When the United States government engineered the overthrow of the troublesome South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963, it set into motion a tumultuous course of events deepening the Vietnam War. The Year of the Hare asks why President John F. Kennedy decided to depose his ally of nine years, despite almost daily warnings from some cabinet officials that the most likely consequence of a coup would be chaos. Why did Kennedy and his colleagues choose this perilous course in the midst of an uncertain civil war? To answer this question, The Year of the Hare takes us inside the Kennedy administration, where the State Department largely supported the coup while the Pentagon and the CIA consistently resisted it. Francis X. Winters' research is based on in-depth interviews with high-ranking members of the Kennedy administration, including Dean Rusk, McGeorge Bundy, and George Ball, along with the newly issued multivolume compilation Foreign Relations and the United States, 1961-1964, Vietnam, and the recently opened General Records of the U.S. State Department for 1963. The reasons for American support of the coup in Vietnam, Winters asserts, lie both in the ethos of the era, with its dynamic confidence in the superiority of American ideals, and in Kennedy's political aspirations. The Year of the Hare explores the synergy between idealism and personal ambition at the root of our troubled memories of the war that "haunts us still."

Prologue: A Tale of Two Walls -- 1. "Sauve qui peut": Signs and Portents, January 25 to May 7 -- 2. "Who Are These People?" May 8 to June 28 -- 3. "Sleeping in the Same Bed, Dreaming Different Dreams" June 29 to August 23 -- 4. "Doing Business on the Weekend" August 24 to August 27 -- 5. Selma and Saigon, August 28 to August 31 -- 6. The Presidential Seal, September 1 to October 4 -- 7. Who Will Kowtow? October 5 to October 28 -- 8. Last Rites and Final Judgments, October 29 to November 22 -- 9. Aftershocks, November 23, 1963, to February 15, 1964 -- 10. Dean Rusk: An Embarrassment of Ethics -- 11. Ngo Dinh Diem: Mandarin to an Empty Throne -- 12. Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.: An American Raj