I’m currently halfway through reading Neil Sheehan’s ‘A Bright Shining Lie.‘ It’s a fascinating book on the many (many) stupid things America did in the 1960’s in Vietnam. The reason I mention here is the figure of Madame Nhu. She was the sister-in-law of President Diem, who ruled – with American support – from 1955 to his overthrow and assassination in 1963.
By most accounts she was a fairly terrible person and associated with an awful regime. She was also very forceful and dominated the men around her. She bullied her younger brother when they were children and dominated the men in the Diem government, yelling and shouting to get her way. She once stated that “Power is wonderful. Total power is totally wonderful.” Sheehan describes her household like so…
The servants were all men. They would shuffle in bent over in a low bow, bow lower, and acknowledge her commands with a long “Daaa…” (the D pronounced like a Z), a servile form of “yes” for servants in old, aristocratic households; then they would shuffle back out still bent over.
Of course, in reading it now, one also has to allow for the racism and sexism of the time. Women from Asia were stereotyped as either sexy and submissive or evil scheming seducers. The US media called her the ‘Dragon Lady’, which made no sense to the Vietnamese, and Defense Secretary McNamara described her “…as bright, forceful, and beautiful, but also diabolical and scheming—a true sorceress.”
She proved to be lucky as well. When her husband and brother-in-law’s regime was overthrown in a coup, she was is the US. While they were executed in ’63 with a shot to the back of the head, she lived to be 86, and passed away in 2011 in Europe.
Mme. Nhu was forceful… but not very bright. Applauding Buddhist self-immolations in a Buddhist-majority country as ‘barbacues’, was one of those astonishing, singularly stupid acts (to say nothing of insensitive). The press might have loved the ‘Dragon Lady’, but if she’d been little more tight-lipped, her husband might have kept his head.
From my (very) limited reading, I suspect the Diem regime was doomed to fall at some point. That level of corruption, incompetence and paranoia wasn’t long term sustainable. But yes, she made many horrible and stupid comments which certainly didn’t help her family or their government. Those particular ones about the Buddhists were particularly awful, and were actually what I had in mind when I described her as a terrible person in the post. It’s kind of amazing how countries of millions of people, with thousands and thousands of super smart people, can regularly put idiots in charge.
-paltego