Solange Hertz

Nellie Solange Strong Hertz ( Strong; January 1, 1920 – October 3, 2015) was an American traditionalist Catholic author, who published almost two dozen books on Catholicism, and wrote for magazines The Remnant and America.

Her writings were strongly conservative and defended topics such as capital punishment, monarchy, and gender roles.

She was also the first woman to ever be offered a scholarship to Georgetown University, though she instead elected to attend the American University, at the age of 15.

Nellie Solange Strong was born in Washington, D.C., on January 1, 1920, the only child to John Logan Strong and Andree Laurans Strong.

At age 15, Solange graduated from Western High School in Washington, D.C., as the class valedictorian.

She was the first female recipient of the school's scholarship to the (at that time) all-male Georgetown University.

Solange had unexpectedly won the scholarship with an essay about the U.S. Constitution, that she had written in 1935 as a senior at Western High School.

Since Georgetown was all-male, the scholarship was transferred to American University, where she attended instead.

Solange married her classmate, Gustav Crane Hertz, in 1938.

The two fell in love in her senior year there, with her remarking that, "I was supposed to be a teacher, for which I had no aptitude, so I got married".

The couple settled in Leesburg, Virginia, where they bought their home, an old historic farmhouse (which would serve as the motivation for her first book, Old Stone Houses of Loudoun County, Virginia).

Solange & Gustav went on to have a total of five children together: Lydia Logan Hertz, Gustav Jr., Stephen, Christina (Tina), and Crane.

At American University, Solange graduated summa cum laude with a BA in Classical Language on June 5, 1939, at the age of 19.

Having been assigned the position in 1963, he traveled all over South Vietnam, teaching civil administration across the war-torn country.

The Hertz family resided for some time in Vietnam, enjoying the local Vietnamese way of life.

Solange initially preferred living among the Vietnamese to American life, despite occasional Viet Cong terrorism.

On this, she explained that "I'm not the nervous type."

In 1965, she received national media and federal attention during the Vietnam War when her husband, Gustav Crane Hertz, was kidnapped by Viet Cong guerrillas in Saigon.

The highest ranking prisoner ever captured by the Viet Cong, Gustav's kidnapping spurred several failed government negotiations to rescue him, including a proposed prisoner swap that was rejected by the White House.

Political figures including Robert F. Kennedy, Cherif Guellal, Abba P. Schwartz, Nguyễn Hữu Thọ, and Norodom Sihanouk were all directly involved with the case, with several of them having directly communicated with Solange.

On the afternoon of Tuesday, Feb. 2, 1965, at about 2:30 P.M., Gustav went out for a leisurely motorcycle ride in Saigon and disappeared.

At the time of his kidnapping, Gustav was the highest-ranking prisoner to be taken captive by the Viet Cong.

By early that evening, Solange Hertz reported her husband missing, but any attempt to search for him was initially delayed.

With it being the Lunar New Year, the Viet Cong had previously observed a truce over the holidays.

Additionally, no other U.S. civilian advisor had been kidnapped by the Viet Cong before Gustav, leading authorities to doubt that he had actually been captured.

Hertz's frantic calls to U.S. military authorities eventually lead to the opening of an investigation.

It took two days after his disappearance before U.S. authorities had even bothered to travel up the street to look for him.

The pace of the search for Gustav was forcibly sped up 40 hours after his disappearance, when Presidential Assistant McGeorge Bundy had arrived in Saigon for an inspection visit.

Bundy was informed that "our Public Administration guy has been kidnapped", which accelerated the search for Gustav.

State Department officials had acknowledged at the time that any further investigation into Gustav's disappearance would likely be a waste, as too much time had passed before they started searching for him.

One official stated that "Within four minutes after the V.C. got Hertz, they had hidden him where we never could have found him."

10 days after his disappearance, on February 12, Hertz received an envelope in the mail, containing two letters.

The first was a handwritten letter from Gustav, stating he would be returning home within a week.

The handwriting matched her husband's, but the letter addressed her "Solange", rather than "Nellie", which he had always called her.

The second letter was written in Vietnamese, and was signed by a man who revealed himself as a representative of the Viet Cong in the village of Thu Duc, which was located five miles north of Saigon.

The letter gave Hertz instructions on what to do to discuss the conditions of her husband's release, but gave a date set for a meeting four days before she received the letter in the mail.

In 1967, following two years of negotiations, all attempts at rescue ultimately failed when Gustav perished from malaria in captivity.

Gustav's body was finally returned to Solange and buried in their hometown after three decades.

At the time of her death in 2015, she was survived by four of her five children (with Lydia having died in 1997), as well as 19 grandchildren, and 50 great-grandchildren.

Solange Hertz's husband, Gustav, was the chief public administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development’s mission in Vietnam.