High life | 7 May 2011

Mme Nhu, who died two days before THE wedding, was a hell of a woman. Her maternal grandmother was a Vietnamese princess of impeccable credentials, yet when she was captured by the commies in Hue in 1946, she stood up to them until the French rescued her four months later. She was anti-French and anti-commie, yet the Western press named her the Dragon Lady, a nickname she didn’t deserve but one that stuck. She was a nationalist par excellence, but in the gathering storm of the Vietnam war the press had to have a villain (the commies were the good guys) and she played her role to the hilt.

When the shocking images of Buddhist monks’ immolations reached the West, she did not flinch or cry crocodile tears. She undiplomatically referred to them as barbecues. American hacks insisted she looked and acted like the diabolical femme fatale in the popular comic strip of the day ‘Terry and the Pirates’.