Nhu, Madame (1924—)

Official hostess of President Ngo Dinh Diem of the Republic of Vietnam, the wife of his powerful brother Ngo Dinh Nhu, and a fiery actor in the politics of U.S.-Vietnamese relations. Name variations: Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu; Tran Le Xuan. Born Tran Le Xuan (pronounced Trahn Lay Shuen); daughter of Tran Van Chuong (a large landowner in central Vietnam and ambassador to U.S.) and Nam Tran Tran van Chuong also known as Madame Tran van Chuong (Vietnamese councilor of the French Union); attended the prestigious Lycee Albert Sarraut in Hanoi; married Ngo Dinh Nhu, in 1944; children: daughter Tran Le Thuy.

As sister-in-law of the unmarried Ngo Dinh Diem, became acting first lady of the Republic of South Vietnam (1955); became founding president of the paramilitary Women's Solidarity Movement (1961); lost power and went into exile in France upon the assassination of her husband (1963).

Born into a Vietnam torn by deeply disruptive forces, the woman who was to attain a worldwide reputation as "Madame Nhu" was a daughter in one her country's most powerful families, the Tran, and married into another, the Ngo. From 1955 to 1963, these ties placed her at the epicenter of Vietnamese politics, where she earned a reputation as an extremist supporter of the regime of her brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of the Republic of Vietnam. But during that time, she also fought to modernize her country, and in particular to liberate its women from traditional Confucian feudalism.

The name Tran Le Xuan means "beautiful spring," suggesting a tranquility rarely found in the adult life of the woman to whom it was given at birth. She lived during modern Vietnam's most turbulent times, when its people experienced the occupation and control of their country by both France and Japan, a war fought on their soil against the United States, and finally the revolutionary Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh that came to power in 1975.

Vietnam's most recent struggle against foreign domination began in the middle of the 19th century, but it had been making adjustments to outside powers since long before that. In the 1840s, it was the French who slowly occupied and conquered the country, believing it to be a region rich in mineral resources and also wanting it as a base for additional expansion into neighboring south China. In an effort to cloak the harsh realities of their colonial domination, they left in place the traditional Vietnamese government, a monarchy seated at the central Vietnamese city of Hue, but further weakened anti-colonial resistance by separating the country into three administrative divisions: Tonkin in the north, centered upon Hanoi; Annam in the center, with the national capital at Hue; and Cochin China in the south, with its center at Saigon. Combined with these divisions were the adjacent countries of Cambodia and Laos, also under French control, which altogether made up French Indochina.

The Vietnamese resisted the French invasion from the beginning. Vietnam's people had come together as a unified country as early as the 10th century, and always lived under China's long shadow. Over the next 900 years, while the Chinese often occupied Vietnam and were continually a threat to its sovereignty, the Vietnamese managed to hold onto their independence in part through their shrewd adaptations of Chinese ways in the service of their own purposes. One such borrowing was Confucianism, the dominant political philosophy of China, with its roots deep in the rice-raising countryside of both China and Vietnam. Confucianism enjoined a rigidly hierarchical society centered upon the family in which the power of the father, and by extension, of most men over most women, was nearly absolute.

Clare Boothe Luce">

For a moment, however brief in history, some part of America's prestige, if not security, seems to lie in the pale pink palm of her exquisite little hand.

—Clare Boothe Luce

In Vietnam, however, women held far stronger positions than most of their Chinese sisters. This was probably true because the Vietnamese viewed their freedom from China as taking precedence over everything else. In Chinese society, for example, soldiers and the military were held in low regard, subordinated to the control of Confucian scholars. But the Vietnamese effectively combined the soldier and the scholar in one role, and preferred strong active women who might defend the nation. One of the primary national cults of Vietnam is that of the Trung sisters , two women who resisted the Chinese as early as 40 ce, when they led one of the feudal states that would coalesce much later into Vietnam. Like many Vietnamese women, Tran Le Xuan personally identified with the Trung sisters from her childhood.

In contrast to the Chinese, the French arrived to conquer Vietnam with modern arms and a strong industrial base. The undeniable power of the French invaders presented a dilemma for the influential families of Vietnam, who were accustomed to sharing political control at the court at Hue and to functioning as local administrators in the Confucian hierarchy. Since the French had cleverly left the hollow shell of the Vietnamese court standing at Hue, it was a relatively easy step for many such families simply to begin collaborating with the French, which is what the Tran family did, and for their service to the colonial power they were richly rewarded. While maintaining their local sovereignty, they probably grew even more powerful under the French, and avoided the destruction that was generally the fate of families who resisted the colonials.

The fact that her family served the French opened many doors to Tran Le Xuan. She entered the French Lycee Albert Sarraut in Hanoi, probably in the late 1930s, and secured a modern education, although she later dropped out. She became fluent in French, but never learned to write in Vietnamese. Her excellent French later served her well in her travels in support of her husband's family and their government.

In the 1930s, what would later be known as World War II began in Asia, when Japan followed on the heels of European imperialists by invading China. For a while, the Chinese traded territory for time, so that by 1941, when their conflict became a theater of World War II, the Japanese were bogged down in a costly guerrilla war. Japanese military men then allied with Germany, and hence became allies of the conquered (collaborationist) French government, the Vichy regime. Previous to that, the Japanese had already entered Vietnam directly, in 1940, believing it would assist them in subduing China.

The new occupation presented collaborationist Vietnamese families like the Tran with a fresh dilemma: whether or not to serve the Japanese. Tran Le Xuan's family chose to do so. This was a much more difficult decision than their earlier support of the French, however, and it may have been one of the sources of the later obvious rift between Tran Le Xuan and her parents. The Japanese were cruel masters, who seized local rice for their own troops; in a resultant famine in 1944, millions of Vietnamese died.

It was during these war years that Tran Le Xuan met and married Ngo Dinh Nhu, and soon gave birth to a daughter, Tran Le Thuy . The Ngo family, like the Tran, had accepted the French, even to the point of giving up their indigenous Buddhist religion and becoming Catholic. The most noted member of the family was Ngo Dinh Diem, the future first president of the Republic of Vietnam, who had been born in 1901 in Hue, where his father served the Vietnamese court. Diem was one of nine children, and in traditional Vietnamese fashion, as he rose in prominence he continually counted upon his family to aid him. Some said that the most able member of the family was not Diem himself, but his younger brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, born in 1910. But it was Diem who had caught the eye of the French and was known to be a tireless worker (although sometimes very self-centered and stubborn). In 1933, he had become minister of the interior, a Cabinet position in the puppet administration of the last Vietnamese emperor under the French, Bao Dai. Unlike many collaborators, however, Diem was a Vietnamese nationalist first and foremost. When the French refused to allow the puppet administration more independence, he resigned his office and left Vietnam. Traveling widely, including in the United States, he thus escaped the opprobrium of working for either the French or the Japanese. and eventually settled in France, where many Vietnamese lived in exile.

In contrast to the Tran and the Ngo families, there were many Vietnamese who chose to resist both the French and the Japanese. Many of these were attracted to the Vietnamese Communist Party, long led by the enigmatic Ho Chi Minh. Born in 1890, Ho ceaselessly resisted the French, usually from abroad. Like many Asian nationalists, he believed that the aid of the revolutionary Communist regime of the Soviet Union might be crucial to his struggle for independence. He began to work with the Soviets and gained revolutionary experience both in France and in China. In 1941, Ho founded the Viet Minh, a front group composed of many organizations but dominated by the Vietnamese Communist Party. While World War II lasted, the Viet Minh worked with allied military and intelligence officers in the jungles along the Sino-Vietnamese border. Repression by the French and atrocities of the Japanese such as the famine of 1944 worked to the advantage of the Viet Minh, and in the wilds of the northern frontier region their military forces grew steadily stronger.

At the end of WWII, with Germany and Japan defeated, the French returned to Vietnam. But the war had weakened the French and strengthened Vietnamese nationalism, and the Vietnamese, led by Ho Chi Minh, were soon in a new war with the French. The Viet Minh were strongest in the northernmost of the three French colonies, Tonkin; while they had many supporters there, in the center and the south, and staged minor military campaigns, the French nonetheless had better control in those regions.

Outside Southeast Asia, the postwar period was increasingly dominated by a new struggle:

the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States. The U.S., believing that Communists everywhere were directly controlled by the Soviet Union, chose to support the French in Vietnam, and was soon paying almost the total cost of the French effort to regain control. But Ho and his general, Vo Nguyen Giap, were masters at fighting guerrilla war in their own land, and in 1954 the French were defeated in a climactic battle at Dienbienphu, putting the north of Vietnam under the control of the Viet Minh.

The United States refused to accept the prospect of Vietnam becoming Communist, seeing such an event as a Soviet victory. Instead it began to throw its support behind non-Communist Vietnamese nationalists, soon led by Ngo Dinh Diem. With U.S. aid, Diem declared the foundation of a new country in the center and south of Vietnam, the Republic of South Vietnam. The agreement which ended the French role in Vietnam, the Geneva Accords, stated that the two governments, popularly known as North Vietnam and South Vietnam, would be separated pending a future election.

Ngo Dinh Diem inherited a terrible situation and, many feel, was unable to improve upon it. While he did establish a government in the south, most of his generals had in fact fought for the French, his bureaucrats were largely northern Catholics who were resented by the southern Buddhist peasantry, and Diem himself ruled with an iron but capricious hand.

The central issue facing the Diem regime was control over land. In the places where the Viet Minh had been dominant, the land had been turned over to the peasants. When the Diem regime returned it to its original owners, who were usually absentee landlords, the local people were alienated. When other protests were made against the notorious corruption of the regime, all opposition was declared to be Communist-inspired and violently stamped out. When Diem did make a few feeble attempts at land reform, he merely alienated his powerful conservative supporters. Even the mother and father of Tran Le Xuan, now Madame Nhu, became covert enemies of the Diem regime (while serving it in prestigious posts), because tracts of their lands had been confiscated.

In this complex situation, Madame Nhu became the central female figure. Since Diem had not married, she assumed the role of official hostess, as the wife of his younger brother; in effect, she became the first lady of the Republic of Vietnam. It was she who organized the earliest public demonstration in support of Diem's new government.

Madame Nhu also relied on her name and Diem's control of the political structure to have herself elected a member of the National Assembly, the legislative chamber of the Vietnamese government. Using her name and authority, she rammed through a number of pieces of legislation, including laws dealing with such diverse issues as marriage, divorce, adultery, prostitution, boxing, dancing, beauty contests, and fortunetelling. The point of these was to break the hold of Vietnamese Confucian tradition, but within a rather puritanical framework which was also intended to resist the worst elements of Western influence. For example, Madame Nhu declared it illegal for Vietnamese women to have their breasts surgically enlarged, believing this fashion to be a result of Western decadence.

Madame Nhu paid particular attention to women's issues, and lectured widely. But whatever influence she might have had as a modern Vietnamese feminist figure was always compromised by her close ties to the Diem government. In 1961, she was the founding president of the Women's Solidarity Movement, a paramilitary organization intended to raise the status of women, but also to mobilize them in support of Diem's government.

According to Vietnamese tradition, Diem relied heavily upon his brothers, and Ngo Dinh Nhu in particular became exceedingly powerful. He controlled the secret police, the Can Lao party—a group created to provide a democratic façade for Diem's increasingly tyrannical rule—and was generally believed to be the power behind the throne. Madame Nhu, with her excellent French and her wide experience abroad, became the international envoy for the Diem regime.

Americans found her fascinating. The United States, because of its own relative isolation from Asia and from Asian peoples, found Asian women especially exotic and alluring. A series of attractive Asian women, beginning with Madame Chiang Kai-shek (Song Meiling ), had found ways to manipulate this American proclivity to the advantage of their own family or country. Madame Nhu, like Imelda Marcos of the Philippines, was soon seen by Americans in this stereotypical fashion. One pole of the stereotype was sexual attraction, as Madame Nhu was slim and beautiful and never hesitated to flirt with men of any nationality. But the other pole was a more negative one, by which the same attractiveness could be interpreted as sly, violent, and manipulative—an embodiment of the "Dragon Lady," a term frequently applied to Madame Nhu.

The Diem government soon found itself confronted not only by a Communist insurgency, but by Buddhistled demonstrations. When Ngo Dinh Nhu's police attacked Buddhist demonstrators, the Buddhists responded with a traditional weapon: self-immolation, a practice in which particularly devout monks publicly burned themselves to death to demonstrate their selfless and principled opposition to the government. When Madame Nhu referred to these horrifying events as "barbecues" and reportedly offered to provide the gasoline for more, such outrageous and impolitic statements inspired international demonstrations against the Diem government. But others found Madame Nhu's pronounced anti-Communism not only appropriate but necessary. Clare Boothe Luce , a noted American conservative political figure (who also attracted a fair share of controversy), pronounced Madame Nhu to be "beautiful, dynamic, courageous, and intelligent."

But the real issue in Vietnam remained who would control the countryside: the Communists, or the government of South Vietnam. Diem's repressive measures were inadequate and simply inspired more resistance. The U.S. demanded increasingly greater control over Vietnamese military forces, but Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, seeing the Americans as a potential threat to Vietnamese independence, resisted. Finally the American supporters of the regime tired of Diem's capricious rule, Ngo Dinh Nhu's repression, and their joint failure to successfully prosecute the war against the rural Communist insurgency. Whether Americans directly encouraged a coup, or perhaps even ordered one, is yet unclear, but on November 1, 1963, a coup was staged by generals of the Diem regime. Madame Nhu was on a speaking tour in the U.S. at the time, but it was reported that some members of her elite female bodyguard died in defense of the presidential palace. The following day, both Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu were captured and shot to death. As the coup unfolded, Madame Nhu denounced the U.S. for its support of the overthrow, saying, "All the devils of hell are against us," and went into exile in France.

The tragedy of Madame Nhu, and to a considerable degree of both her husband and her brother-in-law, was their attempt to follow a middle course. At a time when Vietnam could not halt the irresistible forces of history, they tried to straddle the line between traditional authoritarianism and modern democratic government, between Vietnamese nationalism and Vietnamese willingness to compromise with overwhelmingly powerful foreign states. In the growing confrontation between Ho's northern government and the United States, the U.S. would search for years for additional southern alternatives to Ho's Communism, and never find them. After decades of war, with millions of Vietnamese casualties, and tens of thousands for the U.S., the divisive war would end in 1975, with the Communists victorious. But the Communists proved unable to create a prosperous and democratic Vietnam, and for many of the millions who left the country to become refugees abroad, the government of the Ngo brothers, Diem and Nhu, and of the acerbic and colorful Madame Nhu, came to be seen as their country's last best hope for an independent non-Communist existence.

sources:

Anderson, David L. "Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu," in Dictionary of the Vietnam War. Edited by James S. Olson. NY: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Fitzgerald, Frances. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. NY: Vintage Books, 1972.

Hammer, Ellen J. A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Luce, Clare Boothe. "The Lady Is for Burning: The Seven Deadly Sins of Madame Nhu," in National Review. November 5, 1963.

Warner, Denis. The Last Confucian: Vietnam, Southeast Asia, and the West. Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1963.

suggested reading:

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. NY: Viking, 1983. Sheehan, Neil. A Bright and Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. NY: Vintage Books, 1989.

related media:

Several episodes in the PBS television series, "Vietnam: A Television History," provide excellent footage of the early years of the war and the Diem regime, together with many images of Madame Nhu.

Jeffrey G. Barlow , Professor in the Department of Social Studies at Pacific University, Forest Grove, Oregon, and Christine A. Richardson , Lincoln High School and Lewis & Clark College, Portland, Oregon