Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  She took right away to the duties of the First Lady, such as inaugurating new elementary schools, organizing flower exhibits, and visiting orphanages around the south. Madame Nhu arranged a huge reception at the palace for over 1,000 schoolchildren and traveled around the world on diplomatic missions. At a dinner for the Nhus in Rangoon given by the Burmese prime minister, she chatted with the leader’s wife, Mrs. U Nu, about their shared passion for flowers. When the Nhus got ready to depart Rangoon on a special Vietnamese air force plane for the flight back to Saigon, they found a special gift onboard from their hostess: a Burmese variety of white blooming bougainvillea for Madame Nhu to plant in her own garden.8 In Portugal, Spain, France, and Austria, delegations of women’s clubs greeted her. Madame Nhu even found a way to make conversation with the Russian delegate to the Interparliamentary Union when they found themselves seated next to each other in Brazil. The Russian, Mrs. Lebedeva, was a thickly set woman known for her brusque manners, but Madame Nhu engaged her in a conversational debate in French about the economic need for foreign investment. And in Washington, DC, on a semiofficial visit with her husband in March 1957, Madame Nhu was invited to have lunch in the Senate chambers. She watched the senators scramble for a good seat at the table and remarked to someone at her elbow how shockingly childish this lunchtime ritual seemed. The statesman who caught her remark, and laughed it off, was a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The Nhus’ CIA escort, their old friend Paul Harwood, would recall that Madame Nhu caused the only blip in an otherwise highly successful trip. She had “reveled” in the attention paid to her by Allen Dulles and notables from the Departments of State and Defense at a dinner held at the Alibi Club, a three-story brick townhouse a few blocks from the White House. Membership is still limited to the most elite—fifty of Washington’s most powerful men—and new members are only admitted after an incumbent dies. Maybe Madame Nhu let the prestige go to her head, because her husband had been unhappy with her. He didn’t enjoy his wife’s flaunting her good looks, charm, and command of English. She had been the star of the evening—and Nhu must have taken it personally. In Harwood’s view she had been “not a problem, but a sensation.”9

  Nhu sounded like he was taking a line from his wife’s critics. Those who didn’t like Madame Nhu said that she was exploiting Diem’s unfamiliarity with women. Why else would he listen to her? She could make her chest heave with emotion. She could bat her lashes. Her body language was more effective on the president, they said, than an arsenal of weapons. She had other tactics at her disposal that he didn’t know how to deal with, like tantrums and mood swings. At the same time that they accused her of wielding her femininity like a sword, they said she could also use it as a shield to deflect allegations that she was the real man in the family.

  Madame Nhu learned to shrug off the carping. She had better things to do than worry about what people thought of her. She was intent on carving out a role for herself in the administration, one that went beyond serving as a pretty hostess.

  The Communists in Vietnam had managed to arouse women’s political consciousness, promising them that they had a purpose and reminding them how the old feudal society, not to mention the colonial one, had exploited them. They also gave women real work to do. The Communist cause valued their contribution and extended the promise of equality—a gaping hole in the Ngo brothers’ revolutionary rhetoric. Female cadres enlisted in the Communist cause moved easily in and out of villages, spreading propaganda in the marketplace as if they were simply gossiping with friends or gathering produce for the family meal. In fact they were activating a network of foot soldiers. These women were the supply chain of what would become the National Liberation Front. Vietnam scholar Douglas Pike meant all the respect in the world when he called these women the “water buffalo of the Revolution.”10

  Madame Nhu took it upon herself to match the progressive strides the Communists were making with women. If they were liberating women, she would too. Madame Nhu had only one reason to consider herself an expert on the subject: she too was a woman. She would call others like herself to arms. But therein lay her problem. Madame Nhu was never a typical Vietnamese woman. She spoke French at the dinner table and rode around town in a chauffeured car. Her forced march by the Communists through the countryside had been, for her, a great hardship, but she simply couldn’t share in the experiences of women who had suffered so much injustice under the colonial system and so much hardship in the previous decade of famine and war.

  Madame Nhu tried anyway. She used her position as a deputy in the National Assembly to promise her “sisters” that she would look out for them. She would make their voices heard and protect them. In October 1957, Madame Nhu presented the Family Code legislation. When enacted in June 1958, it outlawed polygamy and concubinage. It also gave women the right to control their own finances after marriage; they could open their own bank accounts, own property, and inherit wealth. Grumbling from some of Madame Nhu’s male co-senators was to be expected. They said these new rights for women were too much too soon. There was “prolonged picking” at the various provisions of the bill. Madame Nhu suggested that those of her male colleagues who resisted the legislation did so because they wanted to keep concubines, and the rumor went around that she had called the leader of the assembly “a pig.” At one point a motion was made to table the proposed law, but no one could afford to oppose Madame Nhu for long. When she appealed to Diem, he applied presidential pressure on the legislature, and the Family Code was approved with only one deputy dissenting.11 It seemed that the majority of the Vietnamese people welcomed legislation reforming the status of women in the Family Code—except for one thing. Madame Nhu’s law also banned divorce. That line item condemned the rest of the code to widespread criticism because, as even the most casual listener to Saigon gossip knew, Madame Nhu had a very personal stake in the matter.

  Madame Nhu’s older sister, Le Chi, was in a loveless marriage. Her parents had handpicked her husband, Nguyen Huu Chau, a rising young lawyer who had worked for Chuong in Hanoi. The young couple married at seventeen. But Chuong’s collaboration with the Japanese had put his new son-in-law’s career at great risk; to survive professionally he had to slip into obscurity. Did Le Chi resent the fact that her younger sister had married better? Nhu, the one-time librarian, now effectively ran the country. Madame Nhu had made sure all her kin had positions in the new government. Chau now toiled away drafting legislation for the regime, taking orders from Le Chi’s younger sister. Instead of being grateful for her husband’s inclusion, Le Chi felt indignant that she had been eclipsed. Maybe that was why she put so little effort into keeping her extramarital affair a secret.

  Le Chi’s lover was a Frenchman, a big-game hunter named Etienne Oggeri who killed elephants in the Vietnamese highlands for their ivory tusks, as well as tigers and guar, a horned bovine native to Southeast Asia. As soon as she started seeing the Westerner, Le Chi changed her look. She took to wearing light, brightly colored lipstick and white eyeshadow to make her eyes look bigger. And instead of setting her hair in the fashion of other ladies in Saigon society, she began wearing it down—straight, silky, and long. It was an embarrassment and, Madame Nhu decided, unacceptable behavior on the part of someone so close to the palace.

  Radio Catinat picked up on the story right away. It was not a real station but the nickname for the chatter that zipped through the air in Saigon. Rumors crackled to life in the restaurants and bars on the old rue Catinat; they passed in a blink to other ears, other lips, as gossipers moved from bar stool to bar stool. Madame Nhu and her family were a favorite topic. It seemed everyone had an opinion on whether Madame Nhu was sleeping with Diem. Some suggested she was more like her mother, seducing the Americans who suddenly seemed to be everywhere. They pointed to aid money pouring into South Vietnamese coffers as proof that her sexual favors were being reimbursed. There was a even a story that a young army general had been one of Madame Nhu’s lovers until his wife found out and s
hot Madame Nhu in both arms. No one seemed to care that Madame Nhu wasn’t wearing any bandages.

  At first the palace tried to stop the gossip. They took out advertisements in newspapers and publicly denied charges of everything from corruption to love triangles.12 But Madame Nhu couldn’t staunch the rumors. She sighed about it to Charlie Mohr of Time magazine: “If any man is promoted and he is not too ugly, it is immediately said, ‘A protégé of Madame Nhu’s.’” But addressing each rumor explicitly seemed to fan the flames, so the Nhus stopped. Madame Nhu told herself she didn’t care.

  But the mess with Le Chi was a real problem for Madame Nhu. She might have cared a little less if her sister hadn’t claimed Etienne Oggeri was more than just a fling. Le Chi declared he was the love of her life. Her husband, once a respected member of the government’s inner circle, lost all prestige and self-respect; deprived of all influence, he was reduced to a simple civil servant.13 Now he wanted a divorce, and that posed a threat—Chau knew too much about the workings of Nhu’s political party, how it operated, and how it got financed. The gossipy conjecture was that Madame Nhu wanted to outlaw divorce to prevent Chau from speaking out against the family.

  The public didn’t know, however, that Madame Nhu’s own marriage was coming apart. To the outside, the Nhus presented a formidable power couple, but Madame Nhu’s private despair soaked through the pages of a diary she began to keep in 1959.

  The diary came to my attention in August 2012, when James van Thach, a retired US Army captain, got in touch with me. He was my age, lived in the Bronx, and had found me through a Google search. Like me, James was interested in the history of the Vietnam War, particularly the story of Madame Nhu.

  I was skeptical when James told me he had Madame Nhu’s diary. That a fifty-year-old journal would surface now, in the hands of a thirty-six-year-old retired US Army captain in New York, seemed, well, far-fetched. Besides, she had never mentioned it.

  I went to James’s parents’ house in Queens anyway. It was a flat-faced townhouse with a stucco exterior in an unlikely shade of brown. Hurricane Sandy had swept through the neighborhood two weeks before but had damaged only the trees here. Crews were still out clearing debris. James’s father stayed out of sight when I came to the door. A former American soldier, now in his eighties, he had done two tours in Vietnam, where he had met James’s mother. She was younger, just past sixty. She fairly skipped down the front steps to meet me but shivered when the air came through the cutouts in her sheer sweater. She was a full head taller than most Vietnamese women, with long black hair that she wore loose down her back. Her nails were lacquered, and she had rounded, squishy lips that echoed the curves under her sweater. As a teenager, she had been on the South Vietnamese Olympic team, a high jumper, before she left Vietnam in 1974. She was just in time. The south fell to the north less than a year after her departure, and it would take a decade of paperwork before she could sponsor the other members of her family and get them out.

  James wouldn’t, or couldn’t, explain much about how he came to possess the diary, but it had something to do with family members who had served in the South Vietnamese police force in 1963. James shook his head, refusing to tell me anything more precise than “I came of age, and I got the diary.” I couldn’t tell if he feared getting into trouble for telling me where he had gotten the diary or if it was just nerves. James had already told me that having it in his possession made him nervous: “It’s like I have a target on my back.” He couldn’t read it—it was in French—but he hoped I would tell him what the pages said.

  It was hard for me to imagine James afraid of anything. He had a strong military frame, six feet, two inches tall and bulging with muscles, but injuries from his service in Iraq and Afghanistan had left him permanently disabled. He suffered migraines and short-term memory loss from brain trauma, nerve damage, and posttraumatic stress disorder. In spite of that, James seemed sanguine about the future. Payments from his retirement pension and disability would continue to arrive monthly and he got by just fine. James drove a big white Mercedes truck and carried a Louis Vuitton briefcase in the hand that didn’t hold his cane. He took his mother to get one-hour massages at the mall nearby and spoke with a blush about an upcoming trip to Vietnam with his aunt to meet a distant cousin: she was only seventeen, but that’s how these things are done in the traditional Vietnamese way, he explained.

  James allowed me to look through the diary at a Starbucks on Jamaica Avenue. It was roughly five by seven inches, the perfect size to slip into a dressing table drawer after recording a day’s entry and small enough to tuck into the waistband of a uniform to smuggle out of the palace. Time-mottled cardboard formed the front and back covers, bound by a fabric tape that threatened to lose its grip with every turn of the page. Right-leaning cursive filled some three hundred pages in brown fountain pen ink, blue ballpoint pen, and sometimes pencil. A few entries looked to have been written with a red wax crayon, the kind my mother uses to mark her sewing. But all the entries matched Madame Nhu’s handwriting exactly. Just to be sure, I cross-checked certain dates, places I knew she had been, things and people I knew she had seen. Nhu, Diem, and the children were the main characters in Madame Nhu’s story from January 1959 until her last entry in June 1963. The diary was hers, I was sure.

  Once upon a time, this diary would have been the one place Madame Nhu could turn to without facing judgment or the pressure of living up to expectations. She would have been in her prime when she started the diary as First Lady. A glamorous and beautiful young mother of three children, she found comfort in the most ordinary things. Madame Nhu loved Hollywood movies and Russian novels. She liked to vacation with her children at the beach and in the mountains. She was afraid of getting old; she feared life passing her by. And in her scrawled pages, she revealed the misery of living as the wife of Nhu.

  Madame Nhu had expected their marital troubles to get better once they lived together in the palace. For the first time in their marriage, she could expect her husband to be home. He had worked hard to get his brother into the palace, and Madame Nhu felt she had proved her worth with her seat on the National Assembly and as Diem’s hostess. She expected everything else to flow from that: emotional support, physical love, that Nhu would quit smoking and be nice to her. When those things didn’t happen, there were violent quarrels and slammed doors. Madame Nhu was tired of being at Nhu’s beck and call, she said—because he never called. She couldn’t understand why at first. She was still young and beautiful. Nhu must be getting too old to enjoy it, she wrote. At first, she seemed to pity him; his lack of interest in sex was a casualty of aging. But in other entries, Madame Nhu expressed sorrow only for herself; she was stuck with an impotent old man and had to devise ways to divert herself from her otherwise all-consuming “rising desire.” There is biological proof that Nhu gave in to her at least once, because Madame Nhu got pregnant again in 1959, but that seems to have been an exception in her otherwise frustratingly lonely life. When Madame Nhu was seven months pregnant with their fourth child, she learned that Nhu was still capable of being sexually aroused after all, but by someone else.

  Madame Nhu wrote a detailed account of their argument when she confronted Nhu with his cheating. She raged against him, less for cheating than for doing it with someone so “vulgar” and “dirty.” Madame Nhu never wrote the girl’s name in the diary, referring to her only as that “creature.”

  Nhu defended himself and his lover: the girl was sweet and nice, and “not dirty—just poor,” and to her credit, she was nothing like his wife, because “you scare me,” he said. The ensuing fight was vicious, but it ended, days later, on a chilly note. Madame Nhu and her husband agreed that their marriage had been much better when they spent more time apart.

  Madame Nhu found herself lying awake in bed, blinking back tears. Who was this strange man sleeping next to her? Love like in the movies, love like she read about in the books, would never happen for her. To survive this marriage, she would have to stop
pretending it would ever be more than it was. Madame Nhu had thought she could bind Nhu to her with her youth, beauty, social graces, or even the fact that she was the mother of their children, but she was all but invisible to him in the palace. There was no real danger that he would leave her—he was too religious—and she wouldn’t leave him. His position behind the throne insured her security, and that of her children and extended family. Without him, what would she be?

  In context, Madame Nhu’s divorce ban seems sad. She didn’t want her older sister getting out of an unhappy marriage if she was going to be stuck in one herself. A story leaked that after Le Chi heard about the law she had driven to the palace with her wrists slit. Madame Nhu refused to see her; what was done was done, she said. Le Chi went running through the palace, dripping blood all over the tiled floors. Madame Nhu had the palace guards take her sister to the hospital and imprison her there.

  Madame Nhu didn’t write about the suicide attempt in her diary, but she did claim that she had done what she had to in order to protect her sister. Le Chi was disgracing the family and herself. The president of the country couldn’t be connected to such a scandal. Later, Madame Nhu’s sister would tell reporters her own version of the events. Five secret policemen dressed as hospital guards had been posted outside her door day and night. She had written a cablegram to her mother and convinced a sympathetic nurse to smuggle it out of the hospital. Her mother had arrived from the United States to rescue Le Chi and used the fact that she was Madame Nhu’s mother to overrule the First Lady’s wishes that Le Chi remain locked in her room. It seems the guards were sufficiently impressed, or maybe just confused enough, to let the patient slip out the hospital door.