The Ugly American Telegram

ON Aug. 24, 1963, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, received a top-secret message with the bureaucratically anodyne title Deptel 243. But the content of the message was anything but routine. Hastily drafted and cleared over the course of a single day, with most of official Washington on vacation, Deptel 243, also known as the Hilsman telegram, signaled a major shift in American policy. A few days later Mr. Lodge remarked, “We are launched on a course from which there is no respectable turning back.”