Vietnam and Me (1) - Madame Nhu at Fordham
September 9, 2021
by
Bill Batkay
I left Maryknoll at Glen Ellyn in June of 1963, two years before LBJ's vast expansion of the war in Vietnam. Still a good Catholic boy, despite my loss of vocation, it never occurred to me to transfer to anywhere other than to a Catholic college. With Fr. Putnam's guidance I applied to Fordham College in the Bronx and Georgetown in Washington, D. C., with a vague idea or eventually joining the Foreign Service. (A continuation of the missionary impulse?)
I decided to major in political science, not really knowing anything else relevant to my career goals, however vaguely articulated. Georgetown, known for its foreign language school, appealed to me because I was also interested in foreign languages, having studied Latin for 6 years and French for 5. But I ultimately opted for Fordham, because I would have to make up only 6 credits of pol. sci. course work there, as opposed to more than 12 at Georgetown.
The highlight of my two years at Fordham was the visit on October eleventh, nineteen sixty-three, by the by-then infamous and beautiful Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of the soon-to-be-assassinated Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, and de facto First Lady f Vietnam, and her gorgeous eighteen year old daughter, Le Thuy. [I realize I am ignoring the impact of the objectively-more-momentous assassination of JFK.] How much of my avid interest in the visit was political-international-relations-y and how much was just lust for the women remains a moot point. Either way, anticipation of the visit, scheduled for a Friday afternoon, built among us students to the point of virtual explosion in the weeks leading up to it.
Normally hell-bent on leaving the campus for home at the end of my last class at 2, I made the significant (for me) decision to stay for Madame Nhu's lecture. The lecture itself was to take place in the large auditorium normally used for cultural events like concerts. By the time I arrived, around 2:20, the place was already jammed with students and faculty. I found a seat about half-way back, near an aisle. The chatter, and antsy-ness, among the attendees grew and grew as the clock ticked closer to 3 pm.
Despite, or maybe because of, her reputation as something of a "dragon lady" on the order of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek, Madame Nhu was popular with young American men. Her previous appearances had all been preceded, accompanied and followed by a hypnotically rhythmic chant that had become her rallying cry, and the audience, including me, clearly anticipated taking it up that day.
3 o'clock came and the lady had yet to appear. As the minutes inched by, the murmuring grew in intensity until about 10 minutes past the hour, when the audience could contain itself no longer and the chanting began--"Madame Nhu, Madame Nhu, Madame Nhu...." Within a minute or two, the woman herself and her daughter came regally across the stage. The chanting became screaming--"Madame Nhu, Madame NHU, MADAME NHU, MADAME NHU"! I yelled as loud as anyone, intoxicated by the spectacle and reveling in the "contact high."
Eventually, the crowd quieted, and Madame Nhu spoke, her relatively brief presentation followed by a question period. Many of the questions, perhaps not surprisingly, were addressed to her lovely daughter, having first been translated into French by one of Fordham's French instructors.
I have no recollection whatever of the content of either the lecture or the questions, only of the exhilaration I felt at what seemed to be a truly historic moment. Most of my college friends and I regarded the vilification of Madame Nhu by the American foreign policy establishment, allegedly because of her criticisms of American foreign policy, as wrong. The vicious verbal attacks on her we regarded as both cruel and unfair, a judgment that only increased her allure and that of her daughter to at least the younger cohort of fairness-obsessed white Americans like me.
We forgot about all of that, of course, when our own president, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated one month later by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Bill Batkay