Word: nhu
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...court but quit in a dispute with Viet Nam's French overlords, despite being virtually penniless, and went out and farmed his rented rice fields side by side with his peasant neighbors. Diem himself left politics before World War II rather than work with the French. In that tradition, Nhu, his wife and family were opposed both to the Red Viet Minh "army of liberation" and to the French with their puppet Emperor, Bao Dai. When the Viet Minh overran Hué, they shot Diem's oldest brother and the brother's only son, for months held Diem himself captive before...
...four months, Mme. Nhu lived on only two bowls of rice a day in a remote Communist-held village. She had only one blouse, one pair of pants and one coat. "I got to hate that coat," she says. "It was wasp-waisted and very fashionable. But for months it was my only blanket. After that, I always said I would only own loose, practical coats, just in case." Mme. Nhu's smooth, well-kept hands were a constant source of contemptuous amusement for her tough peasant captors. "I cannot bear the Communists," she says. "They considered me a child...
When the French army began moving out into the countryside, Mme. Nhu's captors prepared a hasty retreat north. But because her mother-in-law was incapable of making such an arduous trip, Mme. Nhu was granted a safe-conduct pass to a nearby village. With her child and the old woman, Mme. Nhu holed up in a convent in the village until the French forces arrived. Shortly afterward she was reunited with Nhu...
...Time. The anticolonialist views shared by the whole Ngo Dinh family made the French regard the Nhus with suspicion. Settling in the resort town of Dalat, the Nhus quietly set about organizing popular support for the return to Viet Nam of Diem, who was in exile in the U.S. Nhu ran a paper and worked to develop his philosophy of personalism; to win favor among poor, potential supporters, Mme. Nhu turned down her family's hefty allowance, shopped for her own groceries, pedaled around Dalat on a bicycle...
...Saigon cocktail parties, Army Boss General Hinh used to threaten a coup almost daily and joke that when he overthrew the government he would exile every member of Diem's family except Mme. Nhu, whom, he said, he would keep as a concubine. One day Mme. Nhu finally met Hinh face to face at a party. She walked over to him, recalls an observer, and said: "You are never going to overthrow this government because you don't have the guts. And if you do overthrow it, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first...