Charles Trueheart, a journalist who waited most of his life to write a book about the bitter rupture in 1963 between two top U.S. diplomats who were also best friends — his father, William, the No. 2 diplomat in the United States embassy in Saigon, and Ambassador Frederick Nolting Jr. — over U.S. policy toward Ngo Dinh Diem, the faltering president of South Vietnam, died on Sept. 15 at his home in Staunton, Va. He was 75.
Anne Swardson, his wife, said the cause was cancer.
In the book, “Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict” (2024), Charles Trueheart focused on the brief period, from 1961 to 1963, when a coup d’état ended the regime of Mr. Diem, but before the United States began committing hundreds of thousands of troops to the war.
But it is a deeply personal story, one in which his father and Mr. Nolting, Charles’s godfather, arrived in South Vietnam as friends, but left with their relationship ruined.
“The only salve for betrayal is forgiveness,” Charles Trueheart wrote. “I think the record is pretty clear that neither Fritz nor Bill ever forgave each other. They couldn’t. It was a matter of principle.”
The events that Charles Trueheart chronicled took place in his childhood, but he would wait until his late 60s — after a career as a journalist, in academia and as director of the American Library in Paris — to write about them.
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The dispute between Bill Truehart and Fritz Nolting — who met in graduate school at the University of Virginia and who had worked together in Paris — centered on Mr. Diem, whom the two initially backed. But Bill Truheart eventually had growing doubts about the leader’s effectiveness, partly over rising unrest among Buddhists enraged by their suppression under Mr. Diem, a Catholic.
In June of 1963, while Mr. Nolting was on a long, ill-timed vacation, a monk set himself on fire on a busy boulevard in Saigon, a grisly scene that escalated protests and became an international story. As acting ambassador, Bill Truehart confronted Mr. Diem, threatening to cut off U.S. support if he didn’t enact reforms. The tough talk — done with the backing of President John F. Kennedy’s White House and State Department, which were also fast losing faith in Mr. Diem — differed from Mr. Nolting’s style.
“It angered Diem that Nolting was not there, whom he found a much more pleasant and genial character,” Charles Truehart said in an appearance at the American Library in 2024. “And he was undoubtedly insulted that it was a mere No. 2 at the embassy delivering these warnings.”
When Mr. Nolting returned, he felt betrayed by Bill Trueheart for not keeping him updated on developments in Saigon while he was away; Charles Truehart suggested that his father might have been told to stay quiet by his superiors in Washington because Mr. Nolting had “too much at stake in the Diem regime.”
That June, Mr. Nolting’s replacement, Henry Cabot Lodge, was announced; Bill Trueheart was later shifted to a State Department position in Washington. And the Nolting-Truheart friendship was permanently fractured. (Bill Trueheart never talked to his son about the rift, referring to it only as “the business with Fritz.”)
On Nov. 2, Mr. Diem, and his politically powerful brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, were assassinated in a coup d’état encouraged by the United States, three weeks before the assassination of Kennedy.
Charles Trueheart was born on Sept. 5, 1951, in Washington, and also lived in Paris, Ankara and London, where his father, a Foreign Service officer, was posted. His mother, Phoebe Anna (Everett) Trueheart, was a full-time diplomat’s wife. The Truehearts moved to Saigon when Charlie was 10.
After graduating from Amherst in 1973 with a bachelor’s degree in history, Mr. Truheart began his journalism career with The Greensboro Daily News as an editorial writer and book review editor.
In 1975, David Halberstam, the Vietnam War correspondent who had written about the Trueheart-Nolting relationship in his best-selling book, “The Best and the Brightest,” met with Mr. Trueheart after a speaking engagement in Greensboro. He told Mr. Trueheart that his father and godfather’s relationship was worthy of a novel.
Mr. Halberstam’s suggestion “set me to thinking and has made its way through four decades of thinking into these pages of nonfiction,” Mr. Truheart wrote in “Diplomats at War.”
Mr. Trueheart left Greensboro to be a columnist and editorial page editor of The Baltimore News-American, then a writer for Publishers Weekly. While working as a freelance columnist for USA Today, he worked at the Institute of Politics at Harvard from 1983 to 1986.
In 1986, he joined The Washington Post, where he wrote erudite profiles of cultural figures, including the writers Graham Greene, Norman Mailer and John Updike. In 1992, he and Ms. Swardson, whom he married in 1988, were dispatched to Toronto as Post correspondents; after four years, they were sent to the Paris bureau.
In 2000, when their assignments ended, Mr. Trueheart became chief speechwriter to Felix Rohatyn, the American ambassador in Paris. In 2007, he was named director of the American Library, a cultural center near the Eiffel Tower for expatriates that has the largest English-language library on the European continent. Mr. Trueheart was fluent in French.
During his decade at the library, he doubled membership; raised more than $2 million for its 2016 renovation; instituted its annual book award; and expanded its public programs, including author events.
“It was a venue for people to come three or four nights a week — whether from out of town or within Paris,” Cullen Murphy, a friend and writer, said in an interview. “It was like a movable feast.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Trueheart is survived by his children, Louise and Henry Trueheart, and his brother, Joshua. His 1979 marriage to Anne Roark ended in divorce.
After a decade at the library, Mr. Trueheart retired and spent seven years on “Diplomats at War.”
He relied heavily on State Department archives, which included telegrams and other declassified correspondence from 1961 to 1963; Mr. Nolting’s papers at the University of Virginia; oral history interviews; and his father’s personal letters.
The book “was his life’s work, in a sense,” Ms. Swardson said of her husband in an interview. “He had boxes of Vietnam stuff sitting around the house. He started saving stuff before we got married.”
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