Madame Nhu was considered the First Lady of South Vietnam in 1963. I guess that’s fair, though fair is foul, and foul is fair. So, there. She was not the President’s wife, so it was a curious arrangement. Diem didn’t have a wife. That was unusual, for a Vietnamese man of the world. There were Buddhist monks, but Diem was a politician and he was Catholic. His only love, according to him, was a young lady who had decided to become a nun. So, he decided to remain poetically celibate, and ever faithful to her chaste memory. He consecrated the rest of his life to his holy crusade against Godless communism.

Madame Nhu, whose real name was Tran Le Xuan, was the wife of Diem’s brother and close collaborator, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Given names come last in Vietnam. Family names come first. It’s hard to get used to. The last will be first. The First Lady’s functions included her presence at state dinners and occasional speeches about cultural and domestic matters. She was not nearly as good at it as Eva Perón, but I think she was reaching for that.

Eva Duarte de Perón grew up poor. She was one of the people, so she knew exactly how to push their buttons. That made her an asset for Perón. Though only in her late twenties, she became Minister of Health and Labor. Cabaret singer by trade, she was beautiful and a moving orator who loved the smell the crowd. It wasn’t TV. Her new gig was right there in the Plaza de Mayo. The descamisados chanted, ¡Evita, Evita! Until their voices refused to make another sound.

Tran Le Xuan had a different background. She was a Europeanized young lady of the French colonial court. She spoke French at home. She went to French boarding school. She wrote her public tirades in French and had them translated into Vietnamese. She didn’t know her native tongue well enough to do it herself. In colonial Saigon, that was how it rolled.

She was a devoted Catholic and her self-appointed mission as First Lady was to close down the whorehouses and the opium dens. And the dance halls and the boxing arenas. I suspect she was sucking up to the power base. The West had a thing about Puritan values in faraway places.

Following in Evita’s footsteps, to consolidate Western support for her menfolk, Madame Nhu even made her own Rainbow Tour. It blew up in her face. Her nine-day speaking tour in September of ‘63 provoked the already growing opposition to Diem in the US. Her excess enthusiasm undermined his credibility. She came off as more papist than the Pope.

She had a royal temper, and a tendency to bite the hand that feeds. The Joint Chiefs resolved in secret that they could only continue to support Diem if his dashing sister-in-law were out of the picture. She had the audacity to say to Americans that Americans in Vietnam acted like soldiers of fortune. Which, of course, they did. Which was why they didn’t want to hear it. Diplomacy was not her strong suit. Her colonial Catholicism was categorical. 

Madame Nhu was called Madame in the French tradition. In English, Madame was reserved for the administrators of whorehouses. Miss Edna was the Madame at Chicken Ranch in La Grange. La Grange is French, too, by the way. It means, the pasture.

But Madame Nhu became the scourge of Saigon whorehouses. Back in the early ‘60’s, they were staffed by teenage girls who had been abducted from the countryside and put to work in Saigon to tend to the growing demand. Soldiers (of fortune) expected some professional attention and they paid in dollars. Prostitution had been just a niche market, in Saigon, until the Americans came. Madame Nhu was outraged. She might have been a witch, but she got that one right.

Diem and Nhu were assassinated on November 2, 1963. It was the Shakespearean dumb-show, foreshadowing the impending tragedy in Dealey Plaza. That was the Yale touch. Kennedy’s murder was not only expedient. It was literary, clever and ominous. Bewitching.

The coup in South Vietnam was arranged by William Averill Harriman, of Brown Brothers Harriman, Investment Banking and Stocks, New York. He was, also, former Secretary of Commerce for Truman, former Governor of New
York, and former chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad. In ‘63, Harriman had become Regional Ambassador-at-large for the Kennedy administration. I have never heard of a Regional Ambassador-at-large. Perhaps it was a position that was created just for the occasion. For dramatic effect. Harriman ordered the murder of Diem and his brother.

Averill Harriman was like General Macarthur. He was such hot shit that he made geopolitical decisions without consulting the President, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs or the State Department. As he understood it, they worked for him. Maybe he was right. 

Henry Cabot Lodge had also given the wink and the nod. He was the ambassador in Saigon, and he let it be known that the US was ready for a change. Diem had made lots of enemies. He suffered from the chronic myopia of authoritarian rulers. He was beginning to believe his own BS.

One clear morning, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc assumed the lotus position at a busy intersection in Saigon. He doused himself with gasoline, chanted his mantra and lit a match. His photo went around the world. That was June 11th of ’63. Duc started a trend. Five more Buddhist monks burned themselves up that summer, including a novice who was only 17.

Madame Nhu responded by saying that if anyone else wanted to barbecue themselves, she would supply the gasoline. She also criticized their action as a bad example of economic austerity in time of war. Vietnam imported gasoline. It was a bad time for sarcasm. 

Within a few months, Diem and Nhu had been butchered in the back of an American armored personnel carrier. Henry Cabot Lodge’s personal military assistant oversaw the operation. This was the new diplomacy. General Duong Van Minh became president, but he didn’t last long. South Vietnam had eight more leaders before it disappeared from the face of the earth forever.

Ho Chi Minh considered the murder of Diem to be a huge favor for the Viet Minh. Diem was a nasty guy but, with the expert technical support of his brother, he ran a viciously efficient dictatorship. It was the only hope for the survival of a wildly unpopular anti-communist puppet state. After the death of Diem, South Vietnam never recovered any semblance of viability. They no longer needed a leader, just someone to wear the hat and direct the traffic. That was fine with the Wise Men. Harriman's crowd. They were the ones who were running the show, anyway. They still are.

Madame Nhu, ever after the mourning oriental ladyship, was interviewed for Time after the Kennedy assassination. From under her black veil, she conveyed her sympathy to Jaqueline, America’s First Widow, her new sister in proverbially infinite grief. She said that surely it must have been a greater shock for Mrs. Kennedy, because in the United States, one didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen. Which meant that in Vietnam, of course, one did.

So, who gave the wink and the nod for the Kennedy murders? Same Wise Men, maybe?

The dress rehearsal in Saigon had been a rollicking success. The actors had no qualms about their participation. They believed themselves predestined to transgress all human decency so that the historical process could advance. That was the Masonic wet dream. Diem’s downfall made a massive ground invasion necessary. That was a shot in the arm for the Military Industrial Complex. After sleeping off the bloody hangover, Dracula woke up thirsty.

Diem’s epic stability had been absolute. He had grown oblivious to anything remotely realistic. Nhu was his police man. Midnight arrest, disappearance and torture. Nhu was also in charge of keeping Madame happy. I don’t think she had as many pairs of shoes as Imelda Marcos, but I suspect they were classier.

Diem had come to power in 1955. He stayed until William Averill Harriman and Henry Cabot Lodge grew weary of him. The assassins always had three names. Lee Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray and John Wilkes Booth. Yale boys; literary, clever and cute.

After the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, the French had decided to leave. It was Ho Chi Minh’s victory over the colonial system. The Geneva Accords divided North from South, a temporary arrangement, pending a referendum of reunification. It was clear that the reunified Vietnam would be whatever Ho Chi Minh wanted. He was a national hero.

The French knew that. They accepted that. They just wanted to slow things down a bit, to avoid a bloodbath. They wanted to give the western businesses, the wealthy Catholics and the colonial administrators a couple of years to withdraw their cash, hide their jewelry and make provisions for their lovers and their bastards. A gentlemanly tip of the hat. Some time to clean up the mess. Parisians have such impeccable good taste, in that way, comrade.

Uncle Ho had fought alongside American soldiers in World War II. When the Japanese left, he kept the Chinese out. Then, he drove the French out. Even the emperor, Bao Dai, endorsed him. Ho was ruthless in his own way, but he was patient, thoughtful and invincible. The American brass had underestimated him, wildly so. They had underestimated his many followers, too.

Bao Dai had been a virtual puppet to the French. His ceremonial self was badly weakened by their departure in ‘54. The imperial city of Hue fell in the south, after partition, so he offered Diem the position of Prime Minister in a new constitutional monarchy.

Diem wanted more. He had himself elected President in a hasty referendum. Out of 450,000 voters, 600,000 voted for him. Not even Landslide Lyndon stuffed ballot boxes so miraculously well. Out of devotion and eternal gratitude, Diem consecrated the Vietnamese nation to Our Lady. In a country that was only 20% Catholic. Sucking up to power.

Diem had a powerful godfather. Cardinal Francis Spellman exercised enormous influence on his behalf. Spellman knew all the spooks, the bosses and the businessmen. They loved him because he was arch-conservative and rabidly anti-communist. As he departed New York to participate in the Second Vatican Council, he promised that none of the proposed changes to the triumphantly immutable Catholic faith would ever get past the Statue of Liberty. Dominus vobiscum, Cardinale. Suck on that.

Spellman was also gay. Really gay. J. Edgar Hoover, expert on the topic of closeted homosexuality at the highest levels of power, had a chubby little file on him. Spellman was described by the FBI as one of the most notorious, powerful and sexually voracious homosexuals in the history of the American Catholic Church. Perhaps he had taken a fancy to the young Catholic bachelor from Southeast Asia. How did that happen?

During the Korean War, Vietnamese anti-communists were considered interesting in Washington. Diem went there to lobby. He was an ignorant, incorrigible fanatic. His interview with acting Secretary of State, James Webb, was dull. But his other brother, Ngo Dinh Thuc, Archbishop of Hue and former classmate of Spellman at the Gregorian in Rome, got him an interview with the man known as the American Pope. That went well. Spellman set him up with all his powerful friends. Anointed him as God’s chosen, and even offered him a place to stay. At the seminary where Spellman lived. So, they could be together for three years while Diem lobbied for a Vietnamese fortress against expansionist Soviet communism in Southeast Asia. That happened during the Red Scare, comrade, when there was a communist lurking under every bush.

Diem is the only chubby Vietnamese guy you will ever see. Well, you won’t see him now, but there are still pictures. It must have been those anti-communist chocolate chip cookies at the Maryknoll Seminary. They were irresistible.

After his murder, Diem was buried with his brother, in an unmarked grave near the US Embassy. The Cardinal was outraged. The official story was that Buddhist generals had hatched the plot, but Spellman blamed it on Kennedy. Madame Nhu fled. Not in a boat, mind you. She flew first class. Actually, she wasn’t in Vietnam when it happened. She was in Beverly Hills. Shopping.

When offered asylum in the US, she turned it down, saying, I cannot stay in a country whose government stabbed me in the back. I think she understood asylum in the US as house arrest. Which was correct. And, she correctly predicted that US intervention in Southeast Asia would end badly. Maybe she put a spell on the Joint Chiefs. She was one mysterious lady.

From that day forward, the Grieving First Sister-in-Law languished between Paris, Rome and the French Riviera. Exiled in style, with expresso, designer dresses and fine wine. She wrote her memoirs and she wore a black veil every day until her death in 2011.

Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara met her on several occasions. Before the assassination. He found her bright, forceful, and beautiful, but also diabolical and scheming—a true sorceress. She was addressed as Madame Nhu, but she was known as The Dragon Lady. She made Vietnam exotic. Her Cold War was seductive and magical, an arcane crusade to save the dragon’s lair from the Soviet horde. But McNamara was a clear-headed Presbyterian. He liked his crusades without magic or seduction.