Madame Nhu, Vietnam War Lightning Rod, Dies

Her death was confirmed by her sister, Lechi Oggeri.

Born in 1924 — the date is uncertain, though some sources say April 15 — she spent the last four decades in Rome and southern France.

Her parents named her Tran Le Xuan, or “Beautiful Spring.” 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.

In those years, before the United States deepened its military involvement in the war, Madame Nhu thrived in the eye of her country’s gathering storm as the wife of Ngo Dinh Nhu, the younger brother and chief political adviser to Ngo Dinh Diem, the president of South Vietnam from 1955 until 1963.

While her husband controlled the secret police and special forces, Madame Nhu acted as a forceful counterweight to the diffident president, badgering Diem’s aides, allies and critics with unwelcome advice, public threats and subtle manipulations. Then, after both men were killed in a military coup mounted with the tacit support of the United States, she slipped into obscurity.

In her years in the spotlight, when she was in her 30s, she was beautiful, well coiffed and petite. She made the form-fitting ao dai her signature outfit, modifying the national dress with a deep neckline. Whether giving a speech, receiving diplomats or reviewing members of her paramilitary force of 25,000 women, she drew photographers like a magnet. But it was her impolitic penchant for saying exactly what she thought that drew world attention.

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.”

Tran Le Xuan was the younger daughter of Nam Tran Chuong, herself the daughter of an imperial Vietnamese princess, and Tran Van Chuong, a patrician lawyer who later became Diem’s ambassador to Washington. As a willful girl, she bullied her younger brother, Khiem Van Tran, and was more devoted to the piano and the ballet than to her studies.

She later resisted any arranged marriage, choosing in 1943 to wed one of her mother’s friends, Ngo Dinh Nhu. Fifteen years her senior, he was from a prominent Hue family of Roman Catholics who opposed both French colonial rule and the Communist rebels. Tran Le Xuan, raised a Buddhist, embraced her new family’s faith as well as its politics.