Finding the Dragon Lady

A quest for one of history’s most controversial figures: the woman, known everywhere in her day as the Dragon Lady, who was a lightning rod for America’s toxic involvement in Vietnam

She was “the beautiful but diabolic sex dictatress” according to the journalist David Halberstam; "everything Jack found unattractive” in the words of Jacqueline Kennedy; “the most dangerous enemy a man can have” in Malcolm Browne’s view; and everywhere in the media in the 1960s she was the “Dragon Lady.” Monique Demery’s search for the woman behind all the epithets, claims, and counterclaims—a woman who had been living in exile and seclusion for thirty years—began on the streets of Paris and deepened when she began a relationship with, and was entrusted with the unpublished memoirs of, Tran Le Xuan, otherwise known as Madame Nhu, the First Lady of the doomed republic of South Vietnam.

Madame Nhu’s diminutive beauty cannot obscure her pivotal role in one of American history’s darkest moments: she was much of the reason that the United States made the fateful decision to get rid of the ruling Ngo family. Demery investigates the reality behind the myth, giving us a deeper look at the woman who was feared and despised by so much of the world, one of the most memorable figures of the entire Vietnam War.