Exile on Newbury Street
On the advice of an astrologer, Nguyen Van Thieu changed his birthday from a date in November 1924 to a more auspicious day, April 5, 1923. The spirits were not fooled. When he resigned as president of the Republic of Vietnam -- the country he had ruled for ten years, until it blinked out of existence with the end of the Vietnam War on April 30, 1975 -- Thieu, in a tear-filled television broadcast, said: "Over the past ten years, all years, months, days and hours in my life have been bad, as my horoscope forecast. As regards my fate, I can enjoy no happiness."
New York Times Magazine, December 2001