Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Madame Nhu also organized another, more militaristic group. Her own daughter Le Thuy joined this reserve unit of women organized as a paramilitary unit. They were trained in gun handling and first aid and marched in parades dressed in stylish military garb that nipped in at the waist. Madame Nhu called the members of her women’s militia “my little darlings.”

  Madame Nhu’s inspiration for her “darlings” came from the legend of the Trung sisters, two young ladies who had led their country to victory over China nearly 2,000 years before in 40 AD. The Communists used the legend too—they found a class issue in the narrative—but for her purposes, Madame Nhu emphasized the strength of women and mothers in battle. In the story, sister Trung Trac avenges the murder of her husband by a Chinese commander. Her younger sister and a posse of noble women ride by her side. One of these ladies is so pregnant that she gives birth during battle and continues to fight with the infant strapped to her back. Madame Nhu hoped that the story would inspire the women of her day to learn the skills to defend their homes. She even commissioned a bronze statue of the Trungs, which would welcome boats into the Saigon port. But when it was erected, the Trungs’ faces and figures resembled Madame Nhu so much that rumors started to fly. Did Madame Nhu want the women of South Vietnam to honor the ancient heroines or their First Lady? The sculptor very possibly imposed the likeness himself in an attempt to flatter the First Lady, but the most popular interpretation was that she was using the women’s movement to serve her own ends—again.

  Most of the women who joined the Solidarity group were upper-class wives in Saigon. They joined to curry favor with Madame Nhu or to insure their husband’s civil service jobs. Madame Nhu still had no idea how to connect to the majority of Vietnamese women. She took people’s enthusiasm for her at face value. When Madame Nhu went into the countryside to check on the integration of her women’s groups into the villages, she was given flowers and greeted warmly. She told Elbridge Durbrow, the former American ambassador to Vietnam, how on her arrival the women in these villages all thanked her for the Family Code abolishing polygamy and divorce. “She had not realized how well known and popular she was.” Nor had she realized that the people might be anxious to tell the First Lady only what she wanted to hear.11

  The Diem regime consisted entirely of family members or yes-men. You were either with them or against them. Government ministers and National Assembly men might go around shaking their heads and privately admitting their displeasure, but in formal matters of state, no one dared speak up. Books—whether nonfiction, novels, or, most ludicrously, poetry—were subjected to censors. Government permits that could be revoked at any time kept the local press under control, and members of the foreign press had to submit their copy to censors. The repressions were from the Communist playbook, but that was the problem: South Vietnam was supposed to be a free country. Resentment built up, silent and corrosive.

  American intelligence sent from Saigon back to Washington catalogs a range of gossip linking Madame Nhu and her husband to corruption and influence peddling and accusing them of giving the president poor advice. As one diplomat remarked astutely, “It doesn’t make any bit of difference if none of the wrongs attributed to her are true, the serious thing is that people believe it.” The reports are skeptical of the influence Madame Nhu’s women’s organizations could really have on the country. They seem to consider them a vanity project.12

  Madame Nhu shrugged off the few criticisms of her work that reached her as unserious. She was impatient with the pettiness of the people around her and wrote out her frustrations in her diary: “Intelligence breeds ambition, but isn’t it terrible when one has to work with idiots to carry out great plans? God must have created those idiots to test me.” Obviously, these people couldn’t see the big picture, and Madame Nhu was moving too fast to stop and explain it to them.

  Still riding high, Madame Nhu presented her colleagues at the National Assembly in 1961 with another set of grand ideas about how to protect women, the family, and the country. These she named the Morality Laws. Madame Nhu banned dancing and beauty contests as distracting to a nation at war. She also outlawed gambling, fortune-telling, cockfighting, and prostitution. She made contraception illegal—“We are underpopulated,” she said—and also banned under-wire bras. It was time, Madame Nhu preached, to practice austerity. Never mind that the outline of her own longline bra showed through the thin silk of her ao dai.

  The Morality Laws didn’t accomplish much besides angering the people—who kept dancing anyway. Chubby Checker and the Isley Brothers made the twist so popular that those defying the dancing ban would go to private nightclubs known as “twisteasies.” The ban didn’t just apply to imported rock and roll; sentimental Vietnamese tunes took the hit too. This was especially distressing for Vietnamese army soldiers, who sang constantly out in the field, for camaraderie or for a sense of comfort in an otherwise scary place where they could run into an ambush or a booby trap at any moment. “Rainy Night on the Frontier” was a particular favorite: “When the sky is turning rose . . . the young man is thinking of the one at home. . . . And his heart is full of love.” Nonetheless, it was banned for not being anti-Communist enough.13

  The laws were patronizing, implying that Madame Nhu knew better than her people what they should and should not be doing, wearing, and listening to. The resulting outcry over the fussy laws obscured Madame Nhu’s general point—and it was a pretty good one. The dollars pouring into South Vietnam made Saigon seem like a party town instead of a city on a war footing. American aid to South Vietnam was supposed to create a middle class of businessmen and entrepreneurs who would support Diem. A comfortable lifestyle was the best defense against Communist instigation. But the commodities-import programs just subsidized an otherwise unaffordable lifestyle. The United States gave South Vietnam the goods to buy, helped the Vietnamese avert inflation, and paid for a high standard of living—plus most of the national expenditures. But it wasn’t just the Vietnamese who benefited. The Pearl of the Orient was turning into a playground for 12,000 American servicemen in country. The number of bars on the rue Catinat had multiplied. Pizza shops opened, and cabbies doubled their rates for the American clientele. Businesses started with the purpose of finding Vietnamese girls as escorts for the lonely American servicemen. Advertisements promised beauty, charm, and class. It cost a GI $2.50 to look through photos of Miss Lee’s girls and another $2.50 if he actually wanted to meet one in person at the agency. A real date could be arranged for under $8, plus the cost of actually taking the girl out. All of the Westernization provided more material for the Communist propaganda machine. If the South Vietnamese were trading their young girls for American weapons, it was easy to believe the country was also selling its soul.

  Madame Nhu defended her strict laws. “You know, in order to keep the Communists down, you must have a line and stick to it.” She was right. The popular conception of Americans “buying” South Vietnam would be a great recruiting tool for the Communists, and Madame Nhu was sharp enough to see the problem early. But she used a fire hose to douse a burning match. The people hated her for her imperious manner. Years of colonialism and war had already ground down her countrymen. Madame Nhu liked to talk about representing “her people,” but she barely knew them. Instead, her laws and rules were a bloated extension of her own personal morals and ubiquitous reminders of her power. Her lifestyle in the palace reeked of extravagance and wastefulness when most Vietnamese still lived in the countryside and struggled to get by. She was in no position to deny them a little fun.

  Madame Nhu’s husband was no more popular than she was. His position in the Diem administration was loosely defined as chief councilor to the president, but he was largely believed to be the man running the show. To illustrate Nhu’s immense power, correspondent David Halberstam tried to superimpose him onto an American context for the readers of the New York Times: “Imagine Diem as the President of the United States; in such a situation Nhu would have controlled al
l the country’s newspapers, headed the CIA, the FBI and the Congress, served as the Attorney General and Secretary of State, and written all the reports the President saw. What Diem knew of the outside world was what Nhu wanted him to know; what he saw he saw through Nhu’s eyes; the people he met he met only after Nhu had approved them.”

  Nhu created different organizations to carry out the political strategies he concocted. There was the Republican Youth, blue-uniform-wearing young men who were supposed to represent the political voice of South Vietnamese youth. Instead of expressing their own political opinions, they mostly parroted the sayings of their founder and leader, Ngo Dinh Nhu. The Republican Youth had 1,386,757 members at the end of 1962, nearly 300,000 down from two years before. The ranks had been purged of any potential Communist saboteurs; 21,061 of the young men had firearms, and they claimed to have killed 234 Communists. Out of their own ranks, they had lost nearly 500 to Communist assassinations and 2,413 more to kidnappings. Those statistics didn’t seem to dampen their enthusiasm for their leader. At Nhu’s reelection ceremony—he had just been voted national chief of the Republican Youth, again—the vice president of South Vietnam and members of the National Assembly stood by while Nhu received delegates of the youth corps. Although it rained throughout, Nhu stood, soaking wet, in his official uniform while one by one the youth swore on bended knee to carry out their leader’s orders and uphold the Republican Youth constitution, seeking nothing short of mobilizing the entire population of South Vietnam to struggle against the Communists.14

  Another of Nhu’s pet projects was the Strategic Hamlets Program. The British had used something like it in Malaya to fight Communist insurgents there. Peasants moved to fortified areas protected by the army, defended by layers of barbed wire, ammunition, and guns. Nhu tried to replicate the British strategy; in theory, strategic hamlets would cut off the Communist access to supplies and manpower. Nhu liked this plan so much because, again, it brought the political revolution out of Saigon and into the rural areas. More than a military tactic to defeat the Communists, it was a logical outgrowth of his social and economic revolution, as well as an opportunity to build a new political base, for Diem, in the countryside. But because of Nhu’s quick anger and favoritism, local officials falsely reported strategic hamlets where they didn’t in fact exist. They were not exactly cozy settings. The villages were surrounded by booby-trapped bamboo thickets, and two watchtowers looked out into the jungle or rice paddies. Between two fences of barbed wire stood rows of spears, their tips coated with human excrement to infect the wound of any would-be trespasser. But installing barbed wire was time-consuming, and the steel itself was a valuable commodity. Instead of the fourteen tons of barbed wire specified for the construction of each hamlet, ten tons of barbed wire were stretched to build 163 not-very-secure ones. The locals were usually not compensated for loss of land, and people were uprooted at bayonet point without warning from their homes to be relocated because Nhu’s strategy was to move into heavy Communist areas without advance notice, preparation, or consent. He made no allowances for the time needed to put other services in place that would have won people over, like security, medical help, and schools. Instead of a pattern of secure villages, Nhu had created what looked like a countryside dotted with small concentration camps.

  Most terrifying of all was Nhu’s Service for Political and Social Research of the Presidency (SEPES), which was basically an organization of informers supposed to function like a Vietnamese CIA. The Americans were generous with funding to help it get going. Soon, though, it earned a sinister reputation. SEPES was more than just an intelligence-gathering organization. It meted out justice through special police sections that employed harsh measures. Since it was hard to distinguish between hardcore revolutionaries and patriotically motivated collaborators, both groups were equally persecuted. The men SEPES rounded up could be beaten or given electric shocks to their genitals, but mostly they were just left to languish as political prisoners, making up two-thirds of the 30,000 inmates kept in the tiny nation’s fifty jails.15

  Nhu always made sure to defer to his brother, the president, in public, but the perception was increasingly that Nhu was in charge. That made him a target. On a hunting trip to Dalat, the Viet Cong attacked his convoy, and Nhu’s head bodyguard was killed in the ambush. The government tried to keep it quiet, presenting the incident as a simple car accident on a dark country road. They never did explain why the car was riddled with bullets.

  In an interview with reporter Marguerite Higgins, Nhu was candid about how much people disliked him, “I am hated, and so is my wife,” but he was resigned to his role. “Every government has to have the tough guy, the man who does the dirty and unpleasant work. Even Eisenhower had to have a Sherman Adams [Higgins’s footnote: Nhu took great pride in following closely the inner workings of the US government]. . . . In Vietnam, where violence and virulence are everywhere, I am the person who takes on the unpleasant jobs. It is I who am vilified, so that others may be spared.”16

  The popular discontent with Nhu and his lovely wife was well known to the Americans even before Johnson’s visit. So why did the vice president make all those rosy promises of American commitment to the regime? As Johnson would explain in an official debrief on the trip, it wasn’t that Diem and his family were especially deserving. Diem was complex, remote, and surrounded by people “less admirable and capable.” But the fact remained that there was simply no one else for America to use to hold the line against communism in Southeast Asia. When he was in Saigon, Johnson had gotten a little carried away in the excitement of the moment and heartily proclaimed Ngo Dinh Diem the Winston Churchill of Asia.

  “Did you really mean it?” asked journalist Stanley Karnow.

  “Shit,” Johnson drawled in response, “Diem’s the only boy we got out there.”

  Karnow couldn’t print that in the Saturday Evening Post, but New York Times reporter Homer Bigart had already coined a phrase for the American predicament in Vietnam: “Sink or Swim with Ngo Dinh Diem.” It was the first line of a little song Bigart had made up to be sung among friends in the Saigon press corps to the tune of “I’m an Old Cowhand”:

  We must sink or swim

  With Ngo Dinh Diem

  We will hear no phoo

  About Madame Nhu.

  Yippee-i-aye, i-aye, etc.17

  On the morning of February 11, 1962, two dissident pilots swooped low over the palace and dropped their bombs. Their target was the right wing of the palace, where the Nhu family resided. The Chinese nurse of the youngest child was crushed by a falling beam and killed. The Nhus’ oldest daughter, Le Thuy, kept a clear head in the chaos. The sixteen-year-old scrambled to save the two youngest children, aged two and not quite ten, when the main stairway collapsed in a fiery crumble.

  An entire section of the bedroom floor had given way just as Madame Nhu was running into the bathroom for a dressing gown to put on over her nightgown. She escaped a direct hit but fell two stories onto a pile of iron, wood, and gravel and came to in a heap of smoldering ashes. She would discover that she had three severe third-degree burns and deep lacerations on her arm, but strangely she felt no pain at all. She couldn’t feel anything except that it was difficult to move, difficult to pick her way through the mess that had landed on her. But she knew she had to get out of there. A valley of light beckoned; a soft wind blew the smoke away from her. She had never seen so clearly. She saw beyond the ruins. Beyond the long broken shadows of the palace a brightness was rising. Goodness and Mercy. Staggering toward her was a figure in the flames. It was her husband looking for her, crying out with joy when he found her because he had thought she was dead. All their marriage troubles set aside, they were united—at least for the moment. Madame Nhu fainted into her husband’s arms.

  Madame Nhu lost nearly everything she possessed in the fire. A few dresses that had been at the dressmaker’s survived, as did, I would later learn, a diary. Her trophies, the precious tiger skins, were a heap of b
urned fur. She had only memories left. But to her surprise, she was not despondent. Something new had opened in her, just as it had when she marched across the bridge in central Vietnam as a twenty-one-year-old woman with an infant in her arms. She would profess never to care about something as trivial as clothes or material possessions again.

  The photographs of the women among the tiger skins in Madame Nhu’s palace bedroom were made all the more poignant by the coming calamity that would transform the palace into a scene of wreckage.

  I pasted each picture carefully into an album, one photograph per page and each page protected by a thin wisp of vellum. The album I had chosen was red, for luck of course. I sent it packed in Styrofoam peanuts by priority mail. In response, she gushed and fawned and praised me. My fulfillment of her challenge was surely a sign of something divine. But she wasn’t quite ready yet, she said, to make good on her promise of handing over the memoir. I should be patient, she chided.

  Of course, I should have known better.

  FIGURE 1. Portrait of Tran Thi Le Xuan as a bride circa 1943

  FIGURE 2. Portrait of Ngo Dinh Nhu circa 1963

  FIGURE 3. Portrait of Tran Thi Le Chi, Madame Nhu’s sister

  FIGURE 4. The South Vietnamese presidential family

  FIGURE 5. Ngo Dinh Nhu and wife, Tran Thi Le Xuan

  FIGURE 6. Madame Nhu playing with two-year-old daughter Le Quyen

  FIGURE 7. Portrait of daughter Le Thuy circa 1963

  FIGURE 8. Malcolm Browne, Saigon correspondent, in front of his photo

  FIGURE 9. Madame Nhu showing Lady Bird Johnson and Mrs. Jean Kennedy Smith her collection of tiger skins

  FIGURE 10. Madame Nhu talking to the press at the airport as she is leaving Vietnam in 1963