In the summer of 1963, while his ambassador and closest friend was away on vacation, a mid-level American diplomat in Saigon backed the U.S.-supported coup that toppled South Vietnam's president. Charles Trueheart, the diplomat's son, who spent four decades as a Washington Post writer, foreign correspondent and library director before turning that family rupture into an acclaimed book, died September 15, 2026, at his home in Staunton, Virginia. He was 75.

The book was "Diplomats at War: Friendship and Betrayal on the Brink of the Vietnam Conflict," published in 2024 after years of research into the falling-out between his father, William C. Trueheart, and Ambassador Frederick E. "Fritz" Nolting Jr., who was also Charles's godfather. The two men, friends since their days as University of Virginia classmates, split over whether South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem should remain in power. While Nolting was on leave in 1963, the elder Trueheart backed the coup in which Diem was killed; Nolting was dismissed as ambassador and, by his son's account, never spoke to his old friend again. Charles Trueheart built the book from family letters, declassified government records and oral history. Reviewing it in The Post, the author Andrew Meier wrote that Trueheart "has achieved something rare in the annals of diplomatic history," and the historian Evan Thomas called it "absolutely top of the line. It's a beautiful book." In 2024 the book won the Douglas Dillon Book Award from the American Academy of Diplomacy, given annually for the finest book on the practice of diplomacy.

Trueheart had grown up inside the story he eventually wrote. Born in Washington on September 5, 1951, the older of two sons, he trailed his father's Foreign Service postings through Paris, Ankara, London and Saigon, arriving in Vietnam as a ten-year-old in 1961, two years before the rupture that would define his father's career and, six decades later, his own last book.

He studied at Phillips Exeter Academy and then Amherst College, graduating in 1973 as a history major and editor of the student newspaper, according to Yahoo News. He had already published a first book, "Kyrie," a collection of letters written to one of his teachers, in 1971, at 19.

Journalism came by a roundabout route: editorial pages in Baltimore and in Greensboro, North Carolina, a posting as West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly, and a run as a magazine columnist for USA Today. From 1983 to 1986 he was associate director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School.

In 1986 he joined The Washington Post as a Style section writer, covering books, authors and the publishing world, and produced profiles of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Graham Greene, John Updike and John le Carre that carried some of the stylistic polish of the novelists he covered. "His writing skills were so comprehensive," his editor Robert Wilson said, "from a lovely quick-turnaround piece when E.B. White died, to a thoughtful assessment of Jacques Derrida's contribution to the culture, to engaging writer profiles ... He could do it all." Across three decades he also wrote essays and book reviews for The Atlantic Monthly and The American Scholar.

He moved to the foreign staff in 1992, serving as Canada correspondent and then, from 1996 to 2000, as Paris correspondent, reporting on French politics and society and on the war crimes tribunal at The Hague as the Balkans conflict and the Kosovo crisis unfolded. When the posting ended in 2000, he served briefly as a counselor and speechwriter for Felix Rohatyn, the U.S. ambassador to France, according to his author website, and he and his wife chose to stay on afterward in Paris, the city where he had lived as a child.

They raised their own children there and led a bilingual life, and he took on the chairmanship of the American Cathedral's governing board. From 2007 to 2017 he directed the American Library in Paris, which his own biography describes as a century-old cultural nexus and the largest English-language library on the European continent, and in 2013 he founded its Book Award, an annual $5,000 prize for a work that deepens understanding of France or French culture, according to the American Library in Paris. In his later years he divided his time between Paris and the Shenandoah Valley town of Staunton, Virginia.

Trueheart was married to Anne Swardson, a former Bloomberg and Washington Post journalist, for 37 years. An earlier marriage, to Anne Roark, ended in divorce. Besides his wife, survivors include their two children, Louise and Henry Trueheart, and a brother.

What Trueheart leaves is less a single career than a set of rooms he kept open for other people's words: the literary profiles that treated novelists as seriously as their novels, the Paris library that still awards the book prize he started, and the account of his father's and godfather's broken friendship that he spent the second half of his life learning how to tell.