Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Finding the Dragon Lady

  Finding the

  Dragon Lady

  THE MYSTERY OF

  VIETNAM’S

  MADAME NHU

  MONIQUE BRINSON DEMERY

  PUBLICAFFAIRS

  New York

  Copyright © 2013 by Monique Brinson Demery.

  Published in the United States by PublicAffairs™,

  a Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address PublicAffairs, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

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  Book design by Cynthia Young

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Demery, Monique Brinson, 1976–

  Finding the Dragon Lady : the mystery of Vietnam’s Madame Nhu /

  Monique Brinson Demery.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-61039-282-2 (e-book)

  1. Tran, Le Xuan, 1924–2011.2. Politicians’ spouses—Vietnam (Republic)—Biography.3. Vietnam (Republic)—Politics and government.I. Title.

  DS556.93.T676D46 2013

  959.7’7043092—dc23

  2013021155

  First Edition

  10987654321

  Contents

  Map of Vietnam

  List of Illustrations

  A Note on Vietnamese Names

  Members of Madame Nhu’s Family

  1Paris, 2005

  2Forgotten Graves

  3A Distinguished Family

  4Portrait of a Young Lady

  5Long-Distance Phone Call

  6The Crossing

  7A Mountain Retreat

  8The Miracle Man of Vietnam

  9A First Lady in Independence Palace

  10Tiger Skins

  11Young Turks and Old Hacks

  12Burning Monks

  13Too Beautiful to Ignore

  14Closed Doors

  15Coup d’État

  16In Exile

  Acknowledgments

  A Condensed History

  Notes

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  FIGURE 1. Portrait of Tran Thi Le Xuan as a bride circa 1943 (Madame Nhu’s personal collection).

  FIGURE 2. Portrait of Ngo Dinh Nhu circa 1963 (Madame Nhu’s personal collection).

  FIGURE 3. Portrait of Tran Thi Le Chi, Madame Nhu’s sister (Corbis).

  FIGURE 4. The South Vietnamese presidential family (Corbis).

  FIGURE 5. Ngo Dinh Nhu and wife, Tran Thi Le Xuan (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).

  FIGURE 6. Madame Nhu playing with two-year-old daughter Le Quyen (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).

  FIGURE 7. Portrait of daughter Le Thuy circa 1963 (Madame Nhu’s personal collection).

  FIGURE 8. Malcolm Browne, Saigon correspondent, in front of his photo (Associated Press).

  FIGURE 9. Madame Nhu showing Lady Bird Johnson and Mrs. Jean Kennedy Smith her collection of tiger skins (Collections of the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum).

  FIGURE 10. Madame Nhu talking to the press at the airport as she is leaving Vietnam in 1963 (Photo by Larry Burrows/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images).

  FIGURE 11. Barefooted Vietnamese youth about to come down on the head of the Trung sister statue (Associated Press).

  A Note on Vietnamese Names

  TO READERS ENCOUNTERING them for the first time, Vietnamese names can seem confounding. The family name comes first, followed by the middle name—or names—and then the first, or given, name. Additionally, an overwhelming number of people share relatively few last names. Tran and Ngo are more common in Vietnam than Johnson or Smith in the United States. The middle name is no help in distinguishing among brothers and sisters, as parents often give their offspring the same middle names. That was the case in the Ngo family; the six male siblings all had the middle name Dinh, and in the case of the Chuongs’s daughters, Madame Nhu and her sister had the same two middle names, Thi and Le. Thi is a common middle name for girls, but in the case of Madame Nhu and her sister, they dropped the Thi in practice and used Le as a prefix to their given names.

  The accepted way to refer to a Vietnamese person is by their given name, even in the most official settings—hence, the president of the Republic of South Vietnam was called President Diem and not President Ngo. One notable exception to this rule is Ho Chi Minh. In his case, he has been decreed so esteemed and so well known that his last name is sufficient.

  I struggled over what to call various Vietnamese people in this book, but when I made a decision, I tried to be consistent—except in the case of Madame Nhu. In the chapters that depict her early years, I use the name her parents gave her: Tran Le Xuan. While women typically keep their family name after they marry, in the case of both Madame Nhu and her mother, Madame Chuong, I have chosen to refer to them the way that they are commonly spoken of in the United States, where this book was written and published.

  Per the guidelines set out by the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th ed., I decided to abandon the use of diacritics in spelling Vietnamese names and places but to retain accents for French words. In Vietnamese, diacritics convey the language’s seven tones, and words that may look the same on paper without marks may have very different meanings once assigned tones through diacritics. I apologize for any inadvertent offense stemming from my efforts to simplify these spellings for my readers.

  Members of Madame Nhu’s Family

  Tran Van Chuong: Madame Nhu’s father; also the South Vietnamese ambassador to the United States under President Ngo Dinh Diem

  Nam Tran Tran Van Chuong (also Madame Chuong, Tran Thi Nam Tran): Madame Nhu’s mother

  Tran Thi Le Chi: Madame Nhu’s sister

  Tran Thi Le Xuan: Madame Nhu’s childhood name

  Tran Van Khiem: Madame Nhu’s brother

  Ngo Dinh Kha: Father of Ngo Dinh Nhu and Ngo Dinh Diem

  Ngo Dinh Khoi: Eldest Ngo brother, killed by the Communists in 1945

  Ngo Dinh Thuc: Nhu’s older brother, archbishop of Hue

  Ngo Dinh Diem: Nhu’s older brother; president of the Republic of South Vietnam, 1955–1963

  Ngo Dinh Nhu: Madame Nhu’s husband and chief political advisor to Diem

  Ngo Dinh Can: controller of Hue and surrounding areas during the presidency of his brother Diem

  Ngo Dinh Luyen: youngest Ngo brother; served as ambassador to the United Kingdom

  Ngo Dinh Le Thuy: Madame Nhu’s oldest daughter

  Ngo Dinh Trac: Madame Nhu’s older son

  Ngo Dinh Quynh: Madame Nhu’s younger son

  Ngo Dinh Le Quyen: Madame Nhu’s youngest daughter

  That hands like hers can touch the strings

  That move who knows what men and things

  That on her will their fates have hung,

  The woman with the serpent’s tongue.*

  * Last stanza of William Watson’s poem “The Woman with the Serpent’s Tongue.” The poem was recited in its entirety in front of the US Congress by Ohio senator Stephen Young on October 3, 1963, in protest of Madame Nhu’s upcoming visit to the United States. See New Poems by Wi
lliam Watson (Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1909), 32–33.

  CHAPTER 1

  Paris, 2005

  BY THE TIME I STARTED LOOKING for Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, she had been living in exile for over forty years. In 1963, at the height of her fame, the New York Times named the thirty-nine-year-old First Lady of South Vietnam “the most powerful” woman in Asia and likened her to Lucrezia Borgia. But it was Madame Nhu’s reputation as the Dragon Lady that brought her real distinction. When Buddhist monks were setting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon, Madame Nhu’s response was unspeakably cruel: “Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands,” she had said with a smile. “If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.” The dangerous, dark-eyed beauty quickly became a symbol of everything wrong with American involvement in the Vietnam War.

  Madame Nhu faded from public view after November 1963, when her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and his brother, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, were killed in a coup sanctioned and supported by the US government. As President John F. Kennedy explained to his close friend, Paul “Red” Fay, the United States had to get rid of the Ngo brothers in no small part because of Madame Nhu. “That goddamn bitch,” he said to his friend. “She’s responsible. . . . That bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.”

  Plenty of books have dissected the events of November 1963 and established the overthrow of the Ngo brothers as pivotal in the American buildup to war in Vietnam. But the historical scholarship about the coup has largely overlooked Madame Nhu’s role. How did a woman who was not even forty years old—and barely five feet tall in heels—come to command the full attention of a superpower like America and embroil the United States in a conflict that would last another decade and take millions of lives?

  I was in Paris to find out—although, I had to admit, I was a little nervous. Pulitzer Prize–winning Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne had written in his memoirs that he knew from “personal experience” that Madame Nhu “could be the most dangerous enemy a man could have.” And that was exactly what was so intriguing. The Dragon Lady image was a Western fantasy of the Orient—sensual, decadent, and dangerous. The wicked stereotype had been applied to powerful Asian women before Madame Nhu, women like Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong May-ling and the Chinese empress Xixi. The spectacular treason trial of Tokyo Rose, the voice behind Japanese propaganda during World War II, was still fresh in the American collective memory when Madame Nhu accused Americans in Vietnam of acting like “little soldiers of fortune.” As a result, the public image of Madame Nhu as the Dragon Lady was one-dimensional, like the mustache-twisting villain in a bad Hollywood script, and a little too convenient.

  Madame Nhu, whatever you thought about her, had had a direct hand in shaping history. But she had been silent for decades. Despite her reputation for outspokenness, the world had heard little from the woman herself. Madame Nhu had turned the last New York Times reporter who tried to gain access to her away from her doorstep in Italy for being too nosy. That was in 1986.

  Although nearly twenty years had passed, there was no reason that I should have any more luck, I told myself as I stared at the building across the street. Just a few hundred meters behind me, the Eiffel Tower soared to its full height. I tried to look inconspicuous as I counted the building’s stories. Tenacious old girl, I thought. As far as the rest of the world knew, including all the so-called experts I had interviewed, Madame Nhu was living in a rundown whitewashed villa somewhere on the outskirts of Rome. It had been anyone’s guess as to whether she was even still alive.

  But I had reason to believe that she was here, in Paris.

  My search for Madame Nhu began with simple curiosity. I was born in 1976, some seventeen months after the end of the war and a universe apart. Like most kids I knew growing up during the 1980s, my early knowledge about Vietnam came from movies; grownups certainly didn’t talk much about it. Vietnam wasn’t a country; it was a cacophony of thumping helicopter blades, flaming thatched huts, and napalmed jungles. I held onto that perception until my junior year in college, when I enrolled for a semester abroad at Vietnam National University in Hanoi, which I’d thought of as something of a lark. A Communist country in the jungles of Southeast Asia sounded dangerous and exciting; adding to the drama, the State Department recommended getting typhoid, tetanus, and rabies vaccinations, as well as taking along antimalarial drugs and iodine pills. My father was stupefied: “I spent my twenties trying to stay out of Vietnam, and here you go, trying to get in!”

  By 2003, I had a master’s degree in Asian studies, had lived in Vietnam twice, and received a US Department of Education scholarship that gave me supreme confidence in my Vietnamese language skills—as long as I was talking about something simple, like a menu or the weather. When it came time to think about getting an actual job, I wished I had done more than pick up a cool CIA pen from the campus job fair.

  Rather than face an uncertain future, I sought comfort where I always have—in books. I returned again and again to the second floor of Boston’s Central Library, where the Vietnam books were kept. Four or five men roughly my father’s age and dressed in ill-fitting coats and baggy pants would be sitting around the tables placed at the periphery of the stacks. The smell of stale coffee leeched into the air around them. It was hard for me to reconcile the Vietnam I knew from 2004, the friendly faces, overflowing markets, and modern cities, with the country—and the war—that had ruined so many lives. Who might these men have become if it hadn’t been for Vietnam?

  “Life is random,” my father would say, like a mantra. He meant the words to be comforting. It was his way of soothing my naive sense of injustice, of making sense of the world. My father got his draft notice in the mail in 1966, just after his college graduation. He had already been accepted to graduate school and offered a stipend as a teaching assistant, but the draft board rejected his appeal for a deferment. My father’s number all but guaranteed him infantry duty in Vietnam, so, like many in the same predicament, he applied to Officer Candidate School and was accepted into the army. He faced better odds as a volunteer officer candidate than as a draftee on foot patrol.

  Just weeks before he was due to report to boot camp, my father was watching television in his parents’ living room. President Lyndon Johnson appeared on the screen and publicly extended the draft deferment to include graduate student teachers. My dad leapt up from the couch and hugged his mother; in short order, he called his local draft board, got his deferment, and unpacked his bags.

  He caught hell from the recruiting officers, who were anxious to make their quota, and from his friend Don. Don and my father had carpooled to the university every day for four years. They were from the same neighborhood, a working-class suburb of Seattle, and lived at home with their parents to save money on room and board. They had talked about how education was their ticket out of their families’ poverty. Don had a spot in a graduate program too. He could have used the same deferment as my dad to avoid the draft.

  But Don didn’t see the point of deferring. He tried to talk my dad back into enlisting, “just to get it over with,” he reasoned. They would do a quick tour of duty in Southeast Asia before starting the rest of their lives.

  Don wasn’t in Vietnam two weeks before his helicopter was shot down and he was killed.

  As a little girl, I would stretch on tiptoe to pull the maroon-covered Time-Life book about the Vietnam War down from our living room bookshelves. The photographs were horrible and fascinating and raised more questions for me than the grownups could answer. There was the one of the South Vietnamese policeman shooting a man’s brains out and the image of the little girl running down a road, naked and burning. It was a war I would never begin to understand, I thought, but instead of closing the book, I returned to it time and time again. My favorite was Larry Burrows’ 1962 photo of Madame Nhu. With her piles of black hair and lacquered fingernails, she jumped out from the rest
of the war’s drab, olive-clad personalities. Wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress, the flowing ao dai, in virginal white, she was a tiny-waisted creature who could have been described as dainty, except for the heavy, black .38 caliber pistol that she held raised, aimed, and ready to fire. When her brother-in-law, President Ngo Dinh Diem, had once questioned the modesty of Madame Nhu’s slim-fitting tunics, referring to their décolletage, she is said to have silenced him with a withering reply: “It’s not your neck that sticks out, it’s mine. So shut up.”

  My fascination as a little girl with Madame Nhu’s glamour gradually evolved into recognition of a very contemporary problem. A female who dressed impeccably and took care to look good would always be accused of a lack of seriousness about changing social policies. Today, Michelle Obama is criticized for her biceps and bangs, but she is only the latest American First Lady to wrestle with questions of style and substance. Jacqueline Kennedy, Madame Nhu’s contemporary in 1963, was an American icon of fashion, elegance, and grace. She believed, at the time, that women should simply stay out of politics because “they’re just not suited to it.” Jackie prided herself on her own “Asiatic” marriage and wholly disapproved of Madame Nhu, who had a “queer thing for power.”

  The lack of easy answers about Madame Nhu ensured that my intrigue lingered until I found myself in the library with plenty of underemployed time on my hands. Passing through the vacant gazes of the Vietnam veterans I shared the stacks with, I began to piece together the life of the woman everyone said had caused so much trouble.

  I still had only the roughest outlines of Madame Nhu’s story when I landed in Paris two years later. I had followed a flimsy trail based on an article on an obscure Vietnamese-language website written by someone I had never heard of. The author said that he had interviewed the famously reclusive Madame Nhu in her apartment three years before, in 2002. I would have dismissed the claim, but the author had been particularly precise about an eleventh-floor apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower through the kitchen window. The description reminded me of something.