Finding the Dragon Lady (2 page)

Ngo Dinh Luyen
: youngest Ngo brother; served as ambassador to the United Kingdom

Ngo Dinh Le Thuy
: Madame Nhu's oldest daughter

Ngo Dinh Trac
: Madame Nhu's older son

Ngo Dinh Quynh
: Madame Nhu's younger son

Ngo Dinh Le Quyen
: Madame Nhu's youngest daughter

That hands like hers can touch the strings

That move who knows what men and things

That on her will their fates have hung
,

The woman with the serpent's tongue.
*

*
Last stanza of William Watson's poem “The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue.” The poem was recited in its entirety in front of the US Congress by Ohio senator Stephen Young on October 3, 1963, in protest of Madame Nhu's upcoming visit to the United States. See
New Poems by William Watson
(Cambridge, UK: The University Press, 1909), 32–33.

CHAPTER 1

Paris, 2005

B
Y THE TIME I STARTED LOOKING
for Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, she had been living in exile for over forty years. In 1963, at the height of her fame, the
New York Times
named the thirty-nine-year-old First Lady of South Vietnam “the most powerful” woman in Asia and likened her to Lucrezia Borgia. But it was Madame Nhu's reputation as the Dragon Lady that brought her real distinction. When Buddhist monks were setting themselves on fire in the streets of Saigon, Madame Nhu's response was unspeakably cruel: “Let them burn, and we shall clap our hands,” she had said with a smile. “If the Buddhists wish to have another barbecue, I will be glad to supply the gasoline and a match.” The dangerous, dark-eyed beauty quickly became a symbol of everything wrong with American involvement in the Vietnam War.

Madame Nhu faded from public view after November 1963, when her husband, Ngo Dinh Nhu, and his brother, South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem, were killed in a coup sanctioned and supported by the US government. As President John F. Kennedy explained to his
close friend, Paul “Red” Fay, the United States had to get rid of the Ngo brothers in no small part because of Madame Nhu. “That goddamn bitch,” he said to his friend. “She's responsible. . . . That bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.”

Plenty of books have dissected the events of November 1963 and established the overthrow of the Ngo brothers as pivotal in the American buildup to war in Vietnam. But the historical scholarship about the coup has largely overlooked Madame Nhu's role. How did a woman who was not even forty years old—and barely five feet tall in heels—come to command the full attention of a superpower like America and embroil the United States in a conflict that would last another decade and take millions of lives?

I was in Paris to find out—although, I had to admit, I was a little nervous. Pulitzer Prize–winning Associated Press reporter Malcolm Browne had written in his memoirs that he knew from “personal experience” that Madame Nhu “could be the most dangerous enemy a man could have.” And that was exactly what was so intriguing. The Dragon Lady image was a Western fantasy of the Orient—sensual, decadent, and dangerous. The wicked stereotype had been applied to powerful Asian women before Madame Nhu, women like Chiang Kai-shek's wife Soong May-ling and the Chinese empress Xixi. The spectacular treason trial of Tokyo Rose, the voice behind Japanese propaganda during World War II, was still fresh in the American collective memory when Madame Nhu accused Americans in Vietnam of acting like “little soldiers of fortune.” As a result, the public image of Madame Nhu as the Dragon Lady was one-dimensional, like the mustache-twisting villain in a bad Hollywood script, and a little too convenient.

Madame Nhu, whatever you thought about her, had had a direct hand in shaping history. But she had been silent for decades. Despite her reputation for outspokenness, the world had heard little from the woman herself. Madame Nhu had turned the last
New York Times
reporter who tried to gain access to her away from her doorstep in Italy for being too nosy. That was in 1986.

Although nearly twenty years
had passed, there was no reason that I should have any more luck, I told myself as I stared at the building
across the street. Just a few hundred meters behind me, the Eiffel Tower soared to its full height. I tried to look inconspicuous as I counted the building's stories. Tenacious old girl, I thought. As far as the rest of the world knew, including all the so-called experts I had interviewed, Madame Nhu was living in a rundown whitewashed villa somewhere on the outskirts of Rome. It had been anyone's guess as to whether she was even still alive.

But I had reason to believe that she was here, in Paris.

My search for Madame Nhu
began with simple curiosity. I was born in 1976, some seventeen months after the end of the war and a universe apart. Like most kids I knew growing up during the 1980s, my early knowledge about Vietnam came from movies; grownups certainly didn't talk much about it. Vietnam wasn't a country; it was a cacophony of thumping helicopter blades, flaming thatched huts, and napalmed jungles. I held onto that perception until my junior year in college, when I enrolled for a semester abroad at Vietnam National University in Hanoi, which I'd thought of as something of a lark. A Communist country in the jungles of Southeast Asia sounded dangerous and exciting; adding to the drama, the State Department recommended getting typhoid, tetanus, and rabies vaccinations, as well as taking along antimalarial drugs and iodine pills. My father was stupefied: “I spent my twenties trying to stay out of Vietnam, and here you go, trying to get in!”

By 2003, I had a master's degree in Asian studies, had lived in Vietnam twice, and received a US Department of Education scholarship that gave me supreme confidence in my Vietnamese language skills—as long as I was talking about something simple, like a menu or the weather. When it came time to think about getting an actual job, I wished I had done more than pick up a cool CIA pen from the campus job fair.

Rather than face an uncertain future, I sought comfort where I always have—in books. I returned again and again to the second floor of Boston's Central Library, where the Vietnam books were kept. Four or five men roughly my father's age and dressed in ill-fitting coats and baggy pants would be sitting around the tables placed at the periphery of the stacks. The smell of stale coffee leeched into the air around them. It was hard for me to reconcile the Vietnam I knew from 2004, the
friendly faces, overflowing markets, and modern cities, with the country—and the war—that had ruined so many lives. Who might these men have become if it hadn't been for Vietnam?

“Life is random,” my father would say, like a mantra. He meant the words to be comforting. It was his way of soothing my naive sense of injustice, of making sense of the world. My father got his draft notice in the mail in 1966, just after his college graduation. He had already been accepted to graduate school and offered a stipend as a teaching assistant, but the draft board rejected his appeal for a deferment. My father's number all but guaranteed him infantry duty in Vietnam, so, like many in the same predicament, he applied to Officer Candidate School and was accepted into the army. He faced better odds as a volunteer officer candidate than as a draftee on foot patrol.

Just weeks before he was due to report to boot camp, my father was watching television in his parents' living room. President Lyndon Johnson appeared on the screen and publicly extended the draft deferment to include graduate student teachers. My dad leapt up from the couch and hugged his mother; in short order, he called his local draft board, got his deferment, and unpacked his bags.

He caught hell from the recruiting officers, who were anxious to make their quota, and from his friend Don. Don and my father had carpooled to the university every day for four years. They were from the same neighborhood, a working-class suburb of Seattle, and lived at home with their parents to save money on room and board. They had talked about how education was their ticket out of their families' poverty. Don had a spot in a graduate program too. He could have used the same deferment as my dad to avoid the draft.

But Don didn't see the point of deferring. He tried to talk my dad back into enlisting, “just to get it over with,” he reasoned. They would do a quick tour of duty in Southeast Asia before starting the rest of their lives.

Don wasn't in Vietnam two weeks before his helicopter was shot down and he was killed.

As a little girl, I would stretch
on tiptoe to pull the maroon-covered Time-Life book about the Vietnam War down from our living room
bookshelves. The photographs were horrible and fascinating and raised more questions for me than the grownups could answer. There was the one of the South Vietnamese policeman shooting a man's brains out and the image of the little girl running down a road, naked and burning. It was a war I would never begin to understand, I thought, but instead of closing the book, I returned to it time and time again. My favorite was Larry Burrows' 1962 photo of Madame Nhu. With her piles of black hair and lacquered fingernails, she jumped out from the rest of the war's drab, olive-clad personalities. Wearing a traditional Vietnamese dress, the flowing
ao dai,
in virginal white, she was a tiny-waisted creature who could have been described as dainty, except for the heavy, black .38 caliber pistol that she held raised, aimed, and ready to fire. When her brother-in-law, President Ngo Dinh Diem, had once questioned the modesty of Madame Nhu's slim-fitting tunics, referring to their décolletage, she is said to have silenced him with a withering reply: “It's not your neck that sticks out, it's mine. So shut up.”

My fascination as a little girl with Madame Nhu's glamour gradually evolved into recognition of a very contemporary problem. A female who dressed impeccably and took care to look good would always be accused of a lack of seriousness about changing social policies. Today, Michelle Obama is criticized for her biceps and bangs, but she is only the latest American First Lady to wrestle with questions of style and substance. Jacqueline Kennedy, Madame Nhu's contemporary in 1963, was an American icon of fashion, elegance, and grace. She believed, at the time, that women should simply stay out of politics because “they're just not suited to it.” Jackie prided herself on her own “Asiatic” marriage and wholly disapproved of Madame Nhu, who had a “queer thing for power.”

The lack of easy answers about Madame Nhu ensured that my intrigue lingered until I found myself in the library with plenty of underemployed time on my hands. Passing through the vacant gazes of the Vietnam veterans I shared the stacks with, I began to piece together the life of the woman everyone said had caused so much trouble.

I still had only the
roughest outlines of Madame Nhu's story when I landed in Paris two years later. I had followed a flimsy trail based
on an article on an obscure Vietnamese-language website written by someone I had never heard of. The author said that he had interviewed the famously reclusive Madame Nhu in her apartment three years before, in 2002. I would have dismissed the claim, but the author had been particularly precise about an eleventh-floor apartment with a view of the Eiffel Tower through the kitchen window. The description reminded me of something.

While poking around the papers of Clare Booth Luce at the Library of Congress a few months before, I had found a letter from Madame Nhu, postmarked in 1964. Luce had been an author, a playwright, a US senator, and, as a staunch supporter of ultraconservative Republican politics in Washington, something of a friend to Madame Nhu. The return address scrawled on the back of the envelope had provided my first glimpse of Madame Nhu's spidery handwriting. When I read about the Eiffel Tower view, I thought back to how carefully I had copied the curls of her script into my notebook: avenue Charles Floquet. It hadn't occurred to me that she might still be living there, but now I wondered, why not?

One glance and I knew I was wrong. The elegant building on avenue Charles Floquet where she had once lived looked like just the sort of place a deposed dictator might hide in until his money ran out. But it was only eight stories high. Even given the European penchant for designating the floor above the ground floor the first floor, this building was several short of the eleven I had been looking for.

I almost gave up on the spot. Even if the article was right and Madame Nhu was living in Paris, how many hundreds of buildings could boast a view of the Eiffel Tower? She could be a mile away and still see it. The tower was the only thing that stuck up in such a low-lying city. Just as I raised my gaze to the skyline to curse the aesthetics of the most beautiful city in the world, I had a crazy thought. I jumped onto a nearby bench and looked around. Such a low city simply did not have many eleven-story buildings—especially not this section of Paris. I just had to walk until I found one.