Two out of the three women I’ve most admired who lived during my lifetime, I’ve met. Margaret Thatcher and her husband, Sir Denis, stayed with me in Gstaad, an alpine Swiss village that used to be a paradise before Russian and Arab nouveaux riche discovered it. Lady T, as we and her staff called her, was as kind and friendly to everyone in person as she was iron-willed to those who opposed her while she was in power.

The Iron Lady saved Britain from becoming Albania, and for that the left will never forgive her. I treasure the letter of thanks she and Denis sent me and have it up on a wall next to one from President Nixon—the only two epistles I care to show off with.

The second remarkable lady was Clare Boothe Luce, wife of Time publisher Henry Luce. Clare was a diplomat, prolific journalist, magnetic public speaker, playwright, screenwriter, and a conservative, as well as in her day a great beauty with legs to die for. I met her when she was already old and retired, when my father bought her apartment at 993 5th Ave. Even then, she remained an enchantress with unmatched wit and knowledge, and always a flirt. 

The third I never met, but have admired her heroism since that fateful day in May 1954 when the news came that Dien Bien Phu had fallen. I was in boarding school and even some of the teachers didn’t know what I was talking about when I asked for (and was refused) a moment of silence.  

The French high command had decided to lure General Võ Nguyên Giáp’s Viet Minh forces into a final battle in a place that has become known as the “Valley of Death.” Fifteen thousand French Foreign Legionnaires, mostly Germans, Greeks and Central Europeans, faced a superior Vietnamese army that had managed to carry heavy guns up into the impassable mountains surrounding the valley. The commander of the French defenders, General Christian de Castries, was straight out of a romantic novel. As scion of an old and noble French family, he was given the post because of his swashbuckling nature and romantic victories. According to the legend, it was his practice to name the outposts defending his central command bunker after his mistresses.

Rumor also has it that John Foster Dulles, then Eisenhower’s secretary of state, had verbally promised the French air cover. True or not, no Yankee planes appeared and Giáp’s men bombarded the valley nonstop. The legionnaires’ camp turned hellish; they suffered horrendous casualties, but refused to give an inch. 

For almost two months in that miserable besieged base, a 29-year-old military nurse tended to the wounded and consoled the dying in a dark, filthy, underground hospital. Geneviève de Galard was a French aristocrat and a Sorbonne graduate. After a retreat at a Benedictine convent, she volunteered for duty in French Indochina. By the time she landed in Dien Bien Phu on a damaged plane, she was already known for saving the lives of soldiers evacuated from various missions. Even before the base was surrounded by the enemy, she refused to leave, which boosted the soliders’ morale. In no time everyone was calling her the “Angel of Dien Bien Phu”. 

At the time, it was reported that de Galard was the only female in the hellish place (in reality there were other women there—prostitutes who were caught up in the fighting, many of whom demonstrated their courage during the siege). After two months, with the Viet Cong closing in, de Castries awarded de Galard the French state’s highest honor. He called her the “purest incarnation of the heroic virtues of the French nurse.” She never left the side of the dying and the wounded even under the severest of bombardments. When she wasn’t changing the bandages of the bleeding, she held the hands of those beyond help.

As the camp was being overrun, de Castries called the French Commander in Hanoi, General René Cogny, telling him, “I’m not raising the white flag, they’ve fought too bravely.” Cogny was in agreement. He told de Castries to stay on the line so that his wife could be connected from Paris. “You sound awfully cheerful,” de Castries told her. “Because for once I know where you’re going and with whom,” she answered.

Two books about Dien Bien Phu are worth reading. Valley of Death was written by a friend of mine, a French duke’s son named Sanche de Gramont, who as an officer fought in Algeria, later becoming an American and changing his name to Ted Morgan. The other is Hell in a Very Small Place by Bernard Fall, whom I never got to meet because he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam.

De Galard survived, was feted as a hero in Paris and Washington, and got a ticker tape parade in New York. She died in May at 99 years old, having lived an exemplary married life with her husband and three children. She was an aristocrat to the end, never bragging, always modest and radiant. Just like Kim Kardashian.  ◆