Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Since Madame Nhu was sending shivers down the spine of the Kennedy administration, she became a convenient friend in an election year to his opponents, such as the Doughertys, who had made their fortune in Texas and had an oil well in their front yard, and the formidable Clare Booth Luce, Republican senator and wife of Henry Luce, founder of the Time-Life empire. They were among many conservatives and Republicans to extend the South Vietnamese First Lady a warm welcome to America. Marguerite Higgins proved a constant friend as well. She had written down what to say and what to avoid saying. Those don’ts included some of Madame Nhu’s favorite phrases: she was to stay away from using expressions like “systematic conspiracy” and “intoxicated monks.” Higgins also warned Madame Nhu not to criticize President Kennedy so blatantly.

  As it was not recognizing her as an “official” visitor to the United States, the State Department bluntly told Madame Nhu that it could not guarantee her safety. She was on her own. The lack of diplomatic protocol around her arrival in New York sent the message loud and clear. The only official recognition of Madame Nhu’s visit was made in protest. Senator Stephen Young, a Democrat from Ohio, said that Madame Nhu had gotten “too big for her britches” and should be sent back to South Vietnam. Representative Wayne L. Hays, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Capitol Hill, went on the congressional record to lodge a formal complaint against that “evil woman” having entered the country on a diplomatic visa. And although Madame Nhu didn’t know it, she had even received a warning from the president of the United States himself.

  In August and September, Madame Nhu had sent letters from Saigon and then Paris to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, asking about whether she would be welcome in the United States. She felt a certain comfort asking Johnson—she had gotten to know him during his official visit, and their teenage daughters had become friends. So Madame Nhu thought she would appeal to the gentlemanly side of the giant Texan. She had been able to charm him not so long before and now she teased him in a letter not to let himself be “frightened by a lady.”

  But President Kennedy was personally vexed about her potential visit. In his view, Madame Nhu emasculated the men around her. The State Department had warned in August that she undercut authority by appearing to lead men around “by her apron strings.” Kennedy had no intention of letting that kind of usurpation of power happen on US soil. A draft of a reply to Madame Nhu’s letter went from Johnson’s office to the White House; Johnson wanted Kennedy to approve it himself.

  “This is not the kind of letter that you write a charming lady,” chided Kennedy with a mocking smile. He was reading it in his steam bath, a kind of alternate office for the president, who suffered from excruciating back pain. It was said that he did some of his best thinking in the bath. In fact, Kennedy’s advisors often gathered around the president, who received them naked from the waist up and covered with a towel below—at least that’s how he was usually described. Meanwhile, the aides wore their suits and ties and even sat on the toilet or crouched on the humid floor tiles.

  Kennedy took a moment to muse about how to craft the letter back to Madame Nhu. “It’s got to be more gentle and more . . .” The thought trailed off as he went to work on crafting a reply. Kennedy expounded on her beauty and charm. He also gave her what can only be read as a warning about “certain political facts of life.” The letter asked her to consider, “in as coldly objective fashion as possible, the question whether your coming here will help or hinder.” Vice President Johnson read the redraft and found it “pretty good.” He dutifully signed the letter and sent it off to Madame Nhu as his own.3

  Madame Nhu may not have known who the author really was, but she read the message between the lines. I can only imagine the square set of her chin as she scratched out an indignant reply with a fountain pen. Her decision not to stand by silently was one of conscience, she said. She would go the United States. And summing up the intensity of her intent with characteristic drama, she wrote, “I refuse to play the role of an accomplice in an awful murder.”

  Presumably, the “murder” she mentions in her letter was a rhetorical flourish. The White House secretary who filed the correspondence must have thought so when she scrawled “no reply needed” across the top. But weeks later, when Madame Nhu’s husband and brother-in-law were, in fact, awfully murdered, the phrase in Madame Nhu’s letter reads as an eerie presentiment. By the time Madame Nhu had written those words, the coup that would topple and kill the Ngo brothers already had US support. The plot should have been very clandestine, with coded wires, eyes-only memos, and back-alley Saigon meetings. Yet Madame Nhu seemed to know about it. And she was set on coming to the United States for an extended visit in the country she was all but accusing of premeditated murder.

  Madame Nhu had been “strongly dissuaded” from coming, she explained to a CBS correspondent on the transatlantic flight from Paris. She was referring to the letter from Kennedy and the State Department’s refusal to guarantee her safety, as well as to other messages she had received from anxious Vietnamese diplomats.4 But Madame Nhu persisted anyway, in what she called her “feminine spirit of contradiction—maybe if they had invited, had insisted that I come, I would not!” And then, according to the reporter, Madame Nhu had giggled and fluttered a little like a butterfly in trouble. Was her visit a coquettish whim, as she had tried to convince the journalist on the flight, or was she a “power-hungry propagandist,” as her father, the ex-ambassador, claimed?

  The truth was that Madame Nhu was more powerful than the tottering government she had left behind in South Vietnam. The Ngo regime was failing, and she knew it. It was weak and defensive while she was vibrant and declamatory. She believed in herself more than she believed in her husband and his brother. She would not stay at home and be a quiet housewife while the mob gathered around her. She, after all, had faced gunfire before; she had gathered her skirts and her infant and crossed the bridge unharmed. She had faced down the Binh Xuyen gangsters and the grandiose General Hinh. Madame Nhu was sure of herself, and her self-belief had never betrayed her.

  Madame Nhu’s bold self-confidence was backed by innate political skill. Even those, like former ambassador to South Vietnam Lawton Collins, who thought her a “vixen of the first order,” couldn’t help but find her politicking—and her fearlessness—remarkable. The foreign journalists who had witnessed her displays of courage in Saigon admitted to a grudging respect for her audacity—and Madame Nhu must have sensed that. She didn’t mind their tagging her the Dragon Lady; she could understand the fascination. “I looked fearless and that was true.” So what if the Americans had invited her and then said, “Don’t come”? Since she wasn’t allowed to stay in her country, she might as well enter into the place she had likened to the biblical lion’s den and see what she could do about fixing the fraying relationship between South Vietnam and America, wielding at least the illusion of power from the inside.

  She knew that she had nothing to lose.

  Columbia, Harvard, and Princeton clamored to have Madame Nhu visit their campuses. Time magazine, the New York Times, and television networks competed for face time with the First Lady. Some of America’s most powerful political families feted her. The American government’s efforts to shush her only reinforced that she was indeed a powerful personality to be reckoned with. All the attention, even the negative kind, paid to her visit padded her confidence.

  Madame Nhu’s stay in New York centered on the seventh floor of the Hotel Barclay. The luxury hotel was used to protecting the privacy of its guests, including celebrities like Marlon Brando and Bette Davis. On the ground floor was the flagship Caswell-Massey pharmacy. Greta Garbo and Katherine Hepburn were clients. Sarah Bernhardt once ran out of the company’s famed cucumber night cream and had the store express ship thirty jars for her European tour. The lobby of the hotel itself had plush carpets and wood paneling. A giant gilt birdcage dominated the entry.

  Madame Nhu did not leave her hotel at all the first day.
She stayed cocooned in Room 708, a suite with heavily draped windows that gave her only a sliver of a view into midtown Manhattan. From there, Forty-Eighth Street passed in front of the hotel to meet the avenues, Lexington and Park, at perfect right angles. That symmetry was unremarkable in itself, but the city went on and on like that, a neat grid paved with shiny black Cadillac sedans, soft-topped Buicks, city buses, and of course yellow taxicabs. The world must have looked so orderly and affluent from up there. Pedestrians observed the boundaries of sidewalks. Streetlights regulated traffic. Dark-suited businessmen went about their daily affairs inside the buildings that stood shoulder to shoulder with her hotel like brothers competing for who was taller. It all confirmed what Madame Nhu believed—that Americans might be a genuine people, but they were arrogant. And no wonder; looking around New York City in 1963 confirmed that can-do confidence was built into the American infrastructure. There was nothing self-effacing or humble in sight.5

  Belgrade, Rome, and of course the last stop on her journey west, Paris, had been beautiful in that old-world way—the twisting streets and crumbling plaster, the historic associations and faded glory. It was a sensibility Madame Nhu could appreciate and the foundation of the only world she had ever known. European aesthetics and standards of beauty had shaped colonial policy in Indochina. But the sound of all these Western cities was so foreign. They were a dissonance of honking and bleating and sirens. In contrast, the carts and bicycles that swarmed the roads of Saigon were a muted whirr that even a good rain could drown out.

  Just beyond the Hotel Barclay’s awning there were protesters. They had been on the street since the night before, chanting, “Phoo on Nhu! Phoo on Nhu!” These were not like the quiet monks who had been lighting themselves on fire in Madame Nhu’s country. Nor did they resemble the American hippies or wild-haired peace activists who would take up the antiwar cause in just a few more years. The young men wore suits and ties; the women wore sensible shoes and stockings. They marched in orderly lockstep circles and carried placards on their shoulders, bearing the messages “End Diem” and “End the War in Vietnam” stenciled in clean block letters. Looking back at video clips of the protest, it seems quaint and quite harmless, a controlled expression of free speech. The painful societal schisms associated with the Vietnam War would come later—at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, where police beat back protesters who were burning draft cards, and of course at Kent State. But the group outside Madame Nhu’s hotel in 1963 was a radical one for its time. Most Americans still believed wholeheartedly in the domino effect and generally trusted their government. When President Kennedy said that the United States had a responsibility in South Vietnam to stop communism, the policy went largely unchallenged.

  A boy in a crew cut and glasses stepped out of the oval formation to be interviewed by Ben Horman, a CBS news reporter. The earnest youth wore a sweater vest under his blazer and carried pens in his front pocket. Horman asked him, almost condescendingly, “So do you think we should pull our forces out? And just let the commies take over?” The young man’s Adam’s apple and nerves threatened to choke him, but he squared his jaw and spoke into the CBS microphone: “It’s for the Vietnamese people to decide.” Then he repeated the statement for good measure. “It’s for the Vietnamese people to decide.”6

  Madame Nhu disagreed entirely. The Vietnamese people could not be trusted with the decision, any more than the Americans could. The notion that South Vietnam might not be worth fighting was anathema for her.

  She emerged refreshed from her hotel the next day. Fifty newsmen and television cameramen were waiting for her in the lobby. She rewarded them with a quick smile, showing a row of pearly teeth. The men shouted for her attention, but she only gathered her fur tighter around her and slid past.

  From then on, Madame Nhu seemed to be everywhere all at once. Helping that impression was the fact that boutiques around the city put mannequins with almond eyes and puffy hairpieces in their shop windows. One fashion designer ruefully commented that he doubted Madame Nhu would be a lasting fashion influence in New York because American women were not small enough, or flat chested enough, to pull off her look effectively.

  Everywhere she went Madame Nhu stopped traffic, literally. Two hundred protesters showed up to picket the first event, but those numbers were dwarfed by the one thousand attendees at Madame Nhu’s lunch at the Waldorf Astoria hosted by the Overseas Press Club. Time magazine reported that women in minks heavily outnumbered the working newsmen. “Is she 40?” asked one matron in the audience. Madame Nhu had just turned thirty-nine. “You don’t have nails like that and do much around the house,” another woman in the audience muttered. Some of her audience had forgotten—perhaps they never knew—why Madame Nhu was in New York. She was trying to save her family. She was trying to enlist support for the fight against communism. She was not there to prove herself a capable housewife.

  The next day three hundred people crowded around simply to watch her emerge from her limousine and dash into Radio City Music Hall. Madame Nhu had to travel around New York under heavy police escort, snarling traffic up and down the avenues as she made her way from midtown to Times Square, from Columbia to Sarah Lawrence to Fordham.7

  On her fourth day in the city, she nearly collapsed. Madame Nhu had taped a television show the day before and had just come from a lunch with the publishers of Time magazine. When she took the stage at Sarah Lawrence College in the late afternoon, her voice was shaky. A woman who had been in the audience said Madame Nhu was “obviously not well” and that she had to stop several times to sip from her glass and swallow some sort of pills. She wavered on her feet under the bright stage lights and excused herself from the stage before she fainted. It was a far cry from her usual spirit. But in this case, it seemed to work in her favor.

  A group of women standing around in twin sets and knee-length pencil skirts gathered after the talk outside the auditorium to chew gum, smoke cigarettes, and compare notes on their impressions. “I couldn’t hate her!” one young woman exclaimed, and her friends nodded in agreement. Then they chimed in like birds pecking the same seed: “I was disarmed.” “She was pretty.” “I’m sorry she didn’t feel better.” But another woman announced her disappointment. The Dragon Lady she had been expecting had not showed up. The term “just didn’t seem to fit that sweet woman.”8

  It might have helped that the Ngo family had hired a New Yorker as program director for Madame Nhu’s trip. She and two assistants worked in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Barclay during Madame Nhu’s stay. They coordinated the details of the cross-country visit but protested to the media that they were not public relations consultants—and certainly “not advising anybody on what to say.”9

  A public relations firm had already fired Madame Nhu and the rest of the Ngo family as clients. The Oram Group was a well-known and well-respected consultant for social and political causes. Their clients included Planned Parenthood and the NAACP, as well as environmental, religious, and civil rights groups. The American Friends of Vietnam had hired the Oram Group sometime during the Eisenhower administration. For $3,000 a month, the firm was charged with promoting President Diem and making sure that the US government and taxpaying public would stand firm behind the embattled president of South Vietnam. Harold Oram himself had helped orchestrate Diem’s triumphal visit to the United States in 1957, when President Eisenhower had personally greeted him at the airport in Washington, and 50,000 people had turned out to watch his motorcade pass through the city. When Diem made his way to Manhattan, the city held a ticker-tape parade. But the staff of consultants at Oram and the directors of the firm had later split among themselves on the question of Diem: was he a strong leader or a repressive dictator? By 1962, they had made up their minds. Oram ended all commitments to represent and promote South Vietnam as a good cause. The firm wasn’t going to do anything to help Madame Nhu on this trip.10

  Like any good tourist to the Big Apple, Madame Nhu took in the sights, including a
show at Times Square and dinner at a nightclub where she listened to jazz. She seemed game for it all. Madame Nhu was making a real effort to show the Americans that she appreciated their culture. The decision to play the good sport on American soil was a smart tactic. She knew she needed to soften her image. By visiting all the sights, taking in all the tastes and sounds that New York City had to offer, she was trying to say that American style and entertainment were great—in America. She wanted to show that she wasn’t a militant moralist all the time. But Madame Nhu did not apologize—at least not sincerely. A few weeks before, in Rome, Madame Nhu had commented to the press that the American military in Vietnam acted “like little soldiers of fortune.” It was a terrible thing to say, even if she didn’t really understand what she was implying. The new ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, had strongly condemned her for it, and the newspapers had run with the story, calling her flagrantly anti-American and accusing her of desecrating the sacrifice of the 112 American soldiers who had died in South Vietnam. All of this helped build the tension and frenzy surrounding her visit to the United States.11

  Madame Nhu refused, or maybe she was unable, to tone down the defensive bristling in her voice. Even though she had apologized for causing offense, she couldn’t drop the issue. Instead, she decided to hammer home what she meant to say. The “Americans bring their houses on their backs [to Vietnam]. . . . They live at great expense.”