Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  On November 5, four days after the coup, she held a press conference in a room off the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Madame Nhu wore dark sunglasses, a simple pearl necklace, and a shimmering ao dai, captured in a poem by Laurence Goldstein as “the color of moonlight.”

  Her voice caught as Madame Nhu tried to read from her prepared statement. “Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need any enemies.” She accused the United States of bearing responsibility for the coup and, clenching a tissue, composed herself enough to issue an eerie prediction. “I can predict to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning.”

  Her father, Tran Van Chuong, who had refused to see her at any other point on her monthlong tour of the United States, climbed a back staircase to Madame Nhu’s hotel suite on the eighth floor. Father and daughter were reunited in private, and afterwards Chuong told the press that there was “no need for a reconciliation”; they had set aside their differences in light of the tragedy. Madame Nhu told Clare Booth Luce a quite different, and far more believable, version. Her father had come to visit her, she said, because he wanted to go back to Vietnam and join the new government, but obviously he could not do so without his daughter’s blessing. Not even Chuong could talk his way out of that kind of political scandal. He couldn’t just join forces with the people who had killed his son-in-law without some kind of explanation or Madame Nhu’s help. He came to her hotel room at the Beverly Wilshire to ask if he could he tell the public that his widowed daughter had forgiven him.

  But Madame Nhu would do no such thing. She wouldn’t forgive him for quitting on the regime in August, and she wouldn’t forgive him for not receiving her and Le Thuy on his doorstep. She would never, ever forgive him or her mother for having made her childhood as the invisible middle daughter so miserable.

  Presumably, Madame Nhu knew that Chuong and his wife had been undermining the Diem government for years, but she might not have known all the details. Wesley Fishel, head of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group and contracted to consult for the Diem regime, became a close friend of Diem’s during the early years of his presidency. His group advised on everything from public administration and personnel to economics and trade decisions, and many of its proposals shaped how the Diem administration ran. But Diem didn’t seem to have registered much of a response to Fishel’s frank letter in 1960, a warning about Chuong’s obvious “ambitions for higher office.” Fishel told Diem that Chuong had “virtually succeeded in destroying the organization of your friends in America” from the moment he arrived in Washington as ambassador.1 No one can answer why Diem kept Chuong in place, but at least after the coup Madame Nhu could take some small solace in the fact that her parents would not benefit from their betrayal. The coup her parents had helped lay the groundwork for would condemn them to a life in exile.

  Madame Nhu couldn’t have known that their lives would end in murder just twenty-three years later. She couldn’t have known that the prized son they had cast her aside for would be their killer. The Shakespearean plays that Chuong had enjoyed listening to so much during his life, tales of madness, betrayal, family tragedy, and revenge, were in retrospect tales that foreshadowed his fate.

  Quite suddenly, Madame Nhu found herself with practical concerns—like money. Her room at the hotel was $98 a night. A source close to Madame Nhu revealed to the New York Times that she had arrived in the United States with $5,000 in cash for what was supposed to be a three-week tour. The source also whispered that her wealth in South Vietnam had been greatly overestimated—all the funds had gone into the coffers of her husband’s political party. There were no savings and few overseas holdings. “Money is definitely a worry,” the associate confided to the New York Times. While sorting out what to do after the coup, Madame Nhu continued to rack up debts—and she no longer had a government to send the bill to. Allen Chase, a financier with a home at the end of a long, winding private drive in the Los Angeles Bel Air neighborhood, invited her to check out of the hotel and become his houseguest. Chase and his wife let Madame Nhu move into their bedroom while they themselves moved into a guest room.

  James McFadden, publisher of the conservative magazine National Review, had been one of the few visitors to Madame Nhu, and the newspapers reported that she had been in negotiations with book publishers and, it being Los Angeles, movie people about selling her story. But Madame Nhu’s highest value might be realized if she stayed in the United States long enough to exert an influence on the upcoming election year. In a telephone conversation, Clare Booth Luce and Richard Nixon shared the sentiment that Madame Nhu had real potential to damage President Kennedy. Luce told Nixon that she was convinced “Jack Kennedy wants a negotiated peace!” and once Americans found out about his real intentions, a neutral South Vietnam, he would be unelectable. Madame Nhu, the grieving widow, was “still a figure in the puzzle.”

  But Madame Nhu had no real choice in the end. She had no money, and her Republican friends couldn’t support her forever. She left half of her $1,000 bill at the Beverly Wilshire unpaid, and left the United States for Rome to be reunited with her three other children. Before leaving, Madame Nhu read a long farewell statement at the airport. “Judas has sold the Christ for 30 pieces of silver. The Ngo brothers have been sold for a few dollars.”

  While Madame Nhu blamed the United States for the coup in Saigon, others were blaming her. President John F. Kennedy wasn’t the only one who faulted Madame Nhu for the coup in Saigon. United States Information Agency officer Everett Bumgardner called Madame Nhu the “friction point” between the Americans and the regime. She instituted “almost everything that I think went wrong with the Diem government that eventually led to his downfall.”2 Vietnam historian Joseph Buttinger is no kinder in his two-volume history on the Vietnam War: he describes Madame Nhu as the rock around the neck of a drowning man.3

  But in the end, Madame Nhu was right about a lot of things that she never got credit for. She was right that the millions of dollars pouring into South Vietnam were hurting as much as helping in the war against communism. The “Americanization” of South Vietnam turned many nationalists toward the Communists, who warned that capitalism merely disguised American colonial intent. Madame Nhu had said that the Americans were conspiring against the regime, and indeed, from the ambassador in Saigon to the president in the White House, they were. As for the Communists “intoxicating” the Buddhists, they did have some influence in the Pagodas. Communist sources after the war revealed that their agents had indeed infiltrated the Buddhists and they could well have had a part in inspiring the uprising in the summer of 1963. By getting rid of Diem, the Americans, it seemed, had played right into the Communists’ hands.

  Madame Nhu also accused the press of being “intoxicated” by communism. There was the case of Pham Xuan An, who worked for Time Magazine and did circulate widely among prominent journalists who regarded him as a knowledgeable analyst. After the war, An was named a Hero of the People’s Armed Forces by the Hanoi government, awarded four military-exploit medals and elevated to the rank of brigadier general in the North Vietnamese army. But whatever access An had to the reporters over the years, their expert views undoubtedly reflected what, they, themselves saw there. Nonetheless, it was a shock to learn that for all those years of contacts with American journalists, An had been a North Vietnamese agent.

  Madame Nhu’s parting words at the press conference at the Beverly Wilshire—“I can predict to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning”—also came true. US President John F. Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam. A trail of documents shows that he intended to reverse the American military commitment to South Vietnam. Scholars think that Kennedy might have promoted the coup against Diem and Nhu in a miscalculated effort to advance that withdrawal, but of course they can only speculate as Kennedy was assassinated three weeks after the Ngo brothers. Because of his early death, Kennedy escaped ultimate responsibility for Vietnam.

  On November
24, 1963, Madame Nhu sent a condolence letter from Rome to Jacqueline Kennedy, writing of her “profound sympathy for you and your little ones.” But she couldn’t help but inject in a barbed reminder of the grief she was suffering herself. “The wounds inflicted on President Kennedy were identical to those of President Ngo Dinh Diem, and of my husband, and [came] only 20 days after the Vietnamese tragedy.” Madame Nhu suggested that she was somehow stronger or better equipped to deal with tragedy than Mrs. Kennedy when she wrote, “I sympathize the more for I understand that that ordeal might seem to you even more unbearable because of your habitually well-sheltered life.” In other words, now you see how it feels.

  Soon after taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One in November 1963, the new American president, Lyndon Johnson, oversaw the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He would not, he said, “be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went”; nor would he let the United States lose to North Vietnam, “some raggedy-ass, fourth-rate country.” In the year that followed, Johnson authorized support for raids against North Vietnam, increased the troop levels from 12,000 Americans to 75,000, and used the reported attacks on an American vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin as justification for presidential war making. Things only got worse from there. US combat units were deployed in 1965, and the war in Vietnam turned into a proxy war between the United States and the Reds; China and the Soviet Union had also begun sending troops to help North Vietnam. By 1969, more than 500,000 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam, but they still couldn’t save the country from communism. The United States withdrew its forces in 1973, and on April 30, 1975, the Communist tanks rolled into Saigon. Vietnam was finally unified, but at devastating human cost. As many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians died, as did 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Communist South Vietnamese fighters and close to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers; in 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, was inscribed with the names of more than 58,200 members of the American Armed Forces who died or are listed as missing as a result of the war. The sobering lessons of Vietnam still haunt American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  As the war in Vietnam exploded and the world focused on Tonkin, then Tet and My Lai and the Christmas Bombings, Madame Nhu faded into the background. Her life got stranger and sadder still. She had been given, anonymously after the coup, an apartment in Paris. Madame Nhu hadn’t questioned the gift; after all, she figured the Americans owed her more than an apartment, and she was too busy fighting off extradition attempts. The new government in South Vietnam was petitioning the French government to abide by a 1954 judiciary convention agreement that provides for the extradition of alleged criminals, and the junta leaders had already issued a warrant for her arrest. They wanted Madame Nhu to stand trial in Saigon for “damaging the national economy” and “violating foreign exchange regulations.” If the French sent her back to South Vietnam, she could all too easily guess what would happen next. Her brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Can, had remained in Vietnam after the coup. Can had turned himself in to the American consul in Hue, where he had hoped to receive some protection. But the Americans turned Can over to the military junta, which convicted him of running the Diem regime’s Hue operations. Can was imprisoned at Chi Hoa Prison in Saigon for months before being dragged into a courtyard and placed in front of a firing squad. Can was so ill from untreated diabetes that he had to be propped up to be shot.

  Renting out the brand-new four-room apartment, light filled and facing the Eiffel Tower, was Madame Nhu’s only potential income—and it would get her out of France before the new government made up its mind about whether to extradite her or not. The Americans were advising the French to go along with the new government in South Vietnam. Desperate to leave, Madame Nhu accepted the first offer she got, well below the 3,000 francs a month she was hoping for but enough to cover basic expenses. She moved to a patch of arid land on the outskirts of Rome, a property that her husband had bought in the hope of one day building a kind of Catholic retreat for government workers in the Diem government.

  The oldest Ngo brother, Archbishop Thuc, helped Madame Nhu secure tenancy on the Roman land before moving on to his next church assignment: a parish in the South of France. In 1981, Thuc went rogue. He splintered from the mainstream Catholics and began consecrating bishops without the approval of the Holy See. Thuc was involved in a plot to appoint bishops to a council in Mexico, where they would appoint a new pope to overthrow the one in the Vatican. Needless to say, that didn’t go over well with the church. Thuc died, penniless and in obscurity, at eighty-seven years old in 1984 at a monastery in Carthage, Missouri.

  Things hadn’t gone well for Madame Nhu either. On April 12, 1967, her beloved daughter, Le Thuy, died in a car crash outside of Longjumeau, France. She was only twenty-two years old. Madame Nhu always believed that her daughter was murdered. Le Thuy had been working toward her law degree. Imbued with passion and a sense of vengeance, Le Thuy had written in her diary that she would kill those who had hurt her country and killed her father. When Madame Nhu talked to me about her suspicions surrounding Le Thuy’s death, I found her logic hard to follow, but she mentioned that four trucks had converged on Le Thuy’s car on a twisty country road, an event so improbable that, in Madame Nhu’s mind, it had to have been planned. The most damning evidence of Le Thuy’s murder, and a conspiracy to cover it up, was that Madame Nhu’s own lawyer afterward asked for her forgiveness; if he had done his best, Madame Nhu reasoned, he wouldn’t have needed it. Her conclusions about Le Thuy’s death were outrageous—and yet understandable. Of course Madame Nhu thought of her daughter’s death as one more episode in the cloak-and-dagger drama that had ruined her life.

  Luckily, to Madame Nhu’s mind, her three remaining children had no interest in reliving history. Trac, Quynh, and Le Quyen were trying to make their lives over as European citizens. They attended prestigious schools, and two of them got jobs with international organizations: Quynh worked for a major American manufacturing corporation in Brussels, and Le Quyen worked for the Italian aid organization Caritas on refugee and migration issues. It seemed that after the Saigon coup and the assassinations of their father and uncle in 1963, the death of their sister in 1967, and the murder of their grandparents by their uncle in 1986, the three remaining Ngo children might be able to move beyond their terrible legacy. But on April 16, 2012, Madame Nhu’s youngest daughter, Le Quyen, was killed on a Roman highway when her scooter collided with a bus. The Italian news channel Roma Uno uploaded a video to YouTube of the accident scene, rivulets of blood still seeping from under a white sheet on the road. It was viewed over 50,000 times in the weeks and months after her death. I can’t help but draw parallels to the infamous Kennedy Curse: the Kennedys are the only other high-profile family I can think of whose members seem to suffer disproportionately tragic fates.

  Madame Nhu was spared the anguish of burying another child. She had died nearly a year before, on Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011. She was eighty-six years old and passed away peacefully, her son assured me, taking comfort in the fact that she was going to be reunited with her husband and daughter in heaven.

  For perhaps the last time in her own right, Madame Nhu made headlines around the world. Pictures of her from half a century earlier ran alongside her obituary; from there, they were uploaded to blogs and assembled into grainy video montages. The death of the so-called Dragon Lady of South Vietnam made the front page of the New York Times. She was “liked” on Facebook, tweeted, and “tumblred.” Svelte and sinister and scheming—all the old clichés came roaring back. The media lingered on Madame Nhu’s almost cartoonish Dragon Lady character for about a week—a pretty grand finale for someone who had been living in obscurity for the last forty-eight years. But Madame Nhu’s resurgence couldn’t last. The spectacular capture and death of Osama bin Laden turned attention away from what had happened in Vietnam in 1963 and back to America’s contemporary wars.

  It felt very lonely being back in the corner of my apartm
ent that I called my office. I thought of Madame Nhu every time the landline rang. I had to remind myself not to scramble for the pad and pencil—it wouldn’t be her. Tacked to the wall were dozens of pictures of Madame Nhu. I just couldn’t bring myself to put them away; I couldn’t even face the papers still strewn about the floor. Newspaper clippings and State Department memoranda and personal letters remained fanned out chronologically, and I kept averting my eyes from where Madame Nhu’s memoir weighted down the west end of my desk. Before she died, I had begun a laborious process of cataloging the whos, whats, and whens, affixing a rainbow of Post-its along the way. Without her, the stack of white pages looked insurmountable.

  And yet, as horrible and disrespectful as it felt to say it out loud, Madame Nhu’s death was somehow liberating. I was not going to hurt her feelings, and she would no longer sit in judgment of my efforts. In hindsight, it seemed obvious. Madame Nhu kept refusing to meet me because she had known that to do so would have broken part of the mystery—and the mystery kept me coming back for her. Once she showed herself fully, she would have lost control. And she would never do that—at least not on purpose. Until the very end she kept herself just out of reach.

  I struggled with what to do. Madame Nhu had trusted me with her memoirs and photographs, and after her death, I felt that responsibility keenly. I couldn’t just let her last words collect dust in my possession; after all, she had told me over and over that she wanted one last chance to be heard. And yet, in her memoir, she was simply perpetuating her own version of the Dragon Lady myth. She wrote as if she were already far removed from reality. For example, in her memoirs, Madame Nhu comes off as self-centered and self-aggrandizing when she writes, “It is therefore for myself that, out of personal curiosity to uncover my long life, I try to remember, bit by bit, my passage as the Predestined little one of the Lord. . . . I think I will be better understood, and can help others on their journey, by recalling mine.” She also credits herself with wholly redefining what it meant to be a modern Vietnamese woman: “I never stopped innovating, given the rules of modernity, what was known as the life of a woman.”