Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Madame Nhu couldn’t let it go. It seemed too unfair: the Buddhists got concessions when the regime had done, in her mind, nothing wrong. She refused to apologize and dug herself in deeper. “I would beat them [the Buddhist activists] ten times more,” she said to David Halberstam. If there was another suicide, even if there were another thirty, Madame Nhu said she would clap her hands in delight.

  Privately, the Ngo brothers continued to depend on Madame Nhu, who had advised the brothers well in the past. Keeping with that tradition, Nhu came to his wife in the middle of the night on June 15, the night before the communiqué was signed to resolve the flag-flying issue, and asked, “What should we do?” Madame Nhu had already told Diem what she thought of the document—and him. “You are a coward,” she had spat at the president. Diem just shook his head and told her she didn’t understand. This time, the problem had international implications. It was too big for her.8

  That night she was too tired to argue more. She told her husband that they were in an impossible situation. To fight the Buddhists would cause more trouble, but to sign the document revising the flag order would admit guilt and open them up to further risk if the Buddhists wanted them to make amends or demanded retribution. “Get Diem to sign it,” she sighed about the joint communiqué. But it was very important to her that one thing not be overlooked. When Diem signed the document, he should write in that none of what he was agreeing to had ever been illegal in the first place—reiterating the fact that the constitution protected religious freedom. Presumably Nhu passed the advice on to Diem because the president did just that, in his neat tight script: “The points put down in the Joint Communiqué were approved in principle by me at the very beginning.” Madame Nhu’s solution appeased the Buddhists on the flag flying without ever admitting that the government had behaved badly, and Madame Nhu thought the brothers ought to be grateful to her for getting them out of a tight spot, again.9

  With the communiqué signed, the Buddhist mess should have been settled. But the flag flying was never the real problem. It was simply the spark that had ignited the underlying issues, and those continued to smolder. The palace was infuriated that the foreign press, the Americans especially, couldn’t let the issue go. Reporters were giving voice to people dissatisfied with the regime, and the more voice they received, the more they protested. There were mass demonstrations in Saigon, Dalat, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, and Hue. Monks continued to stage public suicides. Their banners no longer asked the Ngos for religious tolerance; now they called for an overthrow of the government. People seemed to respond with enthusiasm. How was the government supposed to react? Its authority was being flouted daily. Nhu confided to his wife his fear that negotiating with the Buddhists had looked like weakness. At the hint of impotence, the brothers would lose political allies; people once too scared to defy them would be no longer so afraid. The palace was vulnerable to attack. The Vietnamese people needed to be reminded who was in charge, and so did the Americans.

  On August 20, President Diem enacted martial law. Troops would occupy strategic points in Saigon, but the pagodas, Diem said, were to be handled with special care. Diem didn’t want any of the monks hurt. He said he didn’t want any more trouble, and his generals seemed to believe him. But Nhu had a different plan.

  The very next day, Nhu’s combat police and special forces, the “shock troops,” were called in. He had ordered the men to dress in regular army fatigues. The plan was to make it look like the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was defying Diem’s presidential order to take it easy on the pagodas. It was a crazy act of duplicity, but he was desperate to keep the unhappy Americans at a distance from the ARVN generals, whose ambitions to take over the country were growing as the Ngos’ iron-fisted control on opposition appeared to be slipping. Nhu was well aware that the Americans would not tolerate a brutal campaign against the Buddhists. Thinking the ARVN had embarked on a rogue assault on the pagodas would be sure to drive a wedge between them. But by faking army involvement in the pagoda raids, Nhu played right into the hands of those who most wanted him gone.

  The screams of Buddhists, the war cries of their attackers, shattering glass, pistol shots, and, over it all, a pagoda gong being struck again and again filled the night of August 21, 1963. Xa Loi pagoda was Buddhist headquarters in Saigon. It was usually a restful place that gently echoed the steady drone of monotone chanting and reverberations of brass gongs. That night it became the scene of a two-hour orgy of violence and a blatant show of power and might. David Halberstam looked on in shock, seeing in the horrific scene unfolding around him “the crumbling of an American foreign policy.” Madame Nhu also watched the assault from a tank parked not far away from Halberstam, but she viewed the situation far more optimistically. Justice was being served.10

  Her good mood carried into the next day, when a press correspondent described the First Lady as in a “state of euphoria, chattering like a schoolgirl after a prom.” Madame Nhu compared the late-night crushing of the “Communist Buddhists” with the 1955 rout of the Binh Xuyen gangsters, except she didn’t seem to realize that only one side was doing the shooting this time. She didn’t dwell on the fact that the victims were weaponless, bald monks. It was the “happiest day of my life,” she said, and another victory for the Ngo family.11

  It was also Madame Nhu’s thirty-ninth birthday. That day a cablegram had arrived at the palace from her parents in America. Maybe she expected a routine, if formal, note, the kind of restrained birthday greetings that parents of a certain pedigree sent to their adult child. But she should have known better. It was the second cable from them in five days.

  The first had been a ciphered cable. In strong, almost threatening words, her mother and father urged her to leave Vietnam with her four children. “Get out of the limelight,” they told her.12 Madame Chuong had also personally delivered this message to Henry Cabot Lodge as he was about to leave Washington for Saigon: the Ngo regime was so hated that “unless they leave the country there is no power on earth that can prevent the assassination of Prime Minister Diem, of his brother Nhu, and of my daughter, Madame Nhu.”13 Madame Nhu had not known about the meddling of her mother meeting the incoming ambassador behind her back, but she been infuriated enough by the letter. She was no longer a child, and they couldn’t tell her what to do. In their second cable, her parents seemed to agree. It was not a birthday message at all but a letter of resignation. The Chuongs quit their prominent ambassadorial posts, her father to the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, her mother as special observer to the United Nations in New York. Chuong wrote, “I cannot go on representing a government which ignores my advice and of which I disapprove.” The regime publicly denied that Chuong had resigned in criticism of the government. They said he had already been fired.14

  What had been just talk before, of barbecuing Buddhists and beating them harder, had become a chilling reality. The raids on the Buddhist pagodas were a manifestation of what Madame Nhu had been saying for months. Diem never publicly broke with his brother over the pagoda-raiding scheme, but he did send a private letter to Madame Nhu, a directive from the president of South Vietnam to a member of the National Assembly: she was to make no public statements about the raids and to give no more statements to the press.

  For once, it seems, Diem acquiesced to American demands to silence his First Lady. But he cushioned the blow. A meeting of the fifty-nine members of the Interparliamentary Union was coming up at the end of September in Belgrade. It wouldn’t look so much like banishment if Madame Nhu was the South Vietnamese representative. How much more trouble could she possibly get into?

  Madame Nhu was happy to go. She could take people up on other offers she had received and extend her trip. She had been invited to speak at the Overseas Press Club in New York City, and why not, she thought. If they wanted her, she was sure she could make a convincing case for herself and her country.

  A grainy, unpublished photo captures the family on the palace stairs on the brink of Madam
e Nhu’s departure. The oldest child, daughter Le Thuy, was going along on Madame Nhu’s travels abroad, and Nhu and the three other children had gathered to bid them good-bye. They smile into the camera and Madame Nhu lays a reassuring hand on her youngest daughter’s shoulder. Only the four-year-old looks at all uncertain about the future as the rest of them make their way to the airport.

  An impressive crowd gathered around Madame Nhu as she prepared to make what would be her farewell address at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport. A dozen men, wearing skinny ties and dark suits despite the heat, leaned in toward the deceptively diminutive beauty smiling in their midst. To a casual observer, it might have looked like the reporters were naturally drawn to her, like moths to a flame, incapable of resisting the Diem regime’s most flamboyant character. The brooch on her left shoulder dazzled, and her eyes were bright with excitement about her upcoming trip. She wore a well-tailored brown ao dai over flowing white pants and high-heeled pumps. Over her arm, she carried a travel bag for the long flight and a fur stole. Her hair was held impeccably in place, high off her head, in a stylish beehive. If it weren’t for the microphones and bulky recording devices of the era, she might have looked like a woman classically surrounded by admirers on bended knee.

  Instead, the men surrounding Madame Nhu at the airport that day were some of her fiercest critics. To them and their American readers, she had become a “female monster,” complete with a “serpent’s tongue” and red-painted “talons.” In their stories about South Vietnam, they had likened her to Lucrezia Borgia and then to Marie Antoinette.

  Malcolm Browne would remember seeing the Nhus say their goodbyes at the airport. They pulled together for a brief moment for one last worried kiss, looking like any normal couple. As her plane took off, Nhu’s eyes followed its ascent into the sky, his hands covering his ears to block the roar of the engines. Could anyone have known it would be the last time he would see his wife? By the time Madame Nhu’s plane was in the air that day, the wheels of the regime’s bloody denouement were already in motion.

  With hindsight, the image of reporters circling Madame Nhu with their microphones takes on a distinctly more ominous cast. Instead of moths to a brightly burning flame, it recalls a more sinister image of sharks circling. Perhaps instinctually they smelled blood in the water.

  CHAPTER 13

  Too Beautiful to Ignore

  MADAME NHU LANDED IN New York hours behind schedule. Her Pan American flight from Paris had encountered turbulence somewhere over the Atlantic; strong headwinds had pushed against the plane. It wasn’t the only force resisting her. Hurricane Flora was lingering off the American coast, although much farther south. It had already killed 4,000 in Haiti, and it was anyone’s guess where she would go next or what damage she would do when she made landfall in the States. Madame Nhu’s plane touched down at Idlewild Airport in the calm before the storm.

  That the airport would be renamed JFK, and that the president whose memory it honored would be assassinated in a matter of weeks, would have been unthinkable in the soft evening light of October 7, 1963. It would have seemed impossible that what the American public still considered the little war in Vietnam, a far-off land in the exotic Orient, would spiral into destruction for the next decade. The Gulf of Tonkin incident was still a year away; the only American servicemen in Vietnam were 15,000 military advisors—a far cry from the 200,000 who would be in country by the end of 1965. In 1963, there were still no troops on the ground.

  But Vietnam had come to the United States—at least in the petite figure of Madame Nhu about to launch a cross-country press tour. She should have been scared. Everything was at stake—her family, her country, even her safety. She seemed to acknowledge the danger. She felt, she confessed, like she had been “caught by the skin of the neck like a kitten and thrown into an arena with lions.”1 So she should have been walking on eggshells. She should have stayed quiet. She shouldn’t have come to America at all. But that would have made Madame Nhu predictable, and she was anything but.

  She deplaned boldly enough, wearing freshly applied pink lipstick and a blazing smile. Transatlantic travel still meant luxury—lavish meals, served on china, and endless drinks. People dressed up to fly. Madame Nhu wore a dark mink stole over her slimly tailored brown sheath; sharp-heeled pumps peeked out from under the hem of her white pants. She made her way down the gangway without having fixed her hair, which had slipped during the long flight, but just a little. One insubordinate lock bounced behind her left ear as she headed toward the terminal.

  A few of the lower-ranking attachés from the South Vietnamese embassy in Washington, DC, were at the airport to greet Madame Nhu. She raised a gloved hand to wave at them in the imperial way, with a stiff wrist. There were also members of the South Vietnam United Nations delegation, and beyond them, a sea of white faces and bright lights.

  How long did it take Madame Nhu to note the other conspicuous absences? There were no official representatives from the United States. No one at the federal, state, or even local level had come to meet the First Lady of the Republic of South Vietnam, the United States’ formal ally in the Cold War battle against communism. There were only a police lieutenant, his sergeant, and the four New York City patrolmen assigned for her security. Also missing were her parents, the former ambassador Chuong and his wife. Although they were in fact visiting New York that day, it was not with the purpose of greeting their daughter. Instead, the Chuongs were sounding the alarm all across the city about the damage the power-hungry Nhus were doing to South Vietnam. They warned that the government there could not be reformed. Madame Nhu’s own parents were calling for her ouster.

  Madame Nhu carried on, making her way down the tarmac to the Pan American terminal—a huge and hovering circle that looked like an alien spacecraft. One hundred reporters and photographers jostled each other to get a better view of her first steps on American soil. The newsmen must have marveled at how this tiny woman could be at the epicenter of so much trouble. Microphones and cameras were ready to document any sign of self-doubt, a chink in the silken armor. But Madame Nhu was used to collecting herself in front of a crowd. Her smile looked genuine enough.

  Madame Nhu went to a podium set up for her arrival. To reach the microphone she stood on a little stool. Her voice rang firm and clear as a bell as she delivered some prepared remarks—she was looking forward to the trip ahead, she said. Her half veil would have cast a shadow over anything else that might have shown in her eyes.

  A reporter from the back of the room asked Madame Nhu about the obvious gaps in the crowd. Madame Nhu turned to her eighteen-year-old eldest daughter, who had accompanied her on the trip, for translation help, and Le Thuy moved closer to her mother. Le Thuy wore her hair in a bell-shaped bob. An oversized bow was fastened so low on one side that it looked like it might fall out at any moment. It was a fashionable look at the time. Twenty-three-year-old Mary Tyler Moore wore her hair the same way on the Dick Van Dyke Show episode set to air later that week. Looking like an obedient schoolgirl, Le Thuy murmured into her mother’s ear a combination of Vietnamese and French.

  Madame Nhu closed her eyes and nodded briefly.

  “I’ve become, in spite of myself, a controversial person. I don’t want to embarrass anyone.” Now that she was here in America, Madame Nhu said she would do her best to “try and understand why we can’t get along better.”

  When Madame Nhu spoke English, she lilted, and some of her words purred together. Her tone was almost flirtatious. But the sad little shrug of her shoulders before she ducked into her waiting Cadillac limousine showed the room full of mostly men exactly what they were waiting for: a carefully measured glimpse of something fragile and human inside the woman they had dubbed the Dragon Lady.

  Madame Nhu’s coast-to-coast itinerary would take her to twelve American cities in twenty-two days. She was booked for seventeen radio and television broadcasts, plus seventeen speaking engagements, eleven of them at universities and colleges. She had also be
en invited as the guest of honor to fifteen more formal luncheons and dinners. But the American enthusiasm had a dark edge.

  The invitations to speak with the press and at private events, press clubs, and academic institutions had been issued despite the wishes of the US government. Such freedom of the press—and blatant disregard for government wishes—would have been unthinkable in South Vietnam. Decades later, Madame Nhu still didn’t understand. She would cite it as an example of her disillusionment with Americans. How, she wondered, could the American media and the country’s most distinguished schools invite her, only for the government then to try to say, “Don’t come.”

  The American people wanted a spectacle. The American government was trying to prevent one. So it had done what it could, diplomatically, to prevent her from visiting the country. Harlan Cleveland from the State Department pulled aside South Vietnam’s new ambassador to the United States in Washington to ask if the regime had taken any steps to “tone down” Madame Nhu. The new ambassador from Saigon had already made clear in highly classified conversations with US officials that he personally thought she should be “eliminated,” but he remained oblique about how that could be accomplished. Out of concern for his job and maybe his neck, he had to be subtler. He sent five cables to Saigon before Madame Nhu’s arrival. He was merely told that the First Lady had been privately instructed to “quiet down.” Everyone knew that couldn’t be trusted to work.

  The American reporters were good at their jobs. They could goad Madame Nhu into making a scene. It helped that the lady was “unfortunately too beautiful to ignore.” So the American government tried to shame the media instead. An unnamed official high in the Kennedy administration went off the record to reproach the biggest players in the media: CBS, NBC, Time, Newsweek, and the New York Post. They were paying this Dragon Lady too much attention. Didn’t they realize the possible harm of giving Madame Nhu a platform to bring her case to the American people? The American stake in South Vietnam was high, and this little lady threatened everything.2