Frederick Nolting Jr.

Frederick E. {"Buzz") Nolting, Jr. (1911-1989) was United States Ambassador to the Republic of Vietnam (May 10, 1961 — August 15, 1963). Succeeded by Henry Cabot Lodge, he was the last ambassador that was committed, by U.S. policy, to support Ngo Dinh Diem as President of South Vietnam. Elbridge Durbrow preceded him in office.

Nolting believed the Ngo Dinh Diem government was making significant economic progress in 1960-1963, but its achievements were misrepresented by the U.S. press. He also was highly critical of U.S. officials who would look at Vietnam in isolation, rather than in the broader context of Southeast Asia.

Early career

A career diplomat, Nolting earned a 1933 undergraduate degree in history, and a masters' and doctorate in philosophy, from the University of Virginia, and a second master's in philosophy from Harvard. After Navy service, he joined the State Department in 1946, becoming an assistant to John Foster Dulles. Before Saigon, he deputy chief of the United State mission to the North Atlantic Treaty Organiztion and to the Organization for European Economic Cooperation.

Vietnam

In general, he considered U.S. relations with Diem to be dishonorable. When negotiating with Diem in 1961, Diem said his country needed American help, but wanted to be sure that the U.S. would not try. Nolting reported that Diem said that as elected president, Diem could not surrender authority; in an oral history interview, Nolting raised no question about the legitimacy of the election.

When Nolting carried Diem's request for assurances back to Washington, President Kennedy “[told] him that we had no idea of interfering in his internal affairs.” Two years later, however, our government “did exactly what I had been instructed to promise him we wouldn’t do.”

While he agreed that Ngo Dinh Dhu was a public relations problem, he said that it was a politically impossible demand, drawing the interesting parallel if John F. Kennedy had been asked to get rid of his brother, Robert Kennedy.

He felt the press was especially deceptive with respect to something he always put in quotes, the "“Buddhist uprising.” He considered it a specific political effort by a newly organized General Association of Vietnamese Buddhists, which Nolting said was not representative of Buddhists.

Nolting had been criticized for being too supportive of Diem, but said he was not in “all-out agreement with Diem” and spent a great deal of time arguing with him, “trying to get him to do things that he didn’t want to do or couldn’t see his way clear to doing.” He said Diem kept his word, and Nevertheless, the two “always managed to have straight-out relations,” and they “respected each other.” Nolting noted that if Diem promised to do something, he would do it.

A relationship of confidence between us and between our mission and his government had been built up so that we could help him. Then suddenly it was broken, and those of us who had worked very hard, including General [Paul D.] Harkins and John Richardson and others, to build this relationship, found ourselves classified as pro-Diem people, even though we had been using this relationship to try to influence his government in many ways in which they didn’t want to move. But, when once this political crisis developed, you found yourself isolated from the growing influence in Washington who were fed up with the government out there, overinfluenced in my opinion by the American press.

He considered the 1960-1963 problem to be principally military, and that Diem, if supported, "would have made it and would have gradually succeeded in pacifying the country and making a reasonably viable place out of South Vietnam.”