The history of Viet Nam is full of heroines. Women often served as gen erals. In the 1st century A.D., the Trung sisters raised an army and started a rebellion against Viet Nam's Chinese overlords; one of their female com manders gave birth to a child on the battlefield, then strapping her infant on her back and brandishing a sword in each hand, led her troops against the Chinese. In 248, a 23-year-old girl put on a suit of golden armor, climbed on the back of an elephant, and led her army into the field against Viet Nam's foreign invaders.
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Today the most formidable and in some ways the bravest woman in South Viet Nam wears tapered satin trousers and a torso-hugging ao-dai, split from ankle to waist, and rides to meet her foes in a chauffeur-driven black Mer cedes. Instead of swords, her weapons are bottomless energy, a devastating charm, a tough, relentless mind, an acid tongue, a militant Roman Catholi cism — and, most important, the power of the family into which she married. She is Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, wife of President Ngo Dinh Diem's younger brother and closest brain-truster. In ad dition to acting as official First Lady for the bachelor President, she is in her own right one of the two or three most powerful people in the country and in a sense embodies all its problems.
In any Western nation she would be a political force to be reckoned with. In an Oriental country burdened with cen turies of ignorance and bloodshed, she is probably more feared than any other man or woman — and fear under such conditions can mean power beyond either respect or popularity.
American Ivanhoes. A fragile, exciting beauty who stands only 5 ft. 2 in. in high heels — who has kept her girlish grace though she is the mother of four — Mme. Nhu does not look the part. To her critics she symbolizes everything that is wrong with the remote, authoritarian, family-dominated Diem regime. But if she is vain, arbitrary, puritanical, imperious and devious, she also exudes strength, dedication and courage. To some it seems that she belongs in an intrigue-encrusted 18th century court, or that she should wear the robes of a Chinese empress — or both.
Her only official positions are those of Deputy in the National Assembly and chief of South Viet Nam's women's movements, but Mme. Nhu orders around army generals, Cabinet minis ters, and even the President. Though he is often reluctant to go along with her, Diem regularly yields to her when she bursts imperiously into his study, and even allows her to countermand his own orders, because he desperately fears a public display of family friction.
When a group of disaffected South Vietnamese paratroopers attempted a coup against Diem three years ago, one of their first demands was that Mme.
Nhu be removed from the presidential palace. She was flattered by the attention, and also brags that the U.S. has tried unsuccessfully for years to get Diem to curb her power. She bitterly attacks the anti-Diem U.S. press corps in Saigon and accuses Americans generally of being a lot of "Ivanhoes"—perpetually in love with the underdog but confused about just who the underdog is.
In the country's current, festering religious crisis, as she sees it, the Buddhists are certainly not underdogs but "provocateurs in monks' robes." She has consistently opposed the U.S. counsel of moderation and Diem's own halfhearted efforts to temporize. Her recommendation for dealing with Buddhist demonstrators: "Beat them three times harder." When the Buddhist monk, Quang Due, burned himself to death in protest against the regime six weeks ago, Mme. Nhu was unimpressed. The Buddhists "barbecued one of their monks, whom they intoxicated," she savagely told a CBS reporter last week. "And even that burning was not done with self-sufficient means, because they used imported gasoline."
In Washington, the South Vietnamese embassy formally repudiated Mme. Nhu's statement as representing only her views and not that of the government. The disclaimer was particularly intriguing, because the ambassador, Tran Van Chuong, is Mme. Nhu's father, who violently disapproves of her —and only partly because the government expropriated his vast property seven years ago. She in turn disapproves of him, once called him a coward.
The Brothers Four. The U.S. is deeply committed to hold South Viet Nam against the Chinese-backed Viet Cong guerrillas, because—according to the old "falling domino theory"—Laos and Cambodia would be outflanked, Thailand caught in a vise, and the Malay Peninsula severely threatened if South Vietnam were to fall. The U.S. is pouring $1,000,000 a day into the country and has sent 14,000 tough, savvy military "advisers" to sharpen the government's war effort against the Red guerrillas. Amid the frustrating military ups and downs, the overriding questions are two: Can the war be won with President Diem and his relatives in control? Can it be won without them?
Part of South Viet Nam's closely knit Mandarin aristocracy, the President's family commands little popular support but firmly dominates the country's political and economic structure. For all its faults, it also represents an order of sorts in a place that has been on the brink of chaos for decades. The remarkable quartet of Diem's brothers:
∙ Ngo Dinh Thuc, 66, the eldest, is Roman Catholic Archbishop of Hue (pronounced Whey), controls large amounts of property in the name of the church, and has placed several favorites in Diem's Cabinet. Diem repeatedly tried to get Thuc transferred to the vacant See of Saigon, but the Vatican, which is distressed by the extent to which Diem's repressive measures have tarnished the image of Catholicism in South Vietnam, vetoed the suggestion. It has also ignored all hints that Archbishop Thuc might become a cardinal. Thuc is the only one of the brothers whom Mme. Nhu does not criticize, and he often arbitrates family disputes.
— Ngo Dinh Can, 50, technically holds no government post at all, but in fact runs the city of Hue and surrounding central Viet Nam. Although, unlike his brothers, Can has never been abroad, did not go to a university, and runs his fiefdom like an old warlord, the war in the central highlands is going far better than anywhere else in South Viet Nam. An inveterate ao-dai chaser, Can has incurred Mme. Nhu's wrath: "He is stubborn and touchy, and unbearably obsolete concerning women." But, she concedes, "we all feel safer to have him in Hué."
∙ Ngo Dinh Luyen, 48, has been abroad since 1954, serves as South Viet Nam's Ambassador to Great Britain and several other European countries, Mme. Nhu is openly contemptuous of Luyen's ability and sneeringly calls him "a dilettante."
∙ Ngo Dinh Nhu, 52, functions as political counselor and theoretician for President Diem. From his soundproofed palace office, surrounded by books and stuffed animal heads, he tirelessly preaches the merits of "personalism," an abstruse amalgam of Confucianism, autocracy and Catholic morality that Diem calls his "formula" for government. Nhu controls the secret police and advises Diem on army promotions, government appointments and business contracts. On the side he runs the Revolutionary Labor Party, whose 70,000 members throughout the nation spend most of their time informing the police about their neighbors.
Falling Out. Mme. Nhu's criticism —she has even suggested that President Diem is not as forceful as he might be — is a frequent irritant. Yet despite occasional bickering, Mme. Nhu fiercely defends Diem and the others. "I have never met anyone as human, warmhearted and chivalrous as the Ngo Dinh brothers," she says extravagantly. "The world is not made for them. They would not hurt a mosquito."
The basic bond between her and the brothers is intense, and very Asian. In the past, South Vietnam's women deliberately gave their husbands money to dissipate on opium and prostitutes in order to control them better. During the Indo-China war, thousands of men worked openly for the French, but cases of women collaborators were rare. Today women control much of South Viet Nam's wealth, and in her home a wife is called noi tuong, or "general of the interior." Matriarchal strength is compounded by the traditional Vietnamese view of the family as monolithic and united against all outsiders, but in Mme. Nhu's case, her family by marriage takes precedence over her own blood. She has fallen out with her father, mother and sister. It is in Diem's clan that Mme. Nhu finds the place and the power she craves.
Beautiful Spring. She was born "about 38" years ago into one of the wealthiest, most aristocratic landowning families in Vietnam. Her maiden name was Tran Le Xuan, which means Beautiful Spring, and at her family's home in Hanoi she was waited on by 20 servants. Tutored at home, she never finished high school, took ballet lessons, once danced a solo at Hanoi's National Theater. She learned to speak French fluently, today mostly converses in that language, writes all her speeches in French before having them translated into Vietnamese.
As a child, she remembers herself as unhappy, unloved, and in rebellion against her mother, a celebrated local beauty who kept the Hanoi equivalent of a salon. "If you are unjust," the young girl told her fiercely, "I will ignore you." When Beautiful Spring was 16, she met Ngo Dinh Nhu, chief archivist at the Indo-China Library and an admirer of her mother's. To Beautiful Spring's distress, Mother forced her to address herself to Nhu as "your little niece." Nhu lent his little niece books, helped her with her Latin lessons. Constantly in her mother's shadow, Mme. Nhu wanted to marry and get out of her house. Her mother's list of selected young men held no interest for her. "Then," she recalls matter-of-factly, "I said to myself, 'Why not that man, Ngo Dinh Nhu?' "
The Nhus were married in 1943. She converted from Buddhism to her husband's Catholic faith, today says that "the sacraments are my moral vitamins." Her daughter, Le Thuy, was born in 1946, and was followed by sons Trac and Quyhn, and daughter Le Quyen. Candidly Mme. Nhu admits that she has "never had a sweeping love. I read about such things in books, but I do not believe that they really exist. Or perhaps only for a very few people."'
Rice Diet. Three years after the Nhus were married, the Indo-China war broke out. All the Ngo Dinh brothers were militantly anti-Communist and anticolonialist. Their father, Ngo Dinh Kha, had been an officer in the old imperial court but quit in a dispute with Vietnam's French overlords, despite being virtually penniless, and went out and farmed his rented rice fields side by side with his peasant neighbors. Diem himself left politics before World War II rather than work with the French. In that tradition, Nhu, his wife and family were opposed both to the Red Viet Minh "army of liberation" and to the French with their puppet Emperor, Bao Dai. When the Viet Minh overran Hué, they shot Diem's oldest brother and the brother's only son, for months held Diem himself captive before turning him loose. Nhu and Can both escaped from the Reds, but Mme. Nhu, her infant daughter and her aged mother-in-law were taken prisoner in December 1946.
For four months, Mme. Nhu lived on only two bowls of rice a day in a remote Communist-held village. She had only one blouse, one pair of pants and one coat. "I got to hate that coat," she says. "It was wasp-waisted and very fashionable. But for months it was my only blanket. After that, I always said I would only own loose, practical coats, just in case." Mme. Nhu's smooth, well-kept hands were a constant source of contemptuous amusement for her tough peasant captors. "I cannot bear the Communists," she says. "They considered me a child, I don't know why. They seemed to have some indulgence for me."
When the French army began moving out into the countryside, Mme. Nhu's captors prepared a hasty retreat north. But because her mother-in-law was incapable of making such an arduous trip, Mme. Nhu was granted a safe-conduct pass to a nearby village. With her child and the old woman, Mme. Nhu holed up in a convent in the village until the French forces arrived. Shortly afterward she was reunited with Nhu.
The Happy Time. The anticolonialist views shared by the whole Ngo Dinh family made the French regard the Nhus with suspicion. Settling in the resort town of Dalat, the Nhus quietly set about organizing popular support for the return to Viet Nam of Diem, who was in exile in the U.S. Nhu ran a paper and worked to develop his philosophy of personalism; to win favor among poor, potential supporters, Mme. Nhu turned down her family's hefty allowance, shopped for her own groceries, pedaled around Dalat on a bicycle.
In 1954, after their disastrous defeat at Dienbienphu, the French in desperation met the exiled Diem's demand for Vietnamese independence and sent him back to Vietnam to try to rally his war-shattered people and to salvage something from the Viet Minh. Two weeks after Diem was installed in Saigon as Premier, the weary and discouraged French sliced Vietnam in half at the Geneva bargaining table; the Viet Minh took the north with its coal and iron, and Diem was left with the south, including Saigon and the rice-rich Mekong River delta.
First Notice. The South Viet Nam that Diem inherited was in a state of anarchy. The economy was in shreds, and there was no functioning executive or administrative machinery to run the government. The army was run by a French puppet, General Nguyen Van Hinh, who was constantly plotting against Diem, and the police and security forces were controlled by the notorious Binh Xuyen river pirates, who had bought the "concession" from puppet Emperor Bao Dai for $1,000,000. In the countryside, two religious sects with well-armed private armies, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, ran two virtually independent fiefs.
At Saigon cocktail parties, Army Boss General Hinh used to threaten a coup almost daily and joke that when he overthrew the government he would exile every member of Diem's family except Mme. Nhu, whom, he said, he would keep as a concubine. One day Mme. Nhu finally met Hinh face to face at a party. She walked over to him, recalls an observer, and said: "You are never going to overthrow this government because you don't have the guts. And if you do overthrow it, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first."
That was when Saigon began to take serious notice of Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu.
In the face of superior odds, hers was the first—and for a long time the only —voice to demand a showdown with the government's foes. She called her own husband "cowardly" for recommending a compromise with the Binh Xuyen gangsters. Once, arranging a demonstration against them, she was surrounded by a hostile crowd of Binh Xuyen. She jumped into her car, cried, "Arrest me, if you can!" and drove straight through the ring of tommy-gun-toting toughs. Finally, the family shipped her out to a convent in Hong Kong to keep her quiet during a period of attempted conciliation. "It was just like the Middle Ages," she says, "but that's where I learned English." When she returned to Saigon three months later, she was still spoiling for a fight. Finally, Diem smashed the Binh Xuyen, forced General Hinh into exile, and sent his troops into the countryside to crush the dissident sects.
Mandate from Heaven. Diem's consolidation of power over all odds was his finest moment. But the strain of constant intrigue had increased his distrust of all outsiders. He seldom ventured from his palace in Saigon, was almost completely out of touch with his people. The gap between Diem and the masses was widened by his militant Catholicism. The "Catholic Mandarin" believed that he ruled by a "mandate from heaven" and that it was the people's "duty" to honor the President.
But it was Mme. Nhu's flaming feminism that most antagonized the traditionalist Vietnamese. In 1956 she was elected to the National Assembly, immediately began a campaign to upgrade the status of Vietnamese women, who had no legal rights and could be dis carded by husbands at will. In these circumstances, said Mme. Nhu, a Vietnamese woman was "an eternal minor, an unpaid servant, a doll without a soul." In 1958 she rammed through the Assembly her controversial Family Bill, which made adultery a prison offense and outlawed polygamy, concubinage, and—except by special presidential dispensation—divorce.*
With tiny tears at the corners of her eyes, Mme. Nhu recently sighed that she had trouble at first appreciating "that I made many people unhappy with my Family Bill—people who were in illegitimate liaisons but who were strongly in love." Pulling herself together, she adds: "But society cannot sacrifice morality and legality for a few wild couples. I have chosen to defend the legitimate family."
"My Darlings." In a succession of bills, Mme. Nhu banned prostitution, contraceptives, abortion, organized animal fights and taxi dancing. Referring to the war, she said, "Dancing with death is enough." In Saigon, "twist easies" began to spring up, and criticism mounted that Mme. Nhu was trying to impose rigid Catholic standards on South Viet Nam's easygoing sexual mores. She herself used to go swimming at the fashionable Cercle Sportif. but stayed away when she saw too many bikinis. Even some government officials privately said that the morality crusade resulted only in increased and unnecessary public hostility toward the Diem regime.
Sure of her infallibility and contemptuous of her critics, Mme. Nhu set up a women's paramilitary corps, a parade ground force whose members ("my darlings") get paid twice as much as army regulars. Snapped Mme. Nhu: "The women are officers, not simple soldiers." She also organized the Women's Solidarity Movement, a sort of Oriental Junior League whose 1,200,000 members supervise workers' nurseries and welfare centers—and serve as a political intelligence network throughout the country.
Calumny Instead of Courage. The First Lady often treated Diem like Petruchio; she would write down a list of the direst predictions of what would happen if he did not follow her advice and then make him sign it so that she could crow if she were borne out. She also patronized Pope John XXIII. "Poor Pope," she said after John's encyclical Pacem in Terris called for more social welfare. "He pleases everyone with this encyclical. But if something pleases everyone, it can be exploited." She can even take quite a firm line with God. In praying for her projects, she says, she often makes a list of promises; when she has carried them out, she tells God: "I have fulfilled all the conditions," and asks to be helped further.
Mme. Nhu denies that she is antimale. "I have no reason to dislike men," she says. "They have always been so nice to me." She is a born actress, and a gentle rap of her delicate ivory fan has the effect of a roll of kettledrums. At a diplomatic party several years ago, U.S. Admiral Arthur Radford, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, locked his arm around her waist and said: "What do you really want, little lady?"
Considering the little lady's tremendous power, Saigon gossip has inevitably linked her with stories of corruption, but there has never been any supporting evidence. "After those charges," she says, "I predicted that next I would be attacked on my sentimental life." She was right. Saigon's cafes abound with tales of palace dalliances. But even some of her worst enemies dismiss the reports as rumors circulated by people who are afraid to attack her any other way.
The Crab's Claw. The attacks on Mme. Nhu grow more bitter as the Buddhist crisis intensifies, for she has made herself the country's leading anti-Buddhist polemicist. Superficially, the controversy shapes up as a simple religious dispute between the Buddhist majority and the nation's 1,500,000 Catholics. But the struggle transcends the charges of religious persecution and inequality. Instead it has developed into a political conflict that illustrates the gulf between the people, who have no natural affinity for a government that has done little to win their support, and Diem's ruling family. In this situation, the Catholic angle can be greatly exaggerated.
Viet Nam's Buddhists and Catholics have long been enemies. Even today, the Buddhists claim that the Catholics were "the claw that enabled the French crab to occupy Viet Nam." Mme. Nhu says that her own Buddhist ancestors used to butcher Catholics and that, dec ades ago, a Buddhist mob burned most of the Ngo Dinh family alive in a church. But since he took over the government in 1954, Diem has gone to great lengths not to offend the Buddhist majority. Less than one-third of his 17 Cabinet ministers and 19 army generals are Catholics; the heavy percentage of Catholics in the civil service and the 123-seat National Assembly is largely the result of a superior and far-reaching Catholic school system. Whenever there is a whisper of opposition, however, the government treats Catholics like anyone else; two Catholics involved in the 1960 coup were sentenced to long prison terms, and three priests have been jailed or forced to leave the country for criticizing the government.
But most Vietnamese still maintain that Diem has shown a definite pro-Catholic bias. Unfortunately for Diem, the simmering Buddhist discontent boiled over at the worst possible spot—in Brother Thuc's diocese at Hue. At a church celebration honoring Thuc, Diem grew furious that in violation of a government edict, Catholic pennants were flying and no South Vietnamese national flag, ordered government officials to prevent similar occurrences. Three days later, government troops forbade Buddhists to unfurl their flags at a rally celebrating the 2,507th birthday of Gautama Buddha. When the Buddhists protested, the government soldiers stupidly shot down nine demonstrators. That was the beginning of the Buddhist protests, which in turn provoked more police repression.
Circle with Corners. The Buddhist demands center around freedom of assembly, abolition of real or fancied inequalities, above all—and most galling to Diem—public government acceptance of responsibility for the Hue tragedy. These demands seem oddly minor to create so much trouble, but they are merely a catchall for myriad often ill-defined grievances.
With her husband, Mme. Nhu is against yielding an inch to the Buddhists, for fear that backing down will be-interpreted as a sign of weakness and lead to new and more sweeping political demands. In a speech to her girl soldiers last week, she called Buddhist agitation "an ignoble form of treason," which reduced Buddhism to the "despicable rank of phariseeism." She called Buddhist leaders "eternal slaves, if not to others, at least to their own folly." Above all, she charges that the Buddhists are organized by the Reds. While U.S. authorities reject this accusation, it is true in a more general sense that many Buddhists are open to Marxist influences.
The grass-roots religion in South Viet Nam's villages, a branch of the easygoing Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) tradition of Buddhism, is a peasant potpourri of animism and ancestor worship, magic charms and chanted sutras. But the saffron-robed monks of Saigon and Hué are more sophisticated. Many Buddhists, says U.S. Scholar Holmes Welch, believe that Buddhism and Communism have many points in common. "They practice some things that the Communists so far have merely talked about—no personal property, a communal life, and devoting oneself to the service of the people and world peace," he says. "It may be true that Buddha differs from Marx, but such differences can be rationalized." As of last week, to Mme. Nhu's disgust, Diem seemed bent on letting the Buddhist situation calm down. "The President too often wants what the French call 'a circle with corners,' " she says scornfully. He would like to conciliate "as the Americans desire, smooth, no bloodshed, everyone shaking hands." But the Buddhist crisis could flare up again at any moment. U.S. officials in Saigon fear that government intransigence can only have a divisive effect in the war against the Communist Viet Cong, in which political unity is the key to victory.
Too Fast, Too Thin. The war is as ugly and indecisive as ever. The more bullish predictions emanate from Saigon. General Paul Harkins, commander of the U.S. forces in South Viet Nam, says that the war will be over in December; statistics show that the Viet Cong launched an average of 120 attacks weekly last year, and for the first seven months this year the average was down to 74. But statistics are meaningless in South Viet Nam. Despite losses of 1,000 men a month, the Reds have increased their hard-core regular troops from 18,000 to 23,000 men.
There are some reasons for optimism. Substantial progress has been made in the central highlands, where U.S. Special Forces teams have molded 150,000 montagnard tribesmen into a tough, well-trained jungle force that is effectively harassing Viet Cong supply lines from Communist North Viet Nam. The government has embarked on a crash program to construct some 12,000 "strategic hamlets." fortified villages where the peasants will be guarded against Viet Cong attacks by trained, well-armed militiamen. Already 9,750,000 people—65% of the population—have been settled in the 7,500 hamlets that have been built so far.
U.S. officials fear that the hamlet program, headed by Mme. Nhu's husband, is spreading too fast and too thin, and that too many of the strongholds are not really defensible against determined Red attack. In the strategically important Mekong River delta, moreover, the well-armed Viet Cong operates with near impunity. For the first time in months, the Reds are consistently raising attacks in battalion-size strength, are showing an increasing tendency to stand and fight against government forces instead of fading away into the paddies.
Evidence Intrigue. All the Vietnamese military commanders are fighting with one eye cocked on Saigon. Generals are reluctant to commit troops to a large role, because Diem disapproves of generals who have heavy casualties. Always in fear of another coup against his regime, Diem also distrusts successful generals and shifts them about constantly to keep them from developing a power base.
In Saigon, intrigue is endemic. A new plot is hatched or at least talked about daily. Diem and his family are aware of most of the talk, and their nerve is good. Suggesting that there will be a coup unless the Buddhist crisis is brought under control, Nhu keeps his elaborate secret police network constantly on the alert. In government "reeducation centers" throughout the country are an estimated 20,000 political internees. According to one report, the new contingency plan against a coup is to draw regiments from the worst Viet Cong areas to the capital, a "deliberately dangerous" plan designed to make the Americans fear that a coup would only lead to Communist advances.
That is precisely what the U.S. does fear.
Superior Subordinates. The chief U.S. objection to Diem is not so much that he is a dictator, but an inefficient dictator. The proper democratic standards of the League of Women Voters cannot be applied to a deeply war-torn country, and Mme. Nhu has a point when she defends the regime's intolerance of opposition: "We consider Communism opposition enough in wartime, but we will have open declared opposition as soon as peacetime allows." The trouble is that Diem rules not so much by firmness as by confusion; deliberate disorganization is his way of keeping possible enemies off balance. Cabinet ministers are undercut by a system of "superior subordinates." who actually outrank their nominal bosses because they get orders direct from the palace. But there is serious doubt whether any of this would change after a coup.
Any number of army commanders, few of whom are truly loyal to Diem, would presumably be ready to take over, and they might conceivably be more ready to accept U.S. advice than Diem. Should his brother be eliminated, it is also generally assumed that Nhu himself would make a bid for power, and some Americans think that he might be more efficient, having shown administrative ability in the strategic-hamlets program. But the U.S. still doubts that any of the available alternatives to Diem would be a real improvement. American policymakers also suspect that a coup would only set off a chain reaction of other coups until some strongman finally emerged, and that in the meantime there would result a power vacuum in which only the Viet Cong could operate.
Into this pit of war, fear and intrigue, the U.S. is sending tough-minded Henry Cabot Lodge to replace Ambassador Frederick E. Nolting, who in 2| years in Saigon has been totally committed to Diem. The U.S. is hopeful—but not overly confident—that Lodge can make Diem more receptive to U.S. advice. Whatever Diem does, there is at least one South Vietnamese leader who will listen to advice with a ravishing smile, and probably refuse to accept it. Mme. Nhu is eagerly awaiting Lodge's arrival. Noting his middle name, she says: "We hear that in his family, they talk only to God." Told the same was said of her family, she replied: "In that case, I hope we will talk together, with God in the middle."
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''I'm not exactly afraid of death. I love power and in the next life I have a chance to be even more powerful than I am."U.S. Defense Secretary McNamara noted that "I saw Madame Nhu as bright, forceful, and beautiful, but also diabolical and scheming—a true sorceress''
French journalist François Sully wrote that Madame Nhu was "conceited, and obsessed with a drive for power that far surpasses that of even her husband ... It is no exaggeration to say that Madame Nhu is the most detested personality in South Vietnam." Sully was promptly expelled from Vietnam by the Ngô family.
She often exerted her influence through bouts of shouting. Sometimes when she disagreed with a proposal or decision that had been made inside the palace by some ministers or other senior public servants, she would verbally abuse them and intimidate them into adopting her preferred stance. Diệm reacted to the bombing by cracking down on political dissidents and further tightening control of the press. Madame Nhu added, "you open a window to let in light and air, not bullets. We want freedom, but we don't want to be exploited by it." In a radio interview in late 1962, she mockingly remarked that American journalists were "intoxicated with communism"
The following year she instructed her Women's Solidarity Movement to oppose American attempts "to make lackeys of Vietnamese and to seduce Vietnamese women into decadent paths." As relations became strained, she publicly accused the Americans of having supported the 1960 coup.Her own father went on radio to condemn her comments. A Confucian, Chương said that the regime had alienated "the strongest moral forces", implying that they had lost the Mandate of Heaven. She responded by calling him a "coward". Her mother said that "There is an old proverb in my country which means 'one should not make oneself or one's family naked before the world'... I was sick... Now, nobody can stop her ... She never listened to our advice." After these comments, the U.S. ambassador, Frederick Nolting, told Diệm that if he did not denounce his sister-in-law's comment in public, the U.S. would have to stop supporting him, but the president refused to do so, and assailed the monks. In an interview with David Halberstam, Madame Nhu said that it was "embarrassing to see people [Buddhist leaders] so uncultured claiming to be leaders"
A series of clashes occurred all over South Vietnam as the police sought to end the marches. When she heard that Diệm was to sign a statement offering compensation to the families of Buddhist protesters shot dead by the police of his brother Ngô Đình Cẩn, Nhu was reported to have thrown a bowl of soup at him. On 8 June 1963, Madame Nhu released a statement through the Women's Solidarity Movement accusing the Buddhists of neutralism, effectively accusing them of being communist collaborators. It then implored "bonzes of good faith" to stop helping the communists, otherwise Vietnamese Buddhism would be seen as a "small anti-nationalist branch of a dubious international association, exploited and controlled by communism and oriented to the sowing of the disorder of neutralism". She made another attack on the United States, calling on Diệm to "keep vigilance on all others, particularly those inclined to take Viet Nam for a satellite of a foreign power or organization." Madame Nhu publicly mocked Thích Quảng Đức, who performed a self-immolation on 11 June 1963.
In July, the U.S. government rejected a request from her to travel to the United States for a public speaking tour, fearing a public relations disaster. On 3 August, she called the Buddhists "seditious elements who use the most odious Communist tactics to subvert the country." Through her paramilitary organization, Madame Nhu claimed that the Buddhists were "controlled by communism" and that they were manipulated by the Americans, calling on Diệm to "expel all foreign agitators whether they wear monks' robes or not".A few days after the raids, Madame Nhu described the deadly attacks on the Buddhists as "the happiest day in my life since we crushed the Bình Xuyên in 1955", and assailed them as "communists".
Madame Nhu claimed Buddhist leader Thích Trí Quang "spoke for many intellectuals who had repeatedly ridiculed her." Following the pagoda raids, Trí Quang was given asylum at the U.S. Embassy after Ngô Đình Nhu's plans to assassinate him were uncovered. Madame Nhu gave a media interview in which she called on government troops to invade the American embassy and capture Thích Trí Quang and some other monks who were staying there, saying that the government must arrest "all key Buddhists". In a media interview, her husband responded to his parents-in-law by vowing to kill his father-in-law, claiming his wife would participate. He said "I will have his head cut off. I will hang him in the center of a square and let him dangle there. My wife will make the knot on the rope because she is proud of being a Vietnamese and she is a good patriot."
When acting U.S. ambassador William Trueheart warned that development aid might be withheld if the repression orchestrated by the Ngôs continued, Madame Nhu denounced it as blackmail. Nhu and Diệm, fearing a cut in aid, sent Madame Nhu to the United States on a speaking tour. She departed South Vietnam on 9 September 1963 in an expedition that brought widespread international scorn to her family's regime. She had predicted "a triumphant lecture tour". She left on 17 September for the Inter-Parliamentary Union meeting in Yugoslavia, followed by a trip to Italy and possibly to the United States, where she had an invitation to speak before the Overseas Press Club of New York. Madame Nhu's comments were such that President John F. Kennedy became personally concerned. He asked his advisers to find means of having Diệm gag her. McGeorge Bundy thought her comments were so damaging that it would only be acceptable for Ngô Đình Diệm to remain in power if she were out of the picture. The National Security Council deemed her a threat to U.S. security, and told the then United States Ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. to seek her permanent removal from South Vietnam. There was also speculation that she could turn up at the United Nations in New York and embarrass South Vietnam and the U.S.[83] Bundy said in a meeting that "this was the first time the world had been faced with collective madness in a ruling family since the days of the czars" and her comments provoked much debate on how to get Diệm to silence her. In Madame Nhu's first destination, Belgrade, she said in an interview that "President Kennedy is a politician, and when he hears a loud opinion speaking in a certain way, he tries to appease it somehow", referring to the opposition to her family's rule.[84] She continued: "if that opinion is misinformed, the solution is not to bow to it, but the solution should be to inform."
The issue resulted in an awkward confrontation when U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, traveled to Vietnam for a fact-finding mission known as the McNamara–Taylor mission about the progress of the war. One of the purposes of the mission was to achieve, in the words of President Kennedy, "a visible reduction in influence of Nhus, who are symbol to disaffected of all that they dislike in GVN [Government of (South) Vietnam]. This we think would require Nhus' departure from Saigon and preferably Vietnam at least for extended vacation."[87] On 29 September 1963 meeting with Diệm, McNamara bemoaned "the ill-advised and unfortunate declarations of Madame Nhu",[88] who had described U.S. military advisors as "acting like little soldiers of fortune".[88] McNamara said that such comments would damage bilateral military cooperation and deter American officers from helping the South Vietnamese forces. Lodge denounced the comments and said, "These men should be thanked, not insulted." However, one of his aides lost his composure and asked if "there were not something the government could do to shut her up." Diệm was stunned by the comments and retorted that "one cannot deny a lady the right to defend herself when she has been unjustly attacked", saying his sister-in-law was entitled to freedom of speech. But McNamara reinforced the point, noting to Diệm that "This is not satisfactory. The problems were real and serious. They had to be solved before the war could be won." Madame Nhu arrived in the United States on 7 October, and her arrival was greeted by the United Nations' launching of an inquiry into the repression of Buddhists in South Vietnam. Kennedy had resisted the temptation to deny her an entry visa and his administration soon came under a flurry of verbal attacks.
Despite U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson's advice for her to stop damaging relations with inflammatory remarks, Madame Nhu refused to back down, describing herself as a scapegoat for American shortcomings and failures. She went on to accuse the administration of betraying her family, saying "I refuse to play the role of an accomplice in an awful murder ... According to a few immature American junior officials—too imbued by a real but obsolete imperialist spirit, the Vietnamese regime is not puppet enough and must be liquidated."[91] She accused the Americans of undermining South Vietnam through "briberies, threats and other means" to destroy her family because they "do not like" it.[91] She further mocked Kennedy's entourage, asking why "all the people around President Kennedy are pink?" She denounced American liberals as "worse than communists" and Buddhists as "hooligans in robes". Her father did not share the same beliefs and followed her around the country rebutting her comments, denouncing the "injustice and oppression" and stating that his daughter had "become unwittingly the greatest asset to the communists." She predicted that Buddhism would become extinct in Vietnam.[94] The Oram Group, the Madison Avenue PR firm that had been hired to promote Diệm's image in the U.S. for $3,000 per month ended its relationship with Diệm during Madame Nhu's visit under the grounds she had so badly damaged the image of the Diệm government in America that there was nothing that could be done to improve his image and a continued association was going to cost the Oram Group other clients. American journalists had discovered Madame Nhu was "unfortunately too beautiful to ignore" as a Kennedy administration staffer complained, and that it was easy to provoke her into saying something outrageous, causing a media circus to develop around her as she traveled across America.
In the wake of the tumultuous events, Madame Nhu appeared on NBC-TV's Meet the Press on 13 October 1963, defending her actions and those of the South Vietnamese government. "I don't know why you Americans dislike us ... Is it because the world is under a spell called liberalism? Your own public, here in America, is not as anti-Communistic as ours is in Vietnam. Americans talk about my husband and I leaving our native land permanently. Why should we do this? Where would we go? To say that 70 percent of my country's population is Buddhistic is absolutely true. My father, who was our ambassador to the United States until two months ago, has been against me since my childhood." Upon the assassination of the Diệm brothers, President Kennedy's feelings were expressed to close friend Paul "Red" Fay, Acting Secretary of the Navy. The circumstances which allowed the flow towards the elimination from South Vietnam of the Diệm regime, Kennedy held, were due to the active personality of Madame Nhu. The Secretary recalls the President's feelings and in an oral history interview gave volunteered paraphrase of the words addressed to him, ''That goddamn bitch. She's responsible for the death of that kind man. You know, it's so totally unnecessary to have that kind man die because that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.''
On 2 November 1963, Diệm and Nhu were assassinated in a coup d'état led by General Dương Văn Minh (Armed Forces Council) with the understanding that the United States would not intervene. At the time of the assassinations, Madame Nhu was in Beverly Hills, California, traveling with her 18-year-old daughter, Ngô Đình Lệ Thủy. Her other children were in Vietnam at the family retreat in Đà Lạt and she feared that they would meet the same fate as their father. The children were not harmed by the generals and were flown out of the country into exile in Rome, where they were placed in the custody of their uncle, Archbishop Thục. Madame Nhu later flew to Rome to join them. In response to the killings of Diệm and Nhu, she immediately accused the United States, saying "Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies", and that "No coup can erupt without American incitement and backing". She went on to predict a bleak future for Vietnam and said that, by being involved in the coup, the troubles of the United States in Vietnam were just beginning. She called the deaths an "indelible stigma" against the U.S. and said "My family has been treacherously killed with either official or unofficial blessing of the American government, I can predict to you now that the story is only at its beginning." She invoked biblical analogies, saying "Judas has sold the Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The Ngô brothers have been sold for a few dollars." When asked if she wanted asylum in the United States, she said, "I cannot stay in a country whose government stabbed me in the back. I believe all the devils in hell are against us."In the aftermath of the coup, the statues of the Trưng Sisters that Madame Nhu had erected with her own facial features were demolished by jubilant anti-Diệm rioters. The Times of Vietnam office was also burned down, and the newspaper was never published again.
The military government of Vietnam under General Dương Văn Minh confiscated all of the property in Saigon that belonged to Madame Nhu and her family, and she was not allowed to return to South Vietnam. She went to Rome briefly before moving to France and, later, Italy, with her children. Her daughter, Lệ Thủy, died in 1967, at age 22, in a car accident in Longjumeau, France.[104] Her younger daughter, Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên, who grew up to be an Italian-Vietnamese human rights lawyer, also died of a car accident in 2012. In November 1982 Madame Nhu accorded a first significant interview on the historic events in Vietnam to Judith Vecchione[105] in Rome. Vecchione was a producer for Vietnam: A Television History.[106] The interview, one of at least two hundred and fifty-nine for the series,[107] lasts a recorded fifty-two minutes but Madame Nhu's subjectivity was far from the hard facts demanded of the producers' intended content and barely two minutes of her observations found use. The interview remains valid though as personal documentation of Madame Nhu's life and character.[108] The series subsequently aired on PBS in 1983. On 2 November 1986, Madame Nhu charged the United States with hounding her family during the arrest of her younger brother, Trần Văn Khiêm, who was charged in the strangling deaths of their parents in their Washington, D.C. home after being cut out of their will. In 1993, she sued her parents' insurance company to prevent it from awarding their death benefit because she contested the validity of their wills. Her parents allegedly changed their wills, disinheriting their son Khiem and Madame Nhu and making their sister Le Chi the sole beneficiary. In the 1990s, she was reportedly living on the French Riviera and charging the press for interviews. In 2002, she gave an interview to journalist Truong Phu Thu of Dân Chúa Mỹ Châu, a Vietnamese Catholic community publication. It was published in October 2004. The article stated that she was living in Paris and working on her memoirs.
In her last years, she lived with her eldest son, Ngô Đình Trác, and youngest daughter, Ngô Đình Lệ Quyên, in Rome, and was reportedly working on a book of memoirs to be published posthumously. In early April 2011, she was taken to a hospital in Rome where she died three weeks later, on Easter Sunday, 24 April 2011. News of her death was announced by her sister Lechi Oggeri, while family friend Truong Phu Thu was interviewed by BBC News afterwards.
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The methods of the ruthless men who run the territories of North and South Vietnam are strongly critiqued as violent, but it is the wife of one of these leaders, the “Dragon Lady” Madame Nhu, who merits an entire chapter on her feminine, glamorous wickedness. Her full-frame portrait gushes, “Power is marvelous. Absolute power is absolutely marvelous.”
As America drifted relentlessly towards war in Southeast Asia, some of the more colorful characters emerged on to the world stage to make a case. One of those figures who brought suitcases full of perplexities was Madame Ngo Diem Nhu, sister-in-law of Ngo Dinh Diem and de facto “First Lady of South Vietnam”. Known for her harsh and incendiary comments that denounced anti-government protests by some Buddhist sects and the strong U.S. influence and presence in the country, she went to live in exile in France after her husband and her brother-in-law, Diệm, were assassinated in 1963. Madame Nhu arrived in the United States on 7 October, and her arrival was greeted by the United Nations’ launching of an inquiry into the repression of Buddhists in South Vietnam.
Kennedy had resisted the temptation to deny her an entry visa and his administration soon came under a flurry of verbal attacks. Despite U.S. Vice President Lyndon Johnson’s advice for her to stop damaging relations with inflammatory remarks, Madame Nhu refused to back down, describing herself as a scapegoat for American shortcomings and failures. She went on to accuse the administration of betraying her family, saying “I refuse to play the role of an accomplice in an awful murder … According to a few immature American junior officials—too imbued by a real but obsolete imperialist spirit, the Vietnamese regime is not puppet enough and must be liquidated.” She accused the Americans of undermining South Vietnam through “briberies, threats and other means” to destroy her family because they “do not like” it. She further mocked Kennedy’s entourage, asking why “all the people around President Kennedy are pink?” She denounced American liberals as “worse than communists” and Buddhists as “hooligans in robes”.
Her father did not share the same beliefs and followed her around the country rebutting her comments, denouncing the “injustice and oppression” and stating that his daughter had “become unwittingly the greatest asset to the communists.” She predicted that Buddhism would become extinct in Vietnam. The Oram Group, the Madison Avenue PR firm that had been hired to promote Diệm’s image in the U.S. for $3,000 per month ended its relationship with Diệm during Madame Nhu’s visit under the grounds she had so badly damaged the image of the Diệm government in America that there was nothing that could be done to improve his image and a continued association was going to cost the Oram Group other clients. American journalists had discovered Madame Nhu was “unfortunately too beautiful to ignore” as a Kennedy administration staffer complained, and that it was easy to provoke her into saying something outrageous, causing a media circus to develop around her as she traveled across America.
In the wake of the tumultuous events, Madame Nhu appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on 13 October 1963, defending her actions and those of the South Vietnamese government. “I don’t know why you Americans dislike us … Is it because the world is under a spell called liberalism? Your own public, here in America, is not as anti-Communistic as ours is in Vietnam. Americans talk about my husband and I leaving our native land permanently. Why should we do this? Where would we go? To say that 70 percent of my country’s population is Buddhistic is absolutely true. My father, who was our ambassador to the United States until two months ago, has been against me since my childhood.”
Madame Nhu was a complicated and contradictory figure. Characterized in a 1962 Time magazine article as “a puritan as well as a feminist,” she campaigned in support of freedom and rights for women, but called for the end to “immoral” entertainment and for death to her family’s detractors, who she characterized as “scabby sheep.” Amy Davidson’s short, unsettling piece for The New Yorker about her death notes that “she responded to the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk by saying, ‘Let them burn and we shall clap our hands.’ And ‘if the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.’”
As Amy Davidson notes, the closeness between the Diem regime and the U.S. government are resonant with the relationships between the U.S. government and various corrupt regimes elsewhere in the world in the present moment. Yet there may be a cautionary tale closer to home for those us inside universities – and one that that this death can help us to remember. On the occasion of Madame Nhu’s death, a colleague sent the above 1966 cover image from Ramparts magazine to me. The cover, which portrayed Madame Nhu as a cheerleader for Michigan State University (MSU), foreshadowed the article inside by Warren Hinckle, Robert Scheer, and Sol Stern, which uncovered the close relationship between MSU and the CIA in counterinsurgency in Vietnam.
The image [while deemed sexist and misogynist by this feminist] effectively captures both the central role of Madame Nhu in public life, and also the U.S. relationship to her, her husband, and her brother-in-law. The article, a reproduction of which can be found in PDF form here, contains details of how different parts of the university became involved in supporting covert, unjust actions carried out in the alleged name of supporting “democracy.”
In the heat of the uprisings that summer, President John F. Kennedy assigned Henry Cabot Lodge as the new ambassador to South Vietnam with the understanding that Lodge would do everything possible to bring the Ngo brothers’ regime under control. With U.S. encouragement, by late October a coup was in the works. While Madame Nhu was touring the United States to garner support for Diem and her husband, the coup was launched in Saigon, and on November 1 Diem and Nhu were brutally assassinated.
Madame Nhu talked to her husband Ngo Dinh Nhu, the brother of South Vietnam President Ngo Dinh Diem, for the last time on Oct. 27, 1963. They had spoken every few days while she was away, first in Europe and then in the United States. It had been a long trip. Madame Nhu and her daughter Le Thuy, 18, had left Saigon six weeks before, and now it was almost time to go home. They planned to fly from California to Vietnam with a stopover in Japan. Nhu was going to meet them in Tokyo to accompany them the rest of the way, and Madame Nhu was trying to finalize the itinerary over a tinny long-distance telephone call connecting her from San Francisco to Saigon. There was a small cyst on her eyelid, she explained to Nhu. She wanted to get it taken care of, but she supposed it could wait a few more days until she got to Tokyo.“Would that be all right?”she asked him. If she did it in Japan, she reasoned,“it will be cheaper!” Madame Nhu was trying to lighten the mood. It could be hard to read a person over thousands of miles of transpacific cable, but Nhu’s voice sounded small and strange to her.
“I’m not coming to Japan anymore. I am staying in Saigon.” Madame Nhu chose not to insist. She didn’t want to get into a disagreement over the phone, so she bit her tongue. “Fine.” She would get the surgery done before flying home. In Los Angeles, why not? Doctors there were used to working on beautiful, famous faces. She would stay 10 more days. After Washington, D.C., Madame Nhu had made highly publicized stops at cities and colleges in North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas. She had taken part in U.S. Day on October 23 at Dallas Memorial Auditorium, where she had been called onto the stage and handed a bouquet of flowers. U.S. Day was a protest rally specifically organized to take place one day before the UN Day celebration of the U.S. membership in the United Nations at the same location. Banners reading “Get the U.S. out of the UN” and “Get the UN out of the U.S.” were unfurled. The anti–United Nations gathering brought together ultraconservatives who opposed the Kennedy administration in Washington—members of the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and the National Indignation Convention. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was there. But for all Madame Nhu’s press attention and powerful new friends, things in Saigon had continued to worsen. Nhu had sounded so strange on the tele- phone with his wife because he knew by then that things were all but hopeless. Nhu’s attack on the [Buddhist] pagodas in August [executed by Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces and police, in which more than 1,400 Buddhists were arrested] had poisoned whatever goodwill remained in his relationship with the Americans. Before then, the general thinking in Washington was that the United States had simply been“insufficiently firm” in its dealings with Nhu and his brother President Diem. But after the August raids and Nhu’s flagrant disregard for the American directive to resolve tensions with the Buddhists, Washington’s policy changed radically. Diem and Nhu were incorrigible, and they would have to be replaced.
detained in holding cells. The brothers in Saigon couldn’t have known that in Washington enthusiasm for the coup was waxing and waning. The White House itself was in disarray over all the conflicting advice it was receiving. CIA director John A. McCone consistently criticized the idea of a coup. To a meeting of the Special Group on Vietnam, McCone said that replacing Diem and Nhu with unknowns was “exceedingly dangerous” and would likely spell “absolute disaster” for the United States. He said privately to President Kennedy too that this coup “would be the first of others that would follow.” The Departments of State and Defense, on the other hand, were adamantly in favor of a coup. The United States was divided but had already passed the point of no return. Ambassador Lodge was firm in his belief:“We are on a course from which there is no turning back.”
scheme: He and Diem would fake their own coup. It was risky, but it was their only hope. A false coup was supposed to scare the Americans into renewing support for the Diem regime. Carefully selected phony coup leaders would pretend to be“neutralists,” in the vein of the surprise 1960 neutralist coup in Lao that had severely damaged U.S. interests in Southeast Asia. To a casual observer, Oct. 31, 1963, seemed like just another day in Saigon. That morning, President Diem chatted easily in his office with Ambassador Lodge and Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Command, Admiral Harry Felt. Felt was passing through Saigon on what looked like a routine inspection of American military assistance to South Vietnam, but in fact the South Vietnamese army generals plotting against Diem had orchestrated his presence, specifically timing Felt’s visit to keep Diem in the palace all morning. The South Vietnamese president warned his visitors that they might hear rumors of a coup and should pay no attention to them.At noon, shutters were lowered over storefronts. Motorbikes, pedicabs and taxis ferried people home, out of the midday heat for two hours of lunch and rest.
The palace was quiet too. The Nhus’ younger children had left for Dalat. They were on school vacation, and the boys had begged their father to let them go hunting. He let them go but made sure that 15 members of the presidential guard accompanied them. His youngest child, 4-year-old daughter Le Quyen, couldn’t hunt, but she would go to the mountains with her brothers and her nurse. A little after 4 p.m., a crash of artillery fire broke out. The gunfire sounded as if it was near the presidential guard barracks. Shooting so close to the palace had definitely not been part of the plan. Until that moment, the brothers had appraised the slow buildup of troops and tanks inside Saigon’s city limits calmly. They had taken note of the developments in the city from the remove of their offices. Instead of raising warning flags, the movement of troops and armor had reassured Diem and Nhu. They believed their plan, code-named “Bravo Two,” was off to a good start. Just before the police headquarters fell into the generals’ hands, a frightened police official had telephoned Nhu to tell him that they were under attack. “It’s all right,” Nhu said. “I know all about it.” Nhu was unruffled because he still thought that, according to plan, his forces would quash the “insurrection,” leaving him and Diem to be hailed as heroes. In the ensuing confusion, Nhu also intended to conduct a very personalized bloodbath. Special Forces and Nhu’s hired gangsters would murder disloyal ARVN generals and senior officers. Troublesome Americans had been marked as well; reporter Stanley Karnow would learn that Ambassador Lodge and veteran CIA agent Lucien Conein were on the list of targets. The countercoup supposedly now underway involved almost cartoonish levels of deception: It was to be a coup inside a coup.
a memoir about his success fighting the Communists in Malaya.And while it turned out that Diem’s reading tastes ran to adventure tales about the American West, the first eager boys pawing at Madame Nhu’s silk negligees overlooked the brown-covered book in her drawers. Her diary was eventually found, discreetly slipped into a waistband, and kept for decades as an heirloom and souvenir. The brothers knew they were finished, so they didn’t try to hide much longer. They moved from Ma Tuyen’s house to another location in Cholon, the yellow and white stucco St. Francis Xavier Church. Diem called the army headquarters and asked to be put in touch with the generals to arrange his surrender. Troops began pulling up shortly after. The officers walked up to the front of the church and saluted the man who had been their president for nine years. Then they led him and his brother out and shoved them into the back of a small, tarpaulin-sided truck. Later, no one can say when, the brothers were transferred to an armored personnel carrier. They would not come out of it alive. Madame Nhu was stuck in the quiet luxury of the Beverly Wilshire, but she was desperate to get her children out of South Vietnam. She called Marguerite Higgins, a reporter she had met in Saigon and who had become a friend. A sobbing Madame Nhu asked, “Do you really believe they [Diem and Nhu] are dead? Are they going to kill my children too?” Higgins offered to help by calling on her connections at the State Department in Washington.
On the day after the coup, President Kennedy dictated a memo for his records. He called Diem’s and Nhu’s deaths“particularly abhorrent” and accepted responsibility for having “encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.” His presidential thoughts on the Saigon assassinations were then interrupted by 3-year-old John Jr. and 6-yearold Caroline, who came squealing into the office for a moment with their daddy. Behind the crinkling of the tapes, you can hear little voices saying, “Hello,” into Kennedy’s Dictaphone. Just a moment later their father asked the children all about the changing of the seasons: Why are leaves green? How is snow on the ground? The exchange is all the more touching when you remember that these children would never see the change of seasons with their father again. Kennedy would be assassinated just three weeks later.
Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu tells a press conference that Americans are responsible for the Vietnamese army coup, denies that her husband and her brother-in-law, President Ngo Dinh Diem, committed suicide. "The supposed leader of the coup, General Duong Van Minh- is he supposed to rule the Americans or the Vietnamese? For how long will they hold power if they ever hold power? I cannot understand why President Diem's Roman Catholicism is constantly mentioned while that of certain other chiefs of state is not...Any crime committed against the Ngo family cannot be hidden under the label of suicide because suicide is incompatible with our religion. The Ngo family only wanted to give Vietnam its own identity which cannot be the same as the one wanted by a few short-sighted arrogant Americans."
Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu lashed out Tuesday at Harvard students for the "impropriety and rudeness" they displayed here during her talk before the Law School Forum. "At Columbia they threw eggs at me like I was a peasant. But Harvard was incredible. The bad reputation of such a school should be told to the American people," said South Vietnam's first lady. Continuing her nation-wide tour, Mme. Nhu made her criticism of Harvard at a reception before her speech at Princeton University. "They showed bad manners--very bad manners--at Harvard," she said. "People in our country respect a lecturer. I don't mind what they do in the street--at Columbia they picketed me in the street--but at Harvard it was the organizing committee. Either Harvard must change or the youth must be warned." Mme. Nhu complained that she had been "sandwiched" between "three forty-five minute speakers. "After all," she said, "I was the main speaker." The format of the Law Forum is such that the main address is followed by extensive comments from several panel members. While at Harvard, Mme. Nhu hinted that she had not found her stay very pleasant. Towards the close of her Forum speech, she admonished her hosts. "I am amazed to hear these hisses, screams, and shouts. Why do you people not make as much noise about Hungary?" Harvey Poll 3L, president of the Law Forum, said that the Forum had had its own troubles with the Nhu program. Poll declared that the Forum had attempted several times to secure some type of preliminary speech form Mme. Nhu but "had never received a single word of what to expect. The program was originally scheduled to be much longer than an hour and a half, Poll said. "It was her security guard that cut the program short. We anticipated more questions from the panel and the floor."
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The Smoke Surrounding the Dragon Lady
Between the use of napalm and grenades, no one expected the most controversial weapon of the Vietnam War to be the Dragon Lady’s words, ready to crumble a regime in one fiery breath. Madame Nhu, born Tran Le Xuan into a wealthy family, wed herself into one of Vietnam’s most prominent families. Her brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Diem, began to lead an emerging nationalist movement. From 1946 to 1954, Nhu and her husband lived in the mountain resort city Dalat and began quietly amassing support for Diem.
When the French were defeated in the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, Diem was named Prime Minister of South Vietnam, and Madame Nhu gained access to a whole new world of influence. During the Vietnam War, the criticism Madame Nhu received for her outspoken and attention-seeking behavior reveals the greater cultural context of the time regarding topics such as feminism, sexual politics, and religion, as Madame Nhu became representative of the potential violence of her country and the objectification of East Asia. Madame Nhu was in a particularly interesting position to influence policy and spread her beliefs as she became the “unofficial first lady of the regime.”1 Since Diem was unmarried with no children, Nhu talked to him daily about his work in the country and to argue for what she wished to change, even being cited by a family friend as being Diem’s “platonic wife.'' Nhu firmly believed that the Diem family was the only solution to Vietnam’s problems and considered herself to be the main part of that solution. Part of that plan involved her running for a National Assembly Seat in 1956 and successfully being elected into her own form of influence.3 She leveraged this position to pass legislation to set up nurseries, maternity clinics, social welfare centers, kindergartens and night schools.4 And in the early 1960s, she began attracting media attention because of a TIMES interview that highlighted her teaching young women martial arts skills for self-defense.
Nhu consistently used her position of power to shape Vietnam as she saw fit, and her legislation was a big part of that. Madame Nhu’s early legislative actions were largely labeled as feminist by the Western media and still the biographical accounts of her life include phrases such as “puritanical feminist” which aims to neatly characterize her actions and square away her intentions.6 Yet, the household structure in her and Diem’s relationship, however unconventional the circumstances, was quite typical of Vietnam at the time. A handbook for U.S. army personnel deployed to Vietnam noted that “many Vietnamese women are in fact extremely powerful and exercise a strong formative influence on their husband’s opinions and actions.” This was countercultural to some of the American’s experience in the 1960s and seeing Nhu’s influence over such a powerful man was threatening to many U.S. leaders. Many tried to have her removed from Saigon, including Secretary of State Dean Rusk, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, and other Kennedy administration officials, but they were warned by those close to the family it would be “practically impossible” to remove her. A large part of this media coverage included her infamous nickname, the “Dragon Lady of Saigon,” which both represented her immense power in the regime and the perceived threat to the West. The origin of the nickname ‘Dragon Lady’ comes from the name of a beautiful lady pirate in Milton Caniff’s comic strip “Terry and the Pirates.” The Dragon Lady’s real name was Lai Choi San, and Caniff wrote her to be an embodiment of the mysteries of the Orient. She was “the strongest of all because she had the double weapon of beauty and absolute ruthlessness.”
The earliest representation of the media’s treatment of the Dragon Lady is Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, the wife of an American supported Chinese leader from the 1930s to WWII who was portrayed as damsel in distress that could be saved by the American knight in shining armor. Americans focused on her Christianity, physical beauty, and well-spoken English used to lobby for support of her husband’s government, even though many Chinese dismissed her as a corrupt, power-hungry symbol of the past. She is an exemplar of the American media portraying Asian women in a warped way to best fit American needs, which often goes against the interests of the women of their culture or their country as a whole. Madame Chiang’s story is a part of a larger epidemic of Western representations of East Asia through the sexualization and fetishization of its women. The tropes of Orientalism served to justify colonialism in Vietnam in its early stages. Later on, as reports of American involvement relied on describing Saigon as a feminized place of “sensual pleasure,” Vietnam began to develop a “sensual geography” in which these sexualized ideas informed the way people conceptualized the country.10 With an understanding of American views of gender roles and sexuality at the time, it can be seen why this “sensual geography” would seem to be justification for the masculine power of U.S. occupation troops’ political mission. By feminizing Saigon as a sensual maiden, the West was able to court, exploit, and abandon her, all within their own sensibilities and moral systems. One of the recognized influences on the media depictions of Vietnam comes from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, which emphasized Saigon’s attraction as a “gendered, quasi-magical, and sensualized enchantment.” The larger identity of Saigon was proving detrimental to its people, who were no longer able to effectively influence its image.
Madame Nhu attempted to occupy a space in this “sensual geography” that was entirely her own. She exemplified the origins of the ‘Dragon Lady’ by being renown for both her beauty and her ruthlessness. Nhu was known for her extravagant glamour and fiery tempers, which made her a favorite in media coverage of Vietnam.13 She was featured on both Time and Life magazines on their covers and developed a reputation for being the talking head of the regime.14 Her style was controversial for her tight fitting bao dais, which were a traditional Vietnamese gown, and her sexually suggestive decollate gowns were shocking to the more old fashioned Vietnamese women.15 One French journalist described her as “molded into her dress like a dagger in its sheath,” which is representative of the physical manifestation of violence her sexuality had taken on. Even her brother Diem criticized her outfits for being too form fitting, but she told him, “It’s not your neck that sticks out, it’s mine. So shut up.”16 She was taking control of her own image and in doing so, propelled herself to the center of both criticism and power. Madame Nhu began to symbolize “the potential violence in her already bloody land.”17 There was a widespread effort to diminish her authority and trivialize her opinions, often using her sexuality as a means of humiliation. During her 1963 speaking tour, Nhu complained the Kennedy White House was too soft on communism and claimed there were “not red yet, but they are pink.” The Washington Post reported on her visit and remarked that her "long, sharpened red fingernails detracting somewhat from her posture of defenselessness."18 Her appearance and femininity supposedly were the downfall of her critiques, rather than their content. The Kennedy White House despised Madame Nhu and everything that she stood for. Nhu was the antithesis of the Kennedy’s air of refinement and of Jacqueline Kennedy’s feelings that women had no place in politics and were better suited to the role of wife and quiet supporter. Mrs. Kennedy admitted that Madame Nhu represented “everything that Jack [Kennedy] found unattractive in a woman.”19 Since her decisions were not ladylike by the Kennedy's standards, and therefore not attractive, the perceived lack of sexual appeal was therefore reflective of Nhu’s inherent value. Jackie Kennedy also criticized Madame Nhu’s reputation for clamoring for power. Madame Nhu’s own parents openly criticized her as a “power-hungry propagandist” of a daughter.20 Mrs. Kennedy once asked her husband “Why are these women like her and Clare Luce, who are both obviously attracted to men… why do they have this queer thing for power?” Both President Kennedy and his wife interpreted Madame Nhu and Clare Luce, a staunch supporter of Madame Nhu, as women who hate men, and Jackie Kennedy whispered to a historian, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.”21 This was perhaps echoing a sentiment that President Kennedy had expressed in the White House to emphasize his distaste for Nhu. The Kennedys were again using Madame Nhu’s sexuality as a weapon against her, attempting to write away her feminist reputation with a more sinister explanation at the time. The Kennedy’s criticism tied into the greater unrest of the time surrounding sexual identity, and they attempted to insult Nhu’s efforts to own and control her sexuality in a culture that was consistently trying to define it for her. The final point of identity subversion came from Madame Nhu’s commitments to her Catholic faith. The practice of being a “puritanical feminist” involved proclaiming modesty despite her sexualized image and seeking to regulate the morality of the “sin city” of Saigon.2223 These Morality Laws banned dancing, beauty contests, contraception, and underwire bras.24 As well as proposing a family bill, which banned polygamy and concubinage, the laws set up stiff penalties for adultery, and outlawed divorce except by permission of the President.25 This was another element to Madame Nhu’s larger plan for Saigon, which seemingly undercuts the expectations of her feminist and sexual politics that were so often the subject of Western media. This was her betrayal to the expectations of her as the Dragon Lady as she redefined her role, from ruthless beauty to one of protector.26 Her strict Catholicism increased tension with the majority Buddhist population of Vietnam, since her minority government was becoming increasingly regulatory and oppressive. Through these Morality Laws, Madame Nhu herself became contradictory as she simultaneously championed Western influence and criticized the U.S. role in Vietnam, sought to modernize Vietnam and return to conservative, traditional values, and used her sexuality to harness attention while restricting and outright banning many expressions of sexuality at the same time. Madame Nhu’s most infamous moment of controversy involved her religious identity when she made her statements surrounding the Monk protests. Madame Nhu was originally born into a Bhuddist family, but converted to Roman Catholicism in order to marry into Ngo Dinh Nhu’s family at the age of eighteen.27 After Diem was elected president with 98% approval in a suspectedly rigged referendum, he became Catholic minority leader in a country that was majority Buddhist, which came with much resentment. The most notable crisis was in Hue on May 8, 1963, as protestors celebrating Buddha’s birthday in defiance of Diem’s restrictions clashed with government troops. This began a series of crackdowns and violent interventions by the Diem regime to suppress Buddist protests. In response, monks began staging self-immolation protests to show the West their distaste and anger with the Diem regime.28 Madame Nhu, who was the spokesperson for the regime, and somewhat responsible for handling this controversy, went on air saying, “I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show.”29 This harsh language upset people in the West and began to sway American’s perceptions about the Diem regime.30 Her parents were appalled and withdrew from their positions in the Diem regime, and her mother even told the CIA she had urged Vietnamese expats to run her “monster” of a child “over with a car” while traveling to America.31 This comment was her biggest downfall and cost her and the Diem family their power, and for some of them, their life.
The Dragon Lady of Saigon became just as feared and desired as her name might suggest, but even that name manages to undersell her power and influence. Throughout her life, Madame Nhu began to exemplify Vietnam and the Diem regime. She represented the hope of change as she sought to legislate her country into the place she wished to see while being discredited and minimalized for her gender and sexuality. Her lifelong need for attention and influence was indicative of the Diem regime as a whole, that was a much better fit for U.S. military support by image, than in reality. Her ability to remain controversial for so long, until she ultimately sealed the Diem’s regime’s fate, paralleled the ongoing violence of her land that had great potential to escalate with a single miscalculated move. Madame Nhu is both a product and author of her own history and neither the world nor the war would have been the same without her.
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Upon the assassination of the Diệm brothers, President Kennedy's feelings were expressed to close friend Paul "Red" Fay, Acting Secretary of the Navy. The circumstances which allowed the flow towards the elimination from South Vietnam of the Diệm regime, Kennedy held, were due to the active personality of Madame Nhu. The Secretary recalls the President's feelings and in an oral history interview gave volunteered paraphrase of the words addressed to him, That goddamn bitch. She's responsible for the death of that kind man. You know, it's so totally unnecessary to have that kind man die because that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.
Malcolm Browne’s famous 1963 photo of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire to protest the South Vietnamese regime horrified the American public, but Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of South Vietnamese President Diem and unofficial First Lady, had no sympathy. “Let [the monks] burn, and we shall clap our hands,” she said. “If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.”
Madame Nhu’s vicious tongue and glamorous image earned her the name “Dragon Lady” in the American media, for whom she was a visual distillation of everything fascinating and frightening about exotic Vietnam. Just as her tiny, previously obscure Southeast Asian country came to consume the attentions of the American superpower, so too did Madame Nhu — this little, French-speaking Asian woman, always fastidiously dressed — become, briefly, the recognizable face of Vietnam for Americans: for conservative hardliners, the tough damsel-in-distress of a beleaguered nation; for the proto-anti war movement, a symbol of everything that was wrong about Vietnam and America’s burgeoning involvement; and for anti-communist liberals, an increasingly embarrassing reminder of the autocratic Diem regime’s moral inconsistency. It was during a speaking tour of the U.S. that Madame Nhu learned that her own government had been overthrown — at the hands of a military coup sponsored by the American government, whose patience with the Diem regime had finally been exhausted. Her husband and brother-in-law were dead. President Diem had been dignified with a single gunshot to the head. Madame Nhu’s husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, the president’s iron-fisted right hand, was bayoneted twenty times by his own soldiers. The Nhu children just barely escaped. Madame Nhu entered exile, and for the next half century, she hid from the public eye, her whereabouts unknown, refusing the attentions of journalists and historians.
The girl born Tran Le Xuan, a Buddhist middle daughter, lived through several Vietnams. Crumbling French Indochina was occupied by Japan during the Second World War with the collaboration of Vichy colonial authorities. The post-war French attempt to re-assert control was countered by a bloody nationalist insurgency, the end results of which were Vietnamese independence and partition between North Vietnam, a revolutionary communist government, and South Vietnam, a rump state led by Diem’s Catholic regime and an often-ungrateful client of the United States. Madame Nhu was First Lady of independent South Vietnam during the interregnum when French influence faded away, American influence ratcheted, and the civil war grew closer to Saigon every day.
conditions on the ground and the sentiment of her own people, ignorant of her looming doom. David Halberstam said she was a “beautiful but diabolic sex dictatress.” For the U.S. administration, American diplomats, and the CIA, Madame Nhu was a cunning Borgia to be reckoned with. President Kennedy blamed the entire coup and its outcome on her: “That goddamn bitch,” he said. “She’s responsible…that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.” Was Madame Nhu — who held little actual power — truly Machiavellian, or were these hyperbolic speculations compounded by the sexual and racial assumptions of her observers? Certainly, Madame Nhu was not all that she was ascribed. What she resembles above all, at least in Demery’s telling, is a character from Shakespeare, stuck in a tragic play with no possible happy ending, doomed by her own hubris. Despite the escalating effect of her uncompromising rhetoric, and despite her formidable public profile, it seems dubious that Madame Nhu was truly historically pivotal. Demery doesn’t try to make that argument. Instead she recognizes Madame Nhu for what she was: a compelling character, and someone who not only occupied but in many ways epitomized a unique, fleeting time and place. Finding the Dragon Lady is not comprehensive or authoritative on Vietnam and it may not even be the last word on Madame Nhu. It’s more of a sketch than a fully-fleshed account, but it’s a very perceptive sketch.
SHE WAS A BITCH, but the camera loved her. To most of the western world she was the antithesis of the modern American woman of the 1960s: brash, outspoken, and domineering. Regardless, Madame Nhu, who died only a few days ago, is and always will be an icon of the 20th century. Like a dagger in a sheath ready for murder, Madame Nhu was not at all sartorially oblivious. With her extremely tight fitting dresses and deep necklines, diamond crucifix necklace, bouffant hair-do and perfect eyebrows, photogs ate her up. She could've been a member of an all girl doo-wop group - one of Phil Spector's protégés. But beyond the surface, Madame Nhu has always been embroiled in heated political environments and this time it would spill over with incredible vengeance and blood. Nhu blamed the United States. “The deaths were murders,” she said, “either with the official or unofficial blessings of the American Government.” When she left her L.A. hotel, reporters asked her whether she felt defeated. She responded defiantly: “Never! Never! Never!” In a news conference on Nov. 2, 1963, she said those who carried out “such a cruel injustice,” should have to “pay for it.” Less than three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Among the many conspiracy theories around his death is that Nhu had him killed in retaliation. She did send a condolence letter to Jacqueline Kennedy with this cutting line: “I sympathize the more for I understand that that ordeal might seem to you even more unbearable because of your habitually well-sheltered life.”
While Madame Nhu seemed to be the antithesis of the Kennedys’ idea of a proper wife, her own self-image seemed to reveal a picture that closely resembled a traditional American first lady, albeit one who took a more progressive stance on the position of women in the government. In an 1963 interview with CBS, journalist Mike Wallace asked Madame Nhu which American first lady she felt she most resembled, she answered that she thought she was most like Bess Truman, as she was happiest at home. A somewhat stunned Wallace opined, “If there is any Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam conclusive statement one can make about the paradoxical Madame Nhu, it is that her resemblance to Bess Truman is obscure.” Wallace echoed what seemed to be a unanimous position in America at the time, that Madame Nhu in no way played the role of a proper first lady, but was instead a cunning politician intent on eradicating the communist threat, transforming society in southern Vietnam, and amassing significant personal power along the way
Jacqueline Kennedy told Schlesinger ''that the reason her husband was politically successful was because he did not hold grudges against his opponent, anticipating a need for cooperation later.'' Mrs. Kennedy said that maintaining alliances despite disagreements was the only way to be effective, and was “one reason I think women should never be in politics. We’re just not suited for it.” On a French television program Radiodiffusion et Television Francaise, Madame Nhu asserted that before 1959 Vietnamese women were “classed in the category of infants and the insane.
The 1959 Family Code she helped pass focused on reforming marriage law in particular, seeking to create equitable laws that assured there was “no longer a battlefront within the family.” 17 It prohibited polygamy, outlawed arranged marriages, and severely curtailed the grounds for divorce in the controversial Article 55. It was rumored that Madame Nhu specifically established the divorce provisions to prevent her sister, Le Chi, from divorcing her wealthy husband in order to marry a French lover. 18 In the French television interview, Madame Nhu’s rationale for the provision, however, invokes her Catholic morality, asserting that the arguments for easy divorce are equivalent to the arguments advocating “free love” and that for the government to allow one, it must allow the other. The moral provisions in the 1959 Family law betray a clear preoccupation with legislating morality and punishing transgressors, specifically noting that men convicted of bigamy or polygamy would not be eligible to hold government office. Madame Nhu also suggested that the Family Bill was incomplete without a broader law governing inheritance, which was said to be part of a larger new Civil Code that was being written in the National Assembly but never passed. The 1959 law and Madame Nhu’s statements about it show a clear interest in asserting women’s rights to financial participation within the family. The law not only gave women the right to open a bank account without her husband’s permission, but also prohibited the husband from “selling, buying, or engaging anything of value in the community property, such as real property, titles, or shares, without the consent of his wife.”
A January 1959 Time article titled “Dainty Emancipator” again casts Madame Nhu as a heroine who rescued young women from lives of drudgery and unhappiness rhanks to her National Assembly bill. Most of the coverage in Time in the late 1950s was sympathetic, presenting Madame Nhu as a shrewd political operative, able to push through ambitious legislation in an all-male assembly. In an interview with a Time reporter in Saigon, Madame Nhu played with gender stereotypes, stating that it was the male members of the National Assembly who prolonged debates over the Family Law. “Really,” Madame Nhu quipped, “men change their minds much more easily than women.”
Undeterred by criticisms that the law was an imposition of Catholic morality on a nation largely composed of Buddhists, Madame Nhu again used a nationalist argument to defend her bill, referencing the ways French colonialism had marked the Vietnamese people and its government and drawing clear parallels between the French system and the American presence. Madame Nhu remarked, “ You must remember that we have been a colonial people too long and there used to be one law for the French and another for the native people. No, our people would not like one law for the Americans and another for themselves. It ‘would bring bitter memories.’” Madame Nhu cast her law as not only compatible with the larger fight against Communism but as a crucial component, arguing that all of the American and ARVN efforts in fighting the North Vietnamese and the NLF would be “wasted if society were to wallow in the infamous ways of license.
Both the American media and residents of Saigon were less eager to oblige Madame Nhu’s legislative will in 1962. Whereas the 1959 bill passed with little objection, as few wanted to be associated with defending concubinage and polygamy, the new bill, officially called the “Law For the Protection of Morality,” passed with a relatively narrow margin, receiving 79 to 123 votes in the National Assembly and sparking some dissent among Senators.
Her new social legislation law banned animal fights, beauty contests, underage consumption of cigarettes and alcohol, mediums and sorcerers, gossiping, as well as contraceptives and the advocacy of contraception. Madame Nhu seemed especially offended by Saigon’s nightlife, crafting a bill that would target the ever-growing number of prostitutes and bar girls. Initially, Madame Nhu told CBS’s Mike Wallace, the purpose of the law was simply to prohibit the job of bar girl, but the Assembly, inspired by the spirit of her resolution, took the prohibitions further. As “twist-easies” sprung up around the city in defiance of the law, Madame Nhu reminded Saigon residents that in a time of war, “dancing with death is enough.” New York Times correspondent Homer Bigart, a veteran war reporter and prominent member of the Saigon press scene, reflected a measure of American amusement at the broad range of activities the proposed new bill restricted, noting that the decision made even “fights between fishes crimes punishable by fines and jail sentences.”
Another article in Time averred that Madame Nhu, a strong-willed feminist, pushed through the “chastity law” that sought to rein in cheating husbands in much the same way she would rein in the foreign correspondents who often reported unflatteringly on her activities. 29 This article so provoked Madame Nhu that she wrote a response, which was published in a subsequent issue of the magazine. Madame Nhu opened her letter asserting “I am not a feminist, if this means advocating a new social imbalance favoring women this time. If ever Viet Nam adopts a ‘chastity law,’ I shall urge that it be applied equally to all citizens.”
In 1962, Madame Nhu officially founded the Vietnamese Women’s Solidarity Movement (VWSM). Earlier, Madame Nhu revealed plans to create a new union of women that would subsume all smaller women’s organizations in the RVN whose task would be to “inform women on what you call their ‘prerogatives’” and “to make of the Feminine Force a force on which the nation can count, and which the nation must take into account.” Before the RVN group was organized, however, the NLF established its own Union of Vietnamese Women, an organization later known as the Women’s Liberation Association that will be discussed in the following chapter. Madame Nhu, in her address during the opening on the VWSM’s first national congress denounced the “act of plagiarism,” suggesting that the “Viet Cong” women’s union was hastily created only to pre-empt her own organization’s founding, an act, she said, “that was not a new strategy for them.” Madame Nhu went further, asserting that the Viet Cong had also passed a “Family Code,” in response to her own bill, but this was a law, she asserted, that “promotes the disintegration of the Family. For in fact all totalitarian institutions attempt systematically to do away with intermediary community institutions in order to render the individual isolated and bare before the totalitarian machine.”
By July 1962, The Times of Viet Nam, a paper which was by then under Madame Nhu’s complete control, reported that the VWSM had a membership of over a million women, a figure that is difficult to substantiate and ultimately says little about the group’s significance. Madame Nhu declared in March 1963 that in addition to the million plus official members, there were an “infinite number of associate members” whose only contribution was payment of the mandatory monthly dues of three piasters. She said ''In this atomic age, to continue to regard woman’s place as solely in the home is to commit a gross and inadmissible anachronism.”
Aknowledging the potential for backlash in women’s involvement in the new nation during a time of war, Madame Nhu urged members to “face not only the struggle for the Nation but also that for our own destiny as women, resolved as we are to reject forever the subservient lot which was formerly ours. 36 While she invoked the need for gender equality, she also reflected the same moral righteousness she exhibited in the earlier fight for the morality bill, warning that women who engaged in “illicit actions” or provoked public disorder would justly exasperate men “who are already too inclined to believe we have been emancipated too early.”
While the VWSM’s primary goals were focused on public welfare, running literacy campaigns and building facilities to support women and the poor, in November 1961 President Diem authorized the development of women’s paramilitary training, including weapons training, to be led by Madame Nhu. While the women were never to be incorporated into the combat forces of the RVN or used in armed defense, the women were trained in judo, jiu-jitsu, artillery, and psychological warfare, and taught to identify and defuse mines and explosives. In the first paramilitary training course there were 1,200 graduates, and more than 150,000 registered for the second and third courses. Each class was assigned a name that evoked the virtues Madame Nhu sought to instill; the first class was called “Quyet Thang” (“Determined to Win”), the second “Dong Tien” (“Forward Together”), and the 1963 class was named “Dong Tam” (“With One Heart”). Madame Nhu made few public comments on the policy not to use the women in combat, suggesting this was President Diem’s decision and not hers. In an interview with The National Observer Madame Nhu stated that the purpose of the paramilitary women was to form a force that “was capable of replacing, or at least effectively helping men in all domains,” and suggested that the women’s force was a way of mitigating the growing reliance on the United States for military force. Along with defending the hamlets, Madame Nhu argued that south Vietnamese women had a duty to contribute to the security of the nation itself, warning the young women not to “see only novelty in this honor” but to realize that membership bestows a responsibility to teach other women about moral strength and perseverance. Madame Nhu dubbed her movement a “kind of feminine order of knighthood,” that even without being integrated into an organized military would contribute to the nation.
In a 1962 interview with United Press International, Madame Nhu argued that the movement was an effort to stave off the advancing NLF, stating that Vietnamese women were obligated to “organize themselves and defend their families much further than just from the porch. Indeed when the enemy reaches the porch, it is always too late.” In a statement to the VWSM, Madame Nhu asserts that it was never her intention to “launch a cosmopolitan fashion” and encourage extravagance, but she only wanted to offer some practical open-necked versions of the ao dai, which she claimed were “neither fanciful nor alien.” In fact, Madame Nhu stated, her modifications to the ao dai were informed by the clothing of ancient Vietnam and were still common among women in the central highlands. While the press in the United States suggested that Madame Nhu was attempting to make the ao dai more western and more revealing and sexually suggestive, she again invoked nationalism, asserting that it was an homage to minority hill tribes. “Thus,” Madame Nhu averred, “nobody can accuse us of abandoning tradition or aping foreigners,” for the new necklines are “genuinely native and traditional.” While Madame Nhu’s interventions in fashion may be dismissed as superficial or insignificant, the way she used sartorial innovations to leave her mark on Vietnamese culture while linking her changes to the nation was important.
For her daughter Le Thuy’s eighteenth birthday Madame Nhu gave her a pistol, declaring, “The better to shoot Viet Cong with.'' The American press feasted upon the juxtaposition of her power and her physical smallness, casting her as an enigmatic and exotic figure, but one still largely limited to women’s issues. By 1963, however, Madame Nhu’s public pronouncements were evolving from statements about the RVN’s imperative to remake Vietnamese society for women to a more overt criticism of the American handling of the war. In a speech at the annual WSM convention in March 1963, Madame Nhu openly questioned the intentions of the Americans, calling into question the need to align the laws of the RVN, or indeed all underdeveloped nations with those of the west, “as if the latter contained all absolute truth in time and in space.” Citing the VWSM as an example of an indigenous movement that took its governance from Vietnamese historical realities, Madame Nhu argues that the RVN must oppose the imposition of “foreign systems without any vital connection with the previous local economic, social, and human structure of our society.” 50 Madame Nhu became a fairly constant critic of the notion that western powers like the United States sought to remake new nations in its own image, making her one of the only people close to the RVN president, and certainly the most recognizable person who publicly called into doubt American motives in Vietnam. Based on prior inflammatory comments, in an August 1962 interview with UPI, Madame Nhu was asked whether she was “anti-American,” to which she responded that she was not so foolish to be against her country’s closest ally. However, Madame Nhu noted that she was indeed against people who abused the hospitality of the Vietnamese people, or attempted to plot against the government and sow division within its ranks. Undoubtedly referring to American military advisers and government officials in Saigon, Madame Nhu sharply criticized those “who like to submerge us in sanctimonious and pretentiously paternalistic sermons.”
The following year Madame Nhu renewed her criticisms of the overbearing Americans, telling Mike Wallace that her hostility toward the United States grew out of interactions with some Americans who clearly viewed themselves as morally superior. She opposed, she told Wallace, “sanctimonious freedom teachers,” who are intolerant and eager to claim credit for anything successful. “You, who believe in freedom, in tolerance,” she pronounced, “let us live as we like.''
After the barbecue comments had captured the attention of the world, Marguerite Higgins wrote to Madame Nhu, offering some prepared talking points she suggested might help to smooth over public opinion and allow Madame Nhu to express her thoughts more diplomatically. 57 Higgins encouraged Madame Nhu to end the entire affair, to claim that she was misquoted and tell the press that she had no interest in prolonging a semantic argument. Words that Madame Nhu should avoid included “conspiracy,” and “systematic,” which Higgins suggested made an unfavorable impression on American audiences. Warning that criticisms of President Kennedy, regardless of their basis in fact, hurt the RVN and cast doubt on her own character, Higgins instead urged Madame Nhu to shift the focus to the state of the war in the countryside, and insist that the RVN was winning there. Much as her own reportage focused on successes in the Mekong Delta, Higgins emphasized that if Madame Nhu focused her comments on the NLF threat that Americans would once again come to regard the RVN as its ally and unite the two nations against the conflict.
When asked to explain her “barbecue” comments about Thich Quang Duc’s immolation, Madame Nhu told an audience that she and her daughter had overheard an American soldier use the phrase at a hot dog stand in Saigon, and that “It sounded like a perfectly harmless Americanism.” 60 Although her response to the Buddhist crisis cannot be reduced to a shaky grasp of English, there is significant evidence supporting the notion that Madame Nhu had a very difficult time expressing herself clearly in English. Despite this, it was clear that Madame Nhu understood the impact of her barbecue comments, even telling Marguerite Higgins that if she had it to do over, she would use the same words. She chose those terms, she told Higgins, “because they have shock value. It is necessary to somehow shock the world out of this trance in which it looks at Vietnam with false vision about religious persecution that does not exist.” To another reporter Madame Nhu said that she was trying to use humor to defuse the situation, thinking that “ridicule was the best weapon” and that the whole flap proved that she was a victim of American advice. It seems as though language was indeed a legitimate barrier for Madame Nhu, but it is also clear that she attempted to use the perception of her lack of fluency to provide a certain amount of cover for her more controversial remarks. Time acknowledged this propensity, stating that Madame Nhu sometimes used her imperfect English as a “handy escape hatch when her more acid quotes backfired.” Most of the American press, however, refused to accept this as a justification for her comments, which to the displeasure of the American staff in Saigon, did not stop with the Buddhist immolations.
In the fall of 1963, another of Madame Nhu’s inflammatory public remarks that she initially attributed to linguistic misunderstanding garnered attention from both the American press and officials in Vietnam. In an article that appeared in Stars and Stripes, Madame Nhu referred to junior American officers in Vietnam as “little soldiers of fortune,” a comment Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge publicly denounced as shocking and irresponsible. 63 Shortly after the American press expressed a similar outrage, the head of the VWSM wrote a letter to Ambassador Lodge attempting to explain the remarks, stating that Madame Nhu’s actual comments were that “some junior officials in the American services are behaving like little improvised officers seeking fortune.”64 The VWSM emphasized its support for American servicemen but expressed concern that some soldiers behaved irresponsibly and had little understanding or respect for the people. Time magazine that she had been misquoted, maintaining that she was merely stating that the American mission in Saigon had “among its lower officials some adventurers who did not hesitate to betray the official policy of their government.” 65 A week later, still not satisfied with her explanation, Time reported that Madame Nhu now claimed she had used the term as a compliment, suggesting that the American military was populated with “self-made heroes.'' At this point even Marguerite Higgins’s reporting began to convey some doubt about Madame Nhu’s suitability for a public role in the regime, suggesting that “moderation is clearly not Madame Nhu’s style,” and that the first lady still did not understand that her remarks were not just destroying her own image, but also hurting the Saigon government.
The Dragon Lady Visits America
It was under this cloud of doubt that Madame Nhu came even more squarely into the American journalistic spotlight when she embarked on a major American tour in fall of 1963. Although some appearances were cancelled during the course of her trip, at the outset Madame Nhu was scheduled to visit twelve American cities, deliver eleven university lectures, and by some estimates give up to eighty scheduled television appearances during her “three-week coastto-coast campaign to woo the American public.” 68 Madame Nhu publicly stated that the tour was her idea, and represented a sincere effort to determine if freedom of expression truly existed in the United States, telling Time that the trip was designed not to rehabilitate her own image, but to “clear up some of the ‘calumny’ aimed at her homeland.” 69 Many in the media also noted that Madame Nhu’s trip to America was timed to coincide with the opening of the United Nations debate on the Diem regime’s Buddhist policies, as the UN had opened an investigation into human rights abuses associated with the crisis. Despite the timing, Madame Nhu did not appear at the UN, as representatives for the RVN, which included Madame Nhu’s own mother made it clear that her presence would ensure harsh condemnation. Evidence suggests that while the United States government did not seek to prevent Madame Nhu’s tour, they also did not aid in its planning. Many press outlets surmised it was orchestrated by the State Department, intended to repair some of the immense public relations damage Madame Nhu had inflicted, but comments by American officials suggest a deep concern over the tour, and an apprehension of the potential political fallout from putting Madame Nhu in the spotlight.
While Madame Nhu never sought permission from the United States government for her trip, she did write to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, informing him of her plans but never requesting official meetings with the Kennedy White House. Johnson responded to Madame Nhu in a letter from September 1963, warning Madame Nhu that her visit came “at an intensely critical time,” and urged her to take into account, “in as coldly objective fashion as possible, the question whether your coming here will help or hinder the struggle to which both our countries are so deeply committed.” Johnson acknowledged that doubts about the effectiveness of the Diem regime were reaching a fever pitch, based largely on the public reaction to the barbecue remarks. Clearly anticipating a media debacle surrounding the American tour, Johnson advised Madame Nhu that her attempts to remake her image would meet with resistance from journalists. Johnson averred, “my experience has taught me that debating with the press is a losing business.”
The Vice President’s letter also responded to Madame Nhu’s contention that the American officials were discouraging her visit because they were afraid of her, and Johnson assured Madame Nhu that she was “quite wrong in supposing that I or any one of us here could feel ‘frightened’ by a lovely lady.” Johnson suggested that Madame Nhu’s efforts to defend herself would be rejected by the press and the public, and would likely only “intensify the doubt which exists in the public mind,” but maintained that if she chose to visit, she would be, “like all visitors, cordially received in all parts of the country.” The press interpreted Madame Nhu’s visit largely along political lines, with the overtly conservative publications defending her and the more liberal outlets dismissing the tour as another publicity stunt. The Washington Post suggested that Madame Nhu, who caused so much harm to the South Vietnamese cause, came to America “to fortify by personal visit the unfavorable impressions she has created from afar,” lamenting the American tendency to make celebrities of its critics. 72 Observing that there is “something pathetic” about Madame Nhu, the article essentially urged the United States to cut its ties with the Diem regime, reminding its readers that the American mission was not to save the Diem administration but to defend Southeast Asia. Foreshadowing a change in leadership, the article suggested that the American presence in Saigon left the south Vietnamese people the option of choosing an alternative government, an option they would lose if the United States withdrew.
On the other hand, the Catholic publication America suggested that the tour was the news media’s way to “carry on the vendetta in full view of the American public,” and the conservative National Review asserted that the trip simply allowed the press to “confirm their dislike for her.” Clearly Madame Nhu came to American in 1963 in a defensive mode and anticipated difficult questions about her recent notoriety. The reception Madame Nhu received from the public and the press varied, as some audiences greeted her with respect and curiosity while others were perceptibly hostile, seeing her presence as an occasion for protesting the American association with what was increasingly believed to be a corrupt regime in Saigon. At Princeton, she was alternately booed and cheered, and at Columbia a barrage of rocks and eggs met her arriving car. Madame Nhu told the press that students and professors at Harvard had shown very bad manners, and a teenager outside a Berkeley lecture leaned beyond police lines to shout “fascist butcher” at the entering Madame Nhu. 75 In New Jersey, where President Diem had spent two years in seminary before becoming president of the RVN, six of the 250 picketers were Buddhist monks, who booed and hissed Madame Nhu. While the appearances during the first week of her three week tour seemed to draw the highest attendance, by the second week the sympathetic crowds seemed to have dwindled, leaving mostly newsmen and students in the crowds. Small demonstrations were common around the sites of Madame Nhu’s speeches, and protestors carried signs that showed an almost compulsive devotion to using her name in puns, including slogans such as “No Nhus is Good Nhus,” “Phu on Nhu,” and perhaps most labored, “Nhu Deal is Nhu Diem Good.” 76 The volume of press coverage of Madame Nhu’s tour was overwhelming, demonstrating a clear shift in tone from the late 1950s stories on her promotion of the Family Bill and her prominent and largely positive role in the establishment of the RVN. Whereas early coverage extolled Madame Nhu as a determined, if imperious, feminist, by 1963 much of the coverage betrayed the press’s fatigue with Madame Nhu’s notoriety, so much that Newsweek columnist Kenneth Crawford wrote dismissively that “her mission has been not so much a failure as an irritating irrelevancy.” 77 Although the press corps may have begun to see Madame Nhu’s political commentary as repetitive and tiresome, what endured was the media’s tendency to describe in minute detail her physical appearance and the way it contrasted with her overbearing personality. In an August 1963 cover story, Time magazine described her with a flurry of adjectives:
“A fragile, exciting beauty who stands only 5 ft. 2 in. in high heels – who has kept her girlish grace though she is the mother of four – Mme. Nhu does not look the part. To her critics she symbolizes everything that is wrong with the remote, authoritarian, family-dominated Diem regime. But if she is vain, arbitrary, puritanical, imperious and devious, she also exudes strength, dedication and courage. To some it seems that she belongs in an intrigue-encrusted 18th century court, or that she should wear the robes of a Chinese empress - or both.”
Much of the newspaper coverage of her visit highlighted the mélange of Madame Nhu’s exotic beauty, small stature, and threatening persona. Newsweek described her as “the talking doll from Saigon,” “St. Joan in a slit-skirt,” and as “a breath-taking vision of loveliness.” Journalists interpreted her behavior as deceptively timid, waving at newsmen “as they looked up into her soft brown almond eyes with their ‘please-protect-me-I’m-fragile’ look, the carefully planned, hard-hitting, searching questions seemed to vanish from their minds.” 79 Comparing Madame Nhu to the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, one journalist gushed that “Mme. Nhu is such a dish that the poor victim, more often than not, is likely to gaze up at her adoringly as the execution order is pronounced.” 80 There was some media speculation that the tour was intended to present a contrite, penitent version of Madame Nhu that would soften her own image and attempt to humanize the Diem administration. Soon after her arrival, however, it became clear that Madame Nhu had no intention of presenting a sympathetic face, but was more interested in telling her side of the story, exactly what Vice President Johnson had warned against. Madame Nhu charged, “the American press tried to lynch me. Now they want to hear everything the corpse says.” 81 Despite this charge, it did not appear that Madame Nhu sought the sympathy of the American public, or held any hope that her image could be revived. In fact, Madame Nhu seemed to revel in her disrepute, particularly poking fun at her belief that American men feared her. Journalist Mary McGrory called her “mockingly ferocious” in her assessment of Vietnamese women’s power, as Madame Nhu suggested that men, presumably both Vietnamese and American, “are a little afraid of the women’s force…I have told the men if they are good we will only take half the seats in the Parliament.” McGrory observed that the audience, “a little afraid, joined in her merry chuckles.
Little of the hostility directed toward Madame Nhu was tied to the larger political failures of the RVN or with America’s unclear role in the government, with most attacking her public persona. It seemed few politicians or public figures wanted to go on the record defending or denouncing Madame Nhu and her press extravaganza. One exception was Congressman Wayne Hays (D-OH), who complained that "It's bad enough that every two-bit dictator around the world reviles and insults the U.S. at will, but it is too much to let this comic-strip Dragon Lady do it under our very noses." 83 Congressman Hays connected Madame Nhu’s presence to increasing anti-American sentiment in the world, a frequent charge in the American media since the outbreak of the Buddhist crisis. Hays also resurrected the familiar comparison that evoked the legendary, lethal combination of beauty, corruption, and violence, referring to Madame Nhu as a “twentieth-century Lucrezia Borgia.” 84 Madame Nhu acknowledged that she had become a controversial figure, and addressed the dragon lady image that the American press had seized upon by crafting her own nickname, the dragonfly. “Everyone calls me ‘the Dragon Lady.’ For the next few weeks I will be like the dragonfly of the Vietnamese song. When it’s happy, it stays; when it’s unhappy, it flies away.” 85 While Madame Nhu expressed disappointment that the first lady of an allied nation was treated so poorly by the American media and virtually ignored by politicians, she did seem to believe that she could escape the harsh consequences of her condemnation of the Buddhists. She relied in some ways on the image created by the American press of her as sharp-tongued but ultimately ineffectual to deflect criticisms and continue to speak her mind.
Humorist Art Buchwald also intervened in the Madame Nhu media frenzy, writing an article that appeared in syndication in several major newspapers. The conceit of Buchwald’s piece is that he is interviewing Madame Nhu while he sleeps, presenting a “dream” interview with an alternative version Madame Nhu who responds in exactly the opposite way that the American public would expect. Asked what she thought the proper role for women should be, Buchwald’s Madame Nhu replied, “‘I can’t speak for other women, but as for myself, I think a woman’s place is in her home with her children.” When asked about her role in the government, alter-Madame Nhu demurred, “I don’t know or understand anything about politics so I believe those things should be left up to the men.” Buchwald also poked fun at the relationship between Madame Nhu and the press, with his fictional subject remarking, “I think the American press has done a magnificent job reporting on events in my country. Occasionally they get a few facts wrong and our secret police have to correct them, but on the whole we have had a wonderful relationship.” Buchwald also touched on Madame Nhu’s tour, and alter-Madame Nhu laid out an itinerary that included more appropriate destinations for a tourist including a visit to Disneyland, fashion shows and Radio City Music Hall, with no political speeches, since “I’m traveling as a private citizen, you know.” 86 Buchwald’s satire of Madame Nhu said a lot about contemporary thoughts on the roles of women in public life, certainly more about American notions of women and politics than about Madame Nhu herself. Buchwald’s article reiterated the well-known idea that Madame Nhu simply did not fit into an American conception of a woman politician, and more importantly suggested that no such thing existed in America at the time.
Madame Nhu Meets the Press
One important aspect of Madame Nhu’s American tour that must be considered is the important and at that point still untested role of television in shaping perceptions of public figures. Many of Madame Nhu’s stops were televised in local markets and she made several appearances on national television. The Nation magazine suggested that her tour spawned “some of the worst interviewing since TV was invented,” programming that was “put on the air by experienced male journalists, who were apparently overcome by Mme. Nhu’s scented silk gowns and inch-long fingernails.” 87 Even women, the article notes, were not always able to resist her spell. The cameras in televised interviews with Madame Nhu often lingered on tight close-ups of her face and her clothing. ABC journalist Peggy Whedon stated that Madame Nhu spoke with such expressive gestures that she directed the cameraman to focus on Nhu’s fingernails, a shot that was repeated in various television appearances. 88 While her ao dai gestured to a more traditional Vietnamese conception of femininity, her hair was elaborately coiffed, usually in a beehive style, and she wore thick makeup that resembled contemporary American styling. Perhaps the most important and most-watched appearance on television was on NBC’s Meet the Press on October 13, 1963. Host Ned Brooks introduced Madame Nhu as a woman many considered one of the most powerful individuals in Saigon, and most of the panel’s questions were directed at her own volatile relationship with the American officials in Saigon and her opinions on the state of the war. Moderator Lawrence Spivak pointed out that while American aid was approximately a million and a half dollars a day at this point, Madame Nhu continued to criticize the actions of the United States government in Saigon and suggest that the Americans were overstepping their bounds by intervening in the daily workings of the RVN government. Didn’t she believe, Spivak asked, that the United States had a right to intervene in its decision? Rather than reasserting her prior criticisms about American interference, Madame Nhu redirected the discussion toward the topic of regime change, which she noted that President Kennedy had publicly mentioned. Madame Nhu suggested it was well known that the Americans were actively seeking new leaders to replace the Diem administration, and told Spivak that she had received “unofficial advice” that she and her husband leave the country. 89 This was not a revelation for the press, as many publications had discussed the inevitability of Diem’s removal for many months, but the Buddhist crisis seemed to increase the urgency of the debate. Later in the interview Madame Nhu backtracked slightly, suggesting that the idea that the Americans were committed to replacing Diem was simply a “supposition.” While Madame Nhu stated that she had no official role in the government, she did assert that the RVN was clearly winning the war and that she did not understand why no one in the press was reporting it. Spivak pressed Madame Nhu, questioning how all of the American officials who spoke skeptically of the progress in Saigon, including the majority of journalists, General Maxwell Taylor, Secretary McNamara, and President Kennedy were wrong and yet she was the only one to have an accurate grasp of the state of the war. Madame Nhu’s response was muddled, as she admitted that not all of the Americans were wrong about the situation, but she attributed the problem to what was thought to be the characteristically Asian problem of “face.” Madame Nhu stated that the problem was that for the officials, “the question of face is stronger than the question of justice.” She said that officials had made poor judgments in the past but were too rigid to admit errors, stating in her characteristically obtuse way, “to err is human, but to persevere is diabolical.” In the years before 1963, American officials would often forgive Madame Nhu’s inflammatory public statements as they sometimes conceded that the press provoked or antagonized her in order to spur outrageous quotes. But by the time of her 1963 tour, it was clear that the State Department wanted Madame Nhu to stop talking. In a September 1963 memorandum from Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Roger Hilsman to the Secretary of State, Hilsman states that “since Nhu and Madame Nhu symbolize to the world and to important Vietnamese opinion GVN policies of repression, Nhus’ power must be terminated,” and that American credibility “requires their departure from Vietnam, at least for extended vacation.” 90 On Meet the Press, Madame Nhu stated flatly that while “officially nothing has been requested,” comments by the American ambassador and other officials had suggested the Nhus flee, framing it as “just an advice from a friend.” 91 By this point, speculation about regime change was rampant, and Diem’s overthrow was increasingly seen as a foregone conclusion. The Buddhist crisis seemed to be the inevitable internal crisis that American officials had predicted, as most of the United States establishment doubted Diem’s ability to maintain a sense of national unity within the RVN. In what seemed like a Hollywood ending, the rumored coup took place on November 1, while Madame Nhu was a guest at the Beverly Wilshire hotel in California.
After learning of the coup in Saigon that killed her husband and brother-in-law, Madame Nhu called Marguerite Higgins, whom she asked to intervene with the State Department in facilitating her children’s safe exit from Vietnam. Higgins was able to arrange for the children’s flight to Rome and reassured Madame Nhu that the White House had a stake in making sure they were not harmed. A barrage of journalists met Madame Nhu at the Beverly Wilshire, where, as Newsweek observed, “she was pallid and apparently had lost weight. But she still breathed fiery defiance.” Asked if the coup signified her defeat, Madame Nhu responded, “Never! I will never be defeated!” 92 Clare Boothe Luce Few came forward to defend Madame Nhu, either before the coup or after, but she found one prominent and faithful supporter in Clare Boothe Luce. Luce, a conservative writer, former Congresswoman, and wife of Time publisher Henry Luce, mounted a vigorous defense of Madame Nhu. In an article in the National Review, published just three days after President Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were assassinated in Saigon, Luce railed against the American press for vilifying Madame Nhu on her American tour, suggesting that the coverage was “remarkably like what happened to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang in China when the Department of State pulled the rug out from under them.” 93 The American press, Luce wrote, had attempted to smash the “china doll-sized stateswoman into a tiny heap of porcelain scraps.” Luce, however, asserted that fortunately, Madame Nhu was not a china doll, and that her endurance of the press’s abuse reaffirmed her credibility as a politician, as a feminist, and as a “fighting lady,” and that her endurance should have reaffirmed America’s commitment to the Diem administration. Luce’s article, like much of the coverage she decried, makes repeated reference to Madame Nhu’s physical frailty and her political toughness. Describing the First Lady as a “militant Catholic, mother of four, she is a devoted and fiercely loyal (if not subservient) wife” who held America’s prestige “in the pale pink palm of her exquisite little hand.” Luce rejected charges that Madame Nhu was a religious bigot, suggesting that Americans wanted progress for American women only. Luce, prefiguring later conservative attacks on the ways journalists contributed to failures in Saigon, blamed the mostly male American press corps in Saigon for fabricating the notion that Madame Nhu held too much power, defending her by mixing stereotypical metaphors about “Oriental” women as well as invoking the image of the women of the American frontier. Madame Nhu, Luce asserts, “Offends both Western and Asiatic male sensibilities, not only because she herself is not the geisha type, the concubine type, or the clinging vine type, but because she seems to want the seven million women of her new-born, embattled nation to behave like the kind of women who went out of style a hundred or more years ago – the pioneer women of America.” 94 Herself a prominent Catholic convert, Luce’s defense of Madame Nhu is primarily framed in terms of her religious morality and her staunch anti-communist politics, asserting the familiar cold war narrative of American conservatives that the overthrow of the Diem administration would lead to a political vacuum that would quickly be filled by the “’Yu-No-Hu’ family: the Chinese Communists.”
Luce’s article had little impact, given the fact that the assassination occurred as the article went to press. After the coup, in addition to Marguerite Higgins, Madame Nhu phoned Luce, asking for advice on what to do next. Luce betrayed a clear concern with public perception, trying to ensure that the public’s hostility towards Madame Nhu was mitigated by a sense of sympathy. In a subsequent conversation with Richard Nixon, Luce said that in her conversations with Madame Nhu she “used all the persuasive power I have to have her play the bereaved widow: homeless…penniless…deposed…and so on.” 96 While recovering Madame Nhu’s image was likely impossible at this point, Luce wanted to make clear that the failure of the Diem regime should be assigned to the Kennedy administration, who she viewed as inept in foreign policy and too timid in its Vietnam strategy. Luce also registered her disappointment in Diem’s lack of planning for a coup, chiding his asceticism and scolding him for not having a “Swiss flight insurance bank account.” 97 Despite her immediate concern with public perception, Luce seemed sympathetic to Madame Nhu’s situation, perhaps because the two women shared a similar history. Both women had converted to Catholicism upon marriage to powerful men, and both had attracted media attention in their rise to political prominence in the 1950s. Luce was long rumored to have had significant control over the editorial decisions of Henry Luce’s publications, including Time and Life, which repeatedly featured Madame Nhu in largely flattering terms, but she consistently denied having any influence on the magazines or its coverage of Vietnam.
1964 Visa
After the coup, the United States government felt that Madame Nhu would finally sink into obscurity and the RVN could go on in waging the war. Despite her cool reception during the 1963 tour, the following year Madame Nhu requested a visa for another lecture tour in the United States, beginning with a scheduled talk at the Conservative Party of New York’s meeting in Flushing. Madame Nhu asked for $1,500 and expenses for each talk, and $500 per half hour for television or radio interviews. Her steep fees supported the widespread press contention that Madame Nhu had fled to Europe with little money, casting doubt on prior rumors that she and her husband had been funneling RVN funds to their own foreign bank accounts. While Madame Nhu had no influence on current affairs in Saigon, she did seem to pose a continuing threat to American credibility, and many officials feared another tour would unnecessarily draw attention to the coup and raise questions about the role of the United States government in its planning. Since 1964 was an election year, President Johnson certainly did not want Madame Nhu reminding American voters of the problems in Vietnam. Correspondence within the State Department and with President Johnson indicate that President Johnson was agreeable to granting Madame Nhu a visa if her application was in order, but Ambassador Lodge urged that the visa be refused. The State Department, in an attempt to preempt any public criticism, laid out two potential explanations for the refusal, the first suggesting that Madame Nhu was a non-immigrant “whose activities might be prejudicial to the public interest.” 98 The second justification was that the new leadership of the RVN had asked the United States not to permit it, but betraying the fact that this was conceived by the State Department, Assistant Secretary of State Forrestal noted that “before doing this, we should tell Lodge.”
The press took note of Madame Nhu’s planned trip, and a few publications objected to the State Department’s ultimate refusal of her visa. The Republican-leaning Los Angeles Times accused the State Department of stalling to discourage Madame Nhu, and the Christian Science Monitor argued that while Madame Nhu may do some short-term damage to the image of the RVN, it would doubtless be more harmful for the State Department to publicly attempt to muzzle her. Despite the element of personal tragedy involved in the coup, the scale of which increased after another Ngo brother, Ngo Dinh Can, was executed by the new government shortly after the coup, the American public had little sympathy for Madame Nhu. The Christian Science Monitor suggested that Madame Nhu be allowed to voice her opinions, certain that she would find few supporters and that stifling her would suggest to the American people that the government had something to hide. 99 As demonstrated in Art Buchwald’s earlier piece on Madame Nhu, her persona provided great fodder for comedy writers, and the 1964 visa issue led comic Paul Coates to publish an article urging the government to grant Madame Nhu a visa because “while her politics may be deplorable, her figure is delightful.” 100 Coates refers to Madame Nhu no longer as a firebreathing dragon but now as a “luscious kitten,” and a “delectable madame.” Where once the press stoked the fear Madame Nhu elicited, now Coates argued that no one took her seriously and that her hysterical outbursts only appealed to right-wing fringe groups. Since her venomous tongue had seemingly been clipped after her husband and brother-in-law’s death, Coates hoped that the State Department would reconsider and “let the poor lady in,” as he would likely go to see her speak himself, but “not to listen - I just want to look at her.” Coates’s persistent attention to her physical appearance was clearly nothing new, but his article seemed to reflect the deflation of Madame Nhu’s influence, suggesting that the threat she had posed was extinguished with the deaths of her husband and brother-in-law. Over the course of the nine years Diem held power, it became clear that the press and Madame Nhu held a mutual fascination for one another, each seeing in the other the means for attracting attention. After the coup, Madame Nhu faded from the public stage, retiring to Rome and later Paris, writing memoirs that were not published before her death in April 2011. Although she disappeared from the headlines, Madame Nhu apparently continued to follow American press coverage of her and any new information that came to light on the murders of Diem and her husband. She wrote a number of letters in response to critical articles that corrected in minute detail quotes she felt were misstated or assailed journalists for not affording her the proper respect. As evidence of her seeming obsession with corresponding with the press after her exile, Madame Nhu wrote to Clare Boothe Luce in early 1964, saying that she was considering filing a libel lawsuit against a journalist from the Phoenix Arizona Journal who had published a harsh piece about her. Luce advised her not to do so, arguing that the paper’s circulation was so small that litigation was not worth pursuing and would likely have the effect of causing the piece to be reprinted throughout the United States. Presumably Luce prevailed, as Madame Nhu did not file any lawsuits and her relevance in the press finally receded once and for all.
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''Americans are generally a lot of "Ivanhoes"—perpetually in love with the underdog but confused about just who the underdog is. The Buddhists are certainly not underdogs but provocateurs in monks' robes."
"Beat them three times harder."
''The Buddhists barbecued one of their monks, whom they intoxicated, and even that burning was not done with self-sufficient means, because they used imported gasoline."
"He is stubborn and touchy, and unbearably obsolete concerning women, but we all feel safer to have him in Hué."
"I have never met anyone as human, warmhearted and chivalrous as the Ngo Dinh brothers, the world is not made for them. They would not hurt a mosquito."
If you are unjust, I will ignore you."
"The sacraments are my moral vitamins."
"I've never had a sweeping love. I read about such things in books, but I do not believe that they really exist. Or perhaps only for a very few people."'
''I'm not exactly afraid of death. I love power and in the next life I have a chance to be even more powerful than I am."
"I got to hate that coat, it was wasp-waisted and very fashionable. But for months it was my only blanket. After that, I always said I would only own loose, practical coats, just in case."
"I cannot bear the Communists, they considered me a child, I don't know why. They seemed to have some indulgence for me."
"You are never going to overthrow this government because you don't have the guts. And if you do overthrow it, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first."
''A Vietnamese woman was considered an eternal minor, an unpaid servant, a doll without a soul."
"Dancing with death is enough."
''I made many people unhappy with my Family Bill—people who were in illegitimate liaisons but who were strongly in love. But society cannot sacrifice morality and legality for a few wild couples. I have chosen to defend the legitimate family."
"The women are officers, not simple soldiers."
"Poor Pope, he pleases everyone with this encyclical. But if something pleases everyone, it can be exploited."
''I have fulfilled all the conditions with God.''
"I have no reason to dislike men, they have always been so nice to me."
"After those charges, I predicted that next I would be attacked on my sentimental life."
''The Buddhist agitation is an ignoble form of treason, it is a despicable rank of phariseeism. The Buddhist leaders are eternal slaves, if not to others, at least to their own folly."
"The President too often wants what the French call 'a circle with corners', as the Americans desire, smooth, no bloodshed, everyone shaking hands."
"We consider Communism opposition enough in wartime, but we will have open declared opposition as soon as peacetime allows."
"We hear that in Lodge's family, they talk only to God. In that case, I hope we will talk together, with God in the middle."
"You open a window to let in light and air, not bullets. We want freedom, but we don't want to be exploited by it."
''American journalists are intoxicated with communism"
''You must oppose American attempts to make lackeys of Vietnamese and to seduce Vietnamese women into decadent paths."
"With bonzes of good faith please stop helping the communists, otherwise Vietnamese Buddhism would be seen as a small anti-nationalist branch of a dubious international association, exploited and controlled by communism and oriented to the sowing of the disorder of neutralism"
"Keep vigilance on all others, particularly those inclined to take Viet Nam for a satellite of a foreign power or organization."
''The Buddhists are controlled by communism, and are manipulated by the Americans. Expel all foreign agitators whether they wear monks' robes or not"
''The deadly attacks on the Buddhists was the happiest day in my life since we crushed the Bình Xuyên in 1955"
''Buddhist leader Thích Trí Quang spoke for many intellectuals who had repeatedly ridiculed me.''
''Our government troops must invade the American embassy and capture Thích Trí Quang and some other monks who were staying there, including all key Buddhists"
''President Kennedy is a politician, and when he hears a loud opinion speaking in a certain way, he tries to appease it somehow"
''If that opinion is misinformed, the solution is not to bow to it, but the solution should be to inform."
''U.S. military advisors are acting like little soldiers of fortune".
''I am a scapegoat for American shortcomings and failures.''
"I refuse to play the role of an accomplice in an awful murder ... According to a few immature American junior officials—too imbued by a real but obsolete imperialist spirit, the Vietnamese regime is not puppet enough and must be liquidated."
''Why are all the people around President Kennedy are pink?"
''American liberals are worse than communists and Buddhists are hooligans in robes".
"I don't know why you Americans dislike us ... Is it because the world is under a spell called liberalism? Your own public, here in America, is not as anti-Communistic as ours is in Vietnam. Americans talk about my husband and I leaving our native land permanently. Why should we do this? Where would we go? To say that 70 percent of my country's population is Buddhistic is absolutely untrue. My father, who was our ambassador to the United States until two months ago, has been against me since my childhood."
"Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies"
"No coup can erupt without American incitement and backing".
"I cannot stay in a country whose government stabbed me in the back. I believe all the devils in hell are against us."
"Judas has sold the Christ for thirty pieces of silver. The Ngô brothers have been sold for a few dollars."
''My families deaths are anindelible stigma against the U.S. My family has been treacherously killed with either official or unofficial blessing of the American government, I can predict to you now that the story is only at its beginning."
“Power is marvelous. Absolute power is absolutely marvelous.”
''I call for the end to immoral entertainment, and for death to my family’s detractors, who are scabby sheep.”
‘Let the monks burn and we shall clap our hands. If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.’”
"The supposed leader of the coup, General Duong Van Minh- is he supposed to rule the Americans or the Vietnamese? For how long will they hold power if they ever hold power? I cannot understand why President Diem's Roman Catholicism is constantly mentioned while that of certain other chiefs of state is not...Any crime committed against the Ngo family cannot be hidden under the label of suicide because suicide is incompatible with our religion. The Ngo family only wanted to give Vietnam its own identity which cannot be the same as the one wanted by a few short-sighted arrogant Americans."
"At Columbia they threw eggs at me like I was a peasant. But Harvard was incredible. The bad reputation of such a school should be told to the American people. They showed bad manners--very bad manners--at Harvard. People in our country respect a lecturer. I don't mind what they do in the street--at Columbia they picketed me in the street--but at Harvard it was the organizing committee. Either Harvard must change or the youth must be warned. I had been sandwiched between three forty-five minute speakers. After all I was the main speaker."
"I am amazed to hear these hisses, screams, and shouts. Why do you people not make as much noise about Hungary?"
“It’s not your neck that sticks out, it’s mine. So shut up.”
“I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show.”
''I sympathize the more for I understand that that ordeal might seem to you even more unbearable because of your habitually well-sheltered life.”
''Out of all the presidential first ladiest I best resemble most like Bess Truman, as she was happiest at home''
“Really men change their minds much more easily than women.”
''All of the American and all of the American and ARVN efforts in fighting the North Vietnamese and the NLF would be “wasted if society were to wallow in the infamous ways of licence.''
“You must remember that we have been a colonial people too long and there used to be one law for the French and another for the native people. No, our people would not like one law for the Americans and another for themselves. It would bring bitter memories.’'
''The purpose of the law was simply to prohibit the job of bar girl, but the Assembly, inspired by the spirit of her resolution, took the prohibitions further.''
“I am not a feminist, if this means advocating a new social imbalance favoring women this time. If ever Viet Nam adopts a ‘chastity law,’ I shall urge that it be applied equally to all citizens.”
“My womens union is there to inform women on what you call their ‘prerogatives’” and to make of the Feminine Force a force on which the nation can count, and which the nation must take into account.”
“Viet Cong women’s union was hastily created only to pre-empt my own organization’s founding, that was not a new strategy for them. The Viet Cong had also passed a “Family Code,” in response to my own bill, but this was a law that promotes the disintegration of the Family. For in fact all totalitarian institutions attempt systematically to do away with intermediary community institutions in order to render the individual isolated and bare before the totalitarian machine.”
''In this atomic age, to continue to regard woman’s place as solely in the home is to commit a gross and inadmissible anachronism.”
''Women who engaged in “illicit actions” or provoked public disorder would justly exasperate men who are already too inclined to believe we have been emancipated too early.”
''The purpose of the paramilitary women was to form a force that was capable of replacing, or at least effectively helping men in all domains.''
''South Vietnamese women had a duty to contribute to the security of the nation itself, warning the young women not to see only novelty in this honor but to realize that membership bestows a responsibility to teach other women about moral strength and perseverance. The movement is a kind of feminine order of knighthood.''
'The movement was an effort to stave off the advancing NLF. TheVietnamese women were obligated to organize themselves and defend their families much further than just from the porch. Indeed when the enemy reaches the porch, it is always too late.”
''It was never my intention to launch a cosmopolitan fashion and encourage extravagance, but Ionly wanted to offer some practical open-necked versions of the ao dai, which are neither fanciful nor alien.”
“Nobody can accuse us of abandoning tradition or aping foreigners, for the new necklines are genuinely native and traditional.”
“The better to shoot Viet Cong with.'' -giving her daughter a gun on her birthday
''The RVN must oppose the imposition of “foreign systems without any vital connection with the previous local economic, social, and human structure of our society.”
“I condemn those who like to submerge us in sanctimonious and pretentiously paternalistic sermons.”
“You, who believe in freedom, in tolerance,” let us live as we like.''
''Me and my daughter had overheard an American soldier use the phrase at a hot dog stand in Saigon, and that it sounded like a perfectly harmless Americanism.”
“I used those words because they have shock value. It is necessary to somehow shock the world out of this trance in which it looks at Vietnam with false vision about religious persecution that does not exist.”
''I was trying to use humor to defuse the situation, thinking that ridicule was the best weapon, and that the whole flap proved that I am a victim of American advice.''
“Some junior officials in the American services are behaving like little improvised officers seeking fortune.”
''The American mission in Saigon had among its lower officials some adventurers who did not hesitate to betray the official policy of their government.”
''American has a tendency to make celebrities of its critics.''
“The American press tried to lynch me. Now they want to hear everything the corpse says.”
' Vietnamese and American are a little afraid of the women’s force…I have told the men if they are good we will only take half the seats in the Parliament.”
“Everyone calls me ‘the Dragon Lady.’ For the next few weeks I will be like the dragonfly of the Vietnamese song. When it’s happy, it stays; when it’s unhappy, it flies away.”
''For the officials, the question of face is stronger than the question of justice. Error is human, but to persevere with error is diabolical.”
''I may shock some by saying 'I would beat such provocateurs ten times more if they wore monks robes,' and 'I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one can not be responsible for the madness of others.''
''Any crime committed against the Ngo family cannot be hidden under the label of suicide. I affirm that suicide has always been considered incompatible with our religion.“
''I believe all the devils in hell are against us but we will triumph eventually because we have the Devil on our side.“
"If one has no courage to denounce, if one bows to madness and stupidity, how can one ever hope to cope with the other wrongs of humanity exploited in the same fashion by Communists?"
''Never! I will never be defeated!”
