Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  She had a point. South Vietnam was a country at war. Moderation would have been more appropriate. As with any couple in a troubled marriage, fights over money just exacerbated the tensions between the US and South Vietnamese governments. By 1963, the United States was pouring $1.5 million into South Vietnam every day, nearly $550 million annually. Americans thought the South Vietnamese should be doing more with the massive inflows of cash, but the South Vietnamese argued that too much of the money earmarked for South Vietnam went to “operational expenses” for American servicemen and advisors—bringing cold Cokes, hamburgers, and color televisions to comfort the advisors stationed in the jungles. The Ngo brothers wanted a cutback in the number of American advisors; instead, the Kennedy administration signaled that it would put more men in South Vietnam but cut the overall aid package. At the same time, the Communists needed only point to the Americanization of South Vietnam—from the economy to the fashion to the shelves of the grocery stores—to make their nationalist point.

  So much had been made of the phrase “the monks’ barbecue” and now the “soldiers of fortune” comment that, Madame Nhu complained, her deeper meaning had been lost. “I could not make myself heard in my country.” She was heard just fine by the 4,000 to 5,000 students who packed the auditorium to hear her at Fordham University on day five of her visit. The all-male audience had given Madame Nhu a roaring welcome when she walked on stage. She wore another silk ao dai, this one with a boatneck, her hair tidily twisted up. She showed no signs of the shaky exhaustion of the day before. This was a different crowd altogether. Row after row of men gazed up at the little figure on the stage. They were dressed in severe suits and dark ties and rippled with appreciative laughter when Madame Nhu told them, “I’m ready to answer questions—but I don’t want to deprive you of your lunch.” They were charmed and seemed more than willing to go along with Madame Nhu when she beseeched them with a final request, “Whatever you hear, please don’t condemn me.” She was given a standing ovation.

  In front of the men at Fordham, Madame Nhu seemed to have overcome whatever shyness or lingering doubts might have plagued her. That success was followed by cheers from a capacity audience at Columbia University. Even though detractors had repeatedly pelted her limousine with eggs and chalk as she traveled through the city, Madame Nhu seemed to realize by the end of her first week in the United States that she would be just fine, no thanks to the government that refused to acknowledge her.

  On Sunday morning, Madame Nhu and her daughter went to Mass at the Church of Saint Agnes on Forty-Third Street near Grand Central Station. Madame Nhu wore a salmon-pink ao dai, and Le Thuy wore turquoise; with their matching smiles the mother and daughter looked like they could have posed for a Howard Johnson ad. Madame Nhu had every reason to smile—her interview on NBC’s popular show Meet the Press would air that evening, and she had just received a huge bouquet of flowers from the students at Columbia in apology for the protests she had encountered on campus the day before. It was a nice touch, but even nicer was a visit from New York City’s public events commissioner. It would be Madame Nhu’s first formal face-to-face greeting from a government official at any level. All the fuss around Madame Nhu had made her “his concern” as a New York City representative.12 She must have been tickled that even he had trouble making his way through the Barclay lobby. Madame Nhu had been in the country nearly a full week, and the excitement surrounding her still hadn’t died down. Curiosity seekers, media, protesters, and fans still swarmed her hotel. After his meeting with Madame Nhu, the official conceded to the press that she was “a dynamo.” She simply couldn’t and wouldn’t be ignored.

  CHAPTER 14

  Closed Doors

  IN 1943, SOONG MAY-LING, the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, travelled across America, from East Coast to West, New York to California. Her itinerary was very much like Madame Nhu’s twenty years later. They had called Madame Chiang the Dragon Lady too—for being determined, daring, and deliberately alluring. And like Madame Nhu, Madame Chiang was on a crusade against the evil threat posed to her country by communism.

  But the context was different. Madame Chiang’s 1943 visit took place less than two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The willowy Chinese woman who took the floor at the US Senate cut a dashing figure; she was an inspirational hero for the Americans—they had fought a common enemy during World War II, the Japanese. If Madame Chiang said the Communists were another threat to China’s security, America was ready to believe her. The American public was enchanted with what she wore, how she spoke, and even her daily toilette. The papers chronicled every detail of her trip.

  For as exotic as Madame Chiang appeared, with her crescent-shaped eyes, glossy black hair, and fine-boned physique, she was also just familiar enough. She had gone to school at Wellesley. She knew how to talk to Americans. This wasn’t her first trip to the States, and she was used to the culture.

  Madame Chiang had been aware of an American paradox that made her innately skeptical of how she was treated. In her experience, Americans could profess to be charmed with the romance of the Orient but still hold racist and condescending attitudes. Madame Chiang bristled at any implied racism or condescension because she was Chinese, and she insisted on top ceremonial protocol during her visit to the United States. Like Madame Nhu, Madame Chiang was not technically the wife of a titular head of state: Chiang Kai-shek was a man of many titles, but president of China was not one of them. Regardless, President and Mrs. Roosevelt greeted Madame Chiang personally when her train pulled into the station in Washington, DC. She rode with them in their car to the White House. Once there, the Roosevelts put her up in the Rose Room and had the bed made up with silk sheets for her sensitive skin. For the entirety of her stay, nearly every night for a month, the Roosevelts invited Madame Chiang to dine with them in the evening.1

  In stark contrast, Madame Nhu was still getting the silent treatment from the Kennedy administration and the entire US government.

  Madame Nhu arrived in Washington, DC, on October 15, 1963. She had been speaking to Princeton University students in New Jersey earlier in the day, and the day before that she had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard Law School and Radcliffe College. She was going to spend one more week on the East Coast, in and around the nation’s capital, before flying to Chicago. It was a grueling schedule. Increased security had been procured; maybe the protests were predicted to be worse in Washington than they had been in New York. So Madame Nhu had a whole entourage trailing her through the District of Columbia and its environs. She rode with her daughter in the lead car, a long black limousine. Streets were cleared; traffic was held up; even the motorcade of the president of the United States had to wait for her to pass. Hearing the self-congratulatory way Madame Nhu remembered it fifty years later, you would think she had been Moses parting the Red Sea.

  Madame Nhu turned up on her parents’ doorstep on Wednesday evening, the day after arriving in Washington. The Chuongs’ new house was modest. After leaving the diplomatic pomp of the South Vietnamese embassy behind in August, the former ambassador and his wife had moved onto a tree-lined street in a residential corner of northwestern Washington. The solidly built brick house had two floors and only five rooms. It was a comfortable enough home, but for a couple with imperial bloodlines used to living life among servants and impeccable luxury, a middle-class American home must have seemed a huge step down.

  It was not family nostalgia that brought Madame Nhu to their front door, although she knew that her father, during his otherwise dignified resignation speech, had choked up at the mention of his daughter. She was suspicious of her father’s emotion. Chuong referred to her in public only as Madame Nhu. He told reporters that he simply “did not wish to know her.” Indeed, he and his wife felt a call of duty to tell their point of view in order to “cover the stench” that their daughter was making. Former president Harry Truman, whose daughter was the exact same age as Madame Nhu, was said to have reached out t
o compliment Chuong on how superbly he was handling his tempestuous daughter.2

  Chuong tried to belittle his daughter in her role as First Lady. She “has not the power she is supposed to have,” he sniffed when asked about the inner workings of the Saigon government. In a CBS interview that aired on network television, he elaborated. His boss of nine years, President Ngo Dinh Diem, was just the front man. The real power in Vietnam belonged to his younger brother and Chuong’s son-in-law, Nhu. Madame Nhu might have been infected with the same “power madness” as her husband, but she was “only a shadow.”3 Chuong was trying to make his daughter seem smaller, but he failed. Instead he reconfirmed what the Americans had come to suspect and fear: that together the Nhus had enormous power over Diem. That made Madame Nhu more, not less, influential.

  The insults still struck a nerve. When an Italian journalist asked Nhu about his father-in-law, Nhu spoke for himself and his wife. For once he let the mask slip, and his words expressed a retributive violence that seemed utterly alien to the discreet librarian he had once presented himself as. If Chuong tried to return to Saigon, Nhu said calmly, as if remarking on the weather, “I will have his head cut off. I will hang him in the center of a square and let him dangle there. My wife will make the knot on the rope because she is proud of being a Vietnamese and she is a good patriot.”4

  The house was dark when the limousine pulled up to the curb. Le Thuy rang her grandparents’ doorbell while her mother waited slightly behind her. Madame Nhu stood with hands on hips, out of the immediate line of sight of anyone looking through the peephole. One fluttering pant leg could be seen through the side slit in her ao dai, her heeled foot tapping—with impatience and perhaps nerves. Madame Nhu played the role of the petulant daughter perfectly. Only two days before she had even sounded like one when she whined to the NBC reporters on Meet the Press about how her father had been against her since her childhood.

  Exasperated with the waiting, Madame Nhu swept Le Thuy to the side and rapped her knuckles on the door herself. There was still no answer. Madame Nhu was keenly aware that the twenty reporters or more who had trailed her to the scene were watching her every move. Lightbulbs flashed against the white trim of the house, catching the humbled First Lady as she stood there. Now Madame Nhu was indignant at being ignored—and at being ignored in front of a crowd. She pushed her shoulders back and marched into the backyard. Poking holes in the lawn with the spikes of her heels, she made her way to the back entrance, where she darted up a few patio steps and peered in through the windows.

  The rooms were dark and the walls inside still mostly bare. She might have noticed the borrowed chairs her parents were using or the uncarpeted living room. A photograph of the couple stood propped up on the mantle, and the only art was a delicate painting of Madame Chuong’s hands on silk. Perhaps there were still boxes to unpack. When the Chuongs had left the embassy behind, they had surely taken more than this with them—like their collection of books and vases and Asian art. The family picture once on a prominent display in the embassy, the one that showed Madame Nhu as a small child clasping her parents’ hands, was nowhere in sight. There was a small phonograph that Chuong had kept next to his desk at the embassy. He had used it frequently to play recordings of Shakespeare’s plays. They were “full of wisdom,” he said; Chuong liked to listen to centuries-old tales and absorb their insights into human behavior. The tragicomedy playing itself out in real time on his front lawn had all the urgency—and potential for destruction—of the final act of a Shakespearean drama.5

  It was all the Washington newsmen could do to keep up with the First Lady as she stalked off her parents’ property. Madame Nhu was upset. “I don’t understand. I called and talked to someone here just moments ago.” But the moment had passed, and now the Chuongs were not at home, or they had done an excellent job of pretending not to be. Madame Nhu and Le Thuy folded themselves into the back seat of the limousine, and the car took off. It sped through the quiet streets of the capital until it pulled up short in front of the Vietnamese embassy. When Madame Nhu made her way to the door and knocked, a figure dressed in white opened it almost immediately. “Chau!” Madame Nhu cried out. And then, according to the reporters who arrived just in time to witness the scene, Madame Nhu threw herself into the arms of the small man. Someone would later explain to the press that Chau had been the family cook for many years. He ushered Madame Nhu and Le Thuy inside the embassy, away from the prying press. The new South Vietnamese ambassador had told the Americans confidentially that he didn’t care much for the First Lady, but he was smart enough to have laid on a pleasant dinner—his job, if not his life, would have been at risk otherwise. And since the newly arrived diplomat had kept Chau on staff after the Chuongs had left, the kitchen probably still had plenty of ingredients on hand to re-create some of the dishes Madame Nhu had loved as a girl—maybe the northern soup flavored with ox tail and anise or grilled pork meatballs wrapped in large lettuce leaves with mint and cilantro. Madame Nhu’s last taste of home came not from her parents, who left her standing in the cold, but from the cook they had once employed. It was a bitter if familiar reminder, like her childhood all over again, when her parents had left her on her grandfather’s estate and handed her care over to nurses.

  When Madame Nhu was still in Europe before coming to America, her mother had summoned a close Kennedy aide to her new home for a “vital” meeting. When he arrived, she told him pointedly: get Kennedy to get rid of the Ngos. Diem was incompetent; her son-in-law, Nhu, was un barbare. As for her daughter, Madame Chuong said that she had advised people in the Vietnamese community in New York and Washington to run Madame Nhu “over with a car” when she arrived. If they couldn’t do that, they should throw tomatoes and eggs. Looking over the edge of her teacup, she vowed to the Kennedy aide that if the White House wasn’t going to do anything about silencing Madame Nhu, she, Madame Chuong, was quite capable of organizing “something against this monster.”

  That conversation was written up and classified “secret.” An official with a sense of irony had scrawled along the side of the document “mother’s love.”6

  Over Madame Nhu’s next few days in Washington, she would go against the advice she had received from Marguerite Higgins, the reporter at the New York Herald Tribune. The First Lady went back to criticizing the American government, an attack calculated to disrupt and wound the Democratic administration, which she accused of being soft on communism. Certain unnamed liberals surrounding Kennedy, she said, were “not red yet, but pink.”

  Still, the crowds seemed sympathetic to Madame Nhu. Five hundred people packed into the National Press Club to see her on Friday, October 18. The audience interrupted her speech more than twenty times with applause—on average once every three minutes that Madame Nhu was on stage. In response, she purred and smiled graciously. She was overwhelmed, she said, by the goodwill of the American people. However, she continued a little sadly, she was also dismayed. The Kennedy administration had continued to give her the silent treatment. She understood, she said, that this was not a state visit. “But there are ways in which these things can be done.” Madame Nhu adopted a “more in sorrow than in anger” tone and suggested the Kennedy administration could have handled the whole business, indeed its whole policy with respect to South Vietnam, a little better. She implied that the administration didn’t really know what it was doing or with whom it was dealing. Her insinuations must have infuriated Kennedy. But, as so often, Madame Nhu wasn’t wrong.

  CHAPTER 15

  Coup d’État

  ALMOST A YEAR HAD PASSED SINCE Madame Nhu and I had given up on each other. When she started calling again in the summer of 2010, it was as if nothing had happened. I played right along, as she wholly expected, but my willingness came as a surprise to me. I found it funny how I had missed her and yet dreaded getting dragged back in.

  Madame Nhu’s voice was gravelly. For the first time, she sounded like the eighty-six-year-old woman she was. She had been sick, she
said; she had undergone surgery on her feet and moved out of Paris. I had guessed that something had happened to her. When I called her about three months after she hung up on me, ready to apologize for upsetting her, I had gotten the standard international tone for a number no longer in service. First I worried that something terrible had happened. I scanned the obituaries daily, holding my breath and exhaling when I didn’t see her name in boldface. I couldn’t imagine that she would change her phone number only because of our disagreement. But I also couldn’t imagine that she would have gone so long without calling me. So much for being her angel, and so much for those memoirs—or so I thought.

  “My children,” she said by way of explaining her silence, “they wanted me closer to them. I live in Rome now.” She prattled off the news of the last few months, described her health troubles, and added, almost as an afterthought, that by the way the memoirs were done. She was ready to send them to me.

  There were a few technical difficulties between that conversation and my receiving the memoirs in my e-mail inbox, something to do with her children and their full-time jobs and, I inferred, their depleting reserves of patience for their mother’s memoir project. I couldn’t rationally explain my own obsession with getting Madame Nhu’s story, but by 2010, perhaps it was that I had spent so much time, nearly five years, hoping and waiting for them that it was a hard habit to break. I expected the memoirs to fulfill my curiosity about Madame Nhu. I would understand her, I would be able to put her in context, and I could put a neat check next to her name on my list of quirky fascinations, and maybe move on.

  Instead, the two volumes that landed in my inbox baffled me. The title didn’t help at all: Le Caillou Blanc, or The White Pebble. Later my mother made a bit more sense of it for me. In France, they say of a momentous event that its date is marked with a white pebble. But at first, scrolling through the pages was like reading something written in code. There were letters and numbers in parentheses, biblical references in bold headings, and italicized subheaders organized chronologically. It appeared Madame Nhu had made a grand catalog of her life, but it was a maze to be deciphered—yet another obstacle to obtaining Madame Nhu’s grand narrative. It was much too foreign for me to make out, at least at first glance.