Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Madame Nhu idealized herself and her family’s history in her memoir’s pages, never once questioning the dark shadow of the family’s good intentions. The only fault she ever came close to admitting to me she almost whispered into the phone: “Perhaps I should have been a little more humble about our family’s greatness.”

  But in the context of our relationship, which I would call a friendship, I saw Madame Nhu as a more complicated and more sensitive woman than she was willing to express in the pages she had sent me. I had found ways to respect her for her tenacity without excusing her bad behavior, and now I felt like I had been handed the chance to breathe some life into the remote, exotic place in history to which she had been assigned.

  I had a dream about Madame Nhu not long after she died. I was at a villa in Rome, standing in front of a tiled atrium that looked like something out of my eighth-grade Latin book. From there I was led to a velvet couch by a graceful young woman I took to be Madame Nhu’s long dead daughter, Le Thuy. She was most unfriendly to me, and I was suddenly scared of the tongue-lashing I would surely receive from Madame Nhu. I was kept waiting and waiting, until finally a shrunken and grey old woman appeared on the threshold of the hallway. I had the bizarre impulse to go and throw my arms around her, but she waved me back to my seat. She never came into the room, but I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were speaking into my ear: “I am far too busy here to receive you.” Then the old woman linked arms with the young one, and they walked away from me. They had almost disappeared into the dark recess of the hall when the little old lady turned back to me with a genuine smile. She was happy where she was. Of course I am fully aware of all the tricks the subconscious can play, but I woke up with the strangest certainty that Madame Nhu was at peace. She no longer cared what I said or did.

  After Madame Nhu’s death, when her diary turned up in the Bronx, I found in its pages confirmation of the fascinating, contradictory character I had come to know over the phone. I have no doubt that she would not have wanted the diary to surface. Why, she’d have chided, would any one care about the petty fights of a bad marriage? Who would want to hear about these small cruelties when they should be so dwarfed by the larger looming politics of the Cold War and fighting communism. She could not have seen that her intensely personal tale of marital woe was a window into the psychology of a woman with ambition to forge an identity and all the complications that she generated.

  In the very first entry of her diary, on January 28, 1959, the thirty-four-year-old Madame Nhu, still youthful and not yet trapped in the despair of a doomed regime, nonetheless asks herself, isn’t the best time to die right after one has been baptized? The depth of her depression was at absolute odds with the self-confident image she had always presented so carefully to the world. A few days later, she writes that she has come to a hard resolution. She has decided to accept that she will never be something more than she is. Her description of the resolution is vague, “renouncing pink and blue dreams,” an end maybe to childish hopes and dreams, but the cryptic entry has a definite finality. “I can no longer be more, I will no longer be more.”

  In the diary, Madame Nhu comes across as a woman desperately preoccupied with her marriage. She writes that Nhu is hunting again. Nhu is in a bad mood because he’s trying to quit smoking. Nhu has missed his flight to come home to her—deliberately, she implies. Only on one occasion does she recall him surprising her by doing something nice—buying her a crystal chandelier for their wedding anniversary. For all that Nhu might still gaze at her or lay a palm on her cool skin, Madame Nhu pities herself: “He is not young enough to do more.” When he does rise to the occasion, he doesn’t do it when or how she wants. Madame Nhu is bitter at the thought that Nhu got to spend his youth as he wanted, on whom he wanted, and at thirty-four, she is stuck with the little that is left. It is not hard to guess at what she wants. Madame Nhu writes that she has to find other ways to “cool the fire of her desires.”

  For all her evasiveness, the diary makes clear that Madame Nhu’s emotional needs went unfulfilled until she found a place in politics. I can’t help but feel for the woman revealed in these private pages. She was frustrated by her time, her place, and the traditions that surrounded her. She was slowly stifled in a passionless marriage and surrounded by others who lacked her spirit and desire. The future must have seemed terribly lonely.

  “I love him less and less,” she wrote to herself miserably. Yet, as she had before in moments of despair, Madame Nhu would rally. She would make a place for herself alongside her husband the only way she could, by insisting that she be recognized. Because of her leonine tenacity Madame Nhu was traveling independently in the United States during the coup. She did not fall when the Ngo brothers fell; she never gave up when those around her fled, and she survived them all: the perfidious generals, the duplicitous American officials, and even the false-faced plotters lurking in the shadows.

  She even seems to have tasted love briefly in the form of a few affairs. In the diary she wrote about three men by their initials only: L, K, and H. The language is vague enough that I have to wonder if she ever actually acted on her impulse: “Happily have not met any one yet who has it all,” “it” being a desired combination of sincerity, admiration, and adoration—the qualities to match her own. But H seems to have come close, with what she describes as his dynamism and extraordinary way of courting her, though she doesn’t provide any details other than to say he was a real Don Juan character. She coyly asks H, “Are you always like this with women?” and his reply pleases her to no end: “Do you really think women are like you? I had to cross oceans to find you.”

  The anonymous H understood Madame Nhu. I rather sympathize with him, even though I have no idea, beyond the initial, who he was. He loved Le Xuan, Madame Nhu, because of who she was: staggeringly beautiful, proud, willful, a woman who would not be consigned to the place that the men around her had fenced off for her. She would battle with empires, bandits, and the forces of history before she was done. She would be at the heart of the story, the center of the epic into which she had been cast, and no one would ever forget her. She was indeed worth crossing an ocean for, and I am glad that I did.

  Acknowledgments

  MY DEEPEST GRATITUDE GOES, of course, to Madame Nhu, for having lived a life as extraordinary as she did and for sharing her story with me. But this book would not have been possible without the help of many others.

  Madame Nhu would have remained ever so much more mysterious were it not for the hospitality of John Pham and the generous spirit of Captain James Van Thach (US Army, Ret.), to whom I extend a sincere thank-you.

  I have studied with many great professors and teachers through the years. Professor Jack Harris led my first visit to Vietnam with Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and Professor Hue Tam Ho Tai at Harvard University stands out for her brilliant scholarship on Vietnamese history. Ngo Nhu Binh, my Vietnamese-language instructor at Harvard, was the most dedicated teacher I have ever had the pleasure to study with. Although he wasn’t a professor of mine, thanks to Professor Edward Miller at Dartmouth for his academic insight and advice.

  I benefited enormously from the honesty and generosity of the people I interviewed. Many of them lived through a war I could only write about, and I was humbled by their knowledge. Thank you to Ambassador Jim Rosenthal, Mrs. Mauterstock, Pham Ngoc Lan, Lan Dai Do, Madame Bourdillion, Laurence Goldstein, and Dominique Matthieu. My eternal thanks go to the many writers and reporters who covered the Vietnam War—and to those who passed away while I was writing this book, including Stanley Karnow and Malcolm Browne. As a rookie, I feel lucky to have been included in the membership of self-described “Old Hacks.” Thank you for letting me into your conversations.

  I am indebted to the many librarians, archivists, and staff who made my research more fruitful at the following institutions: the John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower presidential libraries, the Hoover Institute, the University of Virginia, Syracuse University,
Michigan State University, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives at College Park in Maryland. Special thanks go to Steve Denney at the University of California, Berkeley, for making and sending so many photocopies, to Margaret Harman at the LBJ Presidential Library for locating Madame Nhu’s tiger-skin pictures, and to Bishop Skylstad for his reflections on Vietnam. Merci to the French archivists in the Centre d’Archives d’Outre-Mer in Aix and the SHAT Archives in Vincennes.

  My special appreciation goes to Malgorzata Labno and Jessica Martino for digging up research and articles and to my talented friend Jessica Tampas for taking my author photograph. To Abby Lewis and Laura Pham Lewis, thank you for making the world seem like a smaller place. Tremendous thanks go to Suzanne Santos, Marjorie Elliott, and Sue Kelly for their careful reading of the manuscript draft and to Ted Moore for just the right phrase.

  Thank you to Katherine Sanford and her parents, Peter and Susan Osnos, who encouraged my earliest efforts. I was incredibly lucky to land agent Lindsay Edgcombe at Levine Greenberg Literary Associates. She guided me to the great team at PublicAffairs, and I sincerely thank everyone there who worked on this book, especially Rachel King and Jen Kelland. My editor and the publisher of PublicAffairs, Clive Priddle, deserves my deepest thanks for shepherding this book through the process and for making every page better.

  I would never have made it through the years of research and writing without the support of my friends and family. Thank you especially to my parents: my mother, Marie Catherine, and her husband, Richard; my father, Gary, and his wife, Suzann; and my in-laws, Carol and Tom. I am indebted to each of them, along with my sisters, Tally and Tama, and their families, for the patience and love they have shown me through this project. I owe a special line of thanks specifically for my mother’s eagle eyes. Above all, I am thankful for the love and creativity of my children, Tommy and CC, and for my amazing husband, Tom; thank you for always believing in me.

  A Condensed History

  1802: Emperor Gia Long unifies a loosely associated group of territories into the country now known as Vietnam and makes Hue the imperial capital.

  1859–1880s: The French colonize Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—the countries that become known as Indochina.

  1910: Ngo Dinh Nhu is born outside Hue.

  1924: Tran Le Xuan is born in Hanoi.

  1940: The Vichy government orders the colonial administration in Indochina to collaborate with the Japanese.

  1943: Tran Le Xuan marries Ngo Dinh Nhu and becomes Madame Nhu.

  1945: The Japanese surrender, and World War II ends. Ho Chi Minh declares Vietnam an independent country but immediately meets with resistance from the French, who intend to retake their colony.

  1946–1954: The First Indochina War, a war of independence between the French and the Viet Minh, takes on strategic importance during the Korean War and divides international support along Cold War lines; China and the Soviet Union support the Viet Minh, and the United States supports France.

  1954: The French are militarily defeated at Dien Bien Phu. The Geneva Accords divide Vietnam into two countries along the seventeenth parallel. The capital of the Communist north is Hanoi; the capital of the south, the Republic of Vietnam, is Saigon.

  1954–1963: Ngo Dinh Diem heads the government of the newly formed Republic of South Vietnam. His sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, is granted the status and power of First Lady of South Vietnam.

  1960: The Communist government in Hanoi forms the National Liberation Front, an anti-Diem, anti-American guerrilla military force in South Vietnam, which the Americans come to call the Viet Cong.

  1963: South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu are killed in a military coup supported by the United States. Madame Nhu begins a life of exile.

  1964: The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurs. The US Congress gives American president Lyndon Johnson war powers, and official US military involvement in Vietnam begins.

  1973: The United States withdraws its troops.

  1975: Saigon falls to the Communists, and the country of Vietnam is reunified.

  1995: Diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam are normalized, and the American embargo against Vietnam is lifted.

  2011: Madame Nhu passes away in a hospital in Rome, Italy.

  Notes

  Chapter 2: Forgotten Graves

  1. “Notes on People” section, New York Times, October 16, 1971, 37.

  2. On Khiem’s telling Warner about the hit list, see “Memorandum from the Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research (Hughes) to the Secretary of State,” September 6, 1963, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1961–1963, Vol. 4, Vietnam: August–December 1963 (Washington, DC: GPO, 1991), 122–123; and Marguerite Higgins, Our Vietnam Nightmare (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 227. The author obtained information about the Ngo brothers not liking Khiem and secret meetings with his sister during a 2005 interview with John Pham.

  3. Madame Chuong’s telephone call to Hilsman is detailed in Department of State Telegram to Saigon no. 764 (November 8, 1963); for Lodge’s response, see Embassy Telegram from Saigon no. 984, November 9, 1963.

  4. Tran Van Khiem letter to Australian journalist Denis Warner, May 1, 1964.

  5. Joe Holley, “Tussle over St. Elizabeth’s: Preservationists Set Their Sights on What Could Become Department of Homeland Security Headquarters,” Washington Post, June 17, 2007, C1.

  6. On Khiem’s being deported to France, see Santiago O’Donnell, “Man Charged with Killing Parents Deported to France,” Washington Post, October 29, 1993, D6; and the records of the US Supreme Court, Khiem, Tran Van, Petitioner v. United States, 92–6587507 U.S. 924; 113 S. Ct. 1293; 122 L. Ed. 2d 684; 1993 U.S. LEXIS 1323; 61 U.S.L.W. 3582, February 22, 1993.

  7. Le Chi is quoted in Saundra Saperstein and Elsa Walsh, “A Journey from Glory to Grave; Vietnamese Clan’s Saga Began in Palace, May End in Court,” Washington Post, October 19, 1987, A1.

  Chapter 3: A Distinguished Family

  1. CAOM, Tran Van Chuong Dossier, HCRT non-cote, notice de renseignements concernant Madame Tran Van Chuong, April 1951.

  2. CAOM, Tran Van Chuong Dossier, HCRT non-cote, and CIA National Intelligence Survey, “South Vietnam Key Personalities,” 1958 (Chuong is not accorded an entry, but his younger brother, Tran Van Don, former foreign minister of Diem’s government, is listed with biographical notes.

  3. The description of her birth is from Madame Nhu’s unpublished memoir, Le Caillou Blanc, 2:39.

  4. Neil Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 18.

  5. CAOM, Tran Van Chuong Dossier, HCRT non-cote.

  6. CAOM, Tran Van Chuong Dossier, HCRT non-cote.

  7. Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Radicalism and the Origins of the Vietnamese Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 32.

  8. CAOM, Tran Van Chuong Dossier, HCRT non-cote.

  9. Madame Nhu, Caillou Blanc, 2:13.

  10. Kieu information is from Tai, Radicalism, 109–111. In 1924, controversy exploded over Kieu. Was the poem about the survival of the Vietnamese through language and culture? Or, as seen through the prism of contemporary colonial society, was Kieu merely a symbol of elite collaboration and treason?

  11. Madame Nhu, Caillou Blanc, 2:49.

  12. Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam, 27.

  13. Madame Nhu, Caillou Blanc, 2:13.

  14. Despite debate about how deeply the practice of Confucianism was engrained in Vietnamese traditional life, scholars generally agree that most educated Vietnamese in the first half of the twentieth century saw their traditional heritage as strongly Confucian. See Jamieson, Understanding Vietnam, 10, 11; Alexander Woodside, Vietnam and the Chinese Model: A Comparative Study of Vietnamese and Chinese Civil Government in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 1988), 60–96. At the height of the Buddhist crisis in 1963, Chuong continued to publicly assert that his “religion” was
Confucian.

  15. Tai, Radicalism, 93.

  16. Madame Nhu told her story to Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne in 1961 interview.

  17. Madame Nhu, Caillou Blanc, 2:14–15.

  Chapter 4: Portrait of a Young Lady

  1. CAOM, Tran Van Chuong Dossier, HCRT non-cote.

  2. Crosbie Garstin in Mark Sidel, Old Hanoi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 22.

  3. Nicola Cooper, France in Indochina: Colonial Encounters (Oxford, UK: Berg Publishers, 2001), 43.

  4. Tu Binh Tran, The Red Earth: A Vietnamese Memoir of Life on a Colonial Rubber Plantation (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985), 30.

  5. Cooper, France in Indochina, 150. There was a differentiation between the high status of the Indochinese over the African blacks in racial hierarchies. However, there was also a blurring between colonial territories. Medical experts on the effects of racial integration drew comparisons between the Indochinese and African populations, indicating a lack of distinction between nonwhite populations. “Imperial France blurred all native populations into one indistinguishable morass of disease and filth” (Cooper, France in Indochina, 152).

  6. Cooper, France in Indochina, 93–94.

  7. Tai, Radicalism, 30.

  8. Nguyen Ky, “The French Model,” in Hanoi, ed. Georges Boudarel and Nguyen Ky (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), 62.

  9. CAOM, Haut Commissariat Indo, carton 375, Surveillance of Nippo-Indochinese Relations by the Sûreté, CAOM Indo Rstnf. 6965.

  10. SHAT Archives 10H 80, Note du Général Aymé sur les événements dont il a été témoin en Indochine du 10 mars au 1 octobre 1945.

  11. Edward Miller, Misalliance: Ngo Dinh Diem, the United States, and the Fate of South Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 42.