Finding the Dragon Lady (15 page)

Bay Vien's reach was so great and his pockets so deep that only someone as hardheaded and as scrupulous as Diem would think to bring him down. Diem was intransigent on the subject of the Binh Xuyen. The Americans tried to offer the gangster's foot soldiers 12,000 piasters, and the officers 28,000 piasters, to join with Diem, and they tried to get Diem to see that facts were facts: the Binh Xuyen were an unfortunate reality of life in Saigon. But Diem would not compromise.
¹⁸
The final showdown came on April 27, 1955, the day after Diem appointed a police chief who was not in Bay Vien's pocket. Binh Xuyen forces began shelling the palace. Inside, Diem showed firm resolve. “Fire back,” he said. All told, 4,000 mortar rounds hurled toward the residence of the Binh Xuyen's leader, Bay Vien, and their command post. It was a furious barrage even before the airborne troops got involved. Eight hundred civilians died, and 20,000 homes were destroyed. Diem's forces and the thugs, gangsters, and policemen backed by the Binh Xuyen and, less overtly, the French waged hand-to-hand combat on Saigon's streets.

The battle against the Binh Xuyen showed Diem's mettle. The scrupulous leader bet on righteousness and won. It also showed Diem,
once and for all, that he didn't need even the emperor's most tenuous support. A few months after crushing the Binh Xuyen, in the summer of 1955, Diem ousted Bao Dai and emerged as the sole leader of South Vietnam. No longer limited to the title of prime minister, Diem proclaimed himself head of state, the president of South Vietnam.

All of these developments went to show the Americans, or Lansdale at least, just how “damn wrong” the French had been in underestimating the new premier of South Vietnam.
¹⁹
A State Department telegram to John Foster Dulles provides perhaps the best summary of the situation Diem found himself in. “Diem is inexperienced and finds it difficult to compromise.” What's more he “insists on building a government free of corruption and dedicated to achieving genuine national independence.” American policy makers might find the man's personal shortcomings, like his stubbornness, frustrating, but ironically, “only a government of the kind Diem envisions, and it would be worthy of our support—has much chance for survival.” American aid to South Vietnam in the fiscal year 1955 amounted to $77,500,000. Some of that money went to help refugees; some went to technical assistance in education, health, and public administration. But the bulk of it went to helping Diem win widespread public support for a governmental system that was not Communist. The sums would only go up from there. The little round-faced premier was about to become the man
Life
magazine would hail as the “Tough Miracle Man of Vietnam.”
²⁰

CHAPTER 9

A First Lady in Independence Palace

T
HE NHU FAMILY MOVED
into the presidential palace in April 1955, but without Madame Nhu, who was still in Hong Kong. Madame Nhu was comfortable enough. She was given a room in a Catholic convent and plenty of time for imposed contemplation and English lessons. The hybrid setting was familiar to her. Hong Kong was Chinese and British, and though she was used to a different cultural mix, Vietnamese and French, the East-West mélange felt familiar and soothing. The nuns were nice, as were the well-mannered schoolchildren who filed obediently in and out of classrooms with a shy smile at the elegant visitor in their midst. Madame Nhu spent her mornings taking English lessons and winding walks around the oval flower beds in the convent garden. Her afternoons, spent napping and reading, ticked by more slowly. Madame Nhu used the quiet hours away from her family to marvel at her doings over the last six months. What a course she had managed to chart! The rally had snowballed into an
outpouring of real support for Diem. The audacious display was something Madame Nhu had known she was capable of, but to the others, it was a surprise. Although perhaps intended as a reprimand, to Madame Nhu's mind, this banishment in Hong Kong demonstrated that her influence was being recognized.

Maybe Nhu moved himself and their three children into the palace during his wife's absence because he wanted to be closer to his brother, or maybe he hoped that the move would keep his family safe. If so, he was mistaken. During one of their first nights in their new home, a midnight Binh Xuyen attack on the palace dislodged a pair of massive drapes from the floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor. A crush of cotton, silk, wood, and plaster fell ten feet onto Quynh, the Nhu's three-year-old son. He nearly suffocated before he was rescued and revived.

Madame Nhu was terrified when she received the news. But far from taking the nearly fatal accident as an omen of the misfortune still to come, she viewed her family's relocation to the palace as a promotion. They had moved from the Clinique St. Pierre's barred windows and tin roof that clattered when it rained into a suite of rooms down the hall from the president of the Republic of South Vietnam.

Until Diem moved in and renamed it Dinh Doc Lap, or Independence Palace, the yellow stucco building had been known as the Palais Norodom, named for the monarch in neighboring Cambodia and built on a boulevard of the same name. The palace had served as the office and residence of the French gouverneur général for all of Indochina—a sort of French colonial White House. Conceived by French architect Achille Antoine Hermitte, who had built Hong Kong's regal city hall, its grandeur was intended to show the natives the full power and wealth of France. The palace's granite foundation had been imported from France, as had the smooth white stone for the carvings that festooned the facade. The only marble floors were in the central pavilion; the rest were tiled, a concession to Saigon's tropical climate. The palace was T-shaped, with two rows of graceful arched windows along the front, facing the city. On the first floor were offices and official reception rooms; the second floor housed the president's and the Nhu family's rooms. The reception hall and adjoining
ballrooms occupied the leg of the
T
and jutted deep into the lushly planted grounds.

When Madame Nhu returned, she found a room that should have been very much to her liking: the heavy drapes had been reinstalled and her bed dressed in silk duvets and shams with a large canopy; fine rugs covered the floor. The furniture was highly polished. As soon as it was smudged, a retinue of household staff was on hand to buff it again. Madame Nhu could open the French doors to the balcony wide in the early morning to catch a quiet breeze. Pungent food smells no longer drifted through the window at all hours as had at their street-level apartment. The odors of frying oil and ginger, meat and garlic stayed in the kitchen, released only from heaving platters served in the dining room at mealtimes. Madame Nhu understood that this move was a sort of nod from her brother-in-law Diem, acknowledging her contributions and those of her husband.

But Madame Nhu found no happiness in the palace. At least, not at first. She was searching for real meaning in her life, and it would take her some time to find her stride.

During their first few years
in the palace, Ngo Dinh Diem and his family regime accomplished a great deal. One million refugees were resettled in the South. Rice production increased from 2.8 to 4.6 million metric tons. Rubber production went from 66,000 to 79,000 million metric tons. Farm-credit programs and land reform broke up the colonial-era plantations and helped people invest in their own fields and try crop diversification. Three major highways were completed, two new universities were established, and the doubled production of electric power sped up reconstruction needed after the nine-year War of Independence. Fifty-one new manufacturing firms were established in South Vietnam, the largest in textiles, something the French had always controlled. South Vietnam's import costs were reduced by over $40 million a year, a significant amount in what was still a very poor country. But all these accomplishments were achieved in the shadow of US assistance—which amounted to $150 million a year for the five years between 1955 and 1960. The figure sounds small in today's dollars, but was close to 15 percent of the foreign aid
budgeted by the United States for all foreign economic and technical development.
¹

The news out of Saigon was especially rosy when compared to the dismal information that could be gathered about living conditions under the Reds in the north, which endured floods and famine. The Viet Minh's nationalist rhetoric had taken a sharp turn leftward after the Geneva Accords, in part because Hanoi was accepting help from Mao's China. But how much was this shift due to pressure from China and how much to the Viet Minh leadership's ability finally to shake off any pretense that it was anything other than Communist at heart? To strengthen their hold, the Communists had to break down the traditional power of the elites. “Speak bitterness” campaigns purged the ranks of the Viet Minh of any “wrong” (i.e., high-class) elements. People were expected to denounce neighbors and even family members, and the situation was easily manipulated to settle old scores. There were trials and executions and a deeply disruptive land-redistribution program. Unlike the huge parcels of land in the south, the holdings in the north were already relatively small. Land was measured in something called a
mau
—someone had to own fifty
mau
in the south to be considered a landowner and only five in the north. The margin of difference between people in one category or another was very small, which made the redistribution of land painful even for small-scale farmers. It also pitted neighbor against neighbor; people of similar means worked against each other for the smallest of gains.

The Ngo regime in the south set itself up as the antidote to the oppression in the Communist north. President Diem denounced communism not only on his own moral grounds, underpinned by his religious convictions and family history, but also because, in his view, communism was just another “foreign ideology.” If the Communists took over all of Vietnam, he insisted, “our beloved country will disappear and it will only be mentioned as a southern province of Communist China. Moreover the Vietnamese people will eternally live under the yoke of a dictatorship inspired by Moscow and denying religion, fatherland and family.”
²

But for all his impassioned speeches, Diem wasn't leading a free country either. Anything resembling real democracy was simply window
dressing. Under the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords, the separation of North and South Vietnam into two countries with capitals in Hanoi and Saigon was temporary. A referendum was supposed to have taken place in 1956 in both parts of the country to unite them again under one chosen president. But the South Vietnamese government of Ngo Dinh Diem refused to hold a vote on the grounds that the South Vietnamese had not actually signed the Geneva Accords; they had only been granted observer status. The Diem regime also accused the Communists of being unable to participate in an honest vote. It wasn't just the northerners living under communism who posed the problem; the south was still home to armed guerrilla fighters, former Viet Minh, who were loyal Communists and had gone underground, waiting for the time to rise again. The southern regime had one more good reason not to hold a vote: Diem would lose. There was no way he could win out over the man who had led the Vietnamese army to victory over the French and to independence. Ho Chi Minh would win any popularity contest.

The Communists weren't the only ones rigging elections. In October 1955, Nhu helped organize a referendum within South Vietnam for his older brother Diem to unseat former emperor Bao Dai once and for all. In a landslide victory, Diem shrugged off his mantle as Bao Dai's appointed prime minister and became South Vietnam's official chief of state and first president. The margin was overwhelming—nearly 6 million to 63,000. Reports coming out of the polling centers told of intimidation tactics and coercion. Red envelopes, indicating a vote for Diem, were being stuffed into the ballot boxes under the watchful eye of Nhu's men, and those who disobeyed risked a beating. Diem got 98 percent of the vote, but his margins in Saigon were even better: his 605,025 votes surpassed the city's number of registered voters by more than one-third.
³

Madame Nhu was elected to the National Assembly on March 4, 1956. She joined 122 other members, almost all male, in the legislative branch of the new government. Madame Nhu denied that it was her idea to run for office, insisting that an anonymous person had proposed her name to represent the northern refugees whom she had championed so “heroically,” and she scoffed at the notion that anything less
than real admiration had motivated her election.
⁴
Still, a distinct pattern was evident. The people in control of South Vietnam were either Ngo family members or related to them by marriage.

Madame Nhu's father, Tran Van Chuong, was put in charge of economy and finance; shortly afterwards he and his wife were appointed diplomats and sent to the United States. Chuong was to be the Diem regime's South Vietnamese ambassador, while Madame Chuong was made the South Vietnamese observer at the United Nations. Madame Nhu's uncle was in charge of foreign affairs, her father's cousin was Diem's vice president, and her sister's husband, Nguyen Huu Chau, was, for a short time, one of Diem's most trusted advisors. Madame Nhu's new prestige had even secured a spot for her little brother, Khiem. Her younger brother had been pampered, petted, and spoiled throughout his childhood, and perhaps because of that, he made for a miserable student overseas. He attended a school in Paris for a while but left without an advanced degree, then failed to complete correspondence classes in law studies. As the French were leaving Vietnam in 1954, Khiem was living a barefoot bohemian lifestyle by the seaside in Algeria with a German wife. What a twist: the boy the Chuongs had always cherished was turning into such a disappointment, and his middle sister might be the one to turn things around by calling him back to Vietnam and appointing him palace spokesman. When the new First Lady of South Vietnam beckoned, Khiem came quickly, leaving his wife behind. It must have given Madame Nhu great satisfaction to manage something her mother had not been able to.