Charles Trueheart of Staunton lived in Vietnam in the early 1960s as conflict arose between the Asian nation and the United States government.
His father, Deputy Chief of Mission William Trueheart, and his godfather, Ambassador Frederick Nolting, were diplomats in Vietnam. They were best friends before, but afterward never spoke to each other again. The situation haunted Charles Trueheart so he wrote a book about it.
Trueheart will speak at 7 p.m. on Thursday, September 25, 2025 at the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library about “Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict.”
“I hope I do what I can to complicate people’s understanding of the Vietnam War,” Trueheart said. “And to tell them this personal story that I doubt not many people know about it even though it’s been covered in a number of books.”
Research for the book brought Trueheart to Charlottesville more than six years ago where he pored through documents in the special collections at UVA. He and his wife were also encouraged to visit Staunton.
“We just kind of fell in love with the town,” Trueheart said.
The same weekend they bought a house on East Beverley Street in downtown Staunton. They also maintain an apartment in Paris, which Trueheart has called home since 1996 and where he led the nonprofit The American Library.
Born in Washington, D.C., Trueheart grew up overseas. He and his family returned to the U.S. when he was 13 years old.
Earlier in his career, Trueheart was a journalist, including writing for The Washington Post for 15 years until 2000.
After a trip to Vietnam with his son in 2016 and retiring from the nonprofit in 2017, Trueheart began the journey to write a nonfiction book about how the Vietnam War impacted his father’s and godfather’s lives. The book was published in March 2024.
“I think my father had a bitter taste in his mouth about what happened in Vietnam,” Trueheart said. “It’s possible he felt partially responsible for the mess that we got into.”
After returning to the United States, his father became an ambassador, but his godfather left the foreign service. The two men, who were both from Virginia, never spoke to each other again. Trueheart’s mother told him that his father became very anti-war after Vietnam.
According to Trueheart, as conflict arose in the early 1960s between the Vietnam and U.S. governments, conflict arose between his father and godfather. The politics of the situation put the two best friends at odds and each felt betrayed by the other “who began to see things very differently about what we ought to be doing in Saigon. And it ended very badly, very bitterly between them and they never spoke to each other again.”
The destruction of a personal relationship he saw as very close is what haunted Trueheart into adulthood. His father died in 1992. Trueheart never tried to talk with his father about what happened in Vietnam and his father never initiated conversation about it.
While details differ, similarities may be drawn of the conflict arising in the early 1960s between the two countries and political conflict in 2025 in the U.S. between Democrats and Republicans.
Communication between countries has changed, Trueheart said. In the 1960s, the U.S. government relied on foreign service officials like his father and godfather to defuse a situation. Today, such a grand problem would be settled by government officials picking up a telephone or getting on an airplane to fly to the other country.
“But, in those days, they had to trust diplomats, trust people on the ground and give them a lot of discretion to read the situation as they saw it and to respond to it,” Trueheart said. “So it’s a very different world. Obviously, Woodrow Wilson was trying to figure structures that would make this kind of drama not happen.”
President Woodrow Wilson was a peacekeeper. As a child in Georgia, he witnessed the destruction of the American Civil War. As an American president in the 1910s, he worked toward founding the League of Nations, now known as the United Nations. Trueheart’s book chronicles what happens when peace is not reached and what Wilson had hoped America and other countries would avoid after his time as president.
Trueheart said if a lesson can be learned from the early 1960s it is about U.S. presidents attempting regime changes and nation building according to the way Americans see it. Vietnam endured 1,000 years of colonial domination before the American government attempted to intervene in the 1960s.
“They don’t like outsiders dominating them and telling them what to do. And when great powers get involved, it was not about north and south Vietnam. It became about Washington and Moscow or Washington v. Beijing, something like that. It never ends well,” Trueheart said. He cited a recent example of the U.S.’s attempt to create change in the governments in Iraq and Afghanistan. “There are kind of obvious historical lessons.”
Trueheart’s book focuses on how the relationship between two countries and between two American men were destroyed in the 1960s.
Registration for WWPL’s Speaker Series is requested online.
“Diplomats at War” is available for purchase online, at WWPL and at Staunton Tea & Books.
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Rebecca Barnabi
