VIETNAMESE SUMMARY SUPPLEMENT (INFORMATION AS OF 1100 EDT)

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79T00429A001400070017-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 3
• Document Creation Date: December 12, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 6, 2001
• Sequence Number: 17
• Publication Date: October 15, 1963
• Content Type: SUMMARY

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OCI No. 3022/63 15 October 1963
VIETNAMESE SUMMARY SUPPLEMENT
(Information as of 1100 EDT)
1. Today's schedule for Madame Nhu includes tap-
ing a "Ladies of the Press" interview for New York Chan-
nel 9 presentation at 2130 Thursday; a luncheon with
Newsweek magazine executives; and a speech before the
Whig Cliosophic Society of Princeton University tonight.
2. Yesterday she told 200 students packed into
the living room of a Radcliffe College dormitory that
women are the "real power" in South Vietnam. Not only
is there a paramilitary army of 200,000 women, she said,
but women dominate the voting and decide in pre-election
"gossip" sessions which candidates are acceptable. She
cited the family code passed in 1956 which eliminated
concubinage, polygamy, and divorce except by presiden-
tial approval, and gave women equal legal, political, and
property rights.
She told the Radcliffe audience that hers is
the first free country to accept a "showdown" with Com-
munism, and is winning. There is little civic action in
South Vietnamese universities, she said, but what there
is is mostly Communist-inspired. This she dismissed as
the action of "guilt-stricken young boys" from the cities
whose parents have shielded them from military service,
so that the girls ostracize them and only the Communists
offer them a chance to demonstrate and thereby show their
courage.
She and her daughter, who reportedly is consider-
ing attending an American college, had dinner in the Rad-
cliffe student dining hall before the evening engagement
at Harvard.
3. Escorted through a back door to bypass 200 noisy
pickets of a Harvard "Ban-the-Bomb" group, Mme. Nhu ap-
peared before an audience of 1,500 at the Harvard Law
Forum. She debated with what the AP described as an "un-
friendly, tough and verbose" panel of three Harvard law
faculty members, Professor Roger Fisher, Associate Pro-
fessor Stanley Hoffmann, and Mrs. Suzanne Randolph, a
lecturer in government.
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After they charged that she was here on a
"charm" mission to argue that "nothing at all is wrong
--everything has been misquoted, misinterpreted, mis-
managed or mis-emphasized," she said in reply: "What
other regime has been fighting a war for the past seven
years, has held five elections of universal suffrage?"
She said her country was fighting "to build democracy,"
not simply "hiding an internal war under the cloak of
anti-Communism."
She said the $1.5 million a day repeatedly
cited as US aid to South Vietnam includes the entire
cost of the guerrilla war as well as expenses for opera-
tions of the US Seventh Fleet, and that Diem had asked
for the withdrawal of some US personnel in Saigon, not
as part of an "America-go-home campaign," but to cut
the costs. Instead, she said, 3,000 more Americans ar-
rived.
"Americans bring their houses on their backs,"
she complained. "They do not live like us...austerely
as us...they live at great expense." These remarks
brought hissing from some members of the audience, which
otherwise was apparently more receptive than the oppos-
ing debaters.
"Too many people," she added, "believe that
American aid arrives in South Vietnam in big bags full
of dollars, and that the president of Vietnam gives it
to his brothers. This is not true."
4. Before flying to the Boston area, Madame Nhu
was the guest of New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs
Sulzberger at an o3' -t e--recor' d-luncheon in the Times
Building. After her Princeton engagement tonight she
is to fly to Washington, where she says she will again
attempt to see her estranged father, former ambassador
Tran Van Chuong.
5. A government-cohtrolled vernacular daily in
Saigon-Cholon Monday described Mme. Nhu's trip as a
"hurricane" sweeping over the US which has caused deep
embarrassment to the US Government.
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6. Princeton Assistant Professor Arash Bormanshi..nov
says a group of Buddhist monks, all naturalized Americans
and including no natives of South Vietnam, will picket
Mme. Nhhu's appearance at Princeton tonight.
7. Yesterday's Supplement cited Mme. Nhu's claim on
Sunday that according to Buddhist figures only one million
of South Vietnam's 40 million are Buddhists. Madame Nhu
obviously meant to say 14,.not 40.
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