there has been a fork in the road drawn for me. i don't think i'm going back to engineering at this point in my life. there are a lot of signs that say keep going this way. >> host: how many drafts did it take to get one, the poem he read at the inaugural? >> guest: i have at home probably a stack about this big. again with poetry drafts take on a different meaning. it might mean a change to words and you throw it in the drafts pile. i only had a week and i had to write three poems in three weeks as the story goes. so there wasn't room. in some ways there was incredible pressure and in some ways i'm kind of glad i didn't have six months to write the poem because god knows what may have happened. i would have ended up locked up somewhere i think so there's something to be said about the time to exercise and giving yourself a time limit on writing. so yeah it took drafts and drafts and drafts but there is a big turnover right in the midd middle. part of that have had to do with my own creative process and finally feeling i have the authority to speak the way i was speaking in the poem, the connection to america that i had to dig deep inside and really -- you know is a poet you can't fake honesty and emotion in a poem. part of the writing process was to connect with what that moment was really about and what it meant to me is once i connected with that emotionally i was able to go back to the palm and speak to the poem in a different way. the first draft was a little winded talking about pilgrims on all this. it was a process of personalizing the poem but also connecting it in a way that was generally letting people into the poem. >> host: why does "the prince of los cocuyos" and when you are 16 and a half years old? >> guest: i wanted to take the book -- i didn't want to be a coming-out story. i wanted it to be sort of a cultural coming-of-age story to a certain degree and it seemed like an actual pause. 16, 16 and a half there's a very big break in one's life and after that the whole new set of experiences and emotional growth happens. if i turned that page into that phase i would have been another 300 pages. there's a practical reason for it. the book is a daunting and awakening in the cover will reflect that. it's taking it right to the cusp and you know from that moment forward you can confer what's going to happen to little ricky so to speak. it just seemed like a natural pause. at first like many authors at first i thought i was going to write about my first trip to cuba and when i moved to connecticut and move back to miami and by the time was eight years old by already had 70,000 words and i thought this isn't going to happen. and it makes sense to me now and i'm so happy with that ending. it's sort of symbolically launching myself into this world. we know and we can infer what's going to happen. it's right at that edge that i thought was a very poetic moments and on. >> host: richard blanco's "the prince of los cocuyos" a miami childhood comes out in the fall of 2014. you are watching booktv on c-span2, television for serious readers. the mac i was living a bohemian lifestyle and i decided to take it because whether it's an illusion or not, i don't think it is, it helps my concentration. it stopped me from being bored. it stopped other people from being boring to some extent. it would keep me awake and make the evening go on longer to enhance evening. if i was asked what i do it again, the answer is probably yes. i would quit earlier possibly in order to get away with the whole thing. the easy for me to say but not nice for my children to hear. sounds irresponsible if i say i would do all of that against you but the truth is who would be hypocritical again to say i would never touch the stuff if i knew. i did know. everyone knows. >> the soviet system in europe contained the seeds of its own destruction. many of the problems that we saw that we saw at the end began at the very beginning. i spoke already about the attempt to control all institutions and control all parts of the economy and political life and social life. one of the problems is when you do that, when you try to control everything then you create opposition and potential dissidents everywhere. if you tell all artist they have didn't pay the semiand one artist says no i don't want to pay that way, i want to paint another way that made them into political dissident. if you want to subsidize housing in this country and they want to talk about it in the populace agrees that something we should subsidize them put it on the balance sheet and make it clear and make it evident and make everybody aware of how much it's costing. but when you deliver it to these third-party enterprises, fannie mae and freddie mac, when you deliver the subsidy for a public company with private shareholders and executives who can extract a lot of that subsidy for themselves that is not a very good way of subsidizing homeownership. next from the "chicago tribune" printers row book fast monique brinson demery on her book of madame nhu the first former lady of south vietnam. >> welcome everyone. it's good to see her this morning and it's my pleasure to welcome today monique brinson demery the author of the amazing book "finding the dragon lady" the mystery of vietnam's madame nhu which has recently been published by public affairs books. demery holds a master's degree from harvard university and east asian regional studies and when she made contact with madame nhu who is the unofficial first lady of the south vietnamese government in 2005 the first journalist to interview her in almost 20 years. demery is based in chicago and we are happy to welcome you. >> thank you for having me and thank you for coming today. >> at such an interesting book. i'm curious how you first came to be interested in writing a book about what i think a lot of people might be a somewhat unlikely an unknown subject, someone who is known to scholars but probably not that well like so many other people. how did you become interested in madame nhu? >> it started sort of by omission. my mother is french and my dad is american so vietnam was always really hard to talk about in our family. it wasn't very clear to me what had happened there and every time i try to ask the adults around me was too controversial to really talk about. there is this nagging question of what happened in vietnam and every time i looked at the books there were the very gory pictures you you've seen of vietnam or the napalm apocalypse now pictures and then they flip the page and there's this beautiful stylish sort of very cosmopolitan looking woman and they are calling her the dragon lady, but diabolical. what is not to be interested in? so i started digging around and not actually out of curiosity wanted to read a book about this woman because her life sounded interesting to me. putting the pieces together i would have known that she grew up during the french colonial period and i thought well someone has written a great historical bodice about this woman. there was nothing. it was just these articles from the 60s that have been written about her and no biography, no historical fiction and what i noticed was no obituary. that led me to think wow she's still alive. >> a life and summer up there. she was the source of great fascination for writers in the early 60s who were reporting from vietnam and there was in no very much at a built-up image of her in united states but then after she went into exile in rome and later to paris she really does disappear from the record so you had a lot of sleuth work in tracking her down. >> i did. i mention there was no obituary. there was no obituary for madame nhu for what i found right away was an obituary for her parents. her parents were living in georgetown. they made their home they are after he resigned in protest from his daughter and son-in-law's government. they have been living in georgetown and in 1986 they were murdered in their sleep by their only son. i thought, this is real-life? this is nonfiction? it gave true meaning and that was the last time madame nhu emerged from self-imposed seclusion to say this is a family affair. leave my family alone and at that time she was living in rome. she was as you mentioned back and forth between rome and paris during those years. >> did you start out and the parents, did you start out thinking about writing about their lives perhaps and she became sentient interesting figure to you along the way? >> i certainly thought there was something there. i'm going to get the names wrong because i don't have them in front of me but they were 90 and 86 or something when they were murdered and they were murdered and read in their pajamas. that to me seems so heartbreaking and sad. what i found was the sympathetic elderly couple had in fact lived quite a life before that. madame nhu's mother was known as the pearl of the orient by the french and in the french archives i found these references to who she had slept with and she slept with the japanese. to further confuse things she was 14 when she had her daught daughter. 14 years old. so i thought, they are so much contradiction here. she wasn't just the sweet old lady. she was a sweet old lady who slept around quite a bit. she also had a daughter at 14 saul so all of those questions lead me to pursue them. >> a very aristocratic family we can step back and say exactly who madame nhu was. her brother-in-law, the brother of her husband became president of south vietnam in 1956, 55? >> 54. >> madame nhu is the de facto first lady because the president of south vietnam and it was at the titles before that. we will for simplicity call him the president. he was a bachelor and bachelor makes it sound like he was going to vegas on the weekends. he was really very moral. he slept, hard wooden cot. there are these, there is this very catholic austere man who needs a first lady. he needs someone to host the parties encoded the orphanages so his younger brother's wife becomes this woman and she's perfect way. she looks great for the cameras and she likes to be out there. plus it gives her a voice. on all of her life in madame nhu have been looking for this purpose. she was the second child. she always had a bit of a chip on her shoulder. for her to be handed to us here you go be the official hostess she took it and ran with it. >> she basically occupied this role up until 1963 when the government was up-ended by a coup. her husband and her brother-in-law were executed. >> that's right and madame nhu wasn't just first lady. she was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming 99.9% at the selection to hold seats in the legislature. by doing so she was the first lady holding parties but she could also pass laws. she called them family and morality laws. some of them were well-intended though perhaps they were all well-intended but south vietnamese women were not able to open bank accounts and they were not allowed to own property. >> before the loss. >> before the law so madame nhu recognize what her husband and his brother did not. 50% of the population is being ignored except by the communists who are doing a great job. madame nhu.okay let's give these women some rights in some power and she did. she sort of took it upon herself to be the voice of the women. she wasn't like most vietnamese women. she came from a very aristocratic -- aristocratic family. for her to declare herself a voice of the vietnamese woman was a little presumptuous. >> she was unable to write in vietnamese. >> she didn't write. she could but she expressed herself but most fluently and french which is what she studied in school. so the other loss that she passed were a little ridiculous. i'm thinking about them in context it seems to make sense. vietnam was a country at war and the communists were doing a good job of saying this is a war and we have to treat it seriously and madame nhu was -- in saigon was becoming a party. they were pizza stands and bars and all of that stuff. it was already starting in the 50s and madame nhu said we have to take this seriously soshi outlawed dancing along with prostitution. she outlawed hand holding and kissing and underwire but she wore them. she had this moral high horse and the best was her sister had been married off young and this was her older sister. she was married to a guy who worked for the government. he fell out of love i guess and she fell in love instead with a french guy. he was a big game hunter and madame nhu thoughts you can't leave a good outstanding vietnamese man for a french guy. this is looking really bad so when her sister tried to divorce her husband's madame nhu outlaw divorce and the story goes and there are no records of this but the story issue/her wrists and ran to the palace. they take their own mother to come back from saigon to break up a daughter who then goes to the united states and marries the french guy anyway. >> they are still alive, correct? >> i believe so. i tried to reach out to her with letters but they have been unanswered. her husband has published a couple of memoirs and they have been published by a press in canada or perhaps self-publish. >> is one of the things that's remarkable about your book and her story. you mentioned her looks. she is a really striking figure. it's hard to characterize her but this image on the cover really says it all. you all probably can't see it from a distance but she knows how to handle a pistol and especially with the beehive haircut. it's a nice look. >> she did at the fashion thing. it has a high color and of man term color and madame nhu was one of the first to say if you got it flaunt it. she cut the neck down so you could see her caller bone and at the time this was really risqué. her brother-in-law says, don't you think that's a little too flashy and she said something like it's not your neck that sticking out, it's mine so shut up. >> that's a great line. what i was going to say is it's fascinating not from a geopolitical standpoint and a historical standpoint but it's a family saga as well. one also where you see someone who is able to whatever we think about her and we can come back to to that in a little bit had an incredible amount of gumption. she managed to create herself and really to direct her own idea of what a public image would be with an iron will. i think that's really fascinating about her. it seems like when you make contact with her in advance tears many years later that a sense of her soap was very much intact. >> i like the word gumption. i think that's a great description and guess madame nhu was going to tell their own story so when i did find madame nhu she was in her early 80s and she said to me, this is great. you are the angel that god sent to me. we are going to do my memoirs and you will get me bill clinton's book deal and that will be great. i really wanted to hear what she had to say that she had a very specific way of seeing her past which is understandable. perhaps we'll revise history and our own way but to madame nhu vietnam was the center of the universe and she was the thing that everything revolves around. she was very much at the center of her story. but then again it was also understandable. her husband and brother-in-law were killed with the sanction of the americans and she had gone through this life that had been quite hard. so i think to make sense of it she really turned to religion and mysticism. i was the only way that she could make sense of things was biblically. >> always a mix of joan of arc idea crossed without know what else, a survivor story. do you think it's just the force of her personality that gave her the present such a heading government? >> is thought that she was really the problem behind the problems that were very clear in the south vietnamese government. the she was the one pulling the strings and i think the way you write about her she does come across as having an unbelievable amount of influence over what her brother-in-law did. do you think that's just a force of her personality? you write about for example when she was taken prisoner of war in 1946 by the communist, and this figure emerges from that who is so strong. is that your sense of it or has her role but someone -- been somewhat overrated in the government? >> actually is a little bit of both if that's possible. madame nhu has the story when she was taken by the communists and she's carrying her infant daughter walking across this bridge and bullets are flying and she emerges unscathed. she was like a oh yeah i've got it. i'll have to do is be brave in that message, in the face of your enemy you just stare him down and stand strong no matter what you do don't back down was kind of her motto. i think she tried to pass that on to the brothers. there was one point when president yen was negotiating to open up his government and madame nhu thought that was just awful that he would dare to share power. she convinced him to stand firm. in some ways yes she had this power to convince the brothers that they didn't need to open up their government. they needed to lock up the doors and keep the more insular. the other thing was just the appearance that it looked like the men were following what she said. kennedy said thinking of the got of the united states. states. >> she was happy for the money. let's be clear, that was how they were funding the fight. but what they wanted was the money but then stay out of our business, let us run our government. and the united states obviously wanted strings attached to that money. when things were going the right way, for example, the united states tried to send in ground troops a lot earlier but the brothers of said absently not. you know, these have to be when things were going the right way for example of the united states tried to send in ground troops earlier but the brothers said absolutely not. these have to be advisers only and it wasn't until much later that obviously the vietnam war escalated into what it became. >> there were several coup attempts against the government beginning in 1960 i believe. there was one famous assault where a couple of airmen flew and bombs the palace and she narrowly survived. >> there was a direct hit on her bedroom. some air force pilot was tired of this bossy lady, pushy lady. one of the vietnamese i talked to said she was talking today. she was to much. one of these air force pilots did a direct hit of her sweet. there was this gaping hole and madame nhu fell through three stories and again this is another one of her survival, it if she survived she was magical. she hurt her arm but one of the children's nannies was killed. otherwise no one in the family was hurt. >> finally the protest against the government began to escalate in 62 and 63. there are strong confrontations with the buddhas in vietnam which he described very well. why don't you tell us about how those protest started and i think this is really when madame nhu plays a bad figure in history surrounding the buddhas protest. if you remember there were the famous pictures of the buddhist monks -- monks burning themselves in traffic stops. it was a way of protesting the government. >> right, so it started with a law that had been on the books since colonial times. no flag was allowed to fly higher than the state flag but of course do what he paid attention to that. there had been a big catholic festival and white and gold flags have been flying all over. for the buddhas birthday sometime in may one of the brothers, so there is zm who was the president, his brother madame nhu's husband who is the head of the secret police in charge of the politics. he was the guy who did the dirty deeds and there were a few brothers one of them was the archbishop of the city in central vietnam. he noticed that the buddhas flag was flying too high so we ordered people to take it down and there was this backlash by the buddhas. why are you enforcing this random law now? instead of backing down and saying we are making a mess out of this, they cracked down and suddenly there was a protest by the buddhas. people started firing on them and people were killed. instead of saying we are sorry things got out of hand the family said we blamed the economist. economists were shooting at the buddhas. no, they were. it quickly turned into a mess and basically the buddhist repression was less repression in the way we think of now it more of a vehicle for every grievance you can think of. no one has been allowed to say anything against this family. 90% of the country was buddhist so everyone could identify with this how you are putting down these people. everybody jumped onto this bandwagon and elderly monks were self emulating which meant they were lighting themselves on fire. madame nhu sounds like marie antoinette. let clap our hands and have a barbecue. the most cruel response you could add to an old buddhist monk lighting himself on fire. that spread like wildfire around the world. people couldn't believe she could be so callous. madame nhu's perspective was the buddhas have been intoxicated which does a mean drunk. it means they were poison. they have been poisoned by communism. they were a loose-knit organization and there were no strict rules coming in and coming out so madame nhu was pretty sure they have been implicated by communists. it turns out actually that by 1968 the united states even agreed they had been used as a cover by communist but in 1963 it was such a shocking thing to say and then to be so casual about suicide was unforgivable. >> i don't think it's ever a good tactic for a leader who is dependent on foreign aid to castigate buddhist monks protesting in the name of religious freedom and whatever else. that is really when i think at that point the u.s. government knows it has a problem on its hands and it tacitly supports the coup that will come. >> correct. in august president kennedy oks a change in government and the new ambassador had been sent over to saigon goes with the understanding that he is there to go look for alternatives to see him and his family who has been in power now for nine years. and it takes -- there are some false starts and some real alternatives have finally been identified. the brothers are killed november 1, 1963 which if any of you know it is the first -- a few weeks before kennedy was assassinated so madame nhu is a conspiracy and some of these -- people think it must have had something to do with madame nhu but i can assure you it didn't. kennedy seemed really shocked at the brothers have been killed. by all accounts he gets up when he hears the news and is visibly shaken. i can't believe they actually killed the brothers but he was the one that gave the okay to go ahead and topple this allied country, this friendly regime and overthrow them suffer him to think they could have gotten out in the other way is a little money. >> at that time she was on a tour of the united states and she believed if she came to the united states and convince people that there was a grave threat that the government was not supported that communists would topple south vietnam pretty quickly. she came to the united states on a speaking tour and in quite a spectacular to her. she went to a lot of colleges and did a lot of television and the day, a time it was harder to do that then it probably is today. what was her reception like when she came to the united states? >> it was very mixed. as you say she came to the united states because she had been asked to leave vietnam. the buddhas had really escalated in the united states are the only way will tamp this down them or store in the order if madame nhu leaves. this has been something that is zm and his brother had not been willing to do but finally they said okay you have to get out of vietnam. you have to shut up basically so where did she go? she comes to the united states and goes on this press relations to her. she doesn't understand the difference. she's invited to speak at harvard and colombia and georgetown and she's also invited by "meet the press" and all of these press organizations. she doesn't understand why she feels like the government hasn't rolled out the red carpet for her. wasn't she invited and she doesn't get the separation between the press and the government because in her country of course the press can only say what the government wants them to say so for her was really totally befuddling to the end of her days. i can understand why they invited me to come and then said go home. why don't they want me here? she goes to new york and goes to washington d.c. and comes to chicago and stays in the blackstone hotel. one of my favorite moments of the trip as she goes to dallas and there's a ranch there and she gets invited to go shooting. her daughter dresses up in western gear and apparently has a first teenage romance with a texas guy. her reception that madame nhu gets her mother is worried about madame nhu's visit so she pulls a state department guy aside and has a meeting and says the madame nhu really shouldn't come here. i appoint all the vietnamese to throw tomatoes at her and if they see her to run her over with their car. this is her mother. kohl .. was she seen in that light, in 1963 in the united states? i assume to the extent that she was hitting, you know, places like fordham, georgetown, they were very much self-conscious of that. was the part of her reception as well? >> i do think that part of the political closet of the south vietnamese government was based on something called personalism which is this philosophy that started in france in the '20s and it was a catholic closet, supposed be an alternative to pure capitalism and communism but it was kind of his third way. that was a cornerstone of their government. no one could quite understand how that translated to south vietnam, and so that was really the problem wasn't marketing. but the regime had bought all the property outside of rome, and property of course enormous pretty and expenses of the bought large tracts of them with the idea that they would send a south vietnamese functionaries over to rome to go get in doctor naked in their version of personalism. and then come back to south vietnam. that didn't work out so well for them but it was a place that madame nhu after her family was itself empowered, she go back to the land outside of rome which was not very valuable and sell it off piece by piece. >> i was always curious about that in a relationships with kennedy, the fact he disliked her so much and was were interested in how the catholicism worked into that. you would almost think that there might be some kind of, you know, sense of closeness between her and kennedy that was obviously not there. if anyone, the person who had the fondest thoughts about it would have been lbj. >> that's right. madame nhu convinced he was flirting with her but i think he must have flirted with everyone. but the connections between the family in saigon and the kennedy family in washington come is really, it's uncanny. on paper they look like they should've gotten along great. catholic dems, both governments run by a lot of family members, and very anti-communist. so they should have really gotten along well, but as it turned out they didn't, and jacqueline kennedy was a real critic of madame nhu. she thought madame nhu was just sort of pushy, what did she call her? she called her everything that jack found unattractive, when sort oppressed, she boasted about her own marriage to president kennedy saying they had this marriage which -- so what is that? who knows, sort of submissive and madame nhu is anything but submissive. .. and typically in government from the beginning of the 20th century until the end of the 20th-century. >> absolutely. the dragon lady, and then you see her in every kind of hollywood bad guy movie, you know, starring the powerful, sly, conniving asian woman or she is the very submissive kind of geisha girl. so there are really two ways that asian women have been portrayed. in so when women rise to a certain level of politics they certainly get shoved into one of these two very neat categories. >> we even have chicago. [inaudible] >> right. >> i mean, what i was trying to kind of reckon with is this very complex figure. and you try and present her in all our complexity, which i think it's wonderful. i start thinking also about someone who does not come up in the book that strikes me as a kind of counter model. she certainly was not a figure like that. >> now, she was not. i just heard there was an off-broadway play in new york. >> kinky boots. [laughter] >> it is called here lives love. i think madame nhu would be a great character for that guess next musical. but she was flashy and flamboyant and did not go quietly. >> has anyone been interested in making a film about her life? has anyone asked? >> not that i know of. >> okay. if there is anyone out there, we're taking offers. what was she like when you -- i mean, he portrayed as well in the book, but tell us a little bit about what she was like when you finally did make contact. she was not exactly advertising where she lived in paris. she was not -- she had avoided paris for some time did she could have been extradited. >> correct. >> had rented the apartment. is that correct? the apartment they owned in paris. >> madame nhu said she was given the apartment. it was an anonymous gift. she always implied to me it was given to her by the american government because they felt bad for not enough for husband and brother-in-law. she had nowhere to go. she could not get the united states visa. she would rent out that apartment and get the extra cash from it. but that is where i found her. face. but to the pair should rent out the apartment to get the cash fromt th by vietnamese is very bad, but every now and then i will go online and try to decipher my way through a little article. i found this article in the early 2000's by a guy who claims of interviewed madame nhu on the close the floor of this building.early 2000 by a guy who claimed to have interviewed madame nhu. she was on the 12th floor this building and that rung a bell to me, so i thought i'd might note and i said i see here she wrote a letter to clare booth luce to this address goes to the eiffel tower. i will go there and see if i can anger. this is when i thought there was no way i'd ever get her to talk to me. >> this is around 2005. >> around 2005. >> i go to this address. it is only eight euros high. i totally missed database. a sort of look around paris and i realize all the building in paris or in fact really love mfn looking for 12 or a building i won't have to go very far. >> it's like washington d.c. there's limits on how high buildings can be built. it really sticks out. >> it does. so i started walking around paris among literally knocking on doors every building i was high enough. i got to the concierge said there's an older vietnamese woman live here. i wasn't sure what name she was going by. she said no, she doesn't live here. she was next-door. so that was how i found her. i was writing her letters and asking her to tell your story, trying to pitch it as they let me sort of did this in a scholarly way. what ended up happening was most unscholarly thing possible. we connect to in a way because the day that she called me for the first time i had written maybe 10 letters at this point, was the day i found out i was right. so i get the phone call and the woman says this is madame nhu. i just now noticed with my first son is automatically my relationship with her, going through the birth of my son was almost as maternal grandmotherly thing. i think we told her, our families are expecting, but before i told many friends i told this woman on the phone, who immediately changed her attitude towards me. it was suddenly like a redneck, let me tell you my dear and we could really connect in a way that was so personal and nonthreatening for her because suddenly i was this girl who needed help and she had four children, so she could tell me every emir was to know. >> you develop this relationship over a number of years and a much gained a cat and mouse. how long did it take for her to really start to talk to you about the memoir she was hopefully going to tell you about quick >> she started talking about the memoir almost right away. it is clear the memoir was going to never be produced via she was talking about it in 1963. she mentioned it to the saturday evening post. when tension was at their stages everywhere, even under mess out for. i thought gosh, were never going to get the spirit that they did exist before she passed away commissioners elsewhere long time and before she passed away she decided i've got to get this done. this is my last chance to get my side of the story heard. so she sent them to me, all 400 pages of why she was the center of the universe. >> we want to take your questions if you have any, but i want to ask you a couple before we do that. you are writing about it. that has been receding in the american imagination for some time. how has both been received? when we were talking earlier, you mention that you get a lot of feedback from the veteran, people are very interested in the industry of almond want to know more about that. what has that been like quick >> are sent to different ounces and the veterans community has been wonderful in curious about my work and found them i'm young and i wasn't there that don't have that experience, so i really do respect people who had the first 10 picks. they are. but they often wonder, why would you ever go digging into this moment? she was terrible and she should just be left as it is. she hurt so many people and made vietnam, which is only a problem so much worse. i would you go digging around in not quite my answer is simply because she was fascinating exploration of what went wrong with our involvement in south vietnam and she sort of personalizes the history in a way people of my generation, when i is in eighth grade we couldn't even talk about the vietnam war yet is cool yet he cuts it was

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