Finding the Dragon Lady
The Mystery of Vietnam's Madame Nhu
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Publisher Description
In November 1963, the president of South Vietnam and his brother were brutally executed in a coup that was sanctioned and supported by the American government. President Kennedy later explained to his close friend Paul "Red" Fay that the reason the United States made the fateful decision to get rid of the Ngos was in no small part because of South Vietnam's first lady, Madame Nhu. "That goddamn bitch," Fay remembers President Kennedy saying, "She's responsible ... that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there."
The coup marked the collapse of the Diem government and became the US entry point for a decade-long conflict in Vietnam. Kennedy's death and the atrocities of the ensuing war eclipsed the memory of Madame Nhu -- with her daunting mixture of fierceness and beauty. But at the time, to David Halberstam, she was "the beautiful but diabolic sex dictatress," and Malcolm Browne called her "the most dangerous enemy a man can have."
By 1987, the once-glamorous celebrity had retreated into exile and seclusion, and remained there until young American Monique Demery tracked her down in Paris thirty years later. Finding the Dragon Lady is Demery's story of her improbable relationship with Madame Nhu, and -- having ultimately been entrusted with Madame Nhu's unpublished memoirs and her diary from the years leading up to the coup -- the first full history of the Dragon Lady herself, a woman who was feared and fantasized over in her time, and who singlehandedly frustrated the government of one of the world's superpowers.
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Madame Nhu (born Tran Le Xuan) was a notorious personage in South Vietnam during the late 1950s and early '60s. The surrogate First Lady of the repressive government (headed by her husband's bachelor brother, Ngo Dinh Diem) was vocal about her love of power and infamous for her fierce authoritarianism (she once mocked a Buddhist monk who had set himself on fire in protest of Diem's regime by saying she would "clap her hands for another monk's barbecue"). Her incendiary rhetoric earned her the nickname "the Dragon Lady." Yet after her husband and brother-in-law were assassinated during the U.S.-backed military coup of 1963, she went into hiding for nearly 30 years. In this illuminating biography, East Asia scholar Demery interweaves the story of her efforts to connect with her reclusive subject with the dramatic tale of Nhu's volatile life. The Dragon Lady ultimately granted Demery unprecedented access, going so far as to entrust the journalist with her unpublished memoirs. Without condoning Nhu's actions, Demery admits that she eventually came to respect her as "a staggeringly beautiful, proud, willful... woman" who refused to be constrained by the men in her life. The book adds little to the history of the Vietnam War, but it does shed light on one of the country's most controversial figures. Photos, map, and time line.
