Sixty years ago, on All Souls Day of 1963, a profound tragedy occurred that would have lasting effects, not just for Americans and Vietnamese, but for all the world. It would culminate in April of 1975 with the ignominious and abrupt departure of the last American diplomats as frightened Vietnamese tried to scale the walls of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. Many made it to the helicopter landing zone on the roof of a nearby building, and clung to the skids of the last helicopters whisking embassy personnel to safety aboard U.S. Navy ships. It was, without question, the low point of our nation’s history — an episode so heart-rending that we must never forget how we abandoned a people who trusted that we would stand with them as they resisted a Communist onslaught.

Sixty years have passed since 2 November 1963, when President Ngo Dinh Diem was assassinated by coup plotters supported by the United States CIA and State Department. Diem and his brother Nhu had just attended Mass on All Souls Day when an armored personnel carrier pulled up to the church and absconded with both Diem and Nhu. They were brutally and sadistically butchered by coup leader “Big” Minh, who oversaw not just the coup but the torture and bodily desecration of the Ngo Dinh brothers.

One of the great tragedies of our cancel culture is that our government, universities, and schools are intent on changing what they call the historical “narrative”. Of course, they can’t really change what is in the past; but the architects of our new “woke” society have taken a page out of George Orwell’s 1984. These barbarians are sending actual historical events down the “memory hole,” and replacing genuine history with their own version of our country’s past. They have to do the same thing with anyone our nation ever supported, so Ngo Dinh Diem, the rightful President of Vietnam, had to be maligned as well.

If you conduct an online search of biographical information regarding President Diem, you will find that the re-writers of history have been very busy painting an ugly portrait of this courageous statesman. They want posterity to remember this good and honorable man as an American “puppet”; though in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, President Diem often ran afoul of the permanent government in the DC swamp, particularly at Foggy Bottom (home of the State Department) and at Langley, Virginia (headquarters of the CIA). Ironically, had he done the permanent government’s bidding more faithfully, he may not have been assassinated, but more on that later.

When you consider that Ngo Dinh Diem was a devout Catholic, raised by religious parents and educated in the French Catholic Schools of Vietnam, you can understand why the re-writers of history set their sights on him. To read Wikipedia, for example, one would think that Diem was nothing but a petty dictator: “Diem has been a controversial historical figure. Some historians have considered him a tool of the United States, while others portrayed him as an avatar of Vietnamese tradition. At the time of his assassination, he was widely considered to be a corrupt dictator.”

Or you could read the propaganda on the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Vietnam: “Diem was a poor administrator who refused to delegate authority, and he was pathologically suspicious of anyone who was not a member of his family. His brother and close confidant, Ngo Dinh Nhu, controlled an extensive system of extortion, payoffs, and influence peddling.” Almost sounds like they got their entries for the Biden and Ngo Dinh families mixed up. But with all the Leftist online propaganda, as well as the Marxist textbooks our tax dollars pay for in our local school systems, where does one go to find a balanced, fair, and impartial portrayal of President Diem and his times?

Thankfully, author and researcher par excellence, the late Dr. Geoffrey David Thompson Shaw, gives us just that in his 2015 book, The Lost Mandate of Heaven, published by Ignatius Press. (Sadly, Dr. Shaw died earlier this year after a valiant fight with cancer. His obituary may be seen here.) Interestingly, this amazing book was also published in 2022 in the Vietnamese language, also available from Ignatius Press.

The subtitle of the book makes our heart ache: “The American Betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem, President of Vietnam”. Beware: as you read this well-written and thoroughly fascinating book you heart will ache, too — over and over. It is a meticulously researched account of a true statesman who was initially supported by the United States, but who ran afoul of the shadowy power brokers and presidential advisors at Foggy Bottom and the vile assets at Langley that operate world-wide with absolutely no Constitutional authority.

There were, however, many Americans who saw in Diem the only man who could ultimately unite all Vietnamese, no matter which side of the 17th Parallel they called home. In fact, as Father James V. Schall, S.J., who wrote the preface for Dr. Shaw’s book, wrote: “The hero of the book is the Virginia-born American ambassador to South Vietnam Frederick Nolting. He best understood Diem, American interests, the Vietnamese situation, the Communists, and what to do about it all.” Unfortunately, as Fr. Schall points out, the American betrayal of Ngo Dinh Diem was accomplished by the dark forces still at work in our nation’s capital, who over-rode Ambassador Nolting’s recommendations and eventually engineered a coup against President Diem. “Shaw’s massively documented book,” Fr. Schall continues, “sets out to do nothing less than present a frank account of the steps that led to the killing of the great South Vietnamese leader, a man whose unjust vilification in the American media is one of almost unbelievable ignorance and willful blindness to the truth.”

The cast of characters in Geoffrey Shaw’s page-turning tragedy will remind many an armchair historian of the key political figures of the 60s– both public and shadowy. Those who dwelt in the depths of the swamp include, inter alia, the State Department’s Averell Harriman, Roger Hilsman, and Henry Cabot Lodge. On the other hand, Fr. Schall observes that President John F. Kennedy “comes across as a man intimidated by events that he really did not understand.” He himself was to be assassinated twenty days after the violent death of the great Vietnamese leader, an act to which JFK almost certainly gave tacit approval. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, meanwhile, genuinely liked President Diem, who he had personally met. He had nothing but contempt for the manipulators in the permanent government who had a hand in the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem.

This book, however, is not an ad hominem attack on anyone in particular, but rather, as Fr. Schall reminds us, “a work of careful scholarship . . . of dramatic proportions.” Indeed, author Geoffrey Shaw’s research included numerous fact-finding trips to the resource-rich archives housed at the USAF Special Operations School at Hurlburt Field, Florida. Additionally, his bibliography and list of sources take up 22 pages! Geoffrey Shaw (who, incidentally, was not Catholic, but Traditional Anglican), writing in his Preface, makes clear in his book that Ngo Dinh Diem “possessed the Confucian Mandate of Heaven, a moral and political authority that was widely recognized by the South Vietnamese, Buddhist and Catholic alike.” Dr. Shaw gives us a glimpse of the central theme of his book when he further writes: “This devout Roman Catholic leader never lost his mandate to rule in the eyes of his people; rather, it was removed by his erstwhile allies in the U.S. government.”

Fr. Schall assesses in his Foreword to the book that The Lost Mandate of Heaven is not “about a North Vietnamese victory caused by Communism’s overwhelming power and moral attraction. . . Their victory was the consequence of moral and intellectual faults on the part of American advisors.” Truer words about the tragedy that was the Vietnam War were never written or spoken. The United States literally “won the war but lost the peace.”

The Hanoi-based Communists did, as mentioned above, eventually prevail over the South; but not because of military superiority. In fact, by Christmas of 1972, due to the mining of Haiphong harbor and the relentless bombing of supply routes by the American Navy and Air Force, the North was out of surface-to-air missiles and helpless as superior U.S. air power bludgeoned the Communist infrastructure. This is the only reason that the Hanoi government conceded to the terms of the Paris Peace Accords in January of 1973. Despite Henry Kissinger’s objections to the contrary, however, the peace treaty was only a “decent interval” for the American politicians to order our military to turn tail and run, while the North Vietnamese Army’s final assault on South Vietnam occurred over the next two years. After the fall of Saigon in April of 1975, countless thousands of South Vietnamese refugees risked their lives by escaping the brutal Communist occupiers by junk, boat, and even raft.

This book is a must-read, if for no other reason than to combat the Leftist lies and propaganda to which we have been exposed regarding the Vietnam War in general, and the great Catholic leader of the free Vietnamese in particular. We are all indebted to Dr. Shaw for this fascinating work. It is the vindication of all of us who believed that President Diem and the people of Vietnam were worth saving from the evil of Communism. Geoffrey Shaw allows us to delve into the “what if” arena, wondering what Southeast Asia would look like today if the United States had not abandoned this courageous Vietnamese statesman. Make no mistake: it will be a painful read, in many ways; however, it will remind you that the 56,000 Americans who died defending the liberty of the people of South Vietnam did so for a righteous cause. While we have no desire to be the world’s policeman, we can say with certainty that this was, indeed, a just war.

Many of us who grew up in the 1950s and ’60s can still clearly recall how our teachers — whether nuns in Catholic schools or the exemplary professionals who once predominated in the public school system — instilled in us the idea that we Americans were helping the small nation of South Vietnam resist the brutal aggression of the Communist North, which was armed and supported by both the Soviet Union and Communist China. They reminded us of President Kennedy’s stirring words of his inaugural address: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”