Who is madame nhu

Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, fell to the communists on April 30, when tanks rolled into the city, reunifying the country. Madame Nhu had been raised Buddhist in Hanoi by well-off and highly influential aristocratic parents, but she converted to Catholicism in when she married Nhu, who was nearly twice her age.

She remained deeply religious until her death, Truong said. In , her brother was charged with strangling their elderly father and mother in their Washington, D. He was found incompetent to stand trial and deported to France. Her villa in the countryside on the outskirts of Rome included a chapel with a statue of the Virgin Mary. Luong said he met Madame Nhu in Paris a few years ago and was struck by her devotion to the church, which likely intensified after realizing her life in South Vietnam was over.

The Karzais know about that tactic. The John F. In fairness, the stories Madame Nhu told about our involvement in Vietnam were often much like the deluded ones our government told itself in those years; she just talked more loudly and, despite her supposed sense of style, crudely. Born in Hanoi, she grew up in isolated privilege as the daughter of one of Vietnam's wealthiest businessmen, who had married a cousin of the Emperor Bao Dai. She was raised by a multitude of servants, who took her to French and ballet lessons, and was educated in Hanoi and Saigon.

In , aged 18, she married Nhu, one of six brothers from the prominent mandarin Ngo clan. Two years later she was captured, along with her eldest child, and was held briefly in a communist-controlled village. When scolding American officials for being insufficiently fervent in their anti-communism, she frequently referred to these months of deprivation, during which she was forced to subsist on just two bowls of rice a day and had only one coat to wear, in her words "a very fashionable wasp-waisted number from Paris".

Diem came to power in , when Vietnam was divided into the communist North and the American-backed South. Almost immediately Madame Nhu began scheming; she was eventually banished to a convent in Hong Kong as her brother-in-law delicately consolidated his power over a country run by pirates, gangsters and armed religious cults.

When she was allowed back, she stepped up her efforts to enhance her influence while maintaining the pretence that she was nothing more than the president's demure hostess for official functions.

Despite Diem's efforts, the communist insurgency that stepped up in took its toll on his rule, which became increasingly vicious. His brother and sister-in-law began to make more decisions and kept close to the isolated president, even sharing his official residence. Madame Nhu was always on hand to cajole or even berate Diem; she was said to have frequently flown into violent rages if he showed any signs of weakness against the regime's many opponents. In February , Madame Nhu survived the bombing of the presidential palace by two rebellious South Vietnamese pilots.

Blinded by the flames and smoke, she raced to her children sleeping next door but fell through a hole left by the explosion and ended up two floors below, in the basement. She believed the attack had been secretly encouraged by the US, which had grown disappointed withDiem and disgusted with both Nhus. As the Buddhist crisis raged in , she toured America's campuses to defend the clan's rule.

The tour disintegrated into farce; even her father — South Vietnam's ambassador to Washington — refused to meet her. There, the couple ran a newspaper and began to organize support for Diem, who was an anti-Communist nationalist leader then living in the United States.

In Nhu moved to Saigon where he organized demonstrations against the French and the Communists and also schemed to undermine popular support for Emperor Bao Dai in order to increase the appeal of the nationalist movement headed by Diem, then living in France and in contact with the large Parisian Vietnamese exile community. The next year Nhu came up with a plan that would allow Diem to win the power struggle with Bao Dai: hold a referendum asking the people to choose between them.

By this time, Nhu had control of the secret police, which could determine the outcome of the October 25, , election. With an astounding Because he was strongly anti-Communist, Diem readily won the support of the Eisenhower administration, which gave him hundreds of millions of dollars in aid. With Nhu at his side, Diem spent the next few years defeating his political opponents and consolidating his powers.

Their power was immense. Both Nhu and Madame Nhu were elected to the National Assembly in ; both rarely bothered to attend its sessions. In she began a campaign to make major changes in Vietnamese domestic relations.

When her Family Code bill became law, it made polygamy, divorce and marital infidelity illegal. Women were given equal rights with men in a variety of areas. By the close of the s, spreading Viet Cong influence was driving the country to the point of political crisis.

His four brothers all had important roles in South Vietnamese affairs. Despite their strong influence, neither Nhu nor Madame Nhu held high official positions within the Diem government. Other observers felt it was Madame Nhu who had become the dominant member of the family. Journalist and diplomat John Mecklin, who served in Vietnam with the U. He found it conceivable that the entire family was clinically mad; indeed, some of their actions were so bizarre as to suggest a death wish.

She was greatly stirred by the crisis affecting her country, but her reactions served to worsen it. She was striking in appearance but not beautiful, very energetic and had extravagant tastes. With resentment against the Diem government growing, but seeing no alternative, the White House urged Diem to pursue reform in order to broaden his base of support. In Ambassador Elbridge Durbrow tried to persuade Diem to jettison Nhu and bring new people into the government.

In November , South Vietnamese paratroopers had the same goal in mind when they attempted a coup. Among their first demands was that Madame Nhu be removed from the Presidential Palace.

According to an article in Time magazine, she was flattered by the attention. In the first moments of the coup, Diem and most everyone inside the palace favored accepting the demands to form a new government.