Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  The guests that she had wanted to impress so badly had been part of the American vice presidential delegation. Lyndon Johnson and a diplomatic entourage had come to South Vietnam in May 1961.

  “Ooh, they were so surprised!” Madame Nhu’s voice brightened recalling the moment the vice president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Mrs. Jean Smith, President Kennedy’s sister, had walked into the room.

  “When I opened the door to my room, they could see a long row of tiger skins [laid out on the floor]. The paws all lined up. The heads attached.” It sounded pretty gruesome to me, but she breathed in deeply, as if recalling the smell of the orange blossoms at Tet instead of taxidermy specimens.

  I understood a moment later, when she continued, “If I had the photographs, I would at least have something of my husband. He was such a skilled hunter. Magnificent. He killed the most beautiful beasts, and every one of his prizes, he turned over to me.”

  The irony of Madame Nhu’s lost tiger skins didn’t escape me. I knew that while the Americans had called her the Dragon Lady, those Vietnamese who had dared speak out against Madame Nhu referred to her instead as the Tiger Lady—out of cultural respect for the dragon.

  I wonder now at all my continued enthusiasm for her. After all, she had stood me up—literally, at the church, and figuratively. She continued to dangle the promise of her memoirs in front of me, but I kept running into doubts that they existed outside her imagination. She had been referring to these so-called memoirs since 1963. She said she had written so many hundreds of pages that papers were collected all over her apartment, even under the couch. Why on earth should I believe that now, nearly fifty years later, she was finally ready to gather them together into a manuscript? When I tried to press her, she snapped at me. It was a quick flick of the sharp tongue I had heard so much about. “You should not speak about what you don’t understand,” she had chided, and it stung. But the truth was, I knew that if I didn’t play along, I would never have anything to show. And her desire to have something of her husband again, I have to say, tugged at my heart strings, just as she had guessed it might.

  Madame Nhu’s challenge turned out to be fairly easy. After a couple of e-mails and telephone calls to the archivists at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, I got what I was looking for.

  When I opened the attachments on my computer, my breath caught in my throat. The sepia-toned photos brought a destroyed world back to life.

  Four women stand in what is clearly a bedroom, a satiny upholstered creampuff of a place with endless curtains hanging over windows and around doorways. Elaborate moldings and parquet floors finalize the palace feel. And there they are: a row of gaping-mouthed tiger hides laid out end to end, running the length of the room right to the foot of the bed. What did it feel like to touch bare feet to them? Were their hides coarse and wiry? I puzzled over how Madame Nhu remembered to avoid tripping over ears, eyes, and teeth when she got out of bed in the morning.

  I recognized three of the women in the photograph easily, and I assumed the fourth must be the ambassador’s wife or the wife of another highly placed American official. The vice president’s wife, Lady Bird Johnson, stands backed up against the edge of the bed, her white pumps planted squarely on the parquet, as if she has taken care to walk around the dead beasts instead of across them. Nicely dressed for a palace visit in a sleeveless sheath and heels, Lady Bird smiles gamely for the camera, but she looks just a little wilted by the heat. Her gloves are off, her hat is askew, and her curls droop in the humidity. She looks right into the camera, her eyebrows hitched in surprise.

  Madame Nhu seems much more at ease. Wearing a long-sleeved ao dai with a scooped neckline instead of the mandarin collar, she welcomes her guests into the draped room with an open palm. In the next picture, she stands with her hips squared toward the camera, her shoulders thrown back. She seems to possess a ballet dancer’s physical awareness. Madame Nhu looks like she might be ready to smile—at least her chin is lifted in the camera’s direction. The strength of her presence distracted me from noticing her size compared to the Americans until much later. She was tiny. Without her heels and elaborate beehive, she might not have made it to Lady Bird’s shoulder.

  President Kennedy’s sister, Jean Smith, has the same square jaw as her brother. She is wearing a full-skirted gingham dress and pearls, and she seems unable to tear her eyes from the tiger hides surrounding her feet—not even to look up for a photograph—as though afraid they might spring to life and attack. Her elbows tucked tightly to her body, one arm holds onto the other, like a security belt, her knees pressed together as though they might buckle otherwise.

  Jean Smith was the youngest of the Kennedy siblings. Her husband, Stephen, was the president’s political advisor and finance chairman, but Jean had pitched in her time and energy for Jack too. She worked tirelessly on the campaign, hosting tea parties and knocking on doors. After the election, President Kennedy would inscribe a photo to his youngest sister, thanking her for all her hard work. Jean had been thrilled, honored, she said, to have her hard work recognized—until she found out that all her sisters and her brothers’ wives had gotten the same.1

  Madame Nhu, the glamorous Asian dynamo, and Mrs. Jean Smith, the all-American woman, had more in common than could be supposed from a casual glance at the picture of them standing together. Both women were carried along by their families’ strong ties to politics. Both had husbands who worked for family; both families were Catholic and anti-Communist and committed to doing the “right” thing. Both women were charming and savvy, and both professed a seriousness of purpose. It seemed like there should have been a natural affinity, not only between the women but between the newly inaugurated Kennedy administration in Washington and the Diem regime in Saigon.

  President Kennedy himself had announced Johnson’s trip to Southeast Asia, calling it a “fact-finding mission.” There were conflicting reports about what was actually happening in South Vietnam. What was there to show for the millions of aid dollars the United States had poured into the tiny country since 1954? Were these Ngo brothers helping the fight against communism as they claimed, or were they hindering it? The last year had seen an uptick in violence and Communist activity, which may have been why Vice President Johnson didn’t want to go. “Mr. President,” Johnson had said, “I don’t want to embarrass you by getting my head blown off in Saigon.”2

  Of course, no harm came to anyone in Johnson’s entourage in South Vietnam. The Diem regime took good care of the Americans, hosting them in the guesthouse on the palace grounds. That first night in Saigon, the Johnsons, the Smiths, and Kennedy’s new ambassador to South Vietnam, Frederick Nolting and his wife, enjoyed a fine French dinner in the rooftop restaurant of the Caravelle Hotel.3 As they looked out over their wineglasses at the city’s twinkling lights, the view convinced them that, indeed, this was a charming place worth saving from the Reds. Graceful women drifted under the acacias along wide tree-lined streets; the happy sounds of children frolicking in the square floated up to them on the cool evening breeze. But there was also a distinct tension in the air, an awareness of imminent danger, of Communists lurking in the shadows. Intelligence reports had confirmed that many of the people who had fought with the Viet Minh during the war against the French and had stayed in the South were now determined to unify the country under one leadership: Hanoi’s. The Communists were having more success than anyone was comfortable admitting.

  The Communists were said to control about one-third of the southern countryside. They had created bases in the delta and the highlands; the same Viet Minh weapons used against the French, wrapped in plastic and buried in the rice paddies for nearly fifteen years, were dug out and repurposed. Le Duan, South Vietnam’s Communist chief, was in charge of organizing the old fighters into new squads. He had an impressive revolutionary pedigree, having spent seven years in French jails before meeting up with Ho Chi Minh in China in the 1940s. So although a southerner, Le Duan had the ear
of his comrades in Hanoi. He was able to plead his fellow southerners’ case: Our people are suffering under Diem and ready to fight. They must rise up. If we do not lead them, they will form their own resistance, and we will become irrelevant. The Politburo agreed with Le Duan and resolved to fight a military struggle in the south in addition to its political efforts. In 1959, a secret mission was authorized to travel down the Truong Son Route to bring arms and other supplies for waging war. The West would come to call the treacherous jungle path that snaked down the western edge of the country the Ho Chi Minh Trail.4

  A year later, the Communist Party Congress in Hanoi committed itself to the military struggle even further. In December 1960, Hanoi formed the National Liberation Front (NLF), the proper name for the southern Communist effort to reunify the country, though the Americans would simply call them the Viet Cong. Regardless of their name, the downfall of the Diem regime was their number one goal. Hanoi had authorized them to overthrow the South Vietnamese president and his “colonial master,” the United States, by whatever means necessary. By the time of the Johnsons’ visit to Saigon, Communists were killing an average of five to eight hundred South Vietnamese army soldiers, government workers, and civilians a month. The figures were kept secret.

  The grim numbers coming out of Vietnam were manipulated for two reasons, and both had to do with politics. On the American side, the US ambassador to Vietnam, Frederick Nolting, and the senior military commander, General Paul Harkins, were concerned that negative evaluations might undermine President Kennedy’s resolve to keep American aid money and advisors flowing to Vietnam. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara went on a two-day fact-finding mission around the country, Nolting and Harkins prohibited their staffs from telling him anything that might give less than a favorable impression. Evasions were a slippery slope leading to the kind of outright manipulations that later took place, such as basing enemy casualty counts on intuition and peeling red stickers off a map that were supposed to indicate where the Communists had a foothold when it looked like there were “too many.” American newsmen, while not censored outright, were made aware of US guidelines when it came to filing “undesirable dispatches.” Specific numbers were to be avoided, as were indications of tactical strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who violated those ground rules would not be taken on missions anymore.5

  The other reason to keep any bad numbers quiet was that President Diem, personally, would be mad. After the 1960 coup attempt, Diem had issued a verbal order to his army commanders not to conduct any operations that might incur serious casualties. The president had concluded that the dissatisfied army paratroopers behind the coup attempt had been angry with the regime for casualties suffered on offensive operations. Diem couldn’t, or wouldn’t, see that the regime’s nepotism, Catholic bias, and repression of freedoms were the real triggers generating resentment. Diem didn’t want another coup, so he did not want the army to suffer losses.

  American advisors to the South Vietnamese army would eventually find out that orders from the very highest levels “not to fight” were completely undermining their advice to engage the Viet Cong, but that didn’t stop them from passing fake body counts along to Washington. Communist losses were inflated, South Vietnamese casualties were downplayed, and no warnings on the iffy numbers were attached. Those numbers were translated into policy, and the policy was that the war was going well.6

  The NLF goal—to smash the southern regime—was a top-down directive from Hanoi that was to be carried out from the ground up. The assault was to begin “in the villages . . . work its way up through the district and then provincial governmental levels until at last there would be an attack on the central government itself.” The NLF Central Committee issued specific orders about what to target to maximize the impact of sporadic and random terrorist assaults: communication centers, warehouses, airports, and US offices were “particularly” singled out.

  The early victims of the NLF terror campaign were from rural areas: Long An, Tay Ninh, An Xuyen, and An Giang provinces. Terror activities included a Buddhist temple sacked, a hamlet school burned and two teachers forced at gunpoint to watch the execution of local men, and a parish priest killed when a bullet smashed through his windshield; a farmer who ignored Viet Cong orders to turn his rice field over to another farmer was taken into a flooded paddy and shot. In December 1960, the violence moved closer to the city when the kitchen at the Saigon Golf Club was dynamited, killing one worker and injuring two cooks.7

  The NLF terrorists were so successful because they were making ingenious use of common materials. For example, the standard bicycle bomb was deadly, effective, and nearly impossible to detect until it was too late. The entire bike frame was filled with explosives; thin wires attached to blasting caps inside the frame led out past the brake cables, which helped camouflage them, and connected to an electric headlamp fitted with a kind of stopwatch. It took only a small flashlight-battery-powered mechanism to blow the bicycle apart and unleash its terrible destructive power in the middle of a busy street. The Viet Cong called their two-wheeled variation on the Trojan horse the “iron horse.” They recruited Vietnamese youth as terrorists—the optimum age was about eighteen, but boys as young as thirteen or fourteen were perfect “city saboteurs,” or grenade throwers. Restaurants and hotels began to install steel grilles in front of the verandahs; people were afraid to sit on patios, go to movie theaters, or even visit the market.8

  On March 22, 1961, only a little over a month before the Johnson trip to Saigon, a truck carrying twenty young girls was blasted off a desolate patch of road in the Rung Sat forest. The girls were on their way home to Phuoc Tuy province from Saigon, where they had just spent the afternoon watching the First Lady, Madame Nhu, make a rousing speech praising Vietnamese women on Hai Ba Trung Day. The celebration commemorated the Trung sisters, ancient Vietnamese heroines who had fought off the Chinese. Madame Nhu held the sisters up as role models for the brave women of modern South Vietnam. For these girls, however, the day ended in tragedy. In the moments after their truck hit the planted land mine, a volley of gunfire rained down. The driver managed to get the lumbering truck in gear and made it to the nearest military outpost, but two girls were already dead.

  The next week, Madame Nhu visited the hospital in Cholon where four of the young victims of the attack were recovering. One had lost an eye, another a leg, and one woman was crippled from a spinal injury. Madame Nhu also went to see the site of the explosion and talked to the girls who had survived the ambush uninjured. In the hamlet of Ti Giay, home of twenty-three-year-old Nguyen Thi Bang, Madame Nhu placed a wreath on the freshly dug grave and expressed her sorrow to the murdered girl’s mother and sister. At the gravesite of Tang Thi Ut, Madame Nhu looked at the victim’s fiancé and, her voice breaking with emotion, promised that this “inhuman and cowardly outrage perpetrated by the Viet Cong” would not go unavenged.9

  The day after his arrival, Vice President Johnson met with President Diem in the palace office, where they talked about the specifics of US aid. While Johnson formally presented his gift—a set of American Heritage hardback books on US history—and his credentials, the wives took a tour of the palace with Madame Nhu to see the tiger skins. The picture of the meeting in the office downstairs shows Johnson bending deeply at the waist to meet Diem. After their meeting, the American vice president laid out an eight-point program that included more arms and more money. Later that afternoon, Johnson, ever the gregarious Texan, waded into the streets of Saigon to mingle with the South Vietnamese people. Reporter Stanley Karnow remarked that Johnson was shaking hands and smiling like he was “endorsing county sheriffs in a Texas election campaign,” but in a sense, that was his job. Johnson had been assigned to reassure the South Vietnamese that the United States would continue to provide arms and money to improve social conditions and fight communism.10

  Madame Nhu was seated in a place of honor next to the vice president, on his right, at the official luncheon. They had met only
briefly on the day of his arrival. Madame Nhu had been at the airport, along with other officials’ wives, to greet the delegation. Upon deplaning, the vice president strode toward her, crossing over the receiving line to shake her hand. His manners tickled Madame Nhu again at lunch. She wasn’t used to men waiting for her to sit before they took their own seat, any more than she was used to being addressed ahead of men like the president and her husband. But Madame Nhu liked Johnson’s gallantry even if she didn’t quite know what to make of it. Over lunch, he insisted that she agree to visit his ranch in Texas. She giggled nervously, covering her mouth with her napkin, but he insisted so much that she finally agreed to come—“when you become president,” she promised. After that, Johnson took Madame Nhu’s left hand in his huge paw and, in front of his wife and a table of diplomats, pulled her out to the balcony. “Show me the sights,” he drawled. She’d have had to scramble to match his giant Texas steps, but the vice president didn’t seem to mind. He had smiled at her for all present at the official reception to see.

  In May 1961, Madame Nhu was surer of herself than she had ever been. Her ambitious project to reshape society was taking hold, with women as the agents of change. The work was more than gratifying, she had written hastily in her journal that January; she hadn’t realized she was so smart! Madame Nhu had come up with the idea for a Women’s Solidarity Movement the summer before. It would be a group of civil servants dedicated to helping the families of Vietnam’s armed forces. They might bring food to someone in the hospital or deliver medicine to rural families; they also held blood drives and wrote encouraging letters to soldiers at the front. The idea was to give women a purpose outside the home, a way to participate in society more fully and realize how important they were to the building of this new country.