Vietnam War lightning rod

As the official hostess to the unmarried president of South Vietnam, her brother-in-law, she was formally known as Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu. But to the American journalists, diplomats and soldiers caught up in the intrigues of Saigon in the early 1960s, she was “the Dragon Lady,” a symbol of everything that was wrong with the American effort to save her country from Communism.

Larry Burrows/Time Life Pictures--Getty Images - Madame Nhu at the Saigon airport in 1963.

When, during Diem’s early days in power, she heard that the head of the army, Gen. Nguyen Van Hinh, was bragging that he would overthrow the president and make her his mistress, she confronted him at a Saigon party. “You are never going to overthrow this government because you don’t have the guts,” Time magazine quoted her as telling the startled general. “And if you do overthrow it, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first.”


Her “capacity for intrigue was boundless,” William Prochnau wrote in “Once Upon a Distant War: Young War Correspondents and the Early Vietnam Battles” (1995). So was her hatred of the American press. “Madame Nhu looked and acted like the diabolical femme fatale in the popular comic strip of the day, ‘Terry and the Pirates,’ ” Mr. Prochnau wrote. “Americans gave her the comic-strip character’s name: the Dragon Lady.” 

In the pivotal year of 1963, as the war with the North worsened, discontent among the South’s Buddhist majority over official corruption and failed land reform efforts fueled protests that culminated in the public self-immolations of several Buddhist monks. Shocking images of the fiery suicides raised the pressure on Diem, as did Madame Nhu’s well-publicized reaction. She referred to the suicides as “barbecues” and told reporters, “Let them burn and we shall clap our hands.”