Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  During the Dalat years, from 1947 to 1954, Ngo Dinh Nhu was planting the seeds of a political party, one he called the Can Lao—the Personalist Labor Party. It recruited members into a shadowy network of cells in which no one knew more than a handful of fellow members. All that intrigue would eventually bear fruit, generating a political apparatus with tens of thousands of enlistees. It would support and sustain the presidency of Ngo Dinh Diem for nine years, but the organization would never shake off the secrecy of its founding years. It would earn itself and its creator, Nhu, a nefarious reputation.

  “Personalism’s” most basic tenet was that a “person” was the antidote to an individual. It was a totally bewildering notion. Nhu had picked up on the obscure Catholic philosophy as a student in the 1930s in France. His attempts to explain how a French Catholic philosophy could apply to building an independent Vietnam would always be long-winded and confusing. His belief, however, was fervent. Nhu was building a real alternative to both the French and the Viet Minh. He was building a network of supporters for his brother Diem.

  “I was alone most of the time,” Madame Nhu wrote about her marriage during that time. While Nhu was building his political base, his wife didn’t know where he was. “My husband would simply disappear without a word.” Madame Nhu may not have known exactly where her husband was, but she had a rough idea of what he was working on. The honeymoon location could not disguise the fact that theirs had become a marriage of pragmatism and plotting with little time left for romance.

  Madame Nhu wasn’t altogether isolated when her husband took off on his secret missions. She had her cousin in Dalat, His Majesty the Emperor Bao Dai, who was good company. Technically he was her mother’s cousin, and technically he was no longer the emperor. Bao Dai had never really ruled anyway. Under the French colonial system, his power had always been mostly symbolic. Bao Dai had been crowned emperor in 1925, when he was twelve years old. He had rushed home from school in France to see his father, Emperor Khai Dinh, buried, but then returned to France. The throne sat empty for the next seven years, during which the French resident superior was in total command. By the time Bao Dai returned to Vietnam in 1932, he had been groomed as a perfect little Frenchman, perfectly happy to do whatever the colonial powers told him to.

  Bao Dai’s life was one of pampered ease. He was married, but that didn’t stop him from living like a playboy. Chasing wildlife and young women were his two passions. His actions during World War II and its aftermath demolished any reputation Bao Dai may have clung to as a leader through the colonial years. First he had capitulated to the Japanese; then he turned his crown over to the Communists before going right back to working with the French in their mission to reestablish control in Indochina by the late 1940s. Bao Dai should have ruled from Saigon, but he frankly preferred life in Dalat. He was wise enough to know that he wasn’t doing anything anyway. Bao Dai was fully aware of, and resigned to, his pathetic fate. When he overheard one of his lady companions being teased for being a prostitute, the emperor protested. “She is only plying her trade,” Bao Dai said. “I am the real whore.”7

  Bao Dai was presumably just as confounded as Madame Nhu by the guerre bizardouille, the strange conflict they were not a part of. The cousins, estranged from the rest of the country at war, could barely conceive the extent to which the world had tilted. At least in Dalat, the royal cousins were in a familiar Europeanized milieu. Madame Nhu accompanied her cousin on fishing trips and partnered with him for bridge. When her husband wasn’t home, they went on picnics and swam in waterfalls. From behind the ochre walls of the emperor’s art deco palace on the hill, Madame Nhu and her cousin could look down on the valley while remaining ensconced in their world.

  She said her husband knew all about “those nighttime soirees and the daytime excursions.” He probably encouraged them. As discredited as Bao Dai was, the monarch’s stamp still meant something politically. If Nhu wanted to build a movement to oppose the French and oppose the Communists, he needed any help he could get. A nod from the emperor would give at least a facade of legitimacy.

  If his wife’s palling around with her cousin the emperor was convenient, it would also prove temporary. Bao Dai was one of the first political casualties of the Ngo regime. He spent the rest of his life in a run-down chateau in the South of France near Cannes. In Madame Nhu’s memoirs, she refers to her cousin bitterly. There is no lingering family warmth: Bao Dai is “that French puppet.”

  The former emperor’s palace is now a major tourist attraction in Dalat for the honeymooners. The state has preserved it, not out of any nostalgia for Bao Dai but rather to showcase the indulgent luxuries of a playboy. It had been built for the Vietnamese emperor in 1933 in the exact same style as the French governor-general’s house—even using the same granite. Both houses had geometric angles, roof terraces, and circular bay windows. Maybe the twin homes were intended to show some kind of equality, but they really demonstrated that the emperor was as foreign as the Frenchman.8

  Even when Madame Nhu became First Lady, she and her family continued to use the mountain retreat of Dalat as a special place to come together. It was where the children attended boarding school, and the family gathered there for holidays and breaks from palace life. By then, the Nhus used the French governor’s home as their weekend home.

  In 1962, Madame Nhu invited Time-Life photographer Larry Burrows for a weekend trip to Dalat. She wanted him to see and capture what a very special place it was to the Nhu family. Madame Nhu insisted that the family show their guest how normal they were. She traded her usual palace attire, the fitted silk ao dai and tightly coiled updo, for weekend wear. She sported a sweater loosely belted over capri pants and let her long hair tumble out of a half ponytail. The style made the thirty-eight-year-old First Lady look more like her younger self, the twenty-three-year-old she had been when she had first lived in Dalat. Madame Nhu clasped her hands inside the crook of her husband’s elbow and drew herself close to him. With the children scampering around on the lawn, they could have been in a New Jersey suburb—until Madame Nhu got down on one knee and showed her two-year-old daughter how to properly aim a pistol and fire at a target.

  The Nhus often said that when they retired, they would move back to Dalat full-time.9 But Madame Nhu didn’t intend to stay in the French governor’s house forever. She commissioned construction of a cluster of houses at 2 Yet Kieu Street overlooking a beautiful mountain valley. She was building one for herself, one for her father, and one for guests. The houses would gather around a courtyard with a heated swimming pool, a Japanese garden, and a lotus lake. When the lake was filled with water, an image of a map of Vietnam was supposed to appear. Her villa was to be named Lam Ngoc, Forest Jewel, and guarded appropriately. A huge grey guard tower for a private security force loomed at the entrance. Even while the home was under construction, people said that if a stray bird flew into the garden, it would be shot immediately. The house would have five fireplaces and be decorated with the hides and heads of the wild animals felled by her husband. It would have a stainless steel kitchen with modern amenities and even an infrared broiler. All the main rooms were to be equipped with secret trap doors, which would lead to escape tunnels that ran under the swimming pool and emptied into a nearby safe house. A secret ladder under her bed would take Madame Nhu down to an underground room and a huge vault lined with enough reinforced iron to withstand firepower.10

  Madame Nhu didn’t think of the “little villa” she was building in Dalat as lavish, but traditional Vietnamese homes in the countryside still functioned with an outhouse on stilts, the hole positioned above a pond teeming with hungry carp. The amount Madame Nhu was spending just to build herself a porcelain-tiled and hygienically plumbed bathroom was beyond what most people earned in an entire lifetime.

  The house took five years to complete. She had the front door rebuilt eight times. The corner window had to be remade ten times before it pleased her. One of her fifty gardeners, Pham Van My, said Madame Nhu
was “a difficult lady” to work for. He said she shouted her orders and threatened the workmen but was scared of worms. The woman he described had expensive and fickle tastes. The construction was initiated by a woman just coming into her own, but Madame Nhu told me she never set foot in the place once it was done. By the time Madame Nhu’s dream house was finally finished, so was she.

  “We should meet,” Madame Nhu said on the phone shortly after Tommy’s birth. It was the first time she had expressed any willingness to meet me face to face. She must have reasoned that I couldn’t possibly be conspiring to hurt her if I was with a baby, so she insisted that I bring Tommy. Would Paris be alright?

  “Of course, Madame. I would be honored.”

  I really was. I was planning a September trip to introduce the baby to my French relatives. A stop in Paris would be on the way. I didn’t tell Madame Nhu that I was also planning to visit the French colonial archives in the South of France to see what other history I could pull up. By this time, I knew how firmly Madame Nhu believed that her version of the truth should be adequate and reported unchallenged—even when it had obvious cracks.

  She planned the time and place. Our meeting was to take place in the Église Saint-Leon, a Catholic church not far from her apartment in the fifteenth arrondissement. We would meet in the nave, in front of Saint Joseph’s statue at 10:00 a.m. “Then we can go to the park across the street,” she said. “To talk. It will be very discreet.”

  When I got inside the church, the vault-like doors closed behind me, shutting out the bright autumn sun. I thought, belatedly, that perhaps I should be worried. I reminded myself that I was just introducing Tommy to a little old lady. What could happen? Sure, she had been the Dragon Lady. She had run a militia of armed women and had her husband’s henchmen at her disposal, but she had also been a mother four times over. I forced myself to focus on that aspect, but I was ill at ease. I told myself I was just nervous about making a good impression.

  I wore a dark blouse tucked into a belted red skirt—the lucky color. I had smoothed my hair into a low bun and wore small pearls in my ears. I wanted to show Madame Nhu that I was professional without being too formal. I told myself I was glad she had insisted that I bring Tommy. He was sleeping sweetly, tucked into a polka-dotted stroller with his teddy bear and blanket, thumb inserted into his perfect bow-shaped mouth. He played his part beautifully. It was up to me to strike the right tone: respectful, smart, capable. I had control over nothing else.

  What, I wondered, would the Dragon Lady look like at eighty-one years old? I had spent so much time poring over pictures of her as a young woman, but the voice I had gotten to know over the phone conjured up another image. In my head, I imagined her with the same hairstyle, swept high above her head, except wintery with age. Her cheekbones, I thought, would be smooth but powdery, like rice paper. Did she still wear red lipstick? I suddenly couldn’t picture her as anything other than a stooped and sad old woman who refused to stop wearing caked red lipstick—lipstick that bled slightly outside the imperfect lines of her upper and lower lips.

  My imagination was running away. I had arrived early, and now she was late. I was spending too much time alone in a dim church, and scenarios flooded into my mind. Had she been watching me the whole time? From a darkened pew, waiting for the right moment to approach? I made a loop around the church, the stroller wheels clacking over the stone and tiled floors, but all the rows were empty.

  After an hour, I heard the door creak open. My stomach flipped over, but it was not Madame Nhu. I was so nervous that the disappointment that washed over me felt more like a flood of relief. Tommy woke up, and his happy little squawks eventually turned into cries that echoed off the stone floors and up into the rafters. I wrestled his stroller up the side aisle, out the thick double doors, and fled to the discreet park to feed him. When I got back to my aunt’s apartment in Paris, I found a message on the answering machine from Madame Nhu. She had broken her own rules by leaving a message saying that she hadn’t come because she wasn’t feeling well. Her foot hurt, she sighed, and she was taking that as a sign that we should postpone our meeting.

  When we spoke next, she didn’t actually apologize, not in so many words. But her voice sounded contrite enough, and of course I forgave her. The next time we would meet in her apartment, she said. I believed her. I waited an hour, in the lobby this time, but she didn’t let me up the elevator. I forgave her again. She told me a woeful story: she wasn’t sure she could trust anyone again. I would have to prove myself. The Dragon Lady was keeping herself tantalizingly out of reach.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Miracle Man of Vietnam

  THE DOOR OPENED BEFORE I could knock, and John Pham stepped out onto his doorstep. He was the father of my friend’s sister-in-law. I had met his daughter exactly once, but John greeted me like a long-lost family member. He wore the standard uniform of the Midwestern grandfather, a checked shirt tucked into belted chinos. His big grin pushed his cheeks into taut-skinned apples. “Welcome to my home,” he beamed, then took my hand to shake it, pumping it up and down, as if he were bringing water up from a well. The seventy-one-year-old’s handshake was still strong. Back when he was a young man, John had been the presidential family’s personal security guard in Saigon from 1954 to 1963. Now he lived in a split-level ranch on the Kansas side of Kansas City.

  The house had been John’s home since the late 1970s. He had escaped Vietnam on a fishing boat from Da Nang, the place US soldiers had called China Beach, only three hours before the city fell to the Communists in 1975. John arrived in the United States with his wife and ten children and no money. A friendly sergeant had advised him to take his family away from California—too crowded, he said. So John looked at the map and picked Kansas because it was right in the middle of the country.

  The horns and tin whistles of a television show filtered down from the den. I got a timid hello from a grandchild passing through, and John smiled at the boy on his reluctant march into the kitchen. “Please,” John said showing me to the faded peach sofa, “sit. Let’s talk together.”

  John was slightly shorter than me, so even though I was sitting, I could still see the top of his head. The white of his scalp showed through the comb marks in his silver hair. It made him seem vulnerable. I tried to imagine him as a twenty-year-old kid, wiry and quick. He must have been a good shot to have been stationed as a guard inside the palaces. But it was hard to reconcile the smiling and kindly grandfather across from me with the hard-faced youth he had been. John had worked for the same notorious state security apparatus as the secret police squads that threw people into tiger cages—the cramped prison cells on Con Son Island where thousands were tortured, starved, and killed during the war. John’s bosses, the president and his brother, lived just down the hall from John’s post. He had spent nearly nine years working alongside Ngo Dinh Nhu and his wife, Madame Nhu.

  I was settling into my position on the sofa when I noticed the decor on the wall in front of me. Jesus hung on a golden cross, and right next to him, a portrait of President Ngo Dinh Diem. A yellow-and-red-striped flag hung in the corner. The president had been dead for more than forty years, South Vietnam had been lost for thirty, but in this house, the past was still very much alive.

  I stayed talking with John well into the afternoon. The smell of lemongrass, vinegar, and seared meat wafted from the kitchen. John’s wife came in, her hands on her apron, to ask if we would like a bowl of soup. She had made bun bo hue, a spicy beef stew from the central region of Vietnam. As I slurped up an endless tangle of rice noodles, John continued to talk about life in Diem’s palaces, nostalgia for the country of his youth filling his voice.

  In this house, Jesus and Diem were both saviors and survivors.

  Born in central Vietnam in 1901, Ngo Dinh Diem had been a good student as a boy, but instead of following his brothers to France or into the seminary, he got into local politics. Diem entered provincial administration under the French as a district chief when
he was twenty years old. Public officials in Vietnam were scholar-bureaucrats called mandarins; they were products of rigorous training and had to pass imperial examinations in writing, literature, history, and mathematics. In just a few years, Diem had risen to administrative supervisor; he was tax collector, sheriff, and judge for an entire region. His position entitled him to use a rickshaw, but Diem preferred riding his own horse to being ferried around by a coolie. He recommended bold reforms to his higher-ups, including more autonomy from the French and better education, but was ignored. Appointed governor of Phan Thiet in southeastern Vietnam in 1929, Diem earned a reputation for fairness and unshakeable integrity. He was so righteous that when the French continued to deny Diem his recommended reforms, he handed back all his titles and decorations and walked off the job. It was all or nothing.1

  Diem brusquely retired from public view in 1933 but did not fade away. He carried on working behind the scenes until 1954, when he reemerged as a public figure.

  The Nhus and their three children arrived at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport early in the afternoon of June 25, 1954, only to find that the incoming plane from Europe had been delayed. Along with the Nhus, a crowd of several hundred people waited for the plane to arrive, including a senior general in the French colonial army, members of the imperial family, foreign diplomats, and officials in the South Vietnamese Armed Forces.2 Madame Nhu’s husband insisted that she and the children join this mix of some of the most important people in all Indochina to await the return of Nhu’s older brother. After all, Ngo Dinh Diem had just been appointed the new prime minister of South Vietnam at a peace conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In what would become known as the Geneva Accords, the participants—the United States, Great Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China—put an end to the war between the Viet Minh and the French by agreeing to split Vietnam into two countries along the seventeenth parallel. Ho Chi Minh would serve as president of the Communist north from his headquarters in Hanoi. Bao Dai, the former emperor, would be the nominal head of the non-Communist new state to the south, but he stayed in France. The real powers of the government would go to the still relatively unknown prime minister the Americans were championing, the man on John Pham’s wall and Madame Nhu’s brother-in-law: Ngo Dinh Diem.