Finding the Dragon Lady (16 page)

In addition to its nepotism
, the Ngo regime discriminated against non-Catholics. The bias could be rationalized in the context of those early years—the Catholic community provided Diem and Nhu with a ready pool of anti-Communist support—but the Ngo brothers took it to an extreme. There were stories of people converting to the Catholic faith just to win political favor and promotions. Surrounding itself with family members and like-minded fellow Catholics meant the regime was isolating itself from people who had real differences in opinion. But politics in Vietnam had always been that way to some extent. Centuries of Vietnamese monarchy and French colonial
rule bequeathed a political legacy that valued conformity, and under Diem, that adherence to a single mind-set was reinforced. There was an entrenched sense among politicians that disagreements or deviations from the status quo, even taking initiative, entailed career risk. The American advisors in South Vietnam pressured Diem to open up his government and make a showcase of political diversity, but Diem resisted. There was too much at stake. The march toward democracy would be a forced march—and a silent one. The regime said it needed stability before it could build a strong state. Madame Nhu rationalized the Ngos' insular tendencies to Australian reporter Denis Warner, explaining, “If we open the window, not only the sunlight, but many bad things fly in also.”

A real dissonance soon emerged between the image of Diem as a moral and good man and the climate of fear that began to pervade Saigon. Those who didn't cooperate with the regime were silenced in one way or another. They might be sent to distant, Communist-friendly outlying areas, where they might be killed. They might be taken away by the secret police and beaten or imprisoned until they learned their lesson. Rumors of torture and imprisonment ran rampant. Carried on every whisper was the name of Diem's younger brother: Ngo Dinh Nhu.

John Pham, Diem's bodyguard
, confirmed many of the saintly traits attributed to Diem in biographies. The president led a monkish, austere life. His private rooms on the second floor of the old French palace had bare wood floors, and his bed was a straw mat. His sleeping space adjoined his office, where he spent most of his waking hours. Furnishings included a round wooden coffee table and a worn leather chair. Diem ate at his desk while he worked through breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the morning he drank coffee with sugar and usually ate
chao
(rice porridge) with
ca kho
(small fish).
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His lunches and dinners were simple too, consisting of rice and
rau cai,
fried pork lardons, or some kind of fish. For dessert, he took two cobs of corn with sugar. Diem had simple tastes; he ate nearly the same menu every day with only the type of fish varying. He drank no wine or whiskey, just hot tea, but he was a chain smoker, lighting a fresh cigarette off the dying ember of the previous. Diem took small puffs and waited until the ash was long
before tapping it into the ashtray. He smoked so much that his fingers were stained yellow.

Diem ate alone most of the time; his meals and sleep were erratic because of his work schedule. Sometimes he didn't dine until 4 a.m. He could push a buzzer in his quarters to ring the kitchen. Two or three valets were assigned to him around the clock, but he was always very generous with the people who worked for him. John told me that Diem even gave his own salary to refugees from the north to help them get established.

As devoted as Diem was to his country, he had no time for personal relationships outside his family. He was a bachelor, but that term implies a freewheeling lifestyle that would have been entirely out of character for the South Vietnamese president. His only personal attachment was to the garden. After work, Diem would stroll through the palace grounds. When foreign dignitaries visited, bringing fruit and food delicacies as a gift from their own countries, Diem gave the goods to his bodyguards; he asked only that they return the seeds to him so he could plant them in his garden.

The only woman the president saw on a regular basis lived just a few doors down: his brother's wife, Madame Nhu. There was a rumor that as a young man, Diem had been engaged to a girl from his home-town of Hue but had ended things when he decided to pursue politics instead of settling into marriage. Politics was a dangerous game under the French, but that still seems like a feeble excuse not to get married. Diem's chief of staff thought that the president had never had sexual relations, and a 1955 profile of Diem in
Time
magazine reports that he had been “long pledged to chastity.” Diem's characterization as “shy” and “uncomfortable” around women may have prompted his chief of staff to confide that the president liked to keep “good looking men around him” instead of women.
⁶

The fact remained that Diem needed a hostess to help him with his social obligations, someone with social graces and a pretty smile. Diem could have chosen one of his own sisters or the wife of another of his brothers. But he chose Madame Nhu.

She was well connected, pretty, and smart, but most of all, she was already there. Perhaps Nhu had always intended this outcome.
Since Nhu's family lived in the palace, it seemed just as smart to keep his brother's wife busy. The chief of staff who had noted that Diem liked to have handsome men working for him described Diem's relationship with Madame Nhu as comfortable: “She is charming, talks to him, relieves his tension, argues with him, needles him and, like a Vietnamese wife, she is dominant in the household.” He likened President Diem's relationship with Madame Nhu to that of Hitler and Eva Braun.
⁷

John Pham, the bodyguard, disagreed. He told me that Diem did not altogether like Madame Nhu. He thought his sister-in-law “look like a hot lady, talk too big.” Everything about her showy personality went against Diem's quiet nature, but he put up with her. He recognized that he was indebted to his little brother Nhu for his political practicality—for doing things that needed to get done but might have compromised Diem's strict ethics. In John Pham's opinion, Diem didn't speak out against Madame Nhu because he didn't want to cause trouble for his younger brother.

John remembered with a smile the one time he saw Diem unable to hold back. It was October 1956. A picture was going to be taken in front of the palace with all the members of the government. The photographer took a long time to get his subjects organized, as the placement of people around the president was a political negotiation in and of itself. Everything about the situation that day was tense. Madame Nhu saw that everyone was distracted and took advantage of the moment. She snuck up onto the second floor of the palace and stood in one of the windows, managing to get herself included in the picture. When the photograph was developed and shown to the president, Diem was furious.

When I asked if she hadn't deserved to be included, John looked perplexed. “She always wanted too much too fast,” he said with a shake of his head.

Although still beleaguered by political infighting and challenges from the Binh Xuyen and religious sects, Diem and his new regime were the darlings of the free anti-Communist world. As such, they had a high diplomatic profile to maintain. There were endless dinner parties and receptions, including elaborate state welcoming parties for
visiting diplomats. The gardens of the park behind the palace would be lit up with garlands of light, and the walkways were illuminated with paper lanterns. After they made their way up the double ramp into the palace pavilion, Madame Nhu greeted invitees with one of her lovely smiles and offered a slim, gloved hand. Traditional Vietnamese music and clinking glasses accompanied her as she wove Diem around the room, mingling among members of the diplomatic corps and stopping strategically to chat with guests of honor before taking the prestigious and highly visible hostess's seat at the elegantly laid dining table.

She took right away to the duties of the First Lady, such as inaugurating new elementary schools, organizing flower exhibits, and visiting orphanages around the south. Madame Nhu arranged a huge reception at the palace for over 1,000 schoolchildren and traveled around the world on diplomatic missions. At a dinner for the Nhus in Rangoon given by the Burmese prime minister, she chatted with the leader's wife, Mrs. U Nu, about their shared passion for flowers. When the Nhus got ready to depart Rangoon on a special Vietnamese air force plane for the flight back to Saigon, they found a special gift onboard from their hostess: a Burmese variety of white blooming bougainvillea for Madame Nhu to plant in her own garden.
⁸
In Portugal, Spain, France, and Austria, delegations of women's clubs greeted her. Madame Nhu even found a way to make conversation with the Russian delegate to the Interparliamentary Union when they found themselves seated next to each other in Brazil. The Russian, Mrs. Lebedeva, was a thickly set woman known for her brusque manners, but Madame Nhu engaged her in a conversational debate in French about the economic need for foreign investment. And in Washington, DC, on a semiofficial visit with her husband in March 1957, Madame Nhu was invited to have lunch in the Senate chambers. She watched the senators scramble for a good seat at the table and remarked to someone at her elbow how shockingly childish this lunchtime ritual seemed. The statesman who caught her remark, and laughed it off, was a young senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kennedy. The Nhus' CIA escort, their old friend Paul Harwood, would recall that Madame Nhu caused the only blip in an otherwise highly successful trip. She had “reveled” in the attention paid to her by Allen Dulles and notables from the Departments of
State and Defense at a dinner held at the Alibi Club, a three-story brick townhouse a few blocks from the White House. Membership is still limited to the most elite—fifty of Washington's most powerful men—and new members are only admitted after an incumbent dies. Maybe Madame Nhu let the prestige go to her head, because her husband had been unhappy with her. He didn't enjoy his wife's flaunting her good looks, charm, and command of English. She had been the star of the evening—and Nhu must have taken it personally. In Harwood's view she had been “not a problem, but a sensation.”
⁹

Nhu sounded like he was
taking a line from his wife's critics. Those who didn't like Madame Nhu said that she was exploiting Diem's unfamiliarity with women. Why else would he listen to her? She could make her chest heave with emotion. She could bat her lashes. Her body language was more effective on the president, they said, than an arsenal of weapons. She had other tactics at her disposal that he didn't know how to deal with, like tantrums and mood swings. At the same time that they accused her of wielding her femininity like a sword, they said she could also use it as a shield to deflect allegations that she was the real man in the family.

Madame Nhu learned to shrug off the carping. She had better things to do than worry about what people thought of her. She was intent on carving out a role for herself in the administration, one that went beyond serving as a pretty hostess.

The Communists in Vietnam
had managed to arouse women's political consciousness, promising them that they had a purpose and reminding them how the old feudal society, not to mention the colonial one, had exploited them. They also gave women real work to do. The Communist cause valued their contribution and extended the promise of equality—a gaping hole in the Ngo brothers' revolutionary rhetoric. Female cadres enlisted in the Communist cause moved easily in and out of villages, spreading propaganda in the marketplace as if they were simply gossiping with friends or gathering produce for the family meal. In fact they were activating a network of foot soldiers. These women were the supply chain of what would become the National Liberation Front.
Vietnam scholar Douglas Pike meant all the respect in the world when he called these women the “water buffalo of the Revolution.”
¹⁰

Madame Nhu took it upon herself to match the progressive strides the Communists were making with women. If they were liberating women, she would too. Madame Nhu had only one reason to consider herself an expert on the subject: she too was a woman. She would call others like herself to arms. But therein lay her problem. Madame Nhu was never a typical Vietnamese woman. She spoke French at the dinner table and rode around town in a chauffeured car. Her forced march by the Communists through the countryside had been, for her, a great hardship, but she simply couldn't share in the experiences of women who had suffered so much injustice under the colonial system and so much hardship in the previous decade of famine and war.

Madame Nhu tried anyway
. She used her position as a deputy in the National Assembly to promise her “sisters” that she would look out for them. She would make their voices heard and protect them. In October 1957, Madame Nhu presented the Family Code legislation. When enacted in June 1958, it outlawed polygamy and concubinage. It also gave women the right to control their own finances after marriage; they could open their own bank accounts, own property, and inherit wealth. Grumbling from some of Madame Nhu's male co-senators was to be expected. They said these new rights for women were too much too soon. There was “prolonged picking” at the various provisions of the bill. Madame Nhu suggested that those of her male colleagues who resisted the legislation did so because they wanted to keep concubines, and the rumor went around that she had called the leader of the assembly “a pig.” At one point a motion was made to table the proposed law, but no one could afford to oppose Madame Nhu for long. When she appealed to Diem, he applied presidential pressure on the legislature, and the Family Code was approved with only one deputy dissenting.
¹¹
It seemed that the majority of the Vietnamese people welcomed legislation reforming the status of women in the Family Code—except for one thing. Madame Nhu's law also banned divorce. That line item condemned the rest of the code to widespread criticism because, as even
the most casual listener to Saigon gossip knew, Madame Nhu had a very personal stake in the matter.