Finding the Dragon Lady Read online

  Under Diem, the southern half of Vietnam would be “free”—free from colonialism, free from communism, but exactly what else was free about it was unclear. In theory, in two years, 1956, the country would hold elections. The Vietnamese would decide for themselves what they wanted, but until then, Communist North Vietnam was above the seventeenth parallel, and something entirely new would be created below.3

  Waiting for Diem to arrive at the airport, Madame Nhu took the youngest boy, Quynh, in her arms to keep him calm. She tried bouncing him against her hip in the shade of the hangar and shifting from side to side in her high-heeled sandals. There was no containing the other two; after watching them squirm and pull at the collars of their nice clothes, Madame Nhu gave the eight-year-old and her five-year-old brother a nod, and they were off, tearing across the otherwise clear tarmac in a game of tag. The children didn’t need to be called back when the airplane appeared. It was just a black dot against the bright sky, but it represented something huge and a little scary because it was unknown: freedom. Le Thuy and Trac came to stand by their parents, and together the family of five faced the roar of the incoming engines with their hands over their ears.

  A fifty-three-year-old man stepped out of the plane and waved over their heads. Diem was squinting—had he grown unaccustomed to the brilliant tropical sun during his time away? Could he even see them there, waiting for him? After all this time, Diem still didn’t look like the one of whom so much was expected. He had a moon-shaped face and a head that sat almost directly on top of his shoulders. Diem’s black hair, slicked back like the bristles of a wet animal, accentuated the general penguin effect of his big belly, characteristic white-sharkskin suit, and open-toed walk. He might have grown even rounder during his travels.

  Madame Nhu had not seen Diem for four years, since his departure from Vietnam. Except for his brief stay with the Nhus in Dalat in the late 1940s, Nhu’s older brother had always seemed a remote figure to her. He was almost the same age as her father, and before the First Indochina War, Diem had been too busy building a secret political party under the name Dai Viet Phu Hung Hoi, the Association for the Restoration of Great Vietnam, to pay much attention to his little brother’s young wife. When the French had caught onto him in 1944, Diem had had to flee. He escaped with the help of the Japanese consul, who smuggled him out of the city by disguising him as a Japanese officer. Diem resettled in Saigon while the Nhus remained in Hue. He was safe there until after the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Diem was eventually captured—although not by the French. Like Madame Nhu, Diem was taken prisoner in 1946 by the Communists. He was stopped while riding a train back to Hue, taken to a remote mountain hut, and held there for three months before being brought to Hanoi. The leader of the Viet Minh, Ho Chi Minh, had requested a face-to-face meeting.

  Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem had a few things in common. Both were from central Vietnam, and both of their fathers had instilled an anti-French, anticolonial, and nationalist ethos in their sons. Ho had even studied at the school in Hue founded by Diem’s father. Like Diem, Ho Chi Minh hoped that the Americans would help the Vietnamese in the anti-French struggle. He had reason to think that they might. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), precursor to the CIA, had intervened on Ho’s behalf when he was a captive in Nationalist China. Ho had recited part of the American Declaration of Independence when he proclaimed Vietnam independent in August 1945, and his Viet Minh had joined US missions against the Japanese. At the same time, Ho Chi Minh was very much a Communist, a follower of Karl Marx and believer in the proletarian revolution. He wanted to build an independent, socialist Vietnam, but he also knew that he had the best chance of getting Vietnam to that independence by making common cause with capitalists, landowners, and the bourgeoisie, at least for a while.

  He tried to convince Ngo Dinh Diem that they had the same goal: Vietnamese independence. Ho offered Diem a position in the government he was building, but by then Diem had heard about the murder of his older brother, Ngo Dinh Khoi, and nephew by the Communists in Hue. As Diem would tell the story, he threw Ho’s offer back in his face. He had looked the wispy leader of the Indochinese Communist Party in the eye and replied, “I don’t believe you understand the kind of man I am. Look at me in the face. Am I a man who fears?” Ho, Diem said, had been forced to look away. It is a stretch to believe that the hardened leader of the Viet Minh couldn’t bring himself to meet Diem’s eye, but Diem would maintain that Ho shook his head and replied almost shamefully that no, Diem was not a man who feared. The next morning, Ho Chi Minh let Ngo Dinh Diem walk out the open doors, a free man.4

  Considering that they would be at war with each other barely a decade later, it is not surprising that Diem would never publicly acknowledge staying in touch with the Viet Minh leaders. But recent research into Diem’s activities around that time shows that in fact he did. Diem was interested in keeping his options open for as long as possible. He was waiting to see if a third way, neither French nor Communist, would be viable. Not until 1949 did Diem finally jump off the fence. He spurned the Viet Minh and at the same time declared the former emperor Bao Dai’s collaboration with the French unacceptable. Standing alone was risky, but Diem was tired of half measures. “I advocate social reforms that are sweeping and bold, with the condition that the dignity of man will always be respected and will be free to flourish.”5 Diem published a treatise to this effect under his name on June 16, 1949, hoping, according to scholar Edward Miller, to rally people to his cause. “The statement was widely read and noted within Vietnam, but it did not produce a new upsurge of popularity for Diem. . . . Its most immediate effect was to exhaust the patience of both the French and the Viet Minh.” Diem was breaking with everyone in order to start something new.

  After his short stay with the Nhus in Dalat, Diem headed out of the country looking for new allies, first, to no avail, to Japan and then to the United States. Diem figured he could turn the Americans’ historical antipathy toward colonialism to his advantage. He couldn’t have arrived at a better time. It was the height of the Red Scare; Americans were building bomb shelters and training their children to hide from Russian nuclear fallout under their school desks. The McCarthy era was the perfect time for Diem to pitch his anti-Communist credentials. He was incredibly successful in finding influential people who were sympathetic to his cause. The powerful Catholic cardinal Francis Spellman, along with academics, a dozen members of Congress, including the young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy, and even Wild Bill Donovan, founder of the OSS, all expressed their admiration for Diem.

  Moral support and encouragement were well and good, but the critical work was happening in Vietnam, as Madame Nhu knew all too well. Her husband, Diem’s younger brother, was the one laying the groundwork for Diem’s return. It wasn’t enough to be anti-Communist; an actual political philosophy was needed. Nhu adapted the Catholic philosophy of personalism to fit Vietnam’s particular situation, a massive project more impressive for its audacity than for its outcome. The Can Lao—the Personalist Labor Party—was poised to become the practical foundation for a political movement. Nhu had established alliances with labor activists, supported the creation of worker and farmer cooperatives, and published a political journal called Xa Hoi-Society, which backed unions.

  Madame Nhu left Dalat in 1953 when Nhu requested that she and their children move to Saigon to support Diem and his climb to power. They rented five adjoining rooms attached to the Clinique St. Pierre. Two housed the printing press of Nhu’s weekly journal, and the other three were converted into living quarters for the family of five. Madame Nhu furnished their bedroom with an antique furniture set she had found at a local flea market. The ornate carving on the wood furniture pleased her; the pieces were fine enough to imagine that some well-placed colonial family had left them behind when they had fled back to France. It was some consolation for the otherwise “fly-specked” union headquarters they lived in.

  Madame Nhu described her e
arly days in Saigon as banal enough to make her cry. The French writer Lucien Bodard had seen her tawdry surroundings in Dalat. He described her situation in Saigon as even worse. “The first time I went there, I crossed a dusty yard where the washing was hung out to dry. Out of a passage covered with corrugated metal came a young woman in a white tunic and green pants. She was shabbily dressed. Children clung to her. She was so depressed by disappointment I did not recognize her.” This wasn’t the marriage or the life she had been groomed for. “All she had to do was wash clothes, cook meals and wipe her children.”6

  One afternoon, Madame Nhu awoke from a nap to loud thumps coming from the printing room for her husband’s journal, located just next door. The children were still sleeping so she slipped silently inside. She saw the backs of eight men, dressed identically in white suits and straw hats, clustered together around something on the ground. Her view obscured, she couldn’t quite make out what was in front of them. Instead of feeling fear, Madame Nhu was incensed at the thought that strange men had intruded into her family’s space. She was going to figure out what was going on. She shook off one of her sandals, a soft-soled espadrille that she wore to pad around the house. But now she wielded it with purpose. She slapped the shoe across the back of the man closest to her.

  “What is going on in here?” she demanded.

  The seven others stopped what they were doing and stepped back enough to reveal a man crouching on the floor. He straightened and lowered his arms from his head, and that was when Madame Nhu saw that they were beating the man her husband had hired to run the press. He scrambled to his feet, blood running down his face. Instead of uttering thanks or gratitude, he raised his shoulders in a shrug and gave Madame Nhu an awkward smile.

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” he said with as much nonchalance as he could muster and busied himself by shaking a cigarette out of his rumpled pack.

  Madame Nhu looked around, but no one else in the room moved. The man clearly didn’t want her assistance, so she stepped back. What could she do? Full of wounded pride and frustration, Madame Nhu turned on her heel and strode out of the room.

  She barricaded herself in her quarters until her husband came home. She flew into his arms, asking what had happened. Who had those men been? But Nhu didn’t respond. She found herself wondering at the man she had married. Hadn’t she delivered his employee from harm? What if Nhu had been in the office, instead of conspiring as usual in some anonymous coffeehouse. Would they have hurt him?

  Madame Nhu’s distress finally provoked a response, but not the one she was hoping for. Nhu held his wife at arm’s length and gave her his usual grin. “Mind your own business and don’t go getting involved,” he said, and despite the smile on his face, she knew it was a warning. As for the man who worked at the press, the one whose life Madame Nhu was sure she had saved that day, he continued to work next door. And every time she saw him, Madame Nhu was reminded again of how very far removed she was from whatever her husband was up to.

  Diem, the new premier, faced all sorts of problems upon his return to Vietnam in 1954, starting with the fact that he had inherited a broken system. The official treasury was empty. The French had not trained competent Vietnamese administrators. South Vietnam was totally paralyzed militarily and politically. Gangsters ruled the cities. The black market thrived. The driving economic forces were drugs, gambling, and prostitution. The influx of refugees from the north just made everything worse. There was no place for all the refugees to live and work. They swarmed around Saigon; families bunked together in empty cement construction tubes.

  After splitting the country in two, the Geneva Accords had made a provision for people to move both ways across the border, but any migration would have to take place within the strict limit of one year. The French army and the US navy provided logistical transport for northerners heading south, with the United States supplying nearly all the funds. The CIA also sent a team to persuade as many northerners as possible to leave for South Vietnam, creating evidence that people were “voting with their feet” for the Americans’ man, Diem, and the promise of a free Vietnam.7 But no one had imagined that so many people would actually go. An exodus of about 1 million people from the Communist north poured into the south. For all the Viet Minh had done, appealing to the nationalist instinct in many Vietnamese and succeeding in getting the French out of Vietnam, people were still too scared of communism to stick around and see it in action. There were whispers of what was to come: class purges, land reform, and the intrusion of the state into local matters—not to mention religion. The Catholics especially left in droves.

  The reverse flow was barely a trickle. The highest-profile Communist cadres in the south went north, and Ho Chi Minh’s government recalled the most visible People’s Army units but encouraged the rest of the people with demonstrated Communist sympathies to stay put: “To go north means victory, to remain in the south is to bring success.”8 Southern supporters for the Viet Minh went clandestine. They would come in handy when the struggle for reunification was launched.

  The immediate population pressure on South Vietnam threatened to break the new regime. Even the US Army’s assessment of the situation Diem was stepping into was grim. The problems the new premier faced were so numerous and so difficult, the report concluded, they were probably “insurmountable.”9

  Not long after Diem’s return, Madame Nhu realized with horror that his installation to govern South Vietnam had been an elaborate setup. Whoever faced this mess was sure to fail—and the French hated Diem enough to try to ruin him. Her brother-in-law had blatantly showed his independent streak and ingratitude for the French civilizing mission. If Diem failed, the French could reasonably argue for his replacement with someone more amenable to their influence.

  Madame Nhu was not imagining things. The French really were trying to get rid of Diem, as confirmed by Edward Lansdale. Lansdale had joined the US Army after Pearl Harbor and was recruited into military intelligence, then later the OSS, by Wild Bill Donovan. He distinguished himself with success in counterinsurgency campaigns and was sent to Vietnam in 1954 to run the Saigon Military Mission. Lansdale took a shine to Diem. When other American officials tried to convey doubts about the South Vietnamese leader to President Dwight D. Eisenhower and the State Department in Washington, Lansdale adeptly sidestepped and countered it, establishing a pattern of reaffirming American support of the leader in Saigon. Some say that Graham Greene based the swashbuckling and dangerously naive Alden Pyle character in The Quiet American on Lansdale, but plenty of Americans thought he was a hero of the anti-Communist cause. John F. Kennedy was among those who considered Lansdale a mustachioed James Bond from his side of the pond. Whatever else he may have been, Lansdale was an eyewitness to French interference with Diem’s power. In Lansdale’s opinion, the French felt that Diem “was sort of rubbing salt into the sore wound of theirs.” The French loss of Indochina at the hands of a Communist army was bad enough, and now that Diem was in power, a century of French colonial pride was at stake. He was renaming streets after Vietnamese patriots, nationalizing French industries, and making the remaining French in Vietnam feel as unwelcome as possible. The French felt that in order to defend themselves and their long-term strategic interest in Indochina, they needed to get rid of Diem.

  Others had caught on quicker. From the very start, Madame Nhu’s husband had been “obviously extremely worried” that his older brother “was not fully aware of the extreme seriousness of [the] situation in Vietnam” when he accepted the premiership from Emperor Bao Dai in 1954. Diem developed a “blind hatred for the French” and for the man who had bestowed the poisoned honor of premiership on him. The US State Department recommended that “Bao Dai should never return to Vietnam as his life would be in danger.”10 Once the implications sank in, Madame Nhu took the plot very personally. After all those hours with her cousin in Dalat, soothing his pride and burnishing his ego, she felt betrayed. She had dared to think that because of her, Bao Dai was giving Di
em a shot at greatness. She could take pride in that when there wasn’t much else. Now she saw that her cousin had used her and her family. She would not forgive him or the French either.

  In 1954 and 1955, the Nhus cozied up to the Americans, and Madame Nhu became close to a woman her own age named Virginia Spence. Spence was a contract CIA employee who, because she spoke French fluently, was sent to Saigon without operations training. The CIA characterized her friendship with Madame Nhu as “genuine,” but Nhu would certainly have encouraged his wife to pursue it. Due to their camaraderie, Nhu himself emerged in Spence’s eyes as “the most promising of an unimpressive lot.” Her description of him was skeptical: he was a “born schemer,” and the covert nature of his role in the Diem government seems to have borne up her early analysis. She also described him as a naive country bumpkin who could get in over his head quickly. “Anything a friend tells him he swallows whole. He does have a certain political stature and a great flair for making nothing look like something.” So Nhu was a tactician with some presence, and as far as Spence could see, there was nobody else to rival Nhu as an effective political operator.

  The Nhus’ other American friends in Saigon, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Harwood, were also CIA. The Harwoods sponsored the confirmation of Nhu’s oldest daughter, Le Thuy. The CIA agents and the Nhus enjoyed a close enough relationship that they could joke about most things. Nhu teased his wife in front of their American friends by calling her a pagan for her relatively recent conversion to Catholicism, and Madame Nhu kidded right back about how stiff Nhu’s older brothers were. Madame Nhu enjoyed the company of the Americans arriving in Saigon: they were “genuine people,” “with whom one [could] easily get along,” without the colonial baggage and pretensions of the French. Like her Japanese friend from childhood, Madame Nhu’s new friends were outsiders too, which made her feel comfortable around them. Madame Nhu liked sharing one joke about her son, Quynh, whom she called “Quang Quang.” The story made it into the CIA cables back to headquarters. “The child once wandered into a Cabinet meeting looking for his Uncle Diem. Someone pointed to a bathroom door at the end of the conference room and Quang Quang opened it, revealing the seated Prime Minister. Mimicking official protocol, Quang Quang executed a hand salute and began singing the national anthem.”11