The news of Diem’s death outraged Kennedy. General [Maxwell] Taylor wrote that he "leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before." George Smathers remembered that Jack Kennedy blamed the CIA, saying "I’ve got to do something about those bastards;" they should be stripped of their exorbitant power. Mike Forrestal called Kennedy’s reaction "both personal and religious," and especially troubled by the implication that a Catholic President had participated in a plot to assassinate a coreligionist. Every account of Kennedy’s response is in complete agreement. Until the very end he had hoped Diem’s life could be spared.

I saw the President soon after he heard that Diem and Nhu were dead. He was somber and shaken. I had not seen him so depressed since the Bay of Pigs.

In the Situation Room, Kennedy was monitoring the coup when told of the murders. He rushed out of the room. Forrestal felt that the assassination "shook him personally" and "bothered him as a moral and religious matter. It shook his confidence, I think, in the kind of advice he was getting about South Vietnam."