Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Thankfully, she sent pictures. I pored over them, wishing I could hear the characters speak. There was one of herself at eighteen, taken on the eve of her wedding, in the moment before everything changed. Studying a glossy portrait of her husband, I noticed for the first time that Nhu, the so-called Rasputin of Vietnam, had a slightly upturned button nose. Instead of looking cold and frightening, he was, well, cute.

  The parts of Madame Nhu’s writing that resembled a conventional memoir were thinly seeded throughout some two hundred pages, but the biographical nuggets were rewarding. This definitely wasn’t the memoir she was said to have sold to the Saturday Evening Post in the days after the 1963 coup; nor was it the memoir that Madame Nhu was writing when she was too busy to give press interviews in the 1960s and 1970s for less than $1,000 a pop. I doubt these pages had ever existed anywhere as physical copy. If she had been writing them, she was writing them in her head. The two volumes e-mailed to me seemed to have been drafted recently, maybe even in the months since we had last spoken. I hadn’t known many things.

  Madame Nhu described herself at her desk writing. She wrote of falling and hitting her head. It was heartbreaking to read about her being so vulnerable and old. She talked of land disputes in Italy between her son Trac and their neighbors, who were trying to encroach on their property. But when she dipped back into the rich loam of her memory, she came up with sparkling details, like the rain in Dalat that was so heavy, it filled Le Thuy’s backpack on her walk to school. Or her elegant pousse, with wheels so big that I easily imagined myself in her place, bouncing along the canals in Hue, feeling a bit like Cinderella on her way to the ball. Her writing style was not linear; at times it was barely coherent. But if you could hang on through the rapids, it was fascinating. I suggested to her that if she hoped for a wide readership, the manuscript would need a good bit of editing, but it would be a valuable addition to the historical record.

  “No.” Her voice was raspy and her breathing labored, but she came across the line taut as a steel cable and sliced cleanly through the patter of our otherwise pleasant morning chat. “I trust you completely with the memoirs. You are fully responsible. But there will be no editing. No changes are to be made. They are to be published as they are written. Volume number one, followed by number two. And,” she added, “I am anxious to get this in print as soon as possible. I don’t have long.”

  I was flummoxed. I had access to the inner thoughts of one of the world’s most famous recluses. I was tantalizingly close but still trying to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. I felt like a character in an ancient Vietnamese fable who finds an enchanted treasure. Each time I got within reach of understanding Madame Nhu, she slipped away again, her elusiveness making her ever more the object of my attention.

  The last time we talked, Madame Nhu sounded worse, her voice sandpaper in her throat. “There are days when I want to close my eyes and go in peace. But what wakes me up is only the feeling that there is something that I have to do, and something I have left to say.” Madame Nhu’s dying wish was to express herself. She was asking me to help her, but I no longer knew how.

  Madame Nhu talked to her husband for the last time on October 27, 1963. They had spoken every few days while she was away, first in Europe and then in the United States. It had been a long trip. Madame Nhu and Le Thuy had left Saigon six weeks before, and now it was almost time to go home. They planned to fly from California to Vietnam with a stopover in Japan. Nhu was going to meet them in Tokyo to accompany them the rest of the way, and Madame Nhu was trying to finalize the itinerary over a tinny long-distance telephone call connecting her from San Francisco to Saigon.

  There was a small cyst on her eyelid, she explained to Nhu. She wanted to get it taken care of, but she supposed it could wait a few more days until she got to Tokyo. “Would that be alright?” she asked him. If she did it in Japan, she reasoned, “it will be cheaper!” Madame Nhu was trying to lighten the mood. It could be hard to read a person over thousands of miles of transpacific cable, but Nhu’s voice sounded small and strange to her.

  “I’m not coming to Japan anymore. I am staying in Saigon.”

  Madame Nhu chose not to insist. She didn’t want to get into a disagreement over the phone, so she bit her tongue. “Fine.” She would get the surgery done before flying home. In Los Angeles, why not? Doctors there were used to working on beautiful, famous faces. She would stay ten more days.

  After Washington, DC, Madame Nhu’s stops had included cities and colleges in North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas. She had taken part in US Day on October 23 at Dallas Memorial Auditorium, where she had been called onto the stage and handed a bouquet of flowers. US Day was a protest rally specifically organized to take place one day before the UN Day celebration of the US membership in the United Nations at the same location. Banners reading “Get the US out of the UN” and “Get the UN out of the US” were unfurled. The anti–United Nations gathering brought together ultraconservatives who opposed the Kennedy administration in Washington—members of the John Birch Society, the Minutemen, and the National Indignation Convention. A man named Lee Harvey Oswald was there. Madame Nhu’s proximity to Oswald in Dallas on US Day, combined with the chain of tragic events about to unfold in Saigon, make Madame Nhu a main character in some of the wilder Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.1

  The accusations are baseless—death was far from Madame Nhu’s mind in Texas. She was too busy enjoying her time as the VIP guest of billionaire oilman Dudley Dougherty at his sprawling ranch, San Domingo, just outside Beeville in southern Texas. He encouraged Madame Nhu to speak her mind freely to the press and gave her and her daughter a taste of Texas hospitality. Le Thuy especially seemed to enjoy it; on the ranch she changed out of the ao dai she had worn on the speaking tour into pants, kitten-heel boots, and a sweater, topping the Western outfit off with a cowboy hat. Le Thuy held a shotgun for the first time on the skeet range, downing clay pigeons with the twelve-gauge at an impressive rate of six out of ten. It wasn’t beginner’s luck—Le Thuy had plenty of machine-gun training from drilling with her mother’s paramilitary organization in South Vietnam—but she still impressed her hosts and landed her first “real” boyfriend, Dougherty’s twenty-four-year-old nephew, Bruce B. Baxter III, from Corpus Christi.

  Young Baxter followed Le Thuy and her mother from Texas to California. His ardor was undeterred by California’s governor Pat Brown, who made what Time magazine declared the “understatement of the month.” Governor Brown said on the eve of their arrival, “Madame Nhu is a controversial figure. She is not the first to visit California, nor will she be the last. I urge all Californians to act like civilized Americans and let the lady have her say.” Baxter, for one, acted like a gentleman. He invited the mother and daughter to dine out with him at a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, and when Baxter left, presumably to return to Texas for a few days, he couldn’t stay away for long. He met up with Le Thuy again at her hotel in Los Angeles. The couple lounged around the Beverly Wilshire pool area before heading out on the town, spending two hours at Hollywood nightspots, but always in the company of their chaperones, two middle-aged men.2

  Eight thousand miles away in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Nhu had bigger things to worry about than his daughter’s first romance or the price of his wife’s eye-cyst surgery. For all Madame Nhu’s press attention and powerful new friends, things in Saigon had continued to worsen. Nhu had sounded so strange on the telephone with Madame Nhu because he knew by then that things were all but hopeless.

  Nhu’s attack on the pagodas in August had poisoned whatever goodwill remained in his relationship with the Americans. Before then, the general thinking in Washington was that the United States had simply been “insufficiently firm” in its dealings with Diem and Nhu in Saigon, but after the August raids and Nhu’s flagrant disregard for the American directive to resolve tensions with the Buddhists, Washington’s policy changed radically. The brothers were incorrigible, and they would have to be replaced.
/>
  On August 24, a top-secret cable sent to US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge in Saigon instructed him to confront Diem with uncomfortable and immediate demands: give the Buddhists what they want, and get rid of Nhu. If Diem didn’t agree or act quickly, “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” Lodge was given the green light to pursue alternative leaders. Although American leaders in Washington would not manage the tricky details of a regime change, the cable assured Lodge that “we will back you to the hilt on actions you take to achieve our objectives.”3

  Of course, a US ambassador couldn’t exactly solicit regime change. That was Fred Flott’s job. An American Foreign Service officer from the Midwest, Flott understood it was his task to do the dirty work the ambassador himself could not—to make contacts with opponents of the Diem regime and funnel American support to topple the government of a friendly nation.

  The Ngo brothers might not have known the full extent of what was going on in the American embassy in Saigon, but they had a pretty good idea. Someone loyal to the Ngos had installed small eavesdropping devices in the embassy offices that went undetected until the Ngo affair was well over.4 But even without the spying technology, the shift would have been obvious to Diem and Nhu. On September 2, 1963, President Kennedy said in a CBS National News interview with Walter Cronkite that the Ngo brothers’ “government has gotten out of touch with the people” of South Vietnam. Kennedy continued, “Now all we can do is to make it very clear that we don’t think this is the way to win,” and he called for “changes in policy and personnel,” a statement widely interpreted as a threat to Diem to get rid of Nhu.

  Ambassador Lodge took a hard line with the brothers in the Saigon palace right from the start. Instead of courting Diem’s favor and smoothing ruffled diplomatic feathers, the ambassador kept his distance. The American embassy staff displayed “unabated hostility” toward Diem and Nhu, and Lodge’s manner was prickly and imperious. When a reporter asked Lodge why he had not visited the palace in weeks, he replied, “They have not done anything I asked. They know what I want. Why should I keep asking?”5

  Instead of taking face-to-face meetings with Diem, Lodge leaked information to the American press that he would hold American aid dollars hostage if Diem didn’t do what he was told, and Lodge became publicly critical of anyone in the American government who was too nice to the Ngo brothers. One of his targets was CIA Saigon station chief John Richardson. It had been Richardson’s job to work with Nhu and get close to him in the hopes of influencing him. Because he failed to demonstrate any influence, however, Lodge regarded Richardson as a failure. In a private letter to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Lodge deftly waged a passive-aggressive campaign to get Richardson fired, implying that without ever “meaning to be disloyal,” he was too complicit with “those we are trying to replace.” Richardson was a symbol of American support. His withdrawal in October 1963 was yet another signal to Diem and Nhu that their time was nearly up.6

  The brothers couldn’t vent their frustration with the Americans outright, so they seemed to take it out on the South Vietnamese people. Martial law had been lifted, but every day Nhu’s police arrested dozens of “dissidents.” People caught distributing antigovernment pamphlets or writing anti-Ngo graffiti were taken into custody; even schoolchildren were detained in holding cells.

  The brothers in Saigon couldn’t know that enthusiasm for the coup in Washington was waxing and waning. The White House itself was in disarray over all the conflicting advice it was receiving. CIA director John A. McCone consistently voiced criticisms of a coup. To a meeting of a Special Group on Vietnam, McCone said that replacing Diem and Nhu with unknowns was “exceedingly dangerous” and would likely spell “absolute disaster” for the United States. He said privately to President Kennedy too that this coup “would be the first of others that would follow.”7 But the Departments of State and Defense, on the other hand, were adamantly behind a coup. The United States was divided but had already passed the point of no return. Ambassador Lodge was firm in his belief: “We are on a course from which there is no turning back.”

  President Kennedy himself still wasn’t sure what to think about a coup against the brothers in Saigon. He dispatched a nine-day fact-finding mission headed by his secretary of defense, Robert McNamara, and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Maxwell Taylor, in October 1963. The cover for the trip was to check on the progress of the war against the Viet Cong, and the men kept with protocol by meeting with President Diem at the palace for more than two hours. Not appearing on the official schedule, however, was a game of tennis with Major General Duong Van Minh.

  General Minh was known as Big Minh for two reasons: to distinguish him from another general of the same name and also because of his unusual size—he was close to six feet tall and two hundred pounds. Minh towered over his Vietnamese colleagues and literally looked down on the Ngo brothers, his bosses. A graduate of the École Militaire in Paris and a veteran of the First Indochina War who had fought alongside the French against the Viet Minh, he had backed Diem and fought against the sects and gangsters who threatened the early years of the Diem presidency. Now Minh was plotting against Diem and Nhu. In reporter Stanley Karnow’s opinion, he was not the main conspirator, “but as the senior general, he was the man who crystalized the various factions who were all plotting against Diem.”

  Despite Minh’s enormous frame, he played elegant tennis. The American officials, McNamara and Taylor, barely kept up in the crushing Saigon heat, but they managed to sweat out a good game of doubles on the grass courts of the Cercle Sportif. Then the group retired to a mahogany-paneled room in the club for a casual chat “about the game.” On hearing about the match and private conversation, Nhu and Diem could only infer that the men had talked intrigue too. In fact, they hadn’t. Minh was too scared of leaks that day. But Diem and Nhu were well aware of his links to plotters and the American embassy and the CIA.8

  In Nhu’s desperation he had tried other tactics, like leaking reports that he was in talks with the Communist government of North Vietnam. In late August 1963, Nhu met with Polish diplomat Mieczyslaw Maneli. A secret meeting with a Communist representative provoked the United States to try to understand: if Nhu really was ready to cut a deal with the north and come to a negotiated peace, would that justify taking urgent action to install a new regime, or would it force the United States to ease up on Diem and Nhu? Records show that in the meeting, Nhu talked about “paving the way for trade exchanges with the North,” and he discussed his anger at the Americans but said he did not want to cut ties entirely with the United States. There is no record that the talks initiated with North Vietnam were more than preliminary. There simply wasn’t time.9

  By the last day of October, Diem and Nhu were down to their last tactic to try to keep the regime a float. It was trademark Nhu, a smoke-and-mirrors scheme: he and Diem would fake their own coup. It was risky, but it was their only hope. A false coup was supposed to scare the Americans into renewing support for the Diem regime. Carefully selected phony coup leaders would pretend to be “neutralists,” in the vein of the surprise 1960 neutralist coup in Laos that had severely damaged US interests in Southeast Asia. Losing South Vietnam to neutralists would be another domino down—a devastating blow to the American Cold War strategy.

  To a casual observer, October 31, 1963, seemed like just another day in Saigon. That morning, President Diem chatted easily in his office with US Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and Commander in Chief, US Pacific Command Admiral Harry Felt. Felt was passing through Saigon on what looked like a routine inspection of American military assistance to South Vietnam, but in fact the South Vietnamese army generals plotting against Diem had orchestrated his presence, specifically timing Felt’s visit to keep Diem in the palace all morning.10 The South Vietnamese president warned his visitors that they might hear rumors of a coup and should pay no attention to them. At noon, shutters were lowered over storefronts. Motorbikes, pedicabs
, and Renault taxis ferried people home, out of the midday heat for two hours of lunch and rest. The city was calm.

  The palace was quiet too. The Nhus’ younger children had left for Dalat. They were on school vacation, and the boys had begged their father to let them go hunting. He must have been glad that his sons were following his own passion for the sport. He let them go but made sure that fifteen members of the presidential guard accompanied them. His youngest child, four-year-old daughter Le Quyen, couldn’t hunt, but she would go to the mountains with her brothers and her nurse. She could run more freely around the grounds there than she was ever allowed to do in the garden of the palace. Nhu couldn’t have known it, but he had saved their lives by allowing them to leave Saigon.

  At a little after 4 p.m. a crash of artillery fire broke out. The gunfire sounded like it was near the presidential guard barracks. Shooting so close to the palace had definitely not been part of the plan. Until that moment, the brothers had appraised the slow buildup of troops and tanks inside Saigon’s city limits calmly. They had taken note of the developments in the city from the remove of their offices. Instead of raising warning flags, the movement of troops and armor had reassured Diem and Nhu. They believed their plan, code-named Bravo Two, was off to a good start. Just before the police headquarters fell into the generals’ hands, a frightened police official had telephoned Nhu to tell him that they were under attack.

  “It’s alright,” Nhu said. “I know all about it.”11