Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  FIGURE 11. Barefooted Vietnamese youth about to come down on the head of the Trung sister statue

  CHAPTER 11

  Young Turks and Old Hacks

  “DAVID HALBERSTAM died yesterday,” I mentioned carefully to Madame Nhu in April 2007. “It was a car crash.” I wasn’t sure how closely she kept watch on current events. I was even less sure how she might react to hearing the name of the New York Times reporter and prolific author, whom she had known in Saigon all those years ago.

  His obituary had run in the morning paper:

  Tall, square-jawed and graced with an imposing voice so deep that it seemed to begin at his ankles, Mr. Halberstam came fully into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for the New York Times.

  His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies.1

  “Mmmm, The Best and the Brightest,” she said, surprising me by immediately calling up the name of his 1972 book. “No, I did not know he had died. Too bad.”

  She didn’t sound very sad, but that wasn’t surprising. From what I knew of Halberstam’s reporting, he hadn’t liked Madame Nhu, and the feeling had been mutual. He had called her “proud and vain” and accused her of “delving into men’s politics with sharp and ill-concealed arrogance.” In his 1964 book Making of a Quagmire, Halberstam had said of Madame Nhu, “To me, she always resembled an Ian Fleming character come to life: the antigoddess, the beautiful but diabolic sex-dictatress who masterminds some secret apparatus that James Bond is out to destroy.”2 He had written so critically about Madame Nhu’s thirst for political power that she was said to have told someone in 1963, “Halberstam should be barbecued, and I would be glad to supply the fluid and the match.”

  Maybe her feelings had mellowed over forty-four years, or maybe her memory had softened. But Madame Nhu’s response to David Halberstam’s untimely death forty-four years later shocked me with how fondly she recalled him. “He was intelligent, one of the rare ones who told the truth.”

  Indeed, he had, both in The Best and the Brightest, which Madame Nhu had mentioned, and in the astute, on-the-ground reporting that won him a 1964 Pulitzer Prize. Halberstam’s truths had made the US government uncomfortable and the military brass mad. He had been one of the first to point out that the war in Vietnam was not going well. He showed how, time and time again, the United States was bungling its mission in Southeast Asia. The academic and intellectual “whiz kids” in the Kennedy administration had arrogantly imposed policies that defied common sense. To Madame Nhu, it must have been at least a little vindicating to see the men who brought her family down tarnished by Halberstam’s reporting.

  But Halberstam had also loudly, and repeatedly, blamed the Ngo family for the American failure in Vietnam. His reporting was read very carefully in Washington. President Kennedy himself asked the CIA to study every story the young journalist wrote, and each of those CIA reports generated pages upon single-spaced pages of analysis. The CIA concluded that the young journalist was more accurately informed about the facts on the ground in South Vietnam than most of the military “advisors.” He was right when he said that the Reds were making gains and right again in stating that the Communist guerrillas were well armed and “had the run of the delta.”3

  The CIA came to another important conclusion about Halberstam’s reporting. His “invariably pessimistic” stories were contributing directly to a political crisis in South Vietnam. The CIA was holding David Halberstam responsible for the Ngo regime’s crack-up. His reporting, they said, was contributing to its downfall. Had Madame Nhu ever known that little detail?4

  Halberstam and the other young men of the press corps in Saigon believed in the American mission in South Vietnam. They supported the domino theory so wholeheartedly that when they saw their government’s policies being dragged down by Madame Nhu and her family, the pressmen seemed to take it upon themselves as good Americans to alter the situation in South Vietnam, as well as report on it. Their goal was nothing less than regime change.

  They blamed the Ngos for nearly everything that was going wrong with the American-supported effort in South Vietnam. Not until after Diem and Nhu were gone did Halberstam himself conclude that for all his reporting on the faults of the Ngo regime, he had simply failed to be pessimistic enough. The problem wasn’t just the arrogance of the aristocratic Diem, the obtuse intellectualism of Nhu, or the self-serving machinations of Madame Nhu. American chances for success in Vietnam had bogged down in a much more layered quagmire. But by then, it was too late.5

  Madame Nhu never seemed to have understood the role of the press in Vietnam. She thought reporters should stick to a common line and expected them to repeat what the palace told them. To look for outside sources was disrespectful. She, Nhu, and Diem didn’t lie, at least not intentionally, to the press. They believed the absurdities they were peddling—like the great gains their army was making in the countryside or the devotion of the people to the regime. The reporters, they felt, were not interested enough in the right story lines. Why not talk about the health programs or social benefits? Instead they focused on the bad. Madame Nhu tried to scold them. “You all act as if you are all just spectators here, don’t you realize you are with us and we need your support?”6 The palace and the press talked past each other. The reporters caricatured her, and she just heaped more scorn on them.

  For all that, on hearing of David Halberstam’s death, Madame Nhu seemed to have blocked out the young reporter’s intention to inspire the overthrow of her family’s regime. She remembered instead how he had flattered her. “He compared my power to that of the president!” She said it as if he had merely complimented the cling of a black dress that she knew she looked good in but didn’t want to admit it: Oh, this old thing! As if ascribing so much power to her was absurd, but flattering all the same.

  David Halberstam had indeed identified Madame Nhu’s greatest strengths: her consistency and determination. He commented on her complete faith in herself and her cause. But Halberstam also saw how that righteous certainty, in its execution, could be a fatal character flaw. Madame Nhu couldn’t or wouldn’t see that part. Instead she simply liked his description of her: “Madame Nhu had a real zest for the ceremonies of leadership. She was the only one of the family who walked the way a dictator should walk—with flair and obvious enjoyment, trailed by a line of attendants—turning slowly first to the right, then to the left in acknowledging the crowd. It was always a virtuoso performance.”

  The description could almost be read as a compliment if it weren’t for its last line: “This was the way Mussolini must have done it.”7

  “I received him,” Madame Nhu told me, as if she had bestowed an honor on the upstart journalist who had only been in the country a few months. It wasn’t so easy to get in front of South Vietnam’s First Lady. The potential interviewer had to go through an elaborate procedure. First he had to formally request a private audience and write a personal letter to her explaining what he wanted to ask. If the interview was approved, inevitably, the reporter would be kept waiting for the five feet and ninety-two pounds of Madame Nhu to make a dramatic entrance. She would make a show of arranging her ao dai, smoothing the silk pleats, and sitting down daintily so as not to rumple the fabric. The chair was so ornately carved that it resembled a throne—all the more so when she pushed a little buzzer in the arm. Somewhere a bell would ring. Halberstam writes of his own encounter with Madame Nhu’s interview techniques in The Making of a Quagmire and describes being served tea and peppermint candies “by little male servants who bowed and scraped so low that the gesture resembled some form of medieval torture.”8

  Halberstam had arrived in Saigon just as another correspondent was leaving. Francois Sully, a Frenchman working for Newsweek, had gotten on the First Lady’s bad side. He was being expelled after f
ifteen years in country. The reason? An article on August 20, 1962, was accompanied by a photograph of Madame Nhu’s darlings—her paramilitary squad—with the caption “Female militia in Saigon: The enemy has more drive and enthusiasm.” The US mission in Saigon was not sad to see Sully go. His reporting was gloomy when the official policy was still resolutely optimistic. But Halberstam took note of the opinions that mattered. Sully left Vietnam as something of a press hero. Two young girls stopped him in a store and asked for his autograph. As Sully prepared to pay the usual exit taxes on his departure, the local official smiled, shook his hand, and refused payment. He called Sully “a true friend” of Vietnam for telling the truth, however painful.

  Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne shared the 1964 Pulitzer with Halberstam for their coverage of Vietnam. They also shared a similar view of Madame Nhu. “She was a very vain sort of person,” Browne confirmed later. “She was always very glad to talk to us correspondents, if she could be assured that what we wrote would be flattering,” which was becoming less and less the case. Browne too gave Madame Nhu some grudging credit. “She was one of Diem and Nhu’s strongest assets,” not that he thought that a good thing for the US effort in Vietnam. “She would walk out into a crowd, at great risk to herself,” he recalled. “She was infuriating, but courageous.”

  Browne had taken the June 1963 photograph of the burning monk. It was a horrific picture. The monk’s face twisted in pain and horror. Thich Quang Duc had set himself on fire to protest the Ngo regime, and Madame Nhu could only say that she would “clap her hands for another monk’s barbecue.” That photograph, and her Marie Antoinette–like response, raised awareness of what was going on in South Vietnam as much as any stories written by foreign correspondents. Browne’s picture was on President John F. Kennedy’s desk when he sent a new ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge, who understood it to be his duty to do everything he could to neutralize Madame Nhu.9

  John Mecklin, a former pressman turned government official, had covered the end of Indochina from 1953 to 1955 and came back in 1961 as the US Information Agency officer. He recognized the history-making impact the reporters were having and in his memoir, Mission in Torment, credits the reporting of men like Halberstam and Browne with bringing down the Diem regime. It occurred to me while reading his book that Madame Nhu had been right. The journalists had painted Madame Nhu as paranoid and crazy; she in turn thought the press was out to get her. Both sides were correct.

  I drove out to Maryland to visit Stanley Karnow, who wrote the definitive, nearly eight-hundred-page Vietnam: A History, which I had taken with me on my first trip to Vietnam. He invited me onto his screened-in porch, where we drank instant coffee, black, and Karnow lit one cigarette after another as he recalled those days in Saigon.

  Madame Nhu was, Karnow said, more feminine than feminist, “so coquette, always flaunting her sexiness.” She was saucy, perky, cavorting, and a “loose cannon—no one could control her.” Americans, Madame Nhu said, were using their aid money to “make lackeys of Vietnamese and to seduce Vietnamese women into decadent paths.” She claimed that American reporters were working against her, that the New York Times had taken a $40,000 bribe to print an interview with a Viet Cong leader, and that the venerable American paper was part of an “international Communist conspiracy” to sink her country. Karnow remembered Diem privately flinching at the things his sister-in-law would say. She accused the American embassy of threats and blackmail, told the rest of the world it needed “electroshock to resume its senses,” and denounced US Army Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann, advisor to the top South Vietnamese army general, as a “foreign militarist” who was “confusing the [South Vietnamese] officers.” Karnow didn’t think Madame Nhu’s brashness was a strength. “Even if she was not stupid, she wasn’t particularly perceptive. She didn’t realize that she was fanning the flames” of public opinion against the regime.

  Like Browne and Halberstam, Stanley Karnow wrote about the dangerous mistake the United States was making by backing the Ngo regime in Saigon. But unlike the others, Karnow ventured so far as to speculate that, as horribly as they might have abused the word “freedom,” had Diem, Nhu, and Madame Nhu stayed in power, they “would never have let in US troops,” or at least not in such great numbers. The war in all its horror might not have happened.

  Madame Nhu’s favorite English-language newspaper was the Times of Vietnam, published by her close friends in Saigon, Ann and Gene Gregory. The Gregorys had been in Saigon longer than most other Americans, arriving in 1952 as part of the US Information Service. After a brief return to the United States, they came back when Gene received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to conduct research on the developing social and economic structures of a country “just beginning to emerge from feudalism.”10 The Gregorys left government and academia behind when they bought what was then a weekly English-language paper. A 1963 profile of the Gregorys in Newsweek described the otherwise “fat and deceptively sleepy eyed” Gene as sharp enough to realize early the potential for his paper if he opened up its columns to the palace as a place to express its views. The Times became so successful that it soon turned into a daily paper. Describing it as a successful venture might be misleading. It had a circulation of only a few thousand copies, but who needed large numbers when you had the most important audience in the country?11

  The other foreign correspondents did not mix well with the Gregorys in Saigon. The couple lived in a cream-colored mansion in an otherwise all-Vietnamese suburb. Ann was blonde and as full of pep as her husband was soft, and the pudgy Gene struck people as sorely out of whack with the other vigorous young newsmen swarming the city. His profession as a journalist was so out of character that for years people had assumed it was just a bad cover for his real work as an intelligence operative, a sort of “flabby James Bond character” who pretended to be so close to the Nhus because his mission was to keep tabs on them. But that theory fizzled. The Gregorys gave over too much of their paper to burning their fellow correspondents to be anything other than sincere regime sycophants. One of their front-page headlines blasted United Press International reporter Neil Sheehan by printing, “UPI LIES, LIES, LIES.” When David Halberstam’s editors asked him to write a piece about the newspaper, he wrote back that to write anything at all accurate about those people would be libelous and to write anything nonlibelous would be too charitable.12 The Southeast Asia scholar Bernard Fall had known the Gregorys when he was finishing up his doctorate in political science at Cornell University. They had had a falling out, something about money he might have owed Ann, who had helped him type up his dissertation. When they met each other again, thousands of miles away in Saigon, the reunion was anything but pleasant. Fall wrote a note to his wife, Dorothy, about it: “I want you to know this so that you can take proper action with the U.S. authorities in case anything at all befalls me here,” implying that Ann and Gene had been spreading highly critical rumors about him and that a bad word from them to the wrong people was highly dangerous.13

  The Times of Vietnam was invaluable to the palace. It gave the regime a place where they could get their views across—in English. It was presumed that Gene Gregory afforded to be chauffeured around town in a black Peugeot because the Gregorys were in such good graces with the Nhus. Ann ran the paper on a day-to-day basis and helped Madame Nhu with the English translations of her proclamations about the latest Women’s Solidarity Day or the anniversary of the Trung sisters. Madame Nhu’s speeches were invariably long-winded and often incredibly boring, and they didn’t always make sense.

  In my own research on Madame Nhu, I had copied out enough of her speeches to recognize their rambling pattern. She used past, present, and future tenses, and she was painfully repetitive. Only a good friend, like Ann Gregory, would have found enough space in her paper to print them even in part. Yet, as often as not, the Times reproduced entire speeches. The paper soon became known as Madame Nhu’s mouthpiece. She even claimed authorship of some of the art
icles herself, like one accusing American intelligence officers in Saigon of being “Nazi-like cynical young men” who were plotting to overthrow the government. Madame Nhu’s style was too distinctive to pass off as anyone else’s. Who else went around accusing people of being “intoxicated”? The New York Times reporter Halberstam was “intoxicated.” President Kennedy was “intoxicated.” The Buddhists and even her own parents—“intoxicated.” The Times of Vietnam printed Madame Nhu’s “campaign for disintoxication,” in an article that began, bafflingly: “A campaign of disintoxication must be opened immediately to disintoxicate those who really want to be disintoxicated.”

  For all the trouble Madame Nhu caused with her talk of “Nazi-like” CIA spies, her accusation that the United States was plotting to overthrow the Diem regime proved to have been accurate a few weeks after the article ghostwritten by Madame Nhu appeared. The Ngos’ downfall brought the Gregorys down too. The Times’s press was burned to the ground. Ann Gregory had to flee and take shelter in the US embassy. She would leave Saigon for Switzerland shortly afterward, where she and Madame Nhu continued to talk. When I asked Madame Nhu about her friendship with Ann, she giggled and said the two of them had had such fun together it was like being young again.

  Madame Nhu had her defenders in the more mainstream press as well. Marguerite Higgins had worked for the New York Herald Tribune as a war correspondent for two decades before moving to Newsday and being assigned to Vietnam. She proved sympathetic to the Dragon Lady’s plight.

  Higgins arrived in Vietnam to interview Madame Nhu and take a look around the country in 1963. She had first experienced the country when she was six months old and sick with malaria. Her family had been living in Hong Kong, and the doctor there ordered the baby’s parents to take her to the mountains of Dalat in French Indochina to breathe fresh, clean air. Dalat’s man-made lakes made reinfection more likely than a cure, but baby Marguerite got lucky—more so than her maternal grandfather, an officer in the French colonial army, who had died of a tropical disease in Vietnam. Higgins got lucky again when she was assigned to cover the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. She was walking next to the famous Magnum photographer Robert Capra when he stepped on a land mine and was killed. By then, Higgins was famous herself. Life magazine had lauded the sparkling-eyed young woman in her rolled-up khakis and tennis shoes as an audacious girl wonder in the boys’ club of foreign correspondents. The caption under her photo read, “Higgins still manages to look attractive.”14