(5 of 10)
The Happy 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.
In 1954, after their disastrous defeat at Dienbienphu, the French in desperation met the exiled Diem's demand for Vietnamese independence and sent him back to Viet Nam to try to rally his war-shattered people and to salvage something from the Viet Minh. Two weeks after Diem was installed in Saigon as Premier, the weary and discouraged French sliced Viet Nam in half at the Geneva bargaining table; the Viet Minh took the north with its coal and iron, and Diem was left with the south, including Saigon and the rice-rich Mekong River delta.
First Notice. The South Viet Nam that Diem inherited was in a state of anarchy. The economy was in shreds, and there was no functioning executive or administrative machinery to run the government. The army was run by a French puppet, General Nguyen Van Hinh, who was constantly plotting against Diem, and the police and security forces were controlled by the notorious Binh Xuyen river pirates, who had bought the "concession" from puppet Emperor Bao Dai for $1,000,000. In the countryside, two religious sects with well-armed private armies, the Cao Dai and the Hoa Hao, ran two virtually independent fiefs.
At 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."
That was when Saigon began to take serious notice of Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu.
In the face of superior odds, hers was the first—and for a long time the only —voice to demand a showdown with the government's foes. She called her own husband "cowardly" for recommending a compromise with the Binh Xuyen gangsters. Once, arranging a demonstration against them, she was surrounded by a hostile crowd of Binh Xuyen. She jumped into her car, cried, "Arrest me, if you can!" and drove straight through the ring of tommy-gun-toting toughs. Finally, the family shipped her out to a convent in Hong Kong to keep her quiet during a period of attempted conciliation. "It was just like the Middle Ages," she says, "but that's where I learned English." When she returned to Saigon three months later, she was still spoiling for a fight. Finally, Diem smashed the Binh Xuyen, forced General Hinh into exile, and sent his troops into the countryside to crush the dissident sects.