Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict by Charles Trueheart
Reading the papers one Saturday morning in 1989, Charles Trueheart, a reporter at The Washington Post, was startled to see a familiar name on the obituary page. Frederick “Fritz” Nolting had died of an aneurysm at age 78. The Washington Post’s obit called him a professor, banker, and “retired foreign service officer” who’d served as “U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam from 1961 to 1963.”
Trueheart had spent those same years in Saigon as a not-yet-teenager. His father, Bill Trueheart, had served as Nolting’s deputy in the U.S. mission. In those days, the younger Trueheart had known Nolting by a slew of less formal titles: godfather, family intimate, and, most importantly, his father’s closest friend.
