Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  While poking around the papers of Clare Booth Luce at the Library of Congress a few months before, I had found a letter from Madame Nhu, postmarked in 1964. Luce had been an author, a playwright, a US senator, and, as a staunch supporter of ultraconservative Republican politics in Washington, something of a friend to Madame Nhu. The return address scrawled on the back of the envelope had provided my first glimpse of Madame Nhu’s spidery handwriting. When I read about the Eiffel Tower view, I thought back to how carefully I had copied the curls of her script into my notebook: avenue Charles Floquet. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might still be living there, but now I wondered, why not?

  One glance and I knew I was wrong. The elegant building on avenue Charles Floquet where she had once lived looked like just the sort of place a deposed dictator might hide in until his money ran out. But it was only eight stories high. Even given the European penchant for designating the floor above the ground floor the first floor, this building was several short of the eleven I had been looking for.

  I almost gave up on the spot. Even if the article was right and Madame Nhu was living in Paris, how many hundreds of buildings could boast a view of the Eiffel Tower? She could be a mile away and still see it. The tower was the only thing that stuck up in such a low-lying city. Just as I raised my gaze to the skyline to curse the aesthetics of the most beautiful city in the world, I had a crazy thought. I jumped onto a nearby bench and looked around. Such a low city simply did not have many eleven-story buildings—especially not this section of Paris. I just had to walk until I found one.

  I had gone about a block when I saw them: three matching buildings, a mid-century mistake, near the Seine side of the avenue de Suffren. They were all concrete and right angles gone wrong. No matter—the sight of them dazzled me, for each stood a glorious twelve floors high. At the first one, I found a small bundle of a woman in a housecoat sweeping the steps. I approached her tentatively with an “excusez moi” and proceeded to ask, as tactfully as I could, whether there was an old Vietnamese lady who lived in her building on the eleventh floor. She paused just long enough to point to the building next door. “I think you are looking for the woman in number 24,” she said with a little smile and a shake of her head. Maybe I was paranoid, but she seemed to be laughing at me.

  She wouldn’t have been the first to doubt me. When I confided to my graduate school advisor that I was thinking of pursuing the Dragon Lady, she had given me a patronizing smile—I assumed because, like everyone else, she thought Madame Nhu was simply too frivolous a topic. It took me longer to understand that my advisor, who had lived in Saigon through Madame Nhu’s reign and seen school friends arrested by the South Vietnamese police, didn’t think Madame Nhu was a subject worth revisiting.

  But I was close now. Buoyed by something like confidence, or maybe naive optimism, I buzzed the concierge at 24 avenue de Suffren, and when she appeared, I grinned broadly at her. After she’d let me in, I slid a thin blue envelope inscribed with Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu’s name across the front desk.

  “Is she expecting something?” the concierge inquired dully. She was less than polite without being exactly rude, but I didn’t care. She had confirmed that Madame Nhu lived upstairs.

  “Please just make sure she gets this,” I replied sweetly. Inside the envelope was a carefully worded note requesting an interview and one of the embossed calling cards I’d had made up in case I needed to make myself look professional. Tomorrow, Madame Nhu would know exactly who I was. As I walked back toward the Metro, I was already running through everything I would say when she called: how I would like to get her story right, how I hoped to fill in the gaps of history, and how I dared to think that we might redeem a little bit of the Dragon Lady’s legacy. It never occurred to me that she might have plans of her own.

  CHAPTER 2

  Forgotten Graves

  NO ONE HAD HEARD FROM Madame Nhu since the summer of 1986—the summer her parents, Tran Van Chuong and Tran Thi Nam Tran, had been murdered.

  Madame Nhu’s parents had been well known in diplomatic circles, even briefly famous when they publicly disowned their Dragon Lady daughter in 1963. In Vietnam, the Chuong couple had enjoyed an illustrious pedigree: Chuong was a large landowner and the first Vietnamese lawyer to get a French degree; his wife, Nam Tran, was related to the royal family and had been born a princess. They had lived a grand life in Vietnam before the war, with twenty servants waiting on them hand and foot. Madame Chuong clung to a sense of regal entitlement even in her role as a diplomat’s wife in Washington, DC. When she hosted events, she asked that no one be allowed to wear the imperial color, yellow, except for her.

  The Chuongs had lived in Washington since Chuong’s appointment as the South Vietnamese ambassador in 1957. They returned to Vietnam for brief visits in the 1960s, but never after the 1975 Communist victory. The Chuongs were long retired; Madame Nhu’s father was eighty-eight and her mother seventy-six. They were just an elderly couple living out their last days in a quiet suburb of Washington, DC, when their only son killed them in their home. The murders brought the tragic and bizarre family history back into the spotlight.

  Madame Nhu did not go to the funeral. By that time, she was growing old herself. She was a sixty-one-year-old recluse living in a shabby villa on the outskirts of Rome with her children. There had been rumors that Madame Nhu had emptied the South Vietnamese treasury before she left the country for the last time, but there was little outward sign of luxury anymore. Piece by piece she had sold off her property. A few straggly olive trees and some grazing sheep were all that separated the grandly named Villa of Serene Light from Rome’s urban sprawl. Her only valuables had been those she managed to squirrel out of Saigon on her person, the jewelry and furs she was wearing and those tucked in her valise. Those were soon gone too. In 1971, Madame Nhu had been the victim of a jewelry heist: thieves made off with $32,000 in gold, jade, and gems.1 Madame Nhu probably would not have been able to afford the trip to Washington, DC, to see her parents buried—at least not in a style that she would have considered fitting.

  On Madame Nhu’s last trip to the United States, in October 1963, her parents had left her standing on the doorstep of their Washington home with the door shut firmly in her face. Her father had called her “power mad” and said they “did not wish to know her” anymore. Her mother urged Americans to throw eggs and tomatoes at her.

  Talking back would have broken the most sacred Confucian value: filial piety. A child should always respect her parents. The furthest Madame Nhu would go was to suggest that her parents must be “intoxicated.” It was one of Madame Nhu’s favorite lines—she used it against her parents, the international press, and even American president John F. Kennedy. But its meaning in English was not exactly what she intended. Intoxicated in French means poisoned. She meant to suggest that the Communists had poisoned the well of public opinion against her. She was trying to suggest that a desperate Communist tactic was at work—one intended to alienate her family from the Americans. But Madame Nhu didn’t get her message across. Instead she sounded shrill, accusing those she didn’t like of being drunk. After the 1963 coup in Saigon, the press reported that Madame Nhu had reconciled with her father. Chuong said of the rapprochement, “My heart was very near my daughter’s.”

  To their neighbors, the Chuongs were just a sweet old couple, the kind who smile at children and puppies and wear sweaters even in the summer. Their home, at 5601 Western Avenue, was a two-story brick Georgian with white trim. The hedges were always neat, the walkway swept clear. Chuong’s doctor described him as a pleasant gentleman, “very friendly,” his wife, somewhat effervescent, always with a smile. It was inconceivable to think that this couple had survived three wars, evaded the colonial secret police, and outwitted the Communist guerrillas only to meet their end on a quiet July night in the seeming safety of their own home.

  The police report had been graphic in detailing the discovery of the bodies. Madame Chuong lay on top of her husband. Her
right arm was draped around him, as if she had died hugging him. They wore matching striped pajamas, but his were soaked with urine. Madame Chuong’s upper lip was bruised, and she had a scratch under her chin. The red pinpoints on her eyeballs were from petechial hemorrhage, when blood leaks from the eye’s tiny capillaries, a strong indication of death by strangulation or smothering—in this case, probably with a pillow.

  All the evidence pointed to the Chuongs’ only son, Tran Van Khiem. Khiem had been left behind in Vietnam in 1963 and had suffered badly. Until then, Khiem had been the scion of a once elite Vietnamese family to whom things had always been handed. When his sister was the First Lady, he was given a seat in the South Vietnamese government’s National Assembly and diplomatic missions to foreign countries. Khiem skated along in typical playboy fashion, but he was fascinated with the inner workings of politics, especially the intrigue. Khiem started rumors that he was the head of a secret security force. He told Australian journalist Denis Warner that he had a hit list of American targets in Saigon that included embassy and military personnel. Madame Nhu’s husband didn’t like him much; he thought Khiem was immature and headstrong. So when Khiem came to the palace to visit his sister, Madame Nhu made sure to close the door to the sitting room or used the bedroom. Nhu and Diem weren’t to know he was there. In fact, it didn’t matter whether the Ngo brothers liked Khiem or not. He was family, and the regime’s umbrella was broad enough to cover him. No real harm could come to him while the Ngos were in power.2

  But afterwards, when Madame Nhu was in exile, Khiem was on his own in South Vietnam. The new military junta in Saigon arrested him. His mother tried to intercede from Washington. She called Roger Hilsman at the State Department, begging him to do something to save her only son. He would recall that Madame Chuong had been highly distraught, but even in her hysteria, unsentimental and pragmatic. Khiem was “only a stupid boy,” Madame Chuong pleaded. He was harmless, just someone who had fallen “foolishly under the sway of his older sister,” Madame Nhu.

  Madame Chuong’s pleas fell on deaf ears. The American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, might have helped but he had no sympathy. He thought Khiem a “thoroughly reprehensible individual” and would not interfere with what he said, without a trace of irony, was the junta’s “orderly administration of justice.”3 Khiem was locked in a cell in Saigon’s old French prison. Looking back on his time there, he called what they did to him—using sleep deprivation and exhaustion to break his mind—“scientific torture.”4 At least he had been spared the firing squad. The new junta didn’t like holdovers from the old regime that might threaten their power, but apparently they didn’t think Khiem posed much of a threat. Or maybe he was more useful to them alive, an example of what happened to those loyal to the old regime. Madame Nhu’s brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Can, didn’t fare as well. He was so paralyzed by diabetes left untreated during his incarceration at Chi Hoa Prison that he had to be carried to the courtyard, unable to stand for his own execution.

  Khiem was subsequently shipped south to the prison island of Poulo Condor, assigned to hard labor until his broken body matched his fragile mind. Who knows what backroom negotiations got him out of Vietnam and to France, but by then forty-year-old Khiem had the body of an old man. He suffered from a heart condition and a kidney ailment. His other scars, the mental ones, were not immediately as visible.

  Khiem couldn’t find a job, and he had a wife and twelve-year-old son to support. His parents came up with an arrangement that was supposed to save face: they said they needed him to move in with them now that they were getting old. By allowing Khiem, his wife, and son to live with them in Washington, his parents were helping him just as much as he was, in theory, going to be helping them. But it never really worked out. Family dinners dissolved into shouting matches, political disagreements about history long past in a country that no longer existed.

  The Chuongs had been working up the courage to kick him out when Khiem discovered their will. He had been disinherited. In a witnessed letter, Madame Chuong had written in a neat, tight script that her son had “behaved all his life like an exceptionally ungrateful and bad son and has been too often to his parents a great source of worries and deep sorrow. Such behavior cannot be forgotten and forgiven in a traditional Vietnamese family.”

  With all the evidence against him, the Chuong murders should have been an open-and-shut case, but it dragged on. At question was not whether Khiem killed his parents—that was clear. The problem was determining whether he had the mental capacity to stand trial for two premeditated murders. Khiem’s legal team challenged the court order forcing him to take psychotropic drugs that would render him competent, but because of the lack of legal precedents, it took seven years’ worth of appeals for a determination to stick. Khiem’s bizarre behavior and courtroom theatrics, railing against the drugs’ side effects, didn’t speed the process.

  Khiem’s mental state didn’t improve during his seven years as a forensic patient at St. Elizabeth’s, a psychiatric hospital in southeastern Washington, DC. The institution was like a parody of an insane asylum: thousands of brains were preserved in formaldehyde, and an on-site incinerator fueled rumors about what happened to the victims of botched lobotomies and CIA-tested chemical cocktails like “truth serums.” During Khiem’s time there, the most basic facilities of the massive, red-turreted building evidenced years of neglect. Equipment failures and medicine shortages occurred frequently, and the heating system was broken for weeks at a time.5 Khiem stayed at St. Elizabeth’s until 1993. The Supreme Court rejected his appeal when it became clear that Khiem would never be competent enough to participate in his own defense. He was deported to France and has not been heard from since.6 Whenever I asked Madame Nhu about her brother, I was met with silence. At most she would say, “Of course he is still alive!” but I never found any trace of him.

  Years of prison and torture had twisted Khiem’s brain. He believed he was at the center of a Zionist conspiracy—he wrote as much in a letter to Ronald Reagan, and that was before he tried to get the US president subpoenaed to testify in his defense. The thought of living on his own, cut off from his parents’ wealth, snapped the fragile threads that connected Khiem to reality. Whatever wild thoughts had been running through his mind as he asphyxiated his frail and elderly parents with a pillow in their bedroom, Madame Nhu showed a kind of sympathy. Had she stayed in South Vietnam, who knows what she would have suffered? Her younger brother was in no way as notorious as she was; she would have fared much worse.

  Madame Nhu stood up for her brother. She continued to claim that Khiem was framed for the murders and insisted that her parents had died of natural causes. Her brother was the real victim. “Agents provocateurs” were trying to silence him because he knew terrible secrets about the United States. “They [had] decided to finish him” by framing him for the murders and locking him up in an insane asylum, they being the unnamed but implied American government. You couldn’t really blame Madame Nhu—the US government had certainly conspired against her in the past.

  Like Khiem, Madame Nhu had been cut out of her parents’ will. Her mother simply believed that her middle daughter “had no need of being provided for by me.” Madame Nhu didn’t agree. While Khiem’s murder trial was bogged down in appeals, she hired Khiem’s lawyer to represent both her and the mentally incompetent Khiem to reclaim part of their dead parents’ estate. Madame Nhu’s motives were opaque if not duplicitous: if Khiem lost his insanity plea and was found guilty, and if they managed to overturn the inheritance issue, Madame Nhu would get his share. The case was thrown out of the US court system because of the conflict of interest.

  Soon after the murders, Madame Nhu stopped speaking to the press altogether. “This is a family affair,” was her final statement. The family was indeed remarkable: one Dragon Lady daughter exiled to Rome, one murdering son locked up in a mental institution, and the oldest child, Le Chi Oggeri, living a seemingly normal life as a professor and artist in North Carolina
, left to mourn the loss of her parents. “The end did not match the beginning,” Le Chi wistfully told the reporters from the Washington Post. “For such beautiful lives, it should have been a beautiful end.”

  The Chuongs are buried less than five miles from the home they died in. Rock Creek Cemetery is a sprawling eighty-six acres of pastoral beauty in the northwest corner of metropolitan Washington, DC. A narrow paved road dips down and rises again; headstones dot the hills like masts bobbing in an undulating sea of green. They bear some illustrious names from the past—Roosevelts and Adamses—and some distinguished contemporary names, like Tim Russert and Gore Vidal. The Chuongs’ double plot is in Section L, halfway up one of the smaller rises.

  The twin headstones are of rose-colored granite, with a simply carved lotus below each of their names. Ambassador Tran Van Chuong. Princess Nam Tran Tran Van Chuong. The ground has shifted in the twenty-five years that they have lain together on that hill. Madame Chuong’s grave is no longer perfectly straight but just slightly off kilter, as if she is leaning into her husband.

  On the spring morning I visited the Chuongs, long grasses waved around the headstones and between the graves, making them look slightly unkempt. With my sister-in-law and infant niece sleeping in her portable car seat as company, I imagined that we were the first visitors the Chuongs had had in a while. I was suddenly self-conscious about having arrived to visit them empty handed.

  “Should have brought flowers,” I mumbled to myself.

  My sister-in-law stepped forward and joined me at the gravesite. She placed the baby’s carrier between the graves, dropped to her knees, and began to tug at the weeds. Together we made quick work of neatening up the site. As we pulled at the clumps of tall grasses crowding the headstones, the scent of wild onions bloomed in the air. The smell would linger on our fingertips for only a few hours, but the satisfaction of seeing and grooming the graves stayed with me. It was symbolic of the task at hand. To find out anything about the Dragon Lady, I would have to put her family life in order and place the Chuong family into the larger context of Vietnam’s history. The important thing was to tell the story before it suffered the neglect of a forgotten grave.