As we continue to mourn the deaths of American service members and Afghan civilians in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the hands of ISIS Islamic terrorists, many are still comparing the earlier takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban with coups and revolutions in two other nations that also had been supported by the U.S. and the West.
Afghanistan, South Vietnam and Iran had suffered from the same malady when they were overthrown: Their respective leaders were corrupt, unscrupulous and crooked as a dog’s hind leg.
In the case of South Vietnam, which had fallen to communist North Vietnam in late April, 1975, it had also undergone a coup 12 years earlier against the regime of President Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, his brother and the national police chief, which was led by protesters fed up with their thievery and nepotism as well as by the majority Buddhist population, which had become increasingly enraged by the discrimination against their religion by Diem, Nhu and many of their supporters who were Roman Catholics. As a foreign affairs writer and columnist for the Los Angeles Examiner at the time of the coup, I experienced a fleeting, personal journalistic “coup” when the coup in Saigon also unfolded in, of all places, Los Angeles, and I will recount this adventure in a few moments.
On Nov. 2, 1963, the coup commenced in Saigon when a group of dissident South Vietnamese army generals and politicians sought out Diem and Nhu with the intent of arresting them and transporting them by military aircraft to exile in a neutral nation. Learning of the coup, Diem and Nhu stuffed suitcases with millions of U.S. dollars and attempted to flee through an underground tunnel in the Presidential Palace. But they were caught, handcuffed and tossed into an armored personnel carrier which was to carry them back to the palace for trial and banishment. However, several hotheaded young officers guarding the pair in the APC stabbed Diem and Nhu and finished them off with pistols. Although the coup was successful and a new government was installed, it, too, suffered from corruption and chaos, and it eventually fell to the North Vietnamese in April 1975, despite massive military and financial aid provided by the United States.
My own Vietnamese “journalistic coup” began early in the morning at Los Angeles International Airport on the same day as the coup in Saigon, when I covered the arrival of Madame Nhu, 39, the sister-in-law of Vietnam’s president Diem and wife of Nhu, his brother. On a U.S. speaking tour to beg Americans for more military and monetary support in the war against North Vietnam, she was greeted by Mayor Sam Yorty and then driven to the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills where she and her 16-year-old daughter, Le Thuy, who had accompanied her on the trip, freshened up in a hotel suite. An hour or so later, Madame Nhu was driven to the nearby Beverly Hilton Hotel where she gave a fiery address to an audience estimated at 1,000. Following her speech, she was transported back to the Beverly Wilshire to rest and prepare to visit a Hollywood movie studio that evening with her daughter.
I had managed to secure entry along with a photographer to her hotel suite, and when we entered the living room, a U.S. State Department official who had accompanied her to the U.S. introduced me to Madame Nhu and daughter Le Thuy, and seated me between them on a couch. We engaged in banter for about 15 minutes, as I had been warned by the State Department official not to discuss the criticism heaped upon her by many Vietnamese who dubbed her the “Dragon Lady of South Vietnam” because of her unlimited power that caused her nation’s military and civilian leaders to grovel and tremble at her commands. Alas, my photographer was told not to take photos of Madame Nhu, Le Thuy and me on the couch!
In the middle of our chat, another State Department official entered and ordered me, the photographer, a hotel maid and others in the room not part of the official party to leave the room at once. We trooped out into the hallway, wondering aloud what was brewing. We soon learned: Madame Nhu’s brother-in-law and her husband had been captured by the coup leaders in Saigon and stabbed and shot to death in the armored personnel carrier.
I never saw the madame and her daughter again. They were hustled off to the estate of friends in Bel-Air and, in a few days, flew to exile in Rome to be near Madame Nhu’s brother-in-law, an archbishop who served in the Vatican. In 1967, Le Thuy was killed in an automobile accident in France, and in 1986 Madame Nhu’s parents were shot to death by their playboy son in their home in Washington, D.C. after he learned they had disinherited them.
On Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011, Madame Nhu, the Dragon Lady, died at her home in Rome at the age of 87.
David C. Henley is publisher emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle-Standard.
