page_title: Madame Nhu
section_title: Post-elections
hierarchical_section_title: Madame Nhu / Post-elections
caption_attribution_description: English: Madame Ngô Đình Nhu and Lyndon Baines Johnson, May 12, 1961, from LBJ library'
context_page_description: Trần Lệ Xuân, more popularly known in English as Madame Nhu, was the de facto First Lady of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963. She was the wife of Ngô Đình Nhu, who was the brother and chief advisor to President Ngô Đình Diệm. As Diệm was a lifelong bachelor and because she and her family lived in Independence Palace together with him, she was considered to be the first lady.
  Known for her harsh and incendiary comments that denounced anti-government protests by some Buddhist sects and the strong U.S. influence and presence in the country, she had to live in exile in France after her husband and her brother-in-law, Diệm, were assassinated in 1963.
context_section_description: After the election, the couple moved into the Presidential Palace. Madame Nhu was influential on government policy and, since her brother-in-law, Ngô Đình Diệm, was unmarried, she was regarded as the First Lady of South Vietnam. She attempted to combine Roman Catholicism with a cult around herself as a modern reincarnation of Vietnam's fabled Trưng Sisters, who raised a revolt against China and temporarily defeated the Hán Dynasty Chinese troops in AD 40. President Diem never married and is not known to have had a relationship with any women, through his bodyguard noted he was fond of keeping "good looking men around him". Diem, who was known for his poor social skills, decided to have his sister-in-law serve as the unofficial First Lady of South Vietnam. Madame Nhu frequently talked to the Vietnamese, French and other foreign press quite candidly. Madame Nhu's marriage was unhappy as she wrote in her diary of an all consuming "rising desire" in her body, complained her husband had little interest in sex with her, and wrote with disgust of his affections for a younger woman whom she called that "creature" who was very "vulgar" and "dirty". Madame Nhu devoted her time to politics, championing a new Family Code she presented to parliament in October 1957 and passed in June 1958 to replace the old French code that banned concubinage and polygamy; allowed women to open bank accounts and own property; and required that daughters be given greater inheritance rights.
  In 1962, she had a statue erected in Saigon to the memory of the Trưng Sisters, with the facial features modelled on herself, and also established the Women's Solidarity Movement, a female paramilitary organization. The statue cost US$20,000, a substantial sum at the time, given that South Vietnam was a developing country, but she was undeterred by criticism about largesse. She pressured the wives of ARVN officers and public servants into joining her "movement". A flamboyant woman, Madame Nhu took to flashing around her handgun in public, and the Women's Solidarity Movement was intended to allow Vietnamese women to participate in the fight against the Viet Cong, just as the Trung sisters had fought against the Chinese, but most of the women who joined the movement were upper-class women who believed that their husbands would benefit by being given government jobs.
  Her father became the ambassador to the United States while her mother was South Vietnam's observer at the United Nations. Two of her uncles were cabinet ministers. Her parents resigned from their posts in 1963, in protest over the treatment of Buddhists under the regime of President Diệm and disowned their daughter.
  Howard Jones says "Madame Nhu was chauffeured in a black Mercedes and wore a small diamond crucifix", and "wore form-fitting apparel so tight that one French correspondent suggestively described her as 'molded into her ... dress like a dagger in its sheath.' On formal occasions, she wore red satin pantaloons with three vertical pleats, which was the mark of the highest-ranking women of the imperial court in ancient Annam." Her personal touch to the traditional national garment, the Áo dài, was to wear a collarless version. When Diệm criticized the flesh revealing cut, he received a ripe response: "It's not your neck that sticks out, it's mine. So, shut up."
caption: Madame Nhu and Vice President Johnson, visit to Vietnam, May 1961
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