"You're in America Now"

Washington was cautiously optimistic --or was it optimistically cautious?--about the military coup in South Viet Nam. Everyone agreed that it was, indeed, a pity that President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu had to get murdered in the process. After the U.S. conferred diplomatic recognition on the generals' government, Dean Rusk said: "We think the new regime will be able to resolve the internal problems and unify the people."

It had better work out that way --for, as the Kennedy Administration knows so well, failure of the U.S.-encouraged generals' junta to hasten the pace of the Vietnamese war might have explosive domestic political implications in 1964. Certain to be heard from for quite a while is Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu--who looks as though she might stay on in the U.S. for as long as possible.

$100,000 & Sympathy. Last week Mme. Nhu was in mourning in Los Angeles with Daughter Le Thuy, 18. Her three younger children were whisked out of Viet Nam after the coup. At first, Mme. Nhu planned to meet them in Rome, but then she decided to have the children join her in California. Sympathetic messages poured in all week--telegrams from such people as Democratic Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, Los Angeles' Mayor Sam Yorty, Publisher William Buckley; a six-minute phone call of condolence from former Vice President and Mrs. Richard Nixon. Paris Match magazine offered her $100,000 for her life story.

Mme. Nhu's warmest admirers turned out to be enthusiasts of the radical right wing, who seemed determined to set her up as a martyr and symbol--like General Edwin Walker. The day before the coup, Millionaire Patrick Frawley, president of Eversharp, Inc., and staunch supporter of Dr. Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communist Crusade, gave a private luncheon for her to meet some of the state's leading conservatives. After that, members of the superconservative California Young Republicans offered to pay for her $90-a-day suite at Los Angeles' Beverly Wilshire Hotel. But Robert Gaston, president of the organization, tested even his own followers by proclaiming: "This little woman could be the end of Kennedy."

The Beleaguered Lady. At week's end, Mme. Nhu, repudiating all those stories of a villa on the Riviera and a bank account in Switzerland, told the press that she was without funds--except for money out of her reach in Viet Nam. She and Le Thuy moved into a four-room suite in the Bel Air mansion of Financier Allen Chase, who has vast investments in the Orient with TV Performer Art Linkletter, and was an occasional visitor at President Diem's palace.

However deep her private grief over the deaths of her husband and brotherin-law was, Mme. Nhu wept in public only once. As she and her daughter left the hotel for Chase's home, they were engulfed in an army of television cameramen and photographers. Policemen battered a path through the crowd to her car. Mme. Nhu rushed in and slumped in the back seat, then turned and sobbed helplessly in Le Thuy's arms. A short time later, at the entrance to Chase's four-acre estate, the same squad of camera carriers blocked the driveway, forcing the car to a stop. One TV type poked a microphone through the car window, almost hitting Mme. Nhu in the face. She shrank into a corner of the seat. Cops again shouldered the crowd aside and the car sped through. A cameraman was enraged. He shouted after the beleaguered lady: "You can't treat us like this! You're in America now."

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