“Careful, compact, and fair minded...as sound and reliable account as we are likely to have of U.S. deliberations and action regarding Vietnam during the Kennedy years.”

Arnold R. Isaacs, author of Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia, in Washington Post Book World, August 4, 1985

“This is an important and readable contribution to the history of American involvement in Vietnam.”

Yale historian Gaddis Smith, in Foreign Affairs, Winter 1985/86

“Deserves the attention of all serious students of American foreign policy.”

Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, in The New Republic, February 1, 1988

Kennedy in Vietnam

Born in Washington, D.C., Bill Rust is an independent researcher who specializes in the history of US relations with Southeast Asian countries. He began his editorial career at U.S. News and World Report, joining the Book Division as a researcher and subsequently contributing retrospective articles on the Vietnam War to the magazine. In 1985, Scribner’s published his first book, Kennedy in Vietnam.

For the next two decades or so, he earned a living as a writer, editor, and communications consultant for foundations and corporations. In 2008, he left this line of work to resume full-time research on the Second Indochina War. The University Press of Kentucky published three of his highly acclaimed books:

1. •Before the Quagmire: American Intervention in Laos,
   1954–1961 (2012)
   

2. •So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy
   in Laos (2014)
   

3. •Eisenhower and Cambodia: Diplomacy, Covert Action, and
   the Origins of the Second Indochina War (2016)
   

Like his earlier histories, Rust’s most recent book, The Mask of Neutrality: The United States and Decolonization in Indonesia, 1942–1950, is an “origin story,” one that shows the beginning of America’s disastrous engagement with Southeast Asia in the middle of the twentieth century.

In June 2016, he presented the paper “Plausible Denial: Eisenhower and the Dap Chhuon Coup” at the annual conference of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

“Rust’s Book, Kennedy in Vietnam, based on thousands of hours of interviews he and his colleagues at the magazine U.S. News and World Report conducted with former officials who had served in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, provided the first sustained analysis of Kennedy’s policies and the fullest portrayal yet of JFK as a conflicted warrior. Kennedy in Vietnam also offered a fuller account of what many saw as Kennedy’s most fateful policy: to support the overthrow of Ngo Dinh Diem in the fall of 1963.”

Andrew Preston in A Companion to John F. Kennedy, Marc J. Selverstone, editor, 2014

The December 2019 issue of Studies in Intelligence, the professional journal published by the Central Intelligence Agency’s Center for the Study of Intelligence, featured Rust’s in-depth profile of Lucien Conein, CIA’s principal contact with the South Vietnamese generals who overthrew and assassinated President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963. Based on recently declassified documents, “No Boy Scout: CIA Operations Officer Lucien Conein” tells the story of a polarizing French-American paramilitary specialist who served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and in its successor intelligence agencies.

In June 2020, Rust published “The Talented Dr. Ripley,” an article revealing S. Dillon Ripley’s leading role in planning operations and recruiting spies, including himself, for postwar espionage in Southeast Asia. Deeply researched, the article sheds new light on the evolution of OSS into a permanent peacetime agency.