peace with her on her deathbed, so to speak, but at that age she was already in her early 80s, and, you know, again, ilt's als a generational thing, so i didn't officially come out to her like i came out to my mother and the rest of the family. but she always insisted i was a confirmed bachelor but i would have children. at one point she offered me $10,000 to marry someone. this was my grandmother. you didn't know whether to laugh or cry. i wanted to take the money, but then when i said yes, sort of half fooling around, she said, okay, i'll give you 5,000 when you get married, then 2,000 for every time you have a kid. so as i already said, my grandmother was the smartest and dumbest person i ever met in the world. >> when did you hfirst start -- what was it about poetry that attracted you? >> i've always had a left brain-right brain -- i've always delved in both worlds since i was a little kid. some of that is in the book as well, sort of the engineer mind as well as the artistic mind. so -- but again, the things that were encouraged more so in an immigrant family and the traditional careers and the things that i would have a better life than they did and doctor-lawyer-engineer, so i picked engineering and went about my business, always thinking someday i would do something creative. it wasn't until i was 24, and it was through working as an engineer that i realized how much writing was involved. it was through writing reports, writing proposals, studies, all this, that i started falling in love with language. from that i just wrote a poem one day. i've always thought poetically, and i try to infuse that poetic ability in chalthings i wrote. i was always impressed by images and sort of the self-contained ways in which something can have meaning. and i remember my first poem was about watching a woman scurry down a staircase on her way to work late in red pumps. i don't know why that seemed poetic to me. they were probably horrible poems, i don't even have them now, but i always saw glimpses and that was my entry into the creative world. at first, you know, i just did it for sheer pleasure and love of the art, sheer creative curiosity, and i think i still do, but i had no expectations when i first started writing and look what's happened. >> can you make a living as a poet? >> i can now. i do now, actually. but mostly through readings and lectures and whatnot, so, yes, that's been a wonderful result of having such exposure from the inauguration, from reading the inaugural poem. i think most poets, and in general, probably a good 90-something percent usually teach, so it's a way to be in the field, so to speak, and make a living while teaching and still being involved in your craft. that's been a wonderful sort of -- that's a wonderful path as well. teaching is its own career, too. it makes its own demands and it's a whole other set of qualities that you need to be a teacher. you can be a great writer, a great poet and be a horrible teacher. you can be a great teacher and a horrible poet. but that's about the one way that poets make a living. >> do you still practice engineering? >> i was until about a year and a half ago, ever since the explosion of the inauguration. i've been -- i'm traveling about 80% of my time. because of the magnitude and the exposure that the inauguration gives me and gifves poetry, people are calling from the most unexpected places. next week i have to read at the federal reserve. i'm reading in engineering firms. so all of this has kept me quite busy, and happily so, and i also feel a sense of purpose in just the sense of exposing people to poetry that are not the usual suspects and to watch the eyes light up and people realize that poetry isn't what they thought it was, that poetry is still a vibrant, relevant art, that it's not something stuck in a high school english book that they didn't understand. so that's part of what keeps me going. but i have been practicing engineering all my life. i've taken hiatuses here and there to teach. but yeah, i've always carried both, and i'm kind of a little bit apprehensive because i've always done both and i'm wondering what would happen -- i've always kept my left brain busy, and if i don't, weird things happen like creating spread sheets on times to clean the cat litter. busy hands are happy hands. that applies to my left brain, and i don't want to start taking it out on my poetry because then my writing with this very sort of analytical mind, which helps in editing but not necessarily in these initial creative phases of work. but i got to face it. there's 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 is a lot of signs that say keep going this way. >> how many drafts did it take to get one today, the poem you read at the inaugural? >> i have at home a stack probably about this thick. again, drafts might mean -- with poetry, you know, drafts take on a different meaning. that might mean you change two words and you throw thit in the draft pile. i only had a week. i had to write three poems in three weeks, as the story goes. so there wasn't room to -- in some ways it was incredible pressure, and in some ways i'm kind of glad i didn't have six months to write my poem because god knows what would have happened to me. i would have ended up locked up somewhere, i think. so there is something to be said about the time to exercise and giving yourself a time for writing. so, yeah, it took drafts and drafts and drafts, but there was a big turnover right in the middle, and part of that had to do with my own creative process and finally feeling that i had the authority to speak the way i was speaking in the poem, the connection to america that i finally sort of had to dig deep inside and really, you know, as a poet, you can't fake honesty and real sort of emotion in a poem, so part of the writing process was to connect with what that moment was really about and what it meant to me, and once i connected with that emotionally, i was able to go back to the poem and really speak to the poem in a very different way. so the first draft was a little winded. it was talking about the pilgrims and all this, and it was a process of really personalizing the poem but also sort of connecting it in a way that was general enough that would let people into the poem. >> why does prince of kokurius end when you are about six and a half years old? >> i didn't want it to be a coming out story, i didn't -- i wanted it to be sort of a cultural coming of age story to a certain degree. it seemed like a natural pause. 16, 16 and a half. there is a very big break in one's life, and after that a whole new set of experiences and emotional growth happens. if i turn that page into that phase, that would have been another 300 pages. there is a practical reason for it. the book is sort of a dawning, an awakening, and i think the cover will reflect that. it's taking you write to the cosmo. from that moment forward, you can infer what will happen to little ricky, so to speak. really, it just seemed like a natural pause. at first, as i think many authors, at first i thought i was going to write up to my first trip to cuba and then when i moved to connecticut and back to miami, i already had about 70 words. i'm really happy with that ending. it's sort of launching myself into this world and we can infer what's going to happen. yeah, it's just right at that edge that i thought was really a very poetic moment, actually, to end on. >> richard blanco, prince of kukurios comes out in fall of 2014. you're watching cspan-2 television for serious readers. >> our book on authors which normally airs on weekends, next is "finding the dragon lady." th then we turn to american history programs normally seen on weekends on c-span 3. then we speak with army veterans of what it was like on the front lines during world war ii. that's followed by the wives and children of world war ii veterans as they talk about life on the home front. >> here's a great read to add to your summer reading list, c-span's book "sundays at eight," a collection from some of the world's most influential people in the last 20 years. >> i was new and i decide to do take it, because whether it's an illusion or not, i don't think it is. it helped my concentration, it stopped me being bored, stopped other people being bored to some extent. it would keep me awake and i would want the evening to go on longer, to enhance the moment. if i was asked would i do it again, the answer is probably yes. i would have quit earlier, possibly, hoping to get away with the whole thing. easy for me to say. it was not very nice for my children to hear. it sounds irresponsible if i say i would do it all again to you, but at the same time it would be hypocritical to say i would never touch the stuff if i had known. because i did know. everyone knows. >> the soviet situation in eastern europe contained the seeds of its own destruction. many of the problems that we saw at the end begin 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 dissidence everywhere. if you tell all artists they have to paint the same way and one artist says, no, i don't want to paint that way, i want to paint another way, you have just made him into a political dissident. >> if you want to subsidize housing in this country, and we want to talk about it, and the populace agrees it's something to subsidize, then put it on the balance sheet and make it clear and make it evident and make everyone aware of how much it's costing. but when you deliver it through these third-party enterprises, fannie mae and freddie mac, when you deliver the subsidy through 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 home ownership. >> christopher hitchens, anne applebaum are a few of some of the stories in "sundays at eight," now available at your favorite bookseller. now from the chicago tribune printers, marie demory on her buy og ra biography of the former first lady of vietnam. >> good morning. it's my pleasure to introduce today marie dimory, of an amazing book, "finding the dragon lady," which has recently been published by public affairs books. she holds a degree in ancient studies, and when she made contact with nu, who was the first lady of the vietnamese government in 2005, you were the first journalist to interview her in almost 20 years. dimory is based in chicago and we're happy to welcome you here. >> thank you for having me. and thank you for coming today. >> it's such an interesting book. i'm curious how you first came to be interested in writing a book about what i think to a lot of people might be a somewhat unlikely and unknown subject, someone who is known to scholars in the history of the vietnam war but probably not that well known to so many other people. how did you become interested in madam nu? >> it started first by omission. my mother is french and my dad is american, so it was hard to talk about in our family. it wasn't clear to me what happened there, and every time i tried to ask the adults around me, it was really too controversial to talk about. so there was this nagging question, okay, what happened in vietnam? every time i looked at the books, there were the gory pictures you've seen of vietnam or sort of the napalm apocalypse now pictures. and then i turn the page and there is this beautiful, stylish, sort of cosmopolitan woman and they're calling her the dragon lady. what is not to be interested in? so i started digging around, and i actually just, 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 she grew up during the french colonial period, and i thought, someone has written maybe a great historical book about this woman, but there was nothing. there were these articles from the '60s that had been written about her, and then no biography, no historical fiction, and what i noticed was no obituary. so that led me to think, wow. she's still alive. >> somewhere out there, yeah. she was a source of great fascination for writers in the early '60s who were roreporting from vietnam. and there was very much a built-up image of her in the united states, but then after she went into exile in rome and also then later to paris, she really does kind of disappear from the record. so you had a lot of sleuth work in tracking her down. >> i did, so i mentioned there was no obituary. there was no obituary for madam nu, but what i did find right away was an obituary for her parents. her parents in 1986 were living in georgetown. they made their home now after he resigned in protest from his daughter and son-in-law's government. so they had been living in georgetown, and in 1986 they were murdered in their sleep by their only son. and i thought, this is real life? this is non-fiction? so the mystery really drew me in, and that was the last time madam nu emerged from her sort of self-imposed seclusion to say, this is my family, leave them alone. >> did syou start out thinking about writing about the children's lives, praerhaps, an then she became such an interesting figure to you along the way? >> i thought there was something there. i'm going to get the names wrong because i don't have it in front of me, but they were like 90 and 86 or something when they were murdered, and they were murdered, i read, in their pajamas. that seemed is to heartbreaking and sad. so i started digging into it, and what i found was these lives of this sort of sympathetic, elderly couple had lived quite a life before that. madam nu's mother was known as the pearl of the orient by the french. in the french archives i found all these references as to who she slept with and why, and then she slept with the japanese. and i thought, wow, this woman -- and then to further confuse things, she was 14 with when she had her daughter. 14 years old. so i thought, there's really -- there's so much contradiction here and she wasn't just a sweet old lady, she was a sweet old lady who slept around quite a bit. but she also had a daughter at 14. so all of those questions kind of led me to pursue them. >> it's a very aristocratic family. we probably need to take a step back and say exactly who madam nu was. her brother-in-law, the brother of her husband, became president of south vietnam in 1956 or '55? >> '54. so, yes, madam nu is sort of the defacto first lady because the president of south vietnam, and there is a new titles before that, prime minister, premier, but for simplicity we'll call him the president. and he was a bachelor. bachelor makes it sound like he was going to vegas on the weekend, but he was really very moral, he slept on a hard, wooden cot. he personally signed entry visas in and out of the country, staying up late at night. so there is like this kind of very catholic, austere man who needs a first lady. he needs someone to host the parties, go to the orphanage and host the flower shows, and his older brother's wife becomes this woman and she's perfect for it. she looks great for the cameras, she loves to be out there. plus this kind of of gives measure a voiher a voice. all her life, madam nu had been looking for this purpose. she was an only child and sort of always had this chip on her shoulder. so to be handed this, here you go, be a first lady, be official hostess. she took it and really ran with it. >> and she basically occupied this role up until 1963 when the government was upended by a coup, and her husband and her brother-in-law were both executed. >> that's right. and one more thing. madam nu wasn't just first lady, she was overwhelmingly elected by, like, an unrealistic 99 poi9.9% of holding seats in the legislature. by doing so, she was still first lady hosting parties, but she could also pass laws. she called them family and morality laws. some of them were very well intended. i think perhaps they were all well-intended, but south vietnamese women were not able to open bank accounts, they were not allowed to open property, and madam nu changed that. >> before the laws. >> before the laws. so madam nu recognized what her husband and her brother did not, was that 50% of the population was being just ignored except by the communists who were doing a great job of recruiting women. so madam nu thought, well, let's give these women some rights and some power, and she did, and sort of took it upon herself to be the voice of the women. but she wasn't like most vietnamese women. aristocratic family, she spoke french at the dinner table, so for her to suddenly declare herself the voice of the vietnamese woman was a little presumptious. >> she was unable to write in vietnamese, is that correct? >> she didn't write. she could, but she expressed herself most fluently in french, which is what, of course, she studied in school and what they spoke at home. so the other laws that she passed were a little ridiculous. we're thinking about them in context, and it seems to make sense, but vietnam was a country at war, the north vietnamese, the communists, were doing a very good job of saying, this is a war, we have to treat it seriously. and with madam nu, it was becoming like a party. there were pizza stands and girlie bars that were already starting in the '50s, and madam nu said, no, we have to take this seriously. she outlawed dancing along with prostitution. she outlawed handholding as well as kissing. she outlawed bras but she had some. the best was her sister had been married off young like madam nu had, and this was her older sister, and she was married to a guy who worked for the royal government. and they fell out of love, i guess, it happened, and she fell in love instead with a french guy. he was a big game hunter and madam nu thought you can't leave a good, upstanding vietnamese guy for a french guy. this is looking bad, this is looking sort of colonial. so when her sister tried to divorce her husband, madam nu out lawed divorce. the story goes that madam nu's sister slashed her wrists and goes running from the palace. madam nu gets her back and she went to america and married the french guy, anyway. >> they're still alive, correct? >> i believe so. >> they live in north carolina, correct? >> uh-huh. i've tried to reach out to her with letters, but they've been unanswered. so her husband has published a couple memoirs of his time, and they've been published by a small press in canada or perhaps self-published. it's quite interesting. >> that's one of the things that's remarkable about your book and about her story. and i should point out you mention, you know, her look. she's 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 the distance, but she's -- she knows how to handle a pistol and especially with the kind of sort of haircut, it's a nice look. >> she did have a fashion thing. so the women wore a high collar and madame was one of the first to say, if you got it, flaunt it. so she cut the neck down so you could e see her collarbone. at the time this was really risque. so e she said something like, it's not your neck that's sticking out, it's mine, so shut up. >> that's a great line. what i was going to say is it's fascinating not just from a geopolitical standpoint and a historical standpoint, but it's a family saga as well. and one also where you see someone who was able to whatever we think about her and we can come back to that in a little bit, just admit the 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. and it seems like when you made contact with her much advanced years, many years later, that that sense of herself was still very much intact. >> i love the word gumption. i think that's a great description. and yes, madame was going to tell her own story. when i did find in her early 80s and she said to e me this is great. you're the angel that god sent to me. you're going to get me bill clinton's book deal and it's going to be great. i really want ed to hear what se had to say. but she had a very specific way of seeing her past, which is understandable. perhaps we all revise history our own way, but she was vietnam was the center of the universe and she was the thing everything revolved around. so 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 and so i think to make sense of it, that was the only way she could really make sense of things was publically ordained. just the force of her personality gave her the presence that she had in the government so much? the americans thought she was really the problem behind the problems that were very clear in the south vietnamese government. that she was the one pulling the strings. and i think the way you write about it, her comes across as someone that hadden unbelievable amount of influence over what her brother-in-law did. is that just a force of her personality. you write about when she was taken prison of war in 1946 by the communists, and this figure emerges who is so strong. is that your sense of it? or do you think her role has been somewhat overrated in the government? >> i think it's actually a little bit of both, if that's possible. so madame nhu has this story of when she was taken by the communists and carrying her infant daughter and bullets are flying and emerges unscathed. for her she was like, yeah, i got it. all i got to do is be brave. and that message, in the face of your enemy just stare him down and stand strong no matter what you do, don't back down, that was her motto. and i think she tried to pass that on to the brothers. there was one point when the president was negotiating. there had been a coo attempt and ma sam nhu thought that was awful to share power. so she convinced him to stand fi firm. so in some ways, yes, she had this power to convince brothers they didn't need to open up the government. they needed to lock the doors. but i think the other thing was that just the appearance that it looked like the men were following what she said. kennedy said she looks like she's leading the men around by her apron strings. that was just as dangerous as any real power to make it -- they were emasculated. that was not going to fly. its modernization, its clonization if you want to call it that. the westernization that started to appear in the late '50s and '60s that she rallied against is a criticism of america. because so much of that was made possible by the influx of foreign policy money from the united states, which put her very quickly, i think, on the opposite side of the intentions of the government of the united states. >> she was happy for the money. let's be clear. that was how they were funding the l fight. what they wanted was the money but stay out of our business. let us run our government. and the united states wanted strings attached to that money. when things weren't going the right way, for example, the united states tried to send in ground troops a lot 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 coupe attempts against the government. there was one famous where a couple airman flew and bombed the palace and narrowly survived. >> right, so there was a direct hit on madame nhu's bedroom. some rogue pilot was tired of this bossy lady, pushy lady, one of the vietnamese i talked to said she was talk too big, she was too much. so one of the air force pilots was upset about it and did a direct hit of her seat. so there was this gaping hole. madame nhu fell through, three stories, this is one of her survival -- if she survived, she was magical. but she hurt her arm. but one of the children's nannies was killed, but no one in the family was hurt. >> finally the protests against the government began it escalate in '62 and '63. the very strong confrontations which you described very well, why don't you tell us about how those protests started and i think this is really bh madame nhu seals her place as a bad figure in history is around the protests. if you'll remember they were the famous pictures of the monks burning themselves in traffic stops. so we had protests against the government. . >> 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. nobody really paid attention. there was a catholic festival and white and gold flags had been flying all over. so for the buddha's birthday some time in may, one of the brothers who was the head of the secret police, also in charge of all the politics. he was the guy who did the dirty needs. there were a few other brothers, one of who was the archbishop of a city in central vietnam. he noticed the flag was flying too high. he ordered people to take it down and there was this kind of backlash by the buddhists of why are you enforcing this random law now. instead of back down and saying, you're right, we're making a mess out of this, they cracked down and suddenly there was a protest by the buddhists. people started firing on them and people were killed. instead of saying, we're sorry, things got out of hand, they blamed the communists. so it quickly turned into a mess. so the buddhists repression was less -- less repression in the way we think of now than more of a vehicle from every grievance you could think of. no one was allowed to say anything against this family. but 90% of the country was buddhists so everyone could identify with this. you're putting down these people. everybody jumped on to this bandwagon and elderly monks were self-emulate i self-emulating. lighting themselves on fire. so she sounds like marie ann twa net. let's clap our hands and have a barbecue. the most cruel response you could have. and that just spread like wildfire around the world. people couldn't believe that she could be so callous. when madame nhu's perspective is the buddhists had been poisoned and intoxicated by communism and they were a very loose knit association, organization. there were no sort of strict rules coming in, coming out. so madame nhu was pretty sure they were infiltrated by communists. . it turns out actually by 1968 the united states even agreed, y yes, they had been used as a cover by communists. but in 1963 it was such a shocking thing to say and 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 for buddhist monks protesting in the name of religious freedom and whatever else. and that really is when i think at that point that the u.s. government knows that it has a problem on its hands. it supports the coupe that will come. >> correct. in august president kennedy okays a change in government. and the new ambassador that's sent over to saigon goes with the understanding that he's there to look for alternatives to this family that's been in power now for nine years. and it takes some -- there's some false starts, but some real alternatives have finally been identified. and the brothers are killed november 1st, 1963, which as many of you know, that's just a few weeks before kennedy himself was assassinated. so she's a conspiracy figure. but it was terrible timing. and so kennedy seemed really shocked that the brothers had been killed. by all accounts he gets up when he hears the news and can't believe they have 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. for him to think they could have gotten out any other way is a little naive. >> she was on a tour of the united states and she believed if she came to the united states and convinced people that there was a grave threat if the government was not supported that communists would topple south vietnam pretty quickly. she came to the united states on a speaking tour and quite a spectacular tour. she went to a lot of colleges in a time that was a lot harder to do that than it is today. what was her reception like when she came to the united states? >> it was very mixed. so as you say, she came to the united states because she had been asked to leave vietnam. the buddhists had really escalated and the united states thought the only way we're going to restore any u order is if madame nhu just leaves. this had been something that they had not been willing to do, but they said, madame nhu, you have to get out of vietnam, shut up basically. she got on this press relations tour and doesn't understand the difference. she's invited to speak at harvard, columbia, georgetown and also invited by "meet the press" and press organizations. she doesn't understand why she feels like the government hasn't rolled out the red carpet for her. she doesn't get this separation between the press and the government because in her country, the press can only say what the government wants them to say. for her it was really buefuddlig to the end of her days. so she goes to new york, washington, d.c., she comes to chicago, she stays in the blackstone hotel and one of my favorite moments of the trip is she goes to sdplast there's a ranch there and she gets invited to go shooting. so her daughter dresses up in western gear and apparently has a first kind of teenage romance with a texas guy. and her reception, her mother is very worried about the visit. so she pulls a state department guy aside and says, madame nhu really shouldn't come here. i have warned to throw tomatoes at her and if they see her to run her over with their car. this is her mother. she gets eggs thrown at her and also a standing ovation from georgetown, from a lot of catholic education. >> was she presented at that point -- it was very important part of her political ideology, if you want to call it that. was she seen in that light in 1963 in the united states? i assume to the extent she was hitting places like georgetown that they were very much self-conscious about. was that part of her reception as well? >> i do think so. part of the philosophy was based on something called personalism, which is this philosophy that started in france in the '20s and it was a catholic philosophy. it was supposed to be a third way. so that was a cornerstone of their government. no one could understand how that translated to south vietnam, so that was really the problem was in the marketing. but the regime had bought property outside of rome. so they bought a large tract of land to send these functionaries over to rome to go get indocket nated in their version of personalism and then come back to south vietnam. so that didn't work out so well pr them, but it was a place that madame nhu. >> i was curious about that in her relationships with kennedy and the fact he disliked her so much. it was more interested in how the catholicism worked into that. you might think there was a sense of closeness between her and kennedy that was obviously not there. the person who had the fondest thoughts about her would have been lbj. >> it's a right. madame nhu convinced he was flirting with her. i think he flirted with everyone. but the connections between the family and psi nonagone and the kennedy family in washington, kansas uncanny. on paper it looked great. and very anti-communist. so they should have really gotten along well, but as it tu turns oud, they didn't. and jacqueline kennedy was a real critic of madame nhu. she thought she was pushy. she called her -- everything that jack found unattractive. and when pressed, she boasted about her own marriage to president kennedy saying they had this easy marriage, that's a direct quote. so what is that? it's been sort of submissive. so the worst she could say is she was probably a lesbian. >> that's interesting. you talk in the book also about the kind of idea of the dragon lady. it's a stereotype applied to any number of powerful women from asian countries. particularly in government from the beginning of the 20th century to the end of the 20th century. >> absolutely. you see her in every kind of hollywood bad guy movie starring the powerful, sly asian woman. or she's the very submissive geisha girl. to there's two ways asian women have been portrayed, so when women rise to a certain level of politics, they get shoved into one of these neat categories. >> we even had chicago's own tokyo rose. >> tokyo rose was in chicago. >> when i was trying to kind of reckon with this very complex figure and you try to present her in all her complexity, which i think is wonderful, i kept thinking also about one that doesn't come up in the book, but strikes me as a countermodel. she certainly wasn't a figure like that. . >> i just heard there's a broadway play in new york, discothemed. >> i think madame nhu would be a great character for that guy's next musical. but she was flashy and flamboyant and did not go quietly either. >> has anyone been interest. ed in making a film about her life? >> not that i know of. >> so if there's anyone out there, taking offers. >> that's right. >> what was she like -- i mean, you portrayed this well in the book, but tell us what she was like when you finally did make contac

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