Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Like Madame Nhu, Higgins had earned a reputation as openly ambitious. Both women could be ruthless and were fearless when it came to facing their enemies. At the end of World War II, while reporting on the liberation of Dachau, Higgins had commandeered a jeep and driven toward German territory. She herself disarmed and accepted the surrender of dozens of retreating Axis soldiers, quitting only when the jeep could carry no more weapons. She was in Seoul on June 25, 1950, when the North Koreans invaded. She swam to shore after her boat sank and then had to walk fourteen miles, but Higgins emerged famous. She was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, and the Associated Press named her Woman of the Year in 1951.15

  Like the other correspondents in Saigon in 1963, Higgins believed wholeheartedly in the domino theory. But she was way more outspoken in her anticommunism than other American reporters. Higgins advocated the use of the atomic bomb against Communist China and called the fight against communism the “Third World War.” She was willing to do what it took to defend America—and Higgins preferred that those battles take place “far from San Francisco and New York.” She was more tolerant of the Saigon regime’s obvious dictatorship, as long as it dictated under the guise of democracy. Higgins would later deny it, but Time magazine quoted her as having told another reporter over dinner in Saigon that American correspondents in South Vietnam “would like to see us lose the war to prove they’re right.” It was an inflammatory comment.16

  When Higgins met Madame Nhu at the palace, the First Lady was smiling and “looking not a bit fierce.” She described her admiringly: “Her beautifully coifed head was piled high with black hair, and wispy bangs covered her forehead. Her white silk ao dai, the traditional dress of Vietnam, hugged her well-proportioned figure closely in a way that suggested a womanly pride in it. She wore black pumps with high French heels. Her long mandarin-type nails were decorated with pink polish.”17

  Higgins openly admired Madame Nhu’s personal courage, and she could sympathize with how any woman with a fiery and determined personality ran the risk of being defamed in public opinion. Higgins had been the subject of much speculation about her sexual adventures. She had been called “as innocent as a cobra” and derided as masculine simply because she was successful in a man’s world. When someone told Homer Bigart of the New York Times that Higgins had given birth to her first child, he was said to have replied, “That’s wonderful. Who’s the mother?” The response was all the more cruel because the baby girl died five days after her premature birth.

  Higgins’s arrival in Saigon in the summer of 1963 coincided with Madame Nhu’s description of the monk’s suicide as a “barbecue.” It really was a barbaric thing to say. But when Higgins asked her about the barbecue remark, she was satisfied with Madame Nhu’s response: “I used those words because they have shock value. It is necessary to somehow shock the world out of this trance in which it looks at Vietnam.” Within minutes of meeting her, Higgins saw the real problem Madame Nhu faced all too clearly. How could America, a country Higgins described as “a bland, aloof, uncaring, don’t involve me society,” understand “a fierce totally involved Oriental Valkyrie”?18

  Higgins saw Madame Nhu as a more complete person than the Dragon Lady she had been prepared to meet. She had no problem with Madame Nhu using her good looks; sex appeal had been an integral weapon in Higgins’s arsenal too. Madame Nhu was obviously a caring mother: when her four-year-old daughter ran into the room where the interview was taking place, Madame Nhu didn’t raise her voice but patted the child playfully on the head and gave her a ribbon to occupy herself with during the rest of the conversation. Higgins saw Madame Nhu as an affectionate and respectful wife even if, as Madame Nhu admitted to Higgins during their interview, her love for her husband was “not the sweeping passionate kind.” Higgins could relate to that too. Before marrying her own husband, she had sighed to a friend that only if a man was as interesting as war would she see the point in getting married. She saw no hint of Madame Nhu’s rumored luxury or wealth, and she saw no problem with her desire for power. “Power is wonderful,” Madame Nhu had told her. Higgins agreed.

  For all those reasons and more, Higgins resolved that she would help Madame Nhu. She was acting as a friend, she said, and “as an American citizen not as a journalist.” As such, Higgins gave her suggestions for how to phrase things, including entire passages to include in her future speeches on the topics of war, Buddhism, and press control. She also gave Madame Nhu some much-needed advice about what not to say in front of the press, clueing her in to words that make an unfavorable impression on the public she should be trying to win over. Madame Nhu thought she could just ignore her detractors and rise above the rumors of war profiteering, money laundering, and overseas bank accounts. She couldn’t grasp that people’s perceptions, even if inaccurate, created a reality she needed to confront. Higgins did. She would try to clear Madame Nhu’s name from any association with corruption. Higgins wrote to Madame Nhu’s mother,

  The Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency say that there is no evidence of any corruption on the part of your daughter or any member of the Ngo Dinh Nhu family. There is no sign that they collected masses of money for their own personal use. Does that fit with your understanding of Madame Nhu’s situation?

  Do forgive me for coming so straight to the point. If you feel disinclined to answer, I shall quite understand.

  Sincerely, Marguerite Higgins

  Madame Nhu’s mother responded with a one-sentence reply that, however curt, confirmed Higgins’s opinion: “I do not believe President Ngo Dinh Diem and the Nhus to be corrupt.”19

  Madame Nhu earned herself the public support of another American friend in a very high place: Clare Booth Luce. Luce was a former war reporter herself and a convert to Catholicism. She too had experience with being in the public eye as a talented, beautiful, rich, and controversial woman. A successful playwright, she worked her way up from a position as secretary at Vogue and married the publisher of the Time and Life magazine empires, Henry Luce. Marrying well didn’t quite satisfy her. Luce was elected to the House of Representatives from Fairfield County, Connecticut, and appointed as President Dwight Eisenhower’s ambassador to Italy in 1952. She knew a thing or two about ambition.

  Together, the Luces supported Republican, anti-Communist politics. They were members of the China Lobby that had supported Chiang Kai-shek before Mao took power. Time magazine had championed the Diem regime from the very beginning, hailing the president and his family as resilient, deeply religious nationalists. So it was no surprise that Clare Luce stood up for Madame Nhu. Luce said that what was happening in Vietnam was “remarkably like what happened to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang in China when the Department of State pulled the rug out from under them and Mao Tse-tung took over in China.”

  Luce took it upon herself to make things right this time around and wrote a cover article for the National Review defending Madame Nhu. She portrayed the South Vietnamese First Lady as a devoted mother and Catholic, a kind of cross between Jackie Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt. “For a moment, however brief, in history, some part of America’s prestige if not security, seems to lie in the pale pink palm of her exquisite little hand.” In a valiant but belated attempt to remake Madame Nhu’s image in November 1963, Luce compared her to an American pioneer woman and called her a do-gooder and a feminist.20

  The day before the article appeared in the press, Luce had a long telephone conversation with her friend “Dick,” Richard Milhouse Nixon, who would go on to become the thirty-seventh president of the United States. At the time, Nixon was nursing deep political wounds, having first lost the 1960 presidential election to John Kennedy and then the race for governor of California in 1962. Luce and Nixon talked about the collapsing situation in Vietnam and the usefulness of the image of the beautiful, beleaguered Madame Nhu.

  Luce was not defending Madame Nhu out of the goodness of her heart. As a staunch Republi
can, she wanted Kennedy gone. Luce believed JFK was losing Southeast Asia to the Communists, and she thought Madame Nhu’s take on the situation in Vietnam was pretty accurate. The American presidential election was coming up, and Luce thought someone like her good friend Dick would better represent her conservative and anti-Communist values in the White House. Luce used all her charm to convince him that Madame Nhu was worth defending publicly, but she must have heard some doubt on Nixon’s part because, before the end of their telephone conversation, Luce declared, “I wish I were running for President!”21

  Why didn’t more women feel the same pull to Madame Nhu as Marguerite Higgins and Clare Booth Luce? Why did the combination of glamour and seriousness fail so miserably in Madame Nhu when it worked so well for other women in politics—such as Kennedy women like Jean Smith, Robert’s wife, Ethel, and especially Jacqueline Kennedy, the president’s wife and the First Lady of the United States? Maybe it was because people considered their kind of feminism subversive. It wore a dress well. Madame Nhu had plenty of lovely ao dais, but she was either laughed off as a female out of her league or vilified as the “real man” in the Ngo family.

  Madame Nhu was not the first woman the Americans called the Dragon Lady. The name seems to trace back to a fictional character from the 1930s comic strip Terry and the Pirates. That cartoon Dragon Lady was a sneaky seductress. She was made from fiercely sketched ink strokes that defined angular cheekbones and slanted eyes. She was interested only in money and power. From then on, any Asian woman who didn’t conform to the submissive, meek, and otherwise obliging feminine fantasy about the Orient was labeled a “dragon lady.” China’s last empress, Xixi, was one, as were Soong May-ling, who would become Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and Madame Mao. Hollywood’s first Asian American movie star, Anna May Wong, was cast either as a delicate flower in a demure supporting role or as a sly and deceitful dragon lady in movies like The Thief of Bagdad and Old San Francisco.

  When Madame Nhu became First Lady of South Vietnam in 1954, America was a racist country. Jim Crow laws segregated people by skin color; anti-miscegenation laws meant that movie star Anna Wong couldn’t play a romantic lead in a movie unless she had an Asian costar—it would have been illegal to show her kissing a white man on the screen in many states. The Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor made the Asian evil genius the archetypal villain. Although the American victory in World War II put an end to the internment of Japanese Americans in camps, racist attitudes didn’t change overnight. Asian scholar Sheridan Prasso argues that the American victory in the Pacific reinforced stereotypes of Asians as weak. By dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States proved its masculine dominance. By the time of Korea and Vietnam, the nation was ready to stand up for other “compliant, feminized peoples who might otherwise succumb to the evil lure of Communism.” Prasso unearths American descriptions of Asian leaders that dwell on these feminine qualities: Mao had a high-pitched voice, as well as long, sensitive woman’s hands and a feminine mouth; Ho Chi Minh was small and frail, earnest and gentle; Diem was “as fragile as porcelain with delicate features and ivory skin.”22

  Vietnam was supposed to be an exotic, decadent place, the women obliging and demure. So Americans found Madame Nhu totally confounding. She didn’t fit their expectations of an Oriental woman any more than she matched the American ideal: she was the exact opposite of the smiling blond woman on the cover of the December 1962 Saturday Evening Post. That issue presented a composite of the “American woman” and revealed her attitudes about family, sex, religion, and society. Mr. Gallup, king of the polls, had surveyed the nation, and the results were in. The American woman was a hardworking full-time housewife and mother. “Although the divorcee, the childless wife, [and] the working mother” existed, they were so atypical and therefore “extreme,” that the authors excluded them from the survey. “Our study shows that few people are as happy as a housewife.” A wife’s responsibility: “You have to put your husband first.” And unlike men who must search for meaning in life, the poll concluded, American women were born knowing their purpose precisely: to be a good wife and a good mother. As for wanting more, the authors concluded, women were easily satisfied with food, clothes, and a little help with housework. “The female doesn’t really expect a lot from life.”

  A major change for American women was in the wings. With her publication of The Feminine Mystique in early 1963, Betty Friedan would give voice to the “problem that has no name,” women’s second-class status in society, and the book would launch the modern feminist movement in the United States.

  The Madame Nhu whom American women read about in newspapers didn’t hesitate to ask for credit where she thought it was due—and to request it loudly. She was unapologetic about liking power and wanting more. A majority of American women “disapproved” of the idea of having a woman as president, and 20 percent of all women said female involvement in politics was a generally bad thing. Women were simply too emotional. The American public in 1963 had certain ideas about just what was appropriate in a First Lady. Madame Nhu was not it.

  Jacqueline Kennedy played the part much better. She looked like a movie star, was well educated, and spoke French. But Jacqueline Kennedy was also trapped by the conventions and stereotypes of the era.

  While Madame Nhu was open in her admiration for Jacqueline Kennedy, using the words “elegant” and “refined” to describe her, the feeling was not mutual. Madame Nhu, Jacqueline Kennedy said, “was everything Jack found unattractive.” The First Lady of the United States was very specific in a recorded interview from 1964. Politically powerful women were pretty awful in general. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, was “a real prune, bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” But in judging others, it was Jackie who sounded ugly—and like a relic from a bygone era.23

  Her defenders might say that Jackie Kennedy recognized the constraints of her era, validating them to gently subvert them, turning them inside out. Perhaps. In 1964, she was all too clearly a product of her time and place. She bragged in her familiar breathy voice about her “Asiatic” marriage to Jack, equating subordination with femininity. As for Madame Nhu, a real woman who happened to be from Asia, who refused to bow and scrape and act demure, Jacqueline thought she was just awful. Madame Nhu acted as if she resented getting power from men, instead of being grateful, and that resentment made her unsexy and masculine. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians,” Jackie whispered about Madame Nhu and Clare Booth Luce. Those kinds of women—ambitious women who wanted something to claim for themselves and weren’t ashamed of it—were not welcome in the Kennedys’ America of 1963.

  CHAPTER 12

  Burning Monks

  MADAME NHU HAD BEEN pleased with my success in finding the tiger-skin pictures for her—so pleased, she said, that she had decided it was finally time to send me a single-paragraph summary of her memoirs.

  Summary of my book: The Holy Church must be defended. Having received the Mission to spread the word around the world, so that others could know the Truth of what was happening in Viêt-Nam, I began my travels on September 11, 1963, at the Interparliamentary Union in Belgrade. In my absence, Vietnam was crucified as the “Christ of Nations.” . . . Everything comes back on the Holy Church, as the Secret of Fatima, to save the world from the Apocalypse . . . Madame Ngô-Dình-Nhu.

  What was this? The secret of Fatima? Christ of Nations? Instead of a precise summary of a once powerful woman’s life, the paragraph sounded like an extract from a religious diatribe. When I asked Madame Nhu where her personal memories were—the smells, the tastes, the sounds—she replied obliquely.

  “Coming,” she promised. “I just need to know that I can count on you.”

  I should have known better.

  My next challenge—the final one, Madame Nhu promised—was to find the text of a particular speech delivered in August 2009 by an American, a Catholic bishop named William Skylstad, during a trip to Vietnam from Spokane, Washi
ngton. Someone had told Madame Nhu about the bishop’s visit to an area close to the city of Hue, a place close to her heart. The bishop stopped at the Shrine to Our Lady of La Vang. To Madame Nhu the symbolism of an American bishop visiting La Vang—what’s more, a bishop who was the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops—could represent only one thing: an apology for what had happened to her family. I had never heard of the bishop or the place, but I promised Madame Nhu that I would look into it.

  Believers say that sometime at the end of the eighteenth century, a vision of Mary appeared in what is today the Hai Lang District of the Quang Tri Province of central Vietnam. At that time, Catholics in the country endured terrible persecution; their religion marked them as colonial sympathizers, and Vietnamese emperors were still trying to fight the French incursion. The Nguyen dynasty issued edicts to destroy churches, and Emperors Ming Mang and Tu Duc encouraged the repression of Catholicism by any means, even violent ones. Nhu’s own Catholic ancestors had almost been wiped out. More than one hundred members of the Ngo clan had been herded into a church and burned to death in the early 1800s.

  Mary was said to have appeared to a group of Catholics hiding from a massacring mob in the woods. She materialized wearing a Vietnamese ao dai and holding a child. Surrounded by lights, she told the people to keep praying and reassured them that their prayers would be granted. The story was told and retold for a hundred years. By then, the French colonial influence in Vietnam had freed Catholics to worship openly, and the spot became a pilgrimage destination for hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics. On August 22, 1928, priests of the Catholic Church consecrated the site in front of 200,000 pilgrims. Madame Nhu was just a little girl, living with her Buddhist family way down in the delta. But she discovered La Vang in 1943 as a new convert to the faith when she had moved to Hue to be with her husband’s family. Maybe she was drawn to the place because the consecration happened on her birthday. Maybe she liked the image of Mary. Or maybe she just liked getting out from under her in-laws and having a good excuse to leave the city. In 1959, the Diem government declared the area a national shrine. The church of La Vang was then promoted to a basilica minor in 1961, reflecting its timely anti-Communist recognition by the Vatican.