In her obituary, published in The Guardian in 2011, Tran Le Xuan, better known as Madame Nhu, was described as “the archetypal ‘dragon lady’ of Asian politics.”
Often called the First Lady of South Vietnam, Nhu was not actually married to the president, Ngo Dinh Diem, who was a lifelong bachelor; but rather to his brother and close advisor, Ngo Dinh Nhu. She married Nhu in 1943, at the age of 18. She later said that she did so as a way of escaping her family, writing in her diary, as quoted in Monique Brinson Demery’s biography Finding the Dragon Lady, that “I never had a sweeping love. I read about such things in books, but I do not believe that they really existed. Or perhaps only for a very few people.”
Like many of the decisions that Madame Nhu made throughout her life, her marriage was a political calculation as much as anything. Born into an aristocratic family in Hanoi, which was under French colonial rule at the time, she was a distant relation of Emperor Bao Dai, then the nominal ruler of Vietnam, though he was widely considered a puppet of France. She was educated in the Lycee Albert Sarraut, a French school in Hanoi. She spoke French at home, and later observed that the purpose of her education was to eliminate any sense of a Vietnamese identity, part of France’s “civilizing mission” to make the people of Vietnam into “Frenchmen with yellow skin.”
By 1945, the August Revolution shook Vietnam and deposed Emperor Bao Dai. Madame Nhu and her family were captured and she was held in a remote village with her infant daughter, where she had to subsist on only two bowls of rice per day and had only one coat to wear, “a very fashionable wasp-waisted number from Paris.”
The dissolution of French Indochina in 1955 left Ngo Dinh Diem in temporary control of American-backed southern Vietnam. The French, meanwhile, hoped to retain a “zone of influence” by keeping Bao Dai on the throne and backing General Nguyen Van Hinh for the position of Prime Minister—a spot then held by Diem.
Among his boasts about deposing Diem, Hinh claimed that he would make Madame Nhu into one of his concubines after his victory. She famously confronted him at a party and said, “You are never going to overthrow this government because you don’t have the guts. And if you do overthrow the government, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first!”
When Ngo Dinh Diem became president, Madame Nhu and her husband moved into the Presidential Palace. Ngo Dinh Nhu ran his brother’s secret police, and Madame Nhu became, in many ways, the face of the presidency.
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Madame Nhu and President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Photo Credit: Wikipedia
Having converted to Catholicism when she married her husband, Madame Nhu “took to it with a convert’s zeal,” and was instrumental in pushing through many of the puritanical laws which took effect during the Diem administration. Among these were laws banning divorce, abortion, and contraception—not to mention dancing the twist.
Despite this, the controversial Madame Nhu was seen by many as an advocate for women, even as she orchestrated laws that limited their options. Outlawing divorce except by presidential decree, for example, prevented Vietnamese men from leaving their wives in poverty to find other mistresses. Madame Nhu was also instrumental in passing laws that ended concubinage and polygamy and allowing women to own property and open bank accounts in their own name, leading The Guardian to report that, “During Diem’s rule, women achieved something close to parity with men.”
The Diem regime was oppressive in other ways, however, and Madame Nhu often exulted in it. “Power is wonderful,” was one of her favorite mottos. “Total power is totally wonderful.”
As Buddhist monks famously immolated themselves in protest of Diem’s regime, Madame Nhu was quoted in a letter to the New York Times saying, “I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one cannot be responsible for the madness of others.”
American newspapers called her an “oriental Lucrezia Borgia.” In his memoir of Vietnam, Robert McNamara, who was then the Secretary of Defense, wrote that, “I saw Madame Nhu as bright, forceful, and beautiful, but also diabolical and scheming—a true sorceress.”
According to the Washington Post, Madame Nhu’s influence was significant in the Vietnam War, which served as the backdrop of Ngo Dinh Diem’s entire regime. By 1962, two dissident Republic of Vietnam Air Force pilots bombed the Nhu residence in an assassination attempt, though everyone escaped unhurt except of Madame Nhu herself, who was injured when the floor collapsed beneath her.
In 1963, Madame Nhu visited the United States on what proved to be a disastrous speaking tour. By that time, her own parents had turned against her. Both Buddhists, her father was the South Vietnamese ambassador to the U.S., while her mother was South Vietnam’s permanent observer in the United Nations. Both resigned in protest of her actions and those of the Diem regime. Madame Nhu responded by calling her father a “coward.”
Though it did not go the way that she had planned, the speaking tour nevertheless may have saved Madame Nhu's life. While she and her 18-year-old daughter were in Beverly Hills, both her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and his brother the president, were assassinated in Vietnam in a US-backed coup d’etat.
“Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need enemies,” Madame Nhu said, in response to the killings, which she called an “indelible stigma,” reflecting on the fact that the United States had initially backed the Diem regime. When asked if she wished to claim asylum in the States, she replied, “I cannot stay in a country whose government stabbed me in the back. I believe all the devils in hell are against us.”
Madame Nhu never returned to Vietnam, however, and spent of the rest of her life in exile, moving first to Rome, then France and Italy, where she lived with her children and charged for photographs and interviews. She survived thus for more than 40 years, before perishing in a hospital in Rome on Easter Sunday in 2011, at the age of 87.
