Since we have a recent topic on the Secret War in Laos, this might be of interest.

 

One of the most controversial figures in the history of the War in Vietnam, Tran Le Xuan, better known as Madame Nhu, wife of Ngo Dinh Nhu, the brother of the first South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, has died aged 87.

 

President Diem was an ascetic bachelor who rarely ventured from his Palace. Madame Nhu therefore became the de facto unofficial "First Lady" of South Vietnam. She wielded immense power until the Americans withdrew their support for her brother-in-law in a CIA-sponsored coup, and his subsequent assassination in 1963. She seems to have a been a thoroughly unpleasant character.

 

She accumulated vast wealth and power, but was reviled for her puritanical social campaigns and her callous dismissal of Buddhist monks who burned themselves to death to protest against the brutal rule of Diem and her husband Ngo Dinh Nhu. "I would clap hands at seeing another monk barbecue show, for one cannot be responsible for the madness of others," she wrote in a letter to the New York Times. The world was stunned by photographs of monks sitting shrouded in flames; Madame Nhu simply offered to bring along some mustard for the next self-immolation. She later accused monks of lacking patriotism for setting themselves alight with imported petrol.

 

Those remarks solidified the enmity felt for a woman whom the American press had optimistically described in the mid-1950s as her country's Joan of Arc. Less than a decade later, as the US was drawn into the conflict between North and South Vietnam, she came to be seen as "an oriental Lucrezia Borgia". This tiny woman, who stood less that 5ft tall, at first intoxicated the US with her lacquered glamour; later the US press, shocked by her icy hauteur and political machinations, turned her into the personification of the remoteness and corruption that afflicted Diem's government.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/26/madame-nhu-obituary

 

I really wonder why the US media was so influenced by people like Madame Nhu and Chiang Kai Shek's wife, Soong Mei-llng (see also the Laos thread). In Soong's case, she always had the favourable and powerful backing of TIME. But were the media as a whole simply duped by these powerful ladies? Was it part wishful thinking on the part of editors? Was the media largely influenced by US policymakers at that time?

Thought this thread was about Yensabai Condo.