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.
Who: Charles Trueheart, Former Washington Post Reporter and author, in conversation with journalist, author and Yale Law School lecturer Lincoln Caplan (http://www.lincolncaplan.com/).
When: Thursday, March 27, 2025 – 5:30pm Reception | 6:00pm Presentation | 7:30pm Post-Presentation Dinner
Where: First Congregational Church of Old Lyme
About the Speaker:
The publication of Charles Trueheart’s Diplomats at War follows his long career as a journalist and nonprofit executive, including fifteen years as a Washington Post correspondent and ten years as the director of the American Library in Paris.
The book, which alternates between historical narrative and family memoir, draws on the young years the author lived in Saigon, the son of the US deputy chief of mission and the godson of the US ambassador. Trueheart’s father, William Trueheart, and his godfather, Frederick Nolting, were graduate school friends at the University of Virginia and then US Foreign Service colleagues in Paris before their assignment to Vietnam in 1961.
Trueheart was ten at the time. After Saigon, he went on to study at Phillips Exeter Academy and then Amherst College before embarking on a journalism career that took him from Greensboro, North Carolina, to Baltimore, and to Los Angeles. In 1983, he was named associate director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard University and director of the Kennedy School’s Public Affairs Forum. In 1986, Trueheart returned to journalism as a reporter for The Washington Post as its principal writer on books, authors, the publishing industry, and literary and intellectual issues. Among the authors he interviewed and profiled for the Post were Graham Greene, John Le Carré, J. M. Coetzee, John Updike, Martin Amis, Gore Vidal, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Annie Dillard, Norman Mailer, Anthony Powell, and George F. Kennan.
In 1992, he joined the foreign staff of the newspaper and served first as Canada correspondent and then as Paris correspondent. There he followed French politics, culture, and society and covered news throughout Europe, including extensive coverage of United Nations war crimes tribunals and the war in Kosovo. After leaving the Post in 2000, he served briefly as a counselor and speechwriter for the US ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn.
In 2007, Trueheart was appointed director of the American Library in Paris, a century-old cultural nexus and the largest English-language library on the European continent. The American Library in Paris Book Award, which Trueheart founded, now honors the best work of the year in English about France and the French. He retired in 2017 and began work on Diplomats at War.
Throughout the last three decades, Trueheart has written essays and book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar, among other publications. His pieces for the Atlantic include cover stories on the American megachurch movement and the war crimes tribunals in the Hague, and for the Scholar, retrospective essays on Lawrence Durrell and Jacques Derrida.
Charles Trueheart, who was born in Washington in 1951, now divides his time between Paris and Staunton, Virginia. He is married to Anne Swardson, a former Washington Post correspondent and editor at Bloomberg News, now a blogger about France and a writer of mystery fiction. They have two adult children, Louise and Henry.