Nobody Home

"I'm not here to greet anybody," snapped New York City's official greeter. Public Events Commissioner Richard C. Patterson Jr., as he strode past a clutch of curious newsmen in the lobby of Manhattan's Barclay Hotel one morning last week. "I'm just here to see that the lady has sufficient police protection." The lady--South Viet Nam's Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu--coolly assured Patterson that her protection was just fine. Besides, she added, "God is in my corner."

Even so, there were times last week when her corner must have seemed a lonely place. As curiosity about the sister-in-law of South Viet Nam's President Ngo Dinh Diem began to ebb in the second week of her 21-day tour, sympathetic crowds dwindled, officials cold-shouldered her, and about the only people who turned out to see her were newsmen and students.

Poison Ivy. Venturing onto the college circuit, Mme. Nhu found little but poison Ivy along the way. At Harvard, she entered an auditorium through the back door to dodge some 500 churlish student pickets who were parading outside and carrying signs with such labored slogans as NHU DEAL is NHU DIEM GOOD. They pounded on the doors, splattered the building with eggs and rattled the windows while she spoke. Inside, things were not much better. When Mme. Nhu, sheathed in brocade and silk and trailing a mink stole, complained that "Americans in Viet Nam do not live like us ... austerely like us," the crowd of 1,700 hissed loudly.

At Princeton, she complained that "they showed bad manners--very bad manners--at Harvard." But Old Nassau was not much more polite. Some 250 pickets, including six Buddhist monks from a monastery in Freewood Acres, N.J., refugees from Tibet and Russia, turned up to razz her. Protested Mme. Nhu: "You're not helping us by hissing or booing us. Tell us precisely what's wrong with us."

Before anyone could say "Buddhist," however, Mme. Nhu whisked off to Washington, spent much of her time there talking about precisely what's wrong with the U.S.* "I have not met your Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge," she told an audience of some 800 which jammed the Women's National Press Club. "But from a distance he seems more mysterious than an Asian." The Kennedy Administration was full of liberals, she said, and while "liberals aren't red yet, they're pink." As for the U.S. decision to withhold some economic aid from the Diem regime in hopes of forcing reforms, it only proved that "there is no real eagerness to win the war against the Communists."

"Trail of Stench." That evening Mme. Nhu sallied forth in search of her estranged father, Tran Van Chuong, who was replaced as Vietnamese Ambassador to Washington two months ago after criticizing Diem's policies. With a score of newsmen and photographers trailing her, she pounded on the door of the darkened Tran home on a tree-lined Washington street while her lovely, 18-year-old daughter, Le Thuy, rang the bell. No answer. Next she peeped through a window. No signs of life. She went around to the back door. Still no answer. No wonder. The Trans were in Manhattan, where the ex-ambassador was laying plans for a speaking tour designed to cover up what he called "the trail of stench" left by his talkative daughter.

Mme. Nhu's parents were not the only ones avoiding her. Official Washington boycotted her completely. The closest President Kennedy got to her was half a block away--he was guest of honor at a reception given by Ireland's Prime Minister Sean Lemass at the Mayflower Hotel while she was getting a permanent and having her nails polished (pearly pink) at a nearby Elizabeth Arden salon. "I know that this visit is unofficial," she complained, "and did not expect a red carpet. But there are 100 ways in which the Government could have shown me friendliness."

Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield, for one, thought she had a point. "She has every right to expect from us a full measure of courtesy," Democrat Mansfield told his colleagues. "This nation has played host to many prominent visitors before Mme. Nhu whose views were, to say the least, not exactly music to our ears."

* In Saigon her husband was doing much the same thing. Ngo Dinh Nhu, Diem's brother, top adviser and secret police chief, spoke to seven Western newsmen at the presidential palace, told them in a 2 1/4-hour interview that:

1) the Central Intelligence Agency and other American organizations urged Buddhist leaders to overthrow the government last August; 2) the Vietnamese people had lost confidence in the U.S.; and 3) the war with the Viet Cong would end more quickly if the U.S. sent its advisers home but continued to send cash and arms.

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