Department, he succumbed to the worst instincts and chose coup. The rest as they say, is history.
The author joined National Security Archive fellow Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi to talk about his book, as well as the Archive’s work in this tumultuous period just before Kennedy’s own assassination. Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, editor-in-chief at Responsible Statecraft, moderated.
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Jack Cheevers
Jack Cheevers is the author of "Kennedy's Coup: A White House Plot, a Saigon Murder, and America's Descent into Vietnam", released this month with Simon & Schuster. He is also the author of Act of War: Lyndon Johnson, North Korea, and the Capture of the Spy Ship Pueblo, winner of the 2014 Samuel Eliot Morison Award for Naval Literature. He worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for twenty-seven years, including stints at the Los Angeles Times, The Oakland Tribune, and the Associated Press and United Press International bureaus in San Francisco. A Massachusetts native, he is a proud graduate of the University of California at Berkeley.
Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi
Arturo Jimenez-Bacardi is associate professor of Instruction in International Relations in the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida. He is also a Research Fellow at the National Security Archive in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Irvine. He just completed a Digital National Security Archive set of 2,500 declassified documents titled "CIA Covert Operations: The Truman Years, 1946-1953" which will be published by ProQuest in the spring of 2026. His most recent article for the National Security Archive is "Imperial Prerogative: How the Panama Invasion and the 'Barr Doctrine' Set the Stage for Maduro 'snatch' Operation."
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is editor-in-chief at Responsible Statecraft and a senior advisor at the Quincy Institute. Previously she was executive editor of The American Conservative magazine. Before joining TAC in 2017, Vlahos served as a contributing editor to the magazine, reporting and publishing regular articles on U.S. war policy, civil liberties, foreign policy, veterans, and Washington politics since 2007. She also spent 15 years as a political reporter for Fox News.com at its national bureau in Washington, DC.