Who Really Ended the Cold War? (Hint: It Wasn't Reagan)

"The notion that the United States forced the collapse of the Soviet Union and vanquished communism is not only a myth but a dangerous canard." 

This conclusion that we did not, in fact, force the Soviet Union to its knees was articulated by Jack Matlock. Who is Jack Matlock to say such an obviously un-American thing? Probably some communist. Well, not exactly. Mr. Matlock was President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991. Before that, he was Director of Soviet Affairs at the US State Department (under another Republican president, Richard Nixon). 

Look, I am fully aware that to the victor goes the spoils—including getting to write the history books. And trust me, I am glad we "won" and aren't currently living in the United States SSR. Three Cold War narratives, however, are simply wrong. One is that the Cold War was actually a cold war that did not result in actual conflict. This one deserves its own post and will not be discussed here. Suffice to say that those who have relatives and loved ones who died in Angola, Vietnam, Korea, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and a whole host of other places as a direct result of American-Soviet rivalry would vehemently disagree with the notion that the Cold War ended without a shot fired.   

Narratives two and three are intertwined. One is that the it was Ronald Reagan with his, "BRING DOWN THIS WALL," rhetoric that singlehandedly brought down the Soviet Union. This tough talk scared, the thinking goes, the Soviet leadership into initiating much needed reforms. 

The other school of thought says that the Soviets could not keep up with Reagan's increased military spending. It was while trying to keep up with the US militarily that the Soviet Union's economy fell apart. Neither of these is true. The Soviet Union fell from within. Its own leaders initiated reforms —inadvertently brought an end to the Evil Empire — out of self-preservation. This is not to say that Reagan did not play a role in ending the Cold War stalemate. However, his part is far less important than we like to believe. And even more importantly, it was not Reagan's stubborn-'murica-cowboy attitude that helped bring about peace — it was his ability to sit down and talk to his supposed enemy that capped the amount of nuclear warheads in the world and paved the way for more meetings. Mind you, he only did this because of the actions taken by Gorbachev.  

Reagan speaking in front of the Brandenburg Gate

Probably more than any other other speech, President Reagan's words at the Berlin Wall in 1987 will forever be associated with his presidency. He famously told the Soviet Premier, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" We think of it now as a watershed moment. One that was heard all around the world. Except it wasn't. The speech received very little media coverage. Not only that, but the crowd at the Berlin Wall that day was nothing compared to the crowd gathered to hear President Kennedy's famous "I am a Berliner"  (or jelly donut, depending on the translation) speech back in 1963. To quote The Atlantic, "when Reagan declared 'Tear down this Wall,' it's easy for us to forget now, he was the visibly aged leader of a lame duck administration clouded by scandal and corruption, Iran-Contra in particular." Some thought the speech was silly, "I thought it was corny in the extreme,” said Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to George H. W. Bush, “It was irrelevant, that statement at that time.”

It should also be noted that had Reagan actually listened to the conservative right, there would be no detente with Gorbachev. Sitting down and talking to the enemy?! The atheist, capitalist-hating, enemy?! You can't be serious?! Talk he did, however. He did it, experts and historians believe, for two reasons. One was he really did not like nuclear weapons...in fact, he was deathly afraid of them. Any kind of agreement that would rid the world, however gradually, of these weapons was one Reagan would be happy with. The second is far more practical: by 1983, Americans were getting tired of Cold War rhetoric and demanded détente. 1984 was an election year so....

The Fall of the Berlin Wall via thegaurdian.com

Make no mistake, however compromising Reagan seemed to be, he was still the man that publicly called the Soviet Union the Evil Empire and ramped defense spending....A LOT. The thinking went (and many still believe) that increased defense spending would force the Soviets to spend spend spend. This, in turn, would bankrupt them. It did not really work that way. The Soviet's defense spending did not rise to keep up with American military expenditures. Revised estimates by the CIA indicate that Soviet defense expenditures remained more or less constant throughout the 1980s. The Soviet regime was in state of chaos long before Reagan became President. The person who put the regime over the edge, so to speak, was not Ronald Reagan but a man younger and more radical than the Old Gipper: Mikhail Gorbachev. 

Gorbachev’s rise to power had nothing to do with the Reagan administration’s hard stances toward its communist rival. It was Gorbachev who understood that the Soviet economy and thinking needed drastic and fundamental changes. In fact, Gorbachev's close advisor Alexander Yakovlev had understood (and told Gorbachev) the weaknesses of the the Soviet system long before Reagan came to power. Let us not forget that one of the biggest blows to the Soviet system, one that inspired almost every Eastern Bloc country, was the Solidarity movement in Poland. Lech Wałęsa forced the communist regime to recognize his independent trade-union all by his lonesome. This bold move by ordinary people inspired similar movements in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and East Germany. 

Lech Wałęsa and his Solidarity Movement via theatlantic.com 

More important than anything else, however, was the internal reform that Gorbachev implemented. Archie Brown, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Oxford, calls these reforms radical and far-reaching. He could not be more right. Ironically, it was this drive to reform that undercut the traditional authority of the party leader. This new transparency (glasnost) brought to the forefront long suppressed dissidence. Banned books were allowed. Religious freedom was allowed. Most importantly, political discourse was allowed within the Communist Party. For the first time Communist leaders ran against each other with DIFFERENT platforms. Radically different at times. Importantly for the international Cold War game, Gorbachev decided not to intervene when puppet regimes fell from East Berlin to Bucharest.

The final nail on the Soviet Union coffin again came, not by actions made by Reagan, but by Gorbachev. In December 1991, Gorbachev called for a referendum to allow the various SSRs to choose their fate within the greater USSR. They voted to leave…and with that the Soviet Union, the scourge of the West since the fall of Hitler, was no more.   

How Castrated Men Allowed China to Conquer the Sea

Before Christopher Columbus mistakenly ‘discovered’ the New World, the Chinese Ming dynasty was undertaking sea voyages that make Columbus’ three ship sojourn look like child’s play. In the early 1400s, a Muslim eunuch (you know, a male who has had his manhood taken away) by the name of Zheng He led seven EPIC sea voyages across the Indian Ocean. He is thought to be the inspiration for Sinbad the Sailor. 

At a time when long sea voyages were a dream for Europeans and Middle Easterners, Zheng He sailed across the seas to southeast Asia, India, Indonesia, the Persian Gulf and finally (and most impressively) the east coast of Africa. To this day, there are people on the Swahili coast that believe they are descendants of some of these Chinese sailors. The Ming treasure voyages, as they are sometimes known, are both impressive and fascinating. They are impressive not so much because of the distance they covered—the Chinese had travelled these distances before—but because of the sheer size of the expeditions. Hundreds of huge ships with thousands of crew and passengers sailed for months. The voyages are fascinating because of the man who led them and the culture the represented. 

Eunuchs have been around since the dawn of time. However, their position of power and influence at the Ming court was unparalleled. It was this power that both allowed Zheng He to captain the greatest voyages the world had ever seen and what eventually caused China’s centuries’ long isolation.

Beijing’s fabled Forbidden City was, in fact, forbidden to most males. The collection of buildings (the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures anywhere in the world) was the Emperor’s private realm. It was where he could enjoy the company of his many MANY concubines and wives. The last thing he needed was a virile man running around challenging his alpha male status. Women, however, could not be trusted to run the household. So what was an insecure male chauvinist to do? Why employ eunuchs, of course. During the Ming era, eunuchs yielded unprecedented power. They were, at times, the only way to get to the Emperor. They served as messengers between the elites at court and the Emperor. They were also the only men who were allowed to stay overnight in the Forbidden City. The eunuchs of the court soon formed a powerful clique — one that promoted expansionist views. It was with their support (and insistence) that the first of seven grand voyages set sail from China to the rest of the known world. It was no surprise that the man chosen to lead this adventure was one of their own.  

The various places visited by the treasure voyages via www.dailykos.com 

Zheng He was born in 1371 in Yunnan in western China. For a person who would become a renowned seaman, it is interesting that his birthplace was located at the foothills of the Himalaya Mountains, some 6,000 feet above sea level far away from any seaport. He wasn’t even an ethnic Chinese. He was Hui. The Hui people are a Muslim group that are descendants of intermarriages between the Han and various Persian, Arab, and Turkish Muslim traders. What we know of Zheng He’s youth is sketchy at best. We know that he grew up a Muslim and that his father and grandfather most likely completed the Hajj in modern day Saudi Arabia. We also know that at some point Ming armies invaded his province, castrated the ten-year old Zheng He, before carting him off to the Emperor’s court. It should be noted that lopping off the penis and testes of the offspring of one’s enemies was very much the norm at the time. No longer a threat to the establishment, he was educated and groomed to be a trusted eunuch of the court. Through hard work and sheer luck, he soon became the Emperor’s right hand man and the second most powerful person in the kingdom.

And what a kingdom it was. In the early 1400s, China’s hard and soft power was unparalleled. It was the most technologically advanced land on earth. Its armies the most powerful. Its navy ruled the seas. The emperor, and the eunuch clique, decided the world should know the extent of China’s wealth and power. The largest fleet ever assembled would sail the Indian Ocean and trade, demand tribute, and simply show off the might of China. The first of these voyages included 317 ships, including close to 28,000 men. The massive ships carried sailors, soldiers, doctors, astronomers, diplomats and scholars. The ships sailed to modern day Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia. Six more voyages followed. They reached modern-day Kolkota in India, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Iran, and the eastern African coast. Sometimes the people they encountered welcomed them warmly. Good thing too, because when they didn’t the Chinese fought back and (not surprisingly) usually won. On one occasion, in Sri Lanka, the native people tried to repel the expedition. He quickly put down the insurrection, captured their king, and had him carted off back to China. What the sailors brought back to China enthralled the masses. The first giraffe the Chinese ever saw was brought back on one of these voyages—a gift from the ruler of Malindi on the African coast. The sailors also brought back zebras, Persian carpets, spices, lions, leopards, and ostriches. Oh, and gold.

Replica of one of the boats used by Zheng He via telegraph.co.uk

Although the size of the ships is still debated, they most certainly dwarfed Columbus’ Niña, Pinta, Santa Maria. Some scholars believe the nine-masted flagship measured about 400 feet long (the Santa Maria measured just 85 feet). Fred Wakeman, a former chair of the University of California at Berkeley’s Center for Chinese Studies, states, “A vessel that large would have displaced at least 3,000 tons, whereas none of Vasco da Gama’s ships exceeded 300 tons…and even in 1588 the largest English merchant ship did not exceed 400 tons.”

A statue of Zheng He 

Okay, so the Chinese at some point led amazing voyages across the oceans. Then, for political reasons, they stopped. So what? Well, as we all know China is fast becoming (if it isn’t already) a global superpower. Its influence is once again felt across the world. Perhaps nowhere more so than in Africa. And that is where Zheng He comes in. Back in 2010, the Chinese government spent millions recovering what is believed to be the wreckage of one of Zheng He’s ships off the coast of Kenya. Why? To underscore the centuries old bond between China and resource-rich Africa. A BBC article points out that this “ties in well with China's diplomatic overtures to African nations, as it goes about securing natural resources and political influence.”

In the same BBC article, Dai Bingguo, a Chinese foreign policy advisor, said, "I want to assure you that China is not to be feared." Invoking Zheng He is a reminder to the audience that the sea admiral brought "porcelain, silk and tea rather than bloodshed, plundering or colonialism…to this day, Zheng He is still remembered as an envoy of friendship and peace.” Never mind that the Chinese government backs despotic rulers in several African countries in order to gain access to natural resources…centuries old bonds are centuries old bonds.

The London Bridge of....Arizona

Back in 1962, engineers found that a bridge spanning the Thames was collapsing under the weight of car traffic. I say a bridge, because there are a few bridges in London.  This one was built in 1832. City officials figured they could make a quick buck, so they decided to put the bridge up for auction. 

The winner at the auction? Robert McCulloch. McCulloch was famous for founding the city of the Lake Havasu City. When he purchased the 26 square mile parcel of barren desert, it was the largest single tract of state land ever sold in Arizona. He paid less than $75 per acre. Although he built a chainsaw factory to spur growth (he made his money manufacturing chainsaws), it was not enough. So what else does one do but buy a 19th century British bridge? He paid $2,460,000. A steal, except he also spent $7 million to have it moved, piece by piece, to Arizona.

Robert P. McCulloch in front of the London bridge via havasunews.com 

The bridge was inaugurated on October 10, 1971 with a big tacky celebration. Even the Lord Mayor of London showed up. One newspaper said of the event that one got "the overwhelming impression that Richard the Lionheart might possibly be returning from the Crusades." Although McCullough died six short years later, the bridge (and the city he built) still stands as one of Arizona’s biggest tourist attractions. 

The Rise and Fall of the Diamond Cartel

The Huffington Post recently ran an article that started with this anecdote:

"American males enter adulthood through a peculiar rite of passage — they spend most of their savings on a shiny piece of rock. They could invest the money in assets that will compound over time and someday provide a nest egg. Instead, they trade that money for a diamond ring, which isn’t much of an asset at all. As soon as you leave the jeweler with a diamond, it loses over 50 percent of its value."

So if diamonds lose their value the minute you buy them, why do we continue to buy them? And, more importantly, why are they so expensive? We can all thank two people: Cecil Rhodes and Ernest Oppenheimer.

Rhodes, a well-known British imperialist, founded De Beers, the greatest diamond company the world had ever seen. Oppenheimer, the son of a Jewish cigar merchant, succeeded in forcibly wresting control from Rhodes and masterminded the you-all-need-to-give-the-woman-you-love-a-diamond-if-you-are-any-kind-of-man social norm. Before the massive diamond discovery in South Africa, diamonds were mostly found in India and Brazil. They truly were rare and were strictly reserved for royalty. But after 1867, the supply of diamonds increased dramatically. But what good would this diamond find be if diamonds were no longer seen as rare — I mean, who wants to pay top dollar for pressurized carbon if it's ubiquitous?!  

The Kimberly Mine in the 1870s

Rhodes arrived in South Africa thinking he would make it big in agriculture. He didn't. No matter, he soon left for the diamond mines of Kimberly where he was going to make it big. Boy did he ever. Year after year, he bought up more and more mines until he finally owned the vast majority of all the diamond mines in South Africa. He needed to make sure that diamonds, for the first time in history readily available, stayed expensive. In what The Atlantic called the "the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce," he created, no joke, something called the Diamond Syndicate. It controlled everything. The mining, the distribution, and the sale of diamonds. Everything was controlled. In this way they could manipulate the price of diamonds and keep up the appearance of scarcity. And everything went smoothly...until the Great Depression. Buying a diamond was simply not on people's minds when there was no food on the table. 

De Beers hired the public relations firm N. W. Ayer to make diamonds snazzy again. A study they conducted found that young men bought 90% of all engagement rings. It was them they had to convince that a diamond was connected with love. De Beers’ efforts to also convince these young men the bigger the diamond the better was not as hard (for obvious phallic reasons). De Beers also went about wooing Hollywood (the first product placement). The diamond company succeeded on both fronts. Since 1940, unlike every other commodity—gold, oil, copper, and silver—diamonds have increased in value every year. The monopoly seemed unstoppable. In fact, when Israel (Tel Aviv is one of the diamond cutting capitals of the world and the Jewish people are intimately connected with every aspect of the diamond industry) tried to play by their own rules, they were quickly punished. 

Diamonds were the first product placements

It all started back in the 1970s. Israel was going through a period of high inflation and diamonds became one of the best ways of securing preferential loan rates. This meant that merchants started hoarding diamonds. Although this hoarding caused the price of diamonds to skyrocket, it was not good for business. The whole point of diamonds being "forever” was that they were not to be resold. The minute diamonds started becoming investments, De Beers would no longer be able to control the supply. De Beers tried everything to get them to stop hoarding diamonds and, when they didn't, Israel was simply kicked out of the Diamond Syndicate. The country then known as Zaire also tried to skirt the rules. De Beers then dumped millions of dollars worth of diamonds on the market to make the Zaire diamonds almost worthless. It might have cost De Beers billions to keep Zaire and Israel in check, but the monopoly had to be kept in tact...at all costs. 

Unfortunately for De Beers, the good times had to come to an end. New, HUGE, diamond mines were found in Russia, Canada, and Australia. None of the companies operating in those countries wanted any part of the De Beers system. The amount of newly found diamonds in these places allowed the companies to compete with De Beers. That had never happened before. For a company that had dominated an entire industry so effectively and for so long (and directly affected the economies of places like Israel and Botswana with a simple directive from corporate headquarters) the end came fairly quickly. In less than 20 years, De Beers saw its share of the market go from over 90% to about 35%. It simply could not compete. The Oppenheimers themselves do not even own De Beers any more. In 2011, Anglo American Plc agreed to buy the Oppenheimer family’s stake in De Beers for $5.1 billion in cash, effectively ending the family’s 80-year ownership in the world’s former diamond cartel.

Did the Dutch Really Buy Manhattan for $24?

Legend tells us that on May 4, 1626 Peter Minuit, Director General of the Dutch West India Company’s colony of New Netherlands, brought trunks full of trinkets with which to buy the island of Manhattan from the local Indian tribe. The value of the trinkets was 60 Dutch guilders or about $24. This story has been told and retold. And why not? Paying $24 where land is currently valued at $2,011 PER SQUARE FOOT is quite the story. Unfortunately, that is not exactly what went down that day in May.

We don’t even know if the date is correct. The only primary source document currently in existence is a letter by Dutch merchant Pieter Schage dated November 5, 1626.  It was sent to the directors of the West India Company. In it, he writes, “They have purchased the Island of Manhattes from the savages for the value of 60 guilders.”  That is all we have. In other words, we don’t even know what was worth the 60 guilders. Food? Beads? We don’t know.

New Netherlands governor Peter Minuit via biography.com 

The $24 amount is also not true. Well, it may have been at one point…back in 1846. It was in that year that a New York historian did the conversion. Nobody ever thought to account for inflation when retelling the story in the 21st century. The best part of the story, however, is not how much was spent on the deal or what was used as payment. The best part is that the Dutch bought the island from the wrong tribe.

The Dutch bought the island of Manhattan from the Brooklyn-based Canarsee tribe. The island actually belonged to the Wappinger Confederacy. To be fair the Canarsee did use Manhattan from time to time to fish and relax. It is also unclear if the Canarsee meant to sell the land or merely lease it. The notion of property rights was alien to the native populations of the Americas. It is most likely they assumed the price, which to be fair was low even back then, was for use of the land. 

One last note: the Wappinger Confederacy did not take all this lying down. They contested the sale and were paid (the actual amount is lost to history) for the island. So the Dutch actually paid for Manhattan twice and they didn’t even keep it. After the Second Anglo-Dutch War they gave it up to retain control of their colony in South America—Suriname.

How the CIA Took Down a Democratically Elected Leader For the Good of Bananas

Every 90 minutes someone is murdered in Guatemala. The country is riddled with drug and gang related violence. Millions have fled to the United States. It is believed that about 2 million are here illegally, but the central government in Guatemala City does not actually know the exact amount. Violence is nothing new to this tiny country in Central America. A brutal civil war was fought here from 1960 to 1996 (yes, a THIRTY SIX year civil war) that killed close to 200,000 people. 

The root causes of the civil war are plenty: The feudal caste system inherited from the Spanish way back in the 1800s. The lack of education for a vast majority of the population (well at least the mestizo and native populations). And, of course, the CIA backed coup that overthrew the democratically leader of the county back in 1954. As I stressed in my article, "Why DO they hate us? Here are 7 Pretty Good Reasons," the United States is NOT the sole reason for the ills of this world. Far from it. However, just like in the Muslim world, we certainly had a hand in creating said ills. A pretty big hand.  

To be sure, Guatemala had problems long before the CIA made things worse. From independence to 1944, the country was ruled by dictator after dictator. By 1944, 2% of the population owned 70% percent of Guatemala’s arable land. In that year, however, the county managed to hold free and fair elections. In 1951, Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman was elected president. Guzman implemented many far-reaching liberal reforms. The biggest reform? Radical redistribution of land.  And this is where things started to go downhill.

Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzman and his wife. 

Under previous governments, the United Fruit Company (today’s Chiquita Banana) had acquired 42% of Guatemala’s land. They were also granted exemption from all taxes and duties on both imports and exports. Although the Arbenz administration compensated United Fruit for their land, this was not enough for the company. They were convinced more land would be taken and they would go bankrupt. Something had to be done. They hired the PR guru Edward Bernays. By the time he was through, the American public thought the United Fruit Company was the victim. The company also lobbied the Truman, and Eisenhower administration to topple the now re-fashioned communist Arbenz. It did not take much convincing. Guatemalan elites had already been working hard in persuading the United States that Arbenz was no good. United Fruit just finished the job.

It is true that Arbenz’s supporters in the Guatemalan congress included the Communist Party. They were far from the majority, however. To date, there has been no evidence that Arbenz himself was a communist. He was more of a European-style democratic socialist. Ironically, Arbenz’s land reform program was less generous than the one suggested by the Reagan administration in El Salvador decades later.

The United Fruit Company in Guatemala in the 1920s. 

Emboldened by their great success in overthrowing the Iranian government the previous year, the CIA figured they wouldn’t have any trouble doing the same in Guatemala. They didn’t. Operation PBSUCCESS was authorized by President Eisenhower in August 1953. $2.7 million budget was set aside for "psychological warfare and political action" and "subversion." If this didn’t work, the CIA had a backup plan: just assassinate Arbenz. It never came to because the psychological warfare worked. The author Tim Weiner writes:

“For four weeks, starting on May Day 1954, the CIA had been waging psychological warfare in Guatemala through a pirate radio station called the Voice of Liberation, run by a CIA contract officer, an amateur actor and skilled dramatist named David Atlee Phillips. In a tremendous stroke of luck, the Guatemalan state radio station went off the air in mid-May for a scheduled replacement of its antenna. Phillips snuggled up to its frequency, where listeners looking for the state broadcasts found Radio CIA. Unrest turned to hysteria among the populace as the rebel station sent out shortwave reports of imaginary uprisings and defections and plots to poison wells and conscript children.”

A few weeks later Arbenz and his top aides fled the country. Declassified documents actually criticized the coup plotters for their shoddy planning. The documents also noted that the coup triggered ferocious international protests against the United States. Nicholas Cullather, a CIA historian, states "Castillo Armas' [the man who the CIA put in Arbenz’s place] new regime proved embarrassingly inept. Its repressive and corrupt policies soon polarized Guatemala and provoked a renewed civil conflict."

The iconic Che Guevara picture...he was inspired by what he saw in Guatemala. 

Castillo Armas’ regime stopped the land reforms, rescinded the constitution, and outlawed political parties and labor unions. This, in turn, galvanized the opposition. By 1960, there was an all-out guerrilla war in Guatemala. The civil war would rage for over 35 years. Close to 200,000 are thought to have died during the conflict. It was not until 1997, when the documents were declassified, that the CIA admitted its key role in the Arbenz coup. In 2011, over fifty years after the events took place, democratically elected President Alvaro Colom publicly apologized to the Arbenz family for the coup:

“That day changed Guatemala and we have not recuperated from it yet,” he said. “It was a crime to Guatemalan society and it was an act of aggression to a government starting its democratic spring.”

The Arbenz family has asked the United States for a similar apology. It has yet to come. To our credit we did apologize for what happened after. President Bill Clinton officially expressed regret for the role the US played in backing a brutal counter-terrorism campaign that caused the deaths of thousands of civilians in Guatemala's civil war. Oh, as an interesting side. A young Argentine by the name of Che Guevera happened to be in Guatemala to witness the coup. After what he saw, he was quoted as saying. “I lost my path to reason [after that].”  

Here's Why So Many Nail Salons Are Owned By Vietnamese Women

Most people familiar with Tippi Hedren are Hitchcock aficionados. She first gained fame as the star of the film The Birds. If you haven't heard of her, you may have heard of her daughter...a certain Melanie Griffith. Interestingly, the group of people who know Hedren the best, however, don't idolize her for her striking good looks or acting ability. No, to a large group of Vietnamese Americans, she is revered for making the American dream come true. The fact that many, many nail salons are owned and operated by Vietnamese Americans is no secret. The Mexican American comedian Angela Johnson does a whole bit on the topic. Joking aside, however, how did this immigrant group come to totally dominate an industry? And why is an American actress credited by this immigrant group as helping them do it? 

Hedren in Marnie with Sean Connery 

Shortly after the fall of Saigon (modern-day Ho Chi Minh City), Hedren visited a Vietnamese refugee camp outside of Sacramento. She wanted to find something these women (many of them married to formerly high ranking South Vietnamese military officials) could do to earn a living. She noticed that all the women kept admiring her manicured nails. She immediately had her manicurist flown in to teach the women the ways of the manicure. Most manicurists today are in some way, shape, or form connected to these original group of women. 

These Vietnamese refugees revolutionized the nail industry. Before they came along, most women could not afford the $50 (in 1970s dollars) it costs to get your nails done. The Vietnamese nail salons, by contrast, charged anywhere from $10 to $20. Today, over 50% of nail salons are owned by Vietnamese Americans. In California the percentage is over 75. Not bad for a group of refugees who came here with next to nothing.