Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Nhu was unruffled because he still thought that, according to plan, his forces would quash the “insurrection,” leaving him and Diem hailed as heroes. In the ensuing confusion, Nhu also intended to conduct a very personalized bloodbath. Special forces and Nhu’s hired gangsters would murder disloyal ARVN generals and senior officers. Troublesome Americans had been marked as well; reporter Stanley Karnow would learn that Ambassador Lodge and veteran CIA agent Lucien Conein were on the list of targets.

  This wasn’t the first fake coup scheme that Nhu had planned. The first, code-named Bravo One, had been shelved in October after Nhu’s special forces caught wind of a brewing insurrection among the military ranks. Bravo Two, the countercoup supposedly now under way, involved almost cartoonish levels of deception: it was to be a coup inside a coup.12

  But it soon became clear to the brothers that something had gone wrong. They gathered around the transmitter in the president’s office. It remained quiet. They called the surrounding provincial chiefs, all military men. They called corps commanders and division commanders too. No one stirred. By the time Nhu realized what was really happening, it was too late. There was no way out of the city and no one to trust. The traitors had encircled the palace, forming a tightening noose. Nhu grabbed the mouthpiece. “Take up your arms.” He barked the order out to the brothers’ last remaining hope, the boys of the Republican Youth and his wife’s paramilitary Women’s Corps.

  Their silence was a death sentence.

  Diem and Nhu’s plans had been hijacked. The man they had entrusted to carry out the phony coup, General Ton That Dinh, had turned on them. The youngest general in the South Vietnamese army, Dinh was described by those who knew him as a loud, whiskey-drinking paratrooper. Dinh made up for any lack of intelligence with sheer ambition, and he didn’t travel anywhere without a personal photographer. His attempts to ingratiate himself with the Ngo regime had included converting to Catholicism and joining Nhu’s obscure political party. Dinh’s tactics worked, to a point. President Diem treated him like an adopted son. But Dinh’s vanity made him easy prey for Diem’s opponents. The conspirators convinced General Dinh that he belonged in the president’s cabinet. When Diem refused him the position, Dinh’s damaged pride made him ripe for the picking.13

  Los Angeles was fifteen hours behind Saigon, and the First Lady was recovering in her suite at the Beverly Wilshire. She’d had the cyst removed from her eye hours earlier, and her dark glasses and gauze bandage were awkward. Thankfully, Le Thuy was there to help her, read to her, and keep her company.

  Madame Nhu and Le Thuy were awakened in the night by a frantic telephone call from the attaché at the Vietnamese embassy. In a panic, he described the unfolding crisis in Saigon. He said roadblocks were being thrown across avenues leading from the city to the airport. Insurgent marine troops wearing red kerchiefs were arriving by the truckload in the heart of the city. Events were unfolding with great precision. This was it. The radio station, the post office, and the central police headquarters were all occupied, as were the Ministries of Interior and Defense.

  Madame Nhu listened helplessly to the details of the unfolding crisis thousands of miles away. She writes, “If only I had been there,” again and again in her memoir. She tells herself that she would have prevented the regime from falling, like she had in 1955, 1960, and again in 1962. She believed her absence this time had fatally weakened the Ngo regime. Of course, a rational person would say that there was no way she would have survived, and there is little reason to think that if Madame Nhu had been in Saigon, she could have done anything to prevent what happened. But rationally, she should never have survived crossing that bridge back in 1946.

  The worst part was that she could not get hold of the children. Trac was fifteen, Quynh eleven, and little Le Quyen only four. The story they would later tell their mother was harrowing. When the coup started, they were still in Dalat. Up there, surrounded by army men, they no longer knew whom to trust. The children fled into the woods behind the house and spent the night in the cold rain. They walked all the next day to a mountain village where they were able to beg a bit of rice and ground meat. Then they waited.

  The Ngo brothers fled to Cholon, the Chinese part of Saigon. Some said they used a tunnel in the basement of the palace to make their daring escape. Others say a black Citroen pulled up in front of the palace gates, and the two brothers, both wearing dark grey suits, simply walked out and climbed in. Either way, they were fugitives. It would be hours before the coup forces realized they were fighting for an empty palace. By then the brothers were hiding in the house of a merchant named Ma Tuyen.

  Before dawn on November 1, 1963, the final siege on the palace began. Marching formations of South Vietnamese army rangers filed in behind a column of tanks. They pointed their barrels at the palace walls and began to fire. It didn’t take long before the assault at point-blank range carved a jagged hole. American journalists Ray Herndon and David Halberstam claimed to have been the third and fourth people to enter the palace, right behind the first two Vietnamese lieutenants who scrambled through the hole in the wall. A white flag finally went up from the first floor window on the southwest corner of the palace, signaling to the other soldiers and cowering civilians that it was over. It was time to loot the palace.

  A rush of people charged across the grounds and up the stairs. The silk drapes hung in tatters, and the palace’s ornate mirrors and lamps, fixtures dating from the French colonial era, lay shattered on the floor. The rangers, army boys, and journalists poked through the rubble. They found Nhu’s whiskey and, lying on his desk, the aptly titled book he had not gotten a chance to finish: Shoot to Kill, by Richard Miers, a memoir about his success fighting the Communists in Malaya. And while it turned out that Diem’s reading tastes ran to adventure tales about the American West, the first eager boys pawing at Madame Nhu’s silk negligees overlooked the brown-covered book in her drawers. Her diary was eventually found, discreetly slipped into a waistband, and kept for decades as an heirloom and souvenir.

  At the palace that day, Fred Flott, the Foreign Service officer from the embassy, saw firsthand the fruits of his labors to overthrow the government: “the body of the first man I ever saw who was shot in the head with the M-16 rifle . . . it looked just like a tomato that somebody had stepped on. He was being hauled downstairs at the time. And there were soldiers doing a bit of looting, but there was also some semblance of discipline.” Flott himself pocketed a few ashtrays from the palace as souvenirs and nodded a greeting to David Halberstam when they passed each other on the stairs. The embassy worker would remember that the journalist’s hands had been filled with a ten-foot elephant tusk. Halberstam would admit instead to having taken a Laotian sword, probably from Nhu’s collection.

  The decorative sword wouldn’t have done Nhu any good at that point. The brothers knew they were finished, so they didn’t try to hide much longer. They moved from Ma Tuyen’s house to another location in Cholon, the yellow and white stucco St. Francis Xavier Church. Diem called the army headquarters and asked to be put in touch with the generals to arrange his surrender. Troops began pulling up shortly after. The officers walked up to the front of the church and saluted the man who had been their president for nine years. Then they led him and his brother out and shoved them into the back of a small, tarpaulin-sided truck. Later, no one can say when, the brothers were transferred to an armored car. They would not come out of it alive.14

  Saigon was in chaos. Camouflage-wearing rebels fired their rifles into the air in celebration. Mobs tore through anything associated with the Ngo regime. The offices of the Times of Vietnam were burned; the Catholic bookstore of Archbishop Thuc was smashed. And a determined crowd marched down to the waterfront. A forceful crowd pulled the statue of the Trung sisters, the one cast to look so much like Madame Nhu, from its pedestal using a few dozen meters of rope. One of the heads was broken off and rolled through the streets—like that of an ogress fallen victim to the guillotine.

&nbs
p; Madame Nhu was stuck in the quiet luxury of the Beverly Wilshire, with its carpeted rooms and thick draperies and California sunshine, but she was desperate to get her children out of South Vietnam. She called Marguerite Higgins, the reporter she had met in Saigon and who had become a friend. A sobbing Madame Nhu asked, “Do you really believe they [Diem and Nhu] are dead? Are they going to kill my children too?” Higgins offered to help by calling on her connections at the State Department in Washington.

  “Hurry,” Madame Nhu had implored. “Please hurry.”

  Higgins called Roger Hilsman, Kennedy’s close advisor and the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, at 2 o’clock in the morning.

  “Congratulations, Roger,” she greeted him. “How does it feel to have blood on your hands?”

  “Oh, come on now, Maggie,” Hilsman replied. “Revolutions are rough. People get hurt.” But Higgins’s voice on the phone in the middle of the night asking about the Ngo children must have been a startling reminder of the power of the press. Hilsman’s initial reaction quickly turned when he realized that the United States couldn’t stand by and let something bad happen to children, no matter who their parents were. The proper and chivalrous thing to do would be to get the kids out of the country as quickly as possible. Hilsman assured her that President Kennedy would do anything he could to safeguard the children and promised to get them to a safe place.15 Within three days, the children were out of harm’s way in Rome.

  The Americans were happy to help. They recognized that the deaths of the Ngo children in the coup would reflect horribly on the new regime the Americans would now have to work with. Things were off to a bad start as it was. The official story, that the Ngo brothers had committed suicide, was blown when two leaked photographs showed Diem shot through the head and Nhu’s body filleted with a bayonet more than twenty times. One picture showed both bodies lying in a pool of blood on the floor of an armored car, their hands tied behind their backs. The other picture showed Diem’s bloody corpse on a stretcher with a smiling soldier looking into the camera. The officer said to be responsible for the deaths of the Ngo brothers, Captain Nguyen Van Nhung, was found strangled at general staff headquarters three months later. His murder was never solved.

  The Pentagon Papers, the US government’s history of its political and military involvement in Vietnam, concluded about the 1963 coup, “As the nine-year rule of Diem came to a bloody end, our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment in an essentially leaderless Vietnam.” The generals behind the coup began to make arrangements for a civilian government. General Big Minh became president, and after delaying for what was deemed an appropriate period, the US government recognized the new government of South Vietnam on November 8.16

  The South Vietnamese and American satisfaction in having found an alternative to Diem and Nhu was short-lived. Another general overthrew Minh’s government only two months later in January 1964. In quick succession, seven more governments in South Vietnam would rise and fall. Exacerbating the political mess, the Viet Cong had organized into an efficient army, and the military balance began to tilt into their favor—although it would be a long time before the United States officially recognized it.

  Fred Flott, the ashtray-stealing Foreign Service officer and unofficial liaison between the American embassy and the South Vietnamese coup plotters, was chosen as the official US government representative to accompany the Ngo children. Trac, Quynh, and Le Quyen had been cleaned up after their ordeal hiding in the jungle of Dalat. Their mother’s friend, Nguyen Khanh, the swaggering, goateed general she had so distrusted during the coup attempt in 1960, brought the three children to Saigon on his private plane. He had nothing to fear from the new military junta, which knew he was safely on their side, so he could afford to do the children a favor.17 The Americans took over from there, putting the children on a private US military C-54 aircraft to Thailand. Then Flott accompanied his three charges to Italy. They sat in first class on a flight Pan Am called the “milk run,” stopping in Rangoon, Calcutta, Delhi, and Karachi, before finally landing in Rome. Flott sat next to fifteen-year-old Trac for the long trip.

  I really had a lot of respect for [him], because he rose to the occasion very well. He wasn’t crying, sort of an Asian outward passivity or composure on the thing [the coup]. . . . And the kid read the account of the condition in which his father and his uncle had been found in the back of this armored personnel carrier, with their heads squashed by rifle butts, and all kinds of bayonet wounds in them and everything else, all cut up, and their heads squashed. And he was reading this with complete calm. He read English quite well, although we talked in French. But he didn’t understand the word “squashed,” so he said to me in French, “What’s the word for squashed?” I said, “Ecrabouille.” I said, “It means squashed, but you don’t want to pay too much attention to the details, because the reporters probably didn’t even see it, and it’s the way they write their things.” And he took it very calmly, went on and talked and eventually I got them to Rome.

  Their uncle, Archbishop Thuc, was waiting for the children in Rome. Madame Nhu was still in Los Angeles. Flott recalled the handoff of the Ngo children to Thuc with bitterness:

  Archbishop Thuc met us there, at planeside. He was very hostile, because he knew I was sent by [Ambassador] Cabot Lodge to accompany the children. There were about 150 Italian newsmen there and other press people. I went up to the Archbishop to pay my respects, pay my condolences, and tell him I’d been asked by Ambassador Lodge to deliver the children to him, so they could rejoin their mother, so their mother could rejoin them. He wouldn’t speak to me, wouldn’t shake hands, nothing. Total distance, total ice treatment. Packed them into the car, not a word of thanks, nothing. . . . We had protected these kids from all possible trauma; there had been no scene, nobody came up and talked to them during the whole trip. But not a word of thanks to Lodge, to me, to Pan Am, or anybody. Archbishop Thuc packed them into a big limousine he had and tore off.18

  It’s hard to believe Flott felt entitled to any thanks from the Ngo family. After all, he had helped orchestrate their overthrow. Entire books have explored the extent to which the United States was directly responsible for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and, by extension, the murder of the Ngo brothers. Few people have put it more succinctly than President Lyndon Johnson, when he grumbled during a February 1, 1966, telephone conversation with Senator Eugene McCarthy, “We killed him [Diem]. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we’ve really had no political stability since then.” Did the fall of the Ngo regime really make the war much worse than it ever would have been if Diem had stayed in power? Former CIA director William Colby thought so. He said, “The overthrow of Diem was the worst mistake we made.” If the United States had sustained support for Diem, and if he had not been killed, Colby believed, the Americans “could have avoided most of the rest of the war, which is a hell of a note.”19

  Clearly, the Americans were involved in the Saigon coup. Some in the government were more for it, some more against, but everyone can agree that there was, at minimum, an implication that the United States, from President Kennedy on down, would support a coup against Diem. Because of that, America has had to bear the responsibility for it.

  By all accounts, President Kennedy was profoundly disturbed by the Ngo brothers’ deaths. In the cabinet room of the White House, General Maxwell Taylor recalled that “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.” CIA man Colby confirmed the reaction, saying the president had “blanched and walked out of the room to compose himself.”20 But others wondered how the president could possibly be surprised. Had he really failed to comprehend that a coup would have enormous implications?

  As Kennedy’s friend Red Fay would recall, the president didn’t just blame himself for the deaths of Diem and Nhu. He blamed Madame Nhu. “That g
oddamn bitch. She’s responsible for the death of that kind man [Diem]. You know, it’s so totally unnecessary to have that kind man die because that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.”21

  On the day after the coup, President Kennedy dictated a memo for his records. He called Diem’s and Nhu’s deaths “particularly abhorrent” and accepted responsibility for having “encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.” His presidential thoughts on the Saigon assassinations were then interrupted by three-year-old John Jr. and six-year-old Caroline, who came squealing into the office for a moment with their daddy. Behind the crinkling of the tapes, you can hear little voices saying, “Hello,” into Kennedy’s Dictaphone. Just a moment later their father asked the children all about the changing of the seasons: “Why are leaves green? How is snow on the ground?” The exchange is all the more touching when you remember that these children would never see the change of seasons with their father again. Kennedy would be assassinated just three weeks later.22

  CHAPTER 16

  In Exile

  MADAME NHU AND HER DAUGHTER lingered in California through the terrible, early days after the coup. The three other children had already arrived in Rome, but Madame Nhu just couldn’t bring herself to follow them yet. She couldn’t accept the news coming out of South Vietnam: that Diem and Nhu were dead and that the military had taken control of the government. Madame Nhu kept hoping for some sign that her husband and his brother had survived. A faked death could have been a page in another of her husband’s ingenious schemes. The photos of the slumped, dead bodies left Madame Nhu unconvinced. The corpses were too badly mangled to identify. She would take three more years to fully accept their deaths and to accept that she would never be the First Lady of South Vietnam again. In the days after the coup, Madame Nhu relied on anger and indignation to keep her going.