Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Instead of Diem in Saigon, the French really wanted General Nguyen Van Hinh in charge. He was thirty-eight years old with no political experience except for having watched the crumbling career of his father, Nguyen Van Tam, an ineffectual premier who served the French for two years in 1952 and 1953. Hinh was an army man, trained in France, and had fought alongside the French against the Italians and Germans in World War II. During the First Indochina War, Hinh led the Armée Nationale Vietnamenne, the Vietnamese force fighting on the French side against the Viet Minh—and against the Viet Minh version of independence. The French believed that if their man Hinh were in charge, he would keep things running smoothly, whereas they were certain Diem would try to cut off ties with them. Hinh would continue using the established channels for trade—French companies—and provide kickbacks to the right people. Hinh and the French found an anti-Diem ally in the Binh Xuyen, a band of river pirates who ran gambling, prostitution, and security in Saigon. Together, they began conspiring to bring Diem down. They all knew which side their baguette was buttered on.

  Saigon was still a small town in many ways. Only a few cafés and restaurants catered to Europeanized tastes. Most high-end businesses were located along what was still known as the rue Catinat, although Diem had renamed it Tu Do (Freedom) Street after the French were defeated and began leaving the country. The Cercle Sportif, a swimming and tennis club, stayed in business by shifting its membership to the Vietnamese business and political community. Madame Nhu was learning enough about General Hinh around town to make her mad. She knew that he was being bolstered by the French and that her cousin, Bao Dai, would give Hinh more real support than he had ever shown Diem. The army general was openly boasting to his friends that he would bring Diem down and dared to add that he planned to keep Madame Nhu as his concubine. As was inevitable in the small world of Saigon, Madame Nhu and General Hinh came face to face at a party. She drew herself up to her full five feet in heels and spat her contempt in the startled general’s face. “You are never going to overthrow this government because you don’t have the guts.” Barely containing the shake in her voice, Madame Nhu continued, “And if you do overthrow it, you will never have me because I will claw your throat out first.” She had publicly joined the fight.12

  The public perceived Diem as an honest man with high morals who wouldn’t be corrupted easily and wouldn’t condone graft. If he had a fault, it was that he lacked street smarts—he didn’t know enough about the situation he was walking into. To make matters worse, in addition to the external crosses the newly returned Diem had to bear—one French-sponsored, coup-plotting general, a million homeless refugees, two powerful religious sects, a gangster-run police force, and untold bleak economic woes—he was a miserable politician. He simply could not connect with the people he was trying so hard to represent. Lansdale noticed from day one how carelessly the Vietnamese mandarin squandered his political capital.

  Lansdale had arrived in Saigon just before Diem, and he was looking forward to meeting the new prime minister. But on the day Diem was due to return to Saigon, Lansdale spontaneously decided to watch the prime minister’s return to the city with the Vietnamese people rather than joining the diplomatic circle at the airport. The streets were mobbed. Emotions ran high; people hoisted their children onto their shoulders to catch a glimpse of the new future of Vietnam. “And we waited and waited and waited for something to happen . . . and suddenly past us at about sixty miles an hour came a motorcycle escort and a closed car. You couldn’t see anybody in it.” There was a genuine disappointment among the Vietnamese, who had been unable even to catch a quick look at Diem. “Here was a tremendously enthusiastic friendly crowd of people who didn’t get to see the show that they wanted to, or to cheer the man.” Lansdale thought it was as though Diem didn’t want to get close to the people at all.13

  In fact, Lansdale missed what was intended to be the real show. Nhu had gone to great lengths to mark the occasion of his brother’s return to Saigon. In Diem’s honor, civil servants were released from work early to attend, along with hundreds of others, a gathering in front of Independence Palace. Nhu’s planning came off without a hitch; when Diem arrived at the palace, even the loudspeakers were placed perfectly. Diem’s remarks hit all the right notes. He received a vibrant ovation from the crowd, but it went unremarked by diplomats and officials, who hadn’t been on hand to see it. Instead, they left the airport with the impression that Diem was unremarkable at best; some, like Lansdale, thought the new premier was a cold fish.14 Miscalculations and misunderstandings between the Ngo brothers and the foreigners would persist through the rest of Diem’s time in power.

  Instead of worrying about diplomatic protocol or dreaming up other ways to court his constituency, Diem spent his time personally signing all visas for entry into and exit from the country. His unwillingness to delegate even the smallest tasks meant that he worked sixteen or seventeen hours a day. When he could no longer keep his eyes open at his desk, he would take a pile of paperwork with him to bed. Diem was a terrible administrator partly because he didn’t trust the bureaucrats he had inherited. The French had trained their Vietnamese subordinates to be passive and more concerned with self-preservation than the preservation of the state. Diem’s empty treasury and inability to pay government workers reinforced the broken system. His brothers, however, he knew he could count on.

  The new premier didn’t inspire much hope in General J. Lawton Collins, the special US representative in Vietnam. Collins found Diem “completely intractable, unwilling to accept suggestions and using such poor judgment that his government will eventually fail.” Instead of making things better, in Collins’s view, the brothers “hover[ed] over the leader, pulling and tugging all the time,” and he warned that the family’s growing choke hold on power in South Vietnam would make a bad situation even worse.15

  Madame Nhu launched herself into the political vacuum created by a distant pen-pushing prime minister and his furtive brother. The brothers had no flair, no sense of theater, and perhaps no stomach for the fight. Madame Nhu possessed all three—with some to spare.

  Her first burst of political creativity came at a restaurant in Cholon, the Chinese part of town. The dinner was being hosted by Diem’s new vice premier, who was also his minister of defense and Madame Nhu’s cousin on her father’s side—a man named Nguyen Van Xuan. With Madame Nhu and her husband and other Vietnamese from the Diem regime, the dinner guests included two counselors from high positions in the French embassy. Madame Nhu used the social occasion to press the Frenchmen. She knew very well that they couldn’t admit the French wanted to oust Diem—not at a dinner hosted by his vice premier and not to Diem’s sister-in-law. But Madame Nhu’s social smile masked a sharp political mind. Why, she asked sweetly, hadn’t they forced General Hinh to go to France? One of the French consuls proposed a schoolgirl’s challenge: if she could get five signatures proving Hinh was unwanted, they would personally see Hinh removed. Madame Nhu dropped the niceties and leveled her gaze at the men. “You will have a million,” she told them. The Frenchmen might still have thought the exchange nothing more than flirtatious dinner conversation when they exclaimed over their half-eaten entrées, “But you are dangerous, Madame!”

  The challenge would have daunted anyone else, but Madame Nhu had a mission. Within a few hours of the dinner, she also met with a helpful coincidence. Her husband Nhu had stayed silent throughout the evening. If he had any thoughts on his wife’s exchange with the Frenchmen, he kept them to himself. After leaving the restaurant, he and his wife parted ways. Nhu went to the palace to see his brother, and Madame Nhu went home, alone as usual. At her door she saw two disheveled looking men. They bowed and scraped, introducing themselves as Quang and Ho. They were waiting for her husband, they explained. “We represent the million refugees who came when we heard Diem received the pleins pouvoirs from Bao Dai. But the reality of the situation here is untenable because the Binh Xuyen police harass us. Even if we wanted to go back,
we couldn’t! What should we do?”

  Here was a means to get the million signatures she had promised at dinner. “Do nothing for the moment,” Madame Nhu coolly replied. But when the time comes, “You listen to me and do exactly what I say.”

  For the next month, Madame Nhu worked in secret. She got banners printed and worked to synchronize the swarm of northern refugees into networks of participants. She was planning a massive demonstration in Diem’s favor; participants would march up the boulevard Hui Bon Hoa, turn on the old rue Chasseloup-Laubat, and arrive dramatically in front of Independence Palace. Not even the French could deny such an obvious display of will by the people.

  But by the time Madame Nhu arrived at the appointed meeting spot on the morning of September 21, 1954, police were already there. They were Hinh’s men, hired guns paid for by the Binh Xuyen gangsters. They were trying to disperse a crowd of 4,000, pointing bayonets and screaming at quaking refugees. The French army report of the situation described gunshots, a number of wounded, and at least one dead.16

  Madame Nhu wove her car, a little light-green Panhard, through a sea of cyclo wheels and the bobbing conical hats of women on their way to market. She swerved to avoid the vendors and their pushcarts, but it was pandemonium.

  Madame Nhu got out of her car but left the motor running. Taking strides as long as the slit of her ao dai would allow, she marched right up to the armed men. She couldn’t let thugs derail her demonstration and had to think quickly. She did what she did best: she made a scene. Madame Nhu began berating the men, shouting at the top of her lungs, “What kind of police are you? What are you trying to do to these poor, defenseless people? Are you afraid of me?”

  Suddenly, a hostile crowd of Binh Xuyen surrounded her. As they closed in on her with their weapons drawn, she jumped into her car, cried, “Arrest me, if you can!” and drove through the ring of tommy gun–toting thugs.

  Madame Nhu’s theatrics distracted the men long enough to allow her rally to continue. The people marched from the cathedral to the palace waving banners that read “Unification and Independence for Viet Nam,” and “Put Down the Saboteurs of National Independence.” The crowd chanted for Diem. Diem looked like a hero for helping out refugees, and General Hinh was backed into a corner. From far away in France, Emperor Bao Dai could not publicly support Hinh without looking like a heartless monarch and losing the last shred of respect that clung to him. Soon afterwards, Hinh was sent away to France and never came back. Madame Nhu got all the credit for having masterminded the rally, and then some for coming to its daring rescue in defiance of the gangster henchmen.17

  Madame Nhu’s dinner partners from the French embassy protested. This woman, they said, was causing trouble! Holding a rally in an already overheated political atmosphere was absolutely irresponsible. The French complained to the Americans, who talked to Diem, who in the end agreed to send Madame Nhu away for a few months. She was angry about her dismissal, but it was just to keep the peace, and just long enough for Nhu to get Diem stabilized; at least, that was how they rationalized it to her.

  Madame Nhu was sent to Hong Kong to “convalesce” for three months at an Italian convent, the Couvent Italien de Chanoinesses de Canossa. Her children and her husband stayed behind. Instead of looking at it as punishment, Madame Nhu began to view their sending her away as confirmation of her potential power. If she didn’t matter, they would have let her stay home. Clearly she was too dangerous to ignore.

  Madame Nhu’s rally marked the beginning of a new chapter for her brother-in-law. Over the next few months, Diem’s government would continue working to establish control over Saigon and the South. No one expected the principled Catholic South Vietnamese premier to make it. Diem’s most formidable foe was vice. The Grand Monde gambling establishment earned $10,000 a day. The mirrored cubicles of the elegant bordello Paradise (Dai La Thien) reflected three hundred girls scantily clad in silk—and enjoyed a long list of satisfied customers. Diplomats and generals shared a pipe at opium parlors before going to nightclubs.

  So everyone was surprised when Ngo Dinh Diem emerged victorious. He proved ruthless. His police closed five hundred opium dens and confiscated thousands of bamboo pipes, a pile of which were burned in a huge bonfire kindled by pages torn out of pornographic magazines. Diem issued an order to close Saigon’s nightclubs at 2 a.m. and layered so many regulations on the city’s striptease industry that it collapsed. Some 2,000 licensed prostitutes simply vanished, breaking the back of the Saigon racket. Diem had the mirrored Paradise brothel turned into a rehabilitation institute for hookers, where they were taught sewing and nursing. He stopped short of shutting down brothels in the countryside where the army was stationed: Diem knew he needed the cops and the military on his side.

  Most surprising of all was Diem’s refusal to negotiate. He would not concede to any power-sharing agreement. This stance went against the instructions of the emperor, his theoretical boss; it also went against French advice. It was in Diem’s political interest to boldly oppose the French and Bao Dai, but in this case, he also showed that he could withstand pressure from the American State Department.

  The Binh Xuyen originated as a band of river pirates from a small village south of Cholon, Saigon’s Chinatown. Their leader, a man named Bay Vien, had collaborated with the Japanese during the period of their occupation. The Binh Xuyen’s anti-French stance made them allies of the Viet Minh, but the gangster-Communist alliance didn’t last long. The political rift was too great. Bay Vien turned back to the French in 1945, as soon as doing so looked profitable. He bought the police concession in Saigon for 40 million piasters and then the opium factory that supplied the very same dens those police were supposed to shut down. In addition to casinos and brothels, Bay’s Binh Xuyen group also owned the best department store in town on the fashionable rue Catinat. The gangsters had a fleet of riverboats, twenty houses, and one hundred shops throughout the city. A crocodile-filled moat surrounded Bay Vien’s home and the Binh Xuyen headquarters. He kept a full-grown leopard chained to a guard post outside his bedroom, and inside, a tigress in a cage. Rumor had it that Bay Vien would feed the tigress any of the 15,000 men serving him who dared displease him.

  Bay Vien’s reach was so great and his pockets so deep that only someone as hardheaded and as scrupulous as Diem would think to bring him down. Diem was intransigent on the subject of the Binh Xuyen. The Americans tried to offer the gangster’s foot soldiers 12,000 piasters, and the officers 28,000 piasters, to join with Diem, and they tried to get Diem to see that facts were facts: the Binh Xuyen were an unfortunate reality of life in Saigon. But Diem would not compromise.18 The final showdown came on April 27, 1955, the day after Diem appointed a police chief who was not in Bay Vien’s pocket. Binh Xuyen forces began shelling the palace. Inside, Diem showed firm resolve. “Fire back,” he said. All told, 4,000 mortar rounds hurled toward the residence of the Binh Xuyen’s leader, Bay Vien, and their command post. It was a furious barrage even before the airborne troops got involved. Eight hundred civilians died, and 20,000 homes were destroyed. Diem’s forces and the thugs, gangsters, and policemen backed by the Binh Xuyen and, less overtly, the French waged hand-to-hand combat on Saigon’s streets.

  The battle against the Binh Xuyen showed Diem’s mettle. The scrupulous leader bet on righteousness and won. It also showed Diem, once and for all, that he didn’t need even the emperor’s most tenuous support. A few months after crushing the Binh Xuyen, in the summer of 1955, Diem ousted Bao Dai and emerged as the sole leader of South Vietnam. No longer limited to the title of prime minister, Diem proclaimed himself head of state, the president of South Vietnam.

  All of these developments went to show the Americans, or Lansdale at least, just how “damn wrong” the French had been in underestimating the new premier of South Vietnam.19 A State Department telegram to John Foster Dulles provides perhaps the best summary of the situation Diem found himself in. “Diem is inexperienced and finds it difficult to compromise.” What�
��s more he “insists on building a government free of corruption and dedicated to achieving genuine national independence.” American policy makers might find the man’s personal shortcomings, like his stubbornness, frustrating, but ironically, “only a government of the kind Diem envisions, and it would be worthy of our support—has much chance for survival.” American aid to South Vietnam in the fiscal year 1955 amounted to $77,500,000. Some of that money went to help refugees; some went to technical assistance in education, health, and public administration. But the bulk of it went to helping Diem win widespread public support for a governmental system that was not Communist. The sums would only go up from there. The little round-faced premier was about to become the man Life magazine would hail as the “Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam.”20

  CHAPTER 9

  A First Lady in Independence Palace

  THE NHU FAMILY MOVED into the presidential palace in April 1955, but without Madame Nhu, who was still in Hong Kong. Madame Nhu was comfortable enough. She was given a room in a Catholic convent and plenty of time for imposed contemplation and English lessons. The hybrid setting was familiar to her. Hong Kong was Chinese and British, and though she was used to a different cultural mix, Vietnamese and French, the East-West mélange felt familiar and soothing. The nuns were nice, as were the well-mannered schoolchildren who filed obediently in and out of classrooms with a shy smile at the elegant visitor in their midst. Madame Nhu spent her mornings taking English lessons and winding walks around the oval flower beds in the convent garden. Her afternoons, spent napping and reading, ticked by more slowly. Madame Nhu used the quiet hours away from her family to marvel at her doings over the last six months. What a course she had managed to chart! The rally had snowballed into an outpouring of real support for Diem. The audacious display was something Madame Nhu had known she was capable of, but to the others, it was a surprise. Although perhaps intended as a reprimand, to Madame Nhu’s mind, this banishment in Hong Kong demonstrated that her influence was being recognized.