Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Whatever the facts behind the story, the Saigon rumor mill was working overtime but still missed the signs of an unhappy marriage inside the palace. Instead people speculated about whether Le Chi was in jail or in a hospital? Had Madame Chuong flown back from Washington to smuggle her oldest daughter out of the country? Had Madame Nhu really told her sister, whose wrists were still covered in bandages, “I have only one regret—that you didn’t succeed at death”?

  The palace tried to make it all go away. Despite having been a good advisor in Diem’s inner circle, Le Chi’s husband was also sent away, to Paris. Etienne Oggeri would publish a memoir years later claiming that Madame Nhu had ordered someone to inject him with the cholera virus. Maybe that was what Madame Nhu meant when she wrote that she did what she had to do.

  Oggeri spent some time in a South Vietnamese prison before being extradited back to France, and from there he followed Madame Nhu’s sister to the United States. In 1963, President Diem would still be complaining about Le Chi; he feared she was “acting like a prostitute in Washington,” “scandalizing Georgetown,” and “even jumping on priests.” But he was ignorant of her genuine love. Le Chi married her Frenchman, and despite the horrible end that befell the rest of her family, she and her husband were still living together contentedly in North Carolina at the time of this writing.14

  With Chau shipped off to Paris and Le Chi nursing her wounds in America, the divorce scandal eventually simmered down, and the Family Code stayed in place. In the eyes of the law, women in South Vietnam had the same rights as men. Wives had parity with their husbands, fathers, and brothers. But not in the palace. Madame Nhu was still deeply unhappy. The rooms were loud—people were constantly running in and out, and the high ceilings and grand scale amplified noises. There was little peace inside, but for Madame Nhu, stepping outside in Saigon was increasingly difficult. She couldn’t just throw on a bathing suit and go for a swim at the Cercle Sportif with the other political wives; she couldn’t play cards or gossip with her friends.

  Edward Lansdale, the American intelligence officer who developed such a good relationship with Diem and Nhu, found Madame Nhu’s situation in the palace tragic:

  She knew all of the social graces of a hostess in a household of wealth and culture so that her training was to be the gracious lady who invites people and knew how to make conversation at the dinner table, could entertain at the grand piano and live a life of quiet charm. She married a man who looked as though this was going to be his life. . . . She would come in to [a room in the palace where people were gathered and] ask if anybody would like to hear her play the piano in the salon. Her husband was busy with his brother, there was some terrible problem taking place, there might be military types come running in with their problems and there might be an alarm that the palace was about to be bombed or something very unladylike taking place, something very unsocial. And the men would say no, just leave us alone now. So she couldn’t act her true role that she was trained for in life.15

  It was easier for Madame Nhu when she was away from the palace altogether. Whenever she could, she escaped back to the mountains in Dalat and dreamed of the jewel of a house she would build there, a place where she could swim in her own pool, walk in her own forests, take refuge, and find solitude when she needed it. While that dream was still under construction and years away, Madame Nhu made use of a French villa by the sea in Nha Trang. The children could run without shoes on the beach, play in the waves, and learn how to fish. When they ran in from their fun to give their mother a hug, she inhaled their scent. They smelled of sea brine and sweat and something sweet, maybe the pineapples on the beach, or maybe it was just the smell of childhood. It was something their lives in Saigon didn’t let them taste very often.

  The one thing that Madame Nhu and her husband could agree on was their shared concern for the children. Growing up in the palace, “with too many servants and no playmates,” was an odd childhood, one they worried would have lasting effects.16

  Le Thuy was bright but so serious. It made her seem wiser, sadder, than a thirteen-year-old girl should be. Her brothers were a puzzle. Trac was withdrawn and sullen at school; at home he pinched his little brother Quynh and made him cry. But Quynh, Madame Nhu remarked, stayed sweet, chasing after his brother and begging for attention, even if it came in the form of a physical punishment. She tried to talk to the boys, tried to discipline Trac, and tried to get Quynh to stick up for himself, but what the boys needed was more time with their father.

  They didn’t even know they were missing him. Nhu had been gone much of the time after the boys were born in Dalat. He was away again when the family first lived in Saigon. And he was always absent now, traveling in the countryside, visiting his brothers, or working in his office. For relaxation, he went away again—to hunt or to visit his lover, the “creature.” Soon there would be another baby, a fourth child, to care for and worry about. A little part of Madame Nhu hoped that this last child, born at such a momentous time in their nation’s history—and in their family’s history—might change things. And maybe once this pregnancy was done, Madame Nhu would try a different way to attract her husband’s attention, one that relied less on her beauty than her brains.

  In July 1959, Madame Nhu gave birth to her last child. It was another girl, and this one, Le Quyen, looked very much like her father. They had the same downward tilt of the eyes and the same off-center smile. Madame Nhu kept her youngest daughter dressed in shorts and styled in a pageboy haircut. The little tomboy outfits were certainly easier to manage than frilly dresses and hair bows, and they emphasized the child’s resemblance to her father. Nhu still didn’t seem to notice. Most nights, he simply said, “I have to work,” and pushed his chair away from the dinner table, leaving his chopsticks leaning against the rim of his rice bowl above the half-eaten morsels.

  Nhu would descend one level on the spiral staircase and spend hours in his office with the door closed. It was packed floor to ceiling with books and papers. Sometimes he would confer with his brother, but Nhu didn’t go down there just to work—he went to smoke cigarettes. Madame Nhu had been after him to quit for years. She hated the smell of stale smoke. It fouled his breath, his hair, and the air around him. Even his fingers were stained yellow. She had tried soft encouragement, then gentle teasing. When they moved into the palace, she had put her tiny foot down. The palace was big enough that he could find somewhere else to indulge his habit. She would not let him smoke upstairs in their private living quarters. Nhu complied but didn’t quit. He snuck around just enough so that Madame Nhu couldn’t very well be angry with him for breaking her rules, but he still made it clear that her rules were not going to change his habits. At the end of his evenings in the office, Nhu would tip the full ashtray into an envelope and hand it to the guards to get rid of. There wasn’t much Madame Nhu could do about it.

  It was 3 a.m. on November 11, 1960, when distant pops of artillery woke Madame Nhu up. The sound was strangely celebratory, like fire-works or champagne corks, but that was because it was still far away. Three hours later, the sharp crack of rifle fire shredded the illusion that this was anything but deadly serious. Then word came through to the palace that two of the Ngo nephews, their sister’s sons, had been shot dead. The streets just outside the gates were chaos. Madame Nhu took the children and hid in the basement of the palace.

  Diem and Nhu were apprised of the situation. Three battalions of on-duty paratroopers had gone rogue, led by a small group of military men and civilians who had grown deeply resentful of the regime. They were tired of the nepotism. They were sick of the ruling family’s always distrusting them. The paratroopers had already seized key government centers in Saigon and were now planning to attack the palace.

  The brothers were badly shaken. They conferred in Diem’s office, still wearing their pajamas. Only the South Vietnamese navy in Saigon had stayed loyal; many of the key military points were in rebel hands. Twenty-eight civilians had already been killed. A group of most
ly young men and boys gathered outside the gates at daybreak. They had no particular sympathy for either side; they were simply curious about what was going on and who would win. The police were staying neutral too, just redirecting the eerily normal traffic out of the line of fire. Most infuriating to the brothers under siege was the lack of response on the United States’ part. Allies were not supposed to be neutral. Diem and Nhu were considering backing down.

  Periodically, one of the servants would dash upstairs for an update, coming back to where Madame Nhu and the children huddled in the basement to report on the current situation. The president was now taking a meeting with General Nguyen Khanh, they said. Madame Nhu’s eyes flashed. She wondered whose side he was on that night. Madame Nhu knew Khanh far too well to trust him. His mother had run a nightclub in Dalat that catered to the French. His father had been a wealthy landowner in the south whose mistress was a well-known singer and actress. Khanh had joined up with the Viet Minh before switching sides to the French, probably because there were more perks to being a soldier in the French army. He went to a military academy in France and came back to fight on the French side during the First Indochina War. He liked to boast that he had served under the famous French general Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, who had worn uniforms tailored by Lanvin, a prominent Parisian fashion designer, to battle. Some of the French general’s grandiosity had rubbed off: Khanh grew a goatee and swaggered around Saigon like a bandy-legged rooster circling the henhouse. It had been nearly a decade since Khanh had accompanied Madame Nhu and Bao Dai on their afternoon picnics in Dalat. Madame Nhu recalled that on their first outing together, Khanh had paid close attention to what she selected from the picnic basket and quizzed her on the activities she enjoyed. The next time they were together, he brought the things that Madame Nhu had liked best and made a show of entertaining her. Instead of considering those touches endearing, Madame Nhu had found Khanh conniving.

  That Khanh would show up at the palace in the middle of a firefight made Madame Nhu suspicious. She very much doubted he would risk harm to his own precious hide. He must have the coup plotters’ protection, she reasoned. So Madame Nhu entrusted the children’s care to the Chinese nurse hiding with them in the basement and made her way alone through the quiet halls in search of Nhu.

  In the rising light of the morning, she saw a dead deer on the palace lawn. It had been shot through the head and somehow landed flat on its belly, its four legs sprawling horribly akimbo. The sight of death so close to the palace was jarring, much more so than all the abstract warnings of danger delivered to her while she was cowering in the basement. The dead animal triggered a primal instinct, which clicked into place as soon as she found her husband and Diem in the office on the first floor, contemplating their next move.

  Diem had already started negotiating terms with the coup plotters. He had promised them a new and different government, and by the time Madame Nhu arrived in his office, he had even gone on the radio to proclaim it. “The president is much too softhearted,” she realized; someone was going to have to take charge. Conciliation was a sign of weakness. Just like when Diem had stood strong in the face of the Binh Xuyen mobsters, he needed to stand firm now.

  Madame Nhu strode over to Diem. She did not hide her frustration. In later interviews, she would say that when the president behaved like a child, she wanted to slap him. In her diary, she accused Diem of acting like a baby. She also wrote, “I am disgusted with him; he has no confidence in himself and has lowered himself by talking with the rebels.” One published account of the confrontation that morning maintains that Madame Nhu actually did slap the president, hard and across the face, before grabbing him by his sloping shoulders and shaking him in a fury. But that sounds like the kind of story that was embroidered on its way through the café gossip circuit before it landed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch three years later.

  Even if Madame Nhu didn’t slap Diem, her words had a lasting impact. “Keep only the necessary men here to defend the palace,” she instructed. “Send the rest of them to retake the radio.”

  The military units that had remained loyal to Diem were moving in as fast as they could from their countryside positions, but they calculated that it would still take twelve hours to mount a full counterattack on the coup plotters. “What is the state of mind there?” a loyal soldier radioed in to ask the captain in charge of palace security.

  “Mrs. Nhu is very tough,” the captain answered. “She wants to fight even if she dies. Mr. Nhu is quiet. He doesn’t seem to know what to do.”17

  But Nhu figured it out quickly enough and convinced the president that his wife was right. They needed to hold firm against the rebels. The brothers followed Madame Nhu’s instructions to the letter. A few hours later, just as Madame Nhu had predicted, Diem’s men retook the key city centers. The unsuspecting rebels, caught off guard as they celebrated the president’s announced plans to capitulate, were crushed.

  Madame Nhu had saved the brothers at a crucial moment. Every time Diem received congratulations, he nodded at his sister-in-law and graciously acknowledged her: “C’est grâce à madame.”

  Looking around her at the jumble of papers cascading off the desk and at the wall of books cluttering her husband’s office, Madame Nhu realized that she did have a place in this regime. The brothers’ expressions of gratitude confirmed it. She was much more than just a pretty face in the palace. Without her, the Ngo brothers were too unworldly, too intellectual and removed from reality. They were the insecure ones after all. It would fall to her, she felt, to be the steel in the spike of the regime. It was the strangest conviction, but she was sure of it. “Up until then,” she told New York Times journalist David Halberstam in 1963, “they had not taken me that seriously. But then they began to notice me.”18

  CHAPTER 10

  Tiger Skins

  AT THE BEGINNING, I HAD BEEN a little starstruck when talking to Madame Nhu. She had been so powerful, so notorious, and so glamorous. It took nearly two years of telephone conversations for me to get up the courage to prod for something more. I was interested in the quotidian details that had slipped through the cracks. In all the press coverage of the powerful woman she had once been, there wasn’t much about life in the palace, what she ate and what she wore. I hoped these details would tell me something more about the woman behind the glossy photographs and the Dragon Lady image. But for Madame Nhu, those were the hardest to recall. It had been almost half a century ago and half a world away. Memories were all Madame Nhu had left, but even those were starting to fade. When I urged her to remember the particulars of life in Independence Palace, Madame Nhu’s voice thinned out on the line, and I had to press the phone hard against my head, squishing my ear to catch her words. She sounded a million miles away. “I can’t seem to remember how the room looked—I mean I can’t remember it exactly . . .”

  She could tell me that she usually woke at 7:30 a.m., took a light breakfast of tea and rice or bread, then dressed for the day. She devoted the rest of the morning to work. If she wasn’t drafting letters with her secretary in her study, she was out visiting her constituents, but she was almost always back by noon. Lunch was the main meal of the day, eaten under the massive chandeliers with linens and formal china. Although the president usually ate simple meals in his office, when there were guests, or once or twice a week on his own, he might dine more formally with his brother and sister-in-law in their dining room on the second floor. Semiofficial evenings were also hosted in the Nhus’ dining room; it was spacious and elegant but more personal, without the ceremonial pomp of the official presidential dining room on the first floor. Madame Nhu wished the family’s five rooms in the palace were just a little bigger. They had a spacious parlor, two large bedrooms, and two other sitting rooms with balconies, but Madame Nhu wanted a kitchen a little closer. By the time the food made it to the dining room from the kitchen on the first floor at the back of the palace, it was cold.

  After lunch, Madame Nhu usually went to lie do
wn in her bedroom. It was too mind-numbingly hot to do anything else. This was the time of day when she was most nostalgic for the seasons in Hanoi. She missed the lakes and wide boulevards and having a place to stroll. In Saigon, she felt like she stared from behind the palace’s massive gates at life passing her by. She thought about how different things would be if she were just living a normal life. What would she do if she weren’t trapped? Madame Nhu imagined that she would be content to live in a small house as long as it had a big garden for the children to play in; she would cook simple meals for her family and spend her days writing children’s stories.

  In response to her daydream, I suppose I must have clucked sympathetically into the telephone as she was speaking. But the eighty-three-year-old wasn’t after sympathy. Her life as First Lady in the palace might not have been the one she would have chosen, but it was the life chosen for her by God. As such, she required not compassion but determination. “How else can I explain my powerful drive? My agenda to change the lives of women? I, myself, would have been content with a peaceful life! I have told you that over and over. But God had different plans for me. It was my duty to see it through.”

  Madame Nhu had another test for me. “I want to see it again. If you can help me, find pictures of my rooms in the palace for me, then you really are sent by God.” The mission was perfectly clear: find photographs of the rooms circa 1961. Get them to Madame Nhu, make an old lady happy, and get her memoirs. Easy enough. Except Madame Nhu’s quarters had taken a direct hit when Independence Palace had been destroyed in the bombing of 1962. Anything retrieved from the rubble was lost again eighteen months later.

  “I never showed my bedroom to anyone. No visitors were ever allowed in my private quarters.” Madame Nhu let a wry laugh escape. “But there was one time, I really wanted to make an impression on my guests. It was so spontaneous for me.”