Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Maybe Nhu moved himself and their three children into the palace during his wife’s absence because he wanted to be closer to his brother, or maybe he hoped that the move would keep his family safe. If so, he was mistaken. During one of their first nights in their new home, a midnight Binh Xuyen attack on the palace dislodged a pair of massive drapes from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. A crush of cotton, silk, wood, and plaster fell ten feet onto Quynh, the Nhu’s three-year-old son. He nearly suffocated before he was rescued and revived.

  Madame Nhu was terrified when she received the news. But far from taking the nearly fatal accident as an omen of the misfortune still to come, she viewed her family’s relocation to the palace as a promotion. They had moved from the Clinique St. Pierre’s barred windows and tin roof that clattered when it rained into a suite of rooms down the hall from the president of the Republic of South Vietnam.

  Until Diem moved in and renamed it Dinh Doc Lap, or Independence Palace, the yellow stucco building had been known as the Palais Norodom, named for the monarch in neighboring Cambodia and built on a boulevard of the same name. The palace had served as the office and residence of the French gouverneur général for all of Indochina—a sort of French colonial White House. Conceived by French architect Achille Antoine Hermitte, who had built Hong Kong’s regal city hall, its grandeur was intended to show the natives the full power and wealth of France. The palace’s granite foundation had been imported from France, as had the smooth white stone for the carvings that festooned the facade. The only marble floors were in the central pavilion; the rest were tiled, a concession to Saigon’s tropical climate. The palace was T-shaped, with two rows of graceful arched windows along the front, facing the city. On the first floor were offices and official reception rooms; the second floor housed the president’s and the Nhu family’s rooms. The reception hall and adjoining ballrooms occupied the leg of the T and jutted deep into the lushly planted grounds.

  When Madame Nhu returned, she found a room that should have been very much to her liking: the heavy drapes had been reinstalled and her bed dressed in silk duvets and shams with a large canopy; fine rugs covered the floor. The furniture was highly polished. As soon as it was smudged, a retinue of household staff was on hand to buff it again. Madame Nhu could open the French doors to the balcony wide in the early morning to catch a quiet breeze. Pungent food smells no longer drifted through the window at all hours as had at their street-level apartment. The odors of frying oil and ginger, meat and garlic stayed in the kitchen, released only from heaving platters served in the dining room at mealtimes. Madame Nhu understood that this move was a sort of nod from her brother-in-law Diem, acknowledging her contributions and those of her husband.

  But Madame Nhu found no happiness in the palace. At least, not at first. She was searching for real meaning in her life, and it would take her some time to find her stride.

  During their first few years in the palace, Ngo Dinh Diem and his family regime accomplished a great deal. One million refugees were resettled in the South. Rice production increased from 2.8 to 4.6 million metric tons. Rubber production went from 66,000 to 79,000 million metric tons. Farm-credit programs and land reform broke up the colonial-era plantations and helped people invest in their own fields and try crop diversification. Three major highways were completed, two new universities were established, and the doubled production of electric power sped up reconstruction needed after the nine-year War of Independence. Fifty-one new manufacturing firms were established in South Vietnam, the largest in textiles, something the French had always controlled. South Vietnam’s import costs were reduced by over $40 million a year, a significant amount in what was still a very poor country. But all these accomplishments were achieved in the shadow of US assistance—which amounted to $150 million a year for the five years between 1955 and 1960. The figure sounds small in today’s dollars, but was close to 15 percent of the foreign aid budgeted by the United States for all foreign economic and technical development.1

  The news out of Saigon was especially rosy when compared to the dismal information that could be gathered about living conditions under the Reds in the north, which endured floods and famine. The Viet Minh’s nationalist rhetoric had taken a sharp turn leftward after the Geneva Accords, in part because Hanoi was accepting help from Mao’s China. But how much was this shift due to pressure from China and how much to the Viet Minh leadership’s ability finally to shake off any pretense that it was anything other than Communist at heart? To strengthen their hold, the Communists had to break down the traditional power of the elites. “Speak bitterness” campaigns purged the ranks of the Viet Minh of any “wrong” (i.e., high-class) elements. People were expected to denounce neighbors and even family members, and the situation was easily manipulated to settle old scores. There were trials and executions and a deeply disruptive land-redistribution program. Unlike the huge parcels of land in the south, the holdings in the north were already relatively small. Land was measured in something called a mau—someone had to own fifty mau in the south to be considered a landowner and only five in the north. The margin of difference between people in one category or another was very small, which made the redistribution of land painful even for small-scale farmers. It also pitted neighbor against neighbor; people of similar means worked against each other for the smallest of gains.

  The Ngo regime in the south set itself up as the antidote to the oppression in the Communist north. President Diem denounced communism not only on his own moral grounds, underpinned by his religious convictions and family history, but also because, in his view, communism was just another “foreign ideology.” If the Communists took over all of Vietnam, he insisted, “our beloved country will disappear and it will only be mentioned as a southern province of Communist China. Moreover the Vietnamese people will eternally live under the yoke of a dictatorship inspired by Moscow and denying religion, fatherland and family.”2

  But for all his impassioned speeches, Diem wasn’t leading a free country either. Anything resembling real democracy was simply window dressing. Under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, the separation of North and South Vietnam into two countries with capitals in Hanoi and Saigon was temporary. A referendum was supposed to have taken place in 1956 in both parts of the country to unite them again under one chosen president. But the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem refused to hold a vote on the grounds that the South Vietnamese had not actually signed the Geneva Accords; they had only been granted observer status. The Diem regime also accused the Communists of being unable to participate in an honest vote. It wasn’t just the northerners living under communism who posed the problem; the south was still home to armed guerrilla fighters, former Viet Minh, who were loyal Communists and had gone underground, waiting for the time to rise again. The southern regime had one more good reason not to hold a vote: Diem would lose. There was no way he could win out over the man who had led the Vietnamese army to victory over the French and to independence. Ho Chi Minh would win any popularity contest.

  The Communists weren’t the only ones rigging elections. In October 1955, Nhu helped organize a referendum within South Vietnam for his older brother Diem to unseat former emperor Bao Dai once and for all. In a landslide victory, Diem shrugged off his mantle as Bao Dai’s appointed prime minister and became South Vietnam’s official chief of state and first president. The margin was overwhelming—nearly 6 million to 63,000. Reports coming out of the polling centers told of intimidation tactics and coercion. Red envelopes, indicating a vote for Diem, were being stuffed into the ballot boxes under the watchful eye of Nhu’s men, and those who disobeyed risked a beating. Diem got 98 percent of the vote, but his margins in Saigon were even better: his 605,025 votes surpassed the city’s number of registered voters by more than one-third.3

  Madame Nhu was elected to the National Assembly on March 4, 1956. She joined 122 other members, almost all male, in the legislative branch of the new government. Madame Nhu denied that i
t was her idea to run for office, insisting that an anonymous person had proposed her name to represent the northern refugees whom she had championed so “heroically,” and she scoffed at the notion that anything less than real admiration had motivated her election.4 Still, a distinct pattern was evident. The people in control of South Vietnam were either Ngo family members or related to them by marriage.

  Madame Nhu’s father, Tran Van Chuong, was put in charge of economy and finance; shortly afterwards he and his wife were appointed diplomats and sent to the United States. Chuong was to be the Diem regime’s South Vietnamese ambassador, while Madame Chuong was made the South Vietnamese observer at the United Nations. Madame Nhu’s uncle was in charge of foreign affairs, her father’s cousin was Diem’s vice president, and her sister’s husband, Nguyen Huu Chau, was, for a short time, one of Diem’s most trusted advisors. Madame Nhu’s new prestige had even secured a spot for her little brother, Khiem. Her younger brother had been pampered, petted, and spoiled throughout his childhood, and perhaps because of that, he made for a miserable student overseas. He attended a school in Paris for a while but left without an advanced degree, then failed to complete correspondence classes in law studies. As the French were leaving Vietnam in 1954, Khiem was living a barefoot bohemian lifestyle by the seaside in Algeria with a German wife. What a twist: the boy the Chuongs had always cherished was turning into such a disappointment, and his middle sister might be the one to turn things around by calling him back to Vietnam and appointing him palace spokesman. When the new First Lady of South Vietnam beckoned, Khiem came quickly, leaving his wife behind. It must have given Madame Nhu great satisfaction to manage something her mother had not been able to.

  In addition to its nepotism, the Ngo regime discriminated against non-Catholics. The bias could be rationalized in the context of those early years—the Catholic community provided Diem and Nhu with a ready pool of anti-Communist support—but the Ngo brothers took it to an extreme. There were stories of people converting to the Catholic faith just to win political favor and promotions. Surrounding itself with family members and like-minded fellow Catholics meant the regime was isolating itself from people who had real differences in opinion. But politics in Vietnam had always been that way to some extent. Centuries of Vietnamese monarchy and French colonial rule bequeathed a political legacy that valued conformity, and under Diem, that adherence to a single mind-set was reinforced. There was an entrenched sense among politicians that disagreements or deviations from the status quo, even taking initiative, entailed career risk. The American advisors in South Vietnam pressured Diem to open up his government and make a showcase of political diversity, but Diem resisted. There was too much at stake. The march toward democracy would be a forced march—and a silent one. The regime said it needed stability before it could build a strong state. Madame Nhu rationalized the Ngos’ insular tendencies to Australian reporter Denis Warner, explaining, “If we open the window, not only the sunlight, but many bad things fly in also.”

  A real dissonance soon emerged between the image of Diem as a moral and good man and the climate of fear that began to pervade Saigon. Those who didn’t cooperate with the regime were silenced in one way or another. They might be sent to distant, Communist-friendly outlying areas, where they might be killed. They might be taken away by the secret police and beaten or imprisoned until they learned their lesson. Rumors of torture and imprisonment ran rampant. Carried on every whisper was the name of Diem’s younger brother: Ngo Dinh Nhu.

  John Pham, Diem’s bodyguard, confirmed many of the saintly traits attributed to Diem in biographies. The president led a monkish, austere life. His private rooms on the second floor of the old French palace had bare wood floors, and his bed was a straw mat. His sleeping space adjoined his office, where he spent most of his waking hours. Furnishings included a round wooden coffee table and a worn leather chair. Diem ate at his desk while he worked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the morning he drank coffee with sugar and usually ate chao (rice porridge) with ca kho (small fish).5 His lunches and dinners were simple too, consisting of rice and rau cai, fried pork lardons, or some kind of fish. For dessert, he took two cobs of corn with sugar. Diem had simple tastes; he ate nearly the same menu every day with only the type of fish varying. He drank no wine or whiskey, just hot tea, but he was a chain smoker, lighting a fresh cigarette off the dying ember of the previous. Diem took small puffs and waited until the ash was long before tapping it into the ashtray. He smoked so much that his fingers were stained yellow.

  Diem ate alone most of the time; his meals and sleep were erratic because of his work schedule. Sometimes he didn’t dine until 4 a.m. He could push a buzzer in his quarters to ring the kitchen. Two or three valets were assigned to him around the clock, but he was always very generous with the people who worked for him. John told me that Diem even gave his own salary to refugees from the north to help them get established.

  As devoted as Diem was to his country, he had no time for personal relationships outside his family. He was a bachelor, but that term implies a freewheeling lifestyle that would have been entirely out of character for the South Vietnamese president. His only personal attachment was to the garden. After work, Diem would stroll through the palace grounds. When foreign dignitaries visited, bringing fruit and food delicacies as a gift from their own countries, Diem gave the goods to his bodyguards; he asked only that they return the seeds to him so he could plant them in his garden.

  The only woman the president saw on a regular basis lived just a few doors down: his brother’s wife, Madame Nhu. There was a rumor that as a young man, Diem had been engaged to a girl from his home-town of Hue but had ended things when he decided to pursue politics instead of settling into marriage. Politics was a dangerous game under the French, but that still seems like a feeble excuse not to get married. Diem’s chief of staff thought that the president had never had sexual relations, and a 1955 profile of Diem in Time magazine reports that he had been “long pledged to chastity.” Diem’s characterization as “shy” and “uncomfortable” around women may have prompted his chief of staff to confide that the president liked to keep “good looking men around him” instead of women.6

  The fact remained that Diem needed a hostess to help him with his social obligations, someone with social graces and a pretty smile. Diem could have chosen one of his own sisters or the wife of another of his brothers. But he chose Madame Nhu.

  She was well connected, pretty, and smart, but most of all, she was already there. Perhaps Nhu had always intended this outcome. Since Nhu’s family lived in the palace, it seemed just as smart to keep his brother’s wife busy. The chief of staff who had noted that Diem liked to have handsome men working for him described Diem’s relationship with Madame Nhu as comfortable: “She is charming, talks to him, relieves his tension, argues with him, needles him and, like a Vietnamese wife, she is dominant in the household.” He likened President Diem’s relationship with Madame Nhu to that of Hitler and Eva Braun.7

  John Pham, the bodyguard, disagreed. He told me that Diem did not altogether like Madame Nhu. He thought his sister-in-law “look like a hot lady, talk too big.” Everything about her showy personality went against Diem’s quiet nature, but he put up with her. He recognized that he was indebted to his little brother Nhu for his political practicality—for doing things that needed to get done but might have compromised Diem’s strict ethics. In John Pham’s opinion, Diem didn’t speak out against Madame Nhu because he didn’t want to cause trouble for his younger brother.

  John remembered with a smile the one time he saw Diem unable to hold back. It was October 1956. A picture was going to be taken in front of the palace with all the members of the government. The photographer took a long time to get his subjects organized, as the placement of people around the president was a political negotiation in and of itself. Everything about the situation that day was tense. Madame Nhu saw that everyone was distracted and took advantage of the moment. She snuck up onto
the second floor of the palace and stood in one of the windows, managing to get herself included in the picture. When the photograph was developed and shown to the president, Diem was furious.

  When I asked if she hadn’t deserved to be included, John looked perplexed. “She always wanted too much too fast,” he said with a shake of his head.

  Although still beleaguered by political infighting and challenges from the Binh Xuyen and religious sects, Diem and his new regime were the darlings of the free anti-Communist world. As such, they had a high diplomatic profile to maintain. There were endless dinner parties and receptions, including elaborate state welcoming parties for visiting diplomats. The gardens of the park behind the palace would be lit up with garlands of light, and the walkways were illuminated with paper lanterns. After they made their way up the double ramp into the palace pavilion, Madame Nhu greeted invitees with one of her lovely smiles and offered a slim, gloved hand. Traditional Vietnamese music and clinking glasses accompanied her as she wove Diem around the room, mingling among members of the diplomatic corps and stopping strategically to chat with guests of honor before taking the prestigious and highly visible hostess’s seat at the elegantly laid dining table.