Finding the Dragon Lady (26 page)

Thuc ordered the flags taken down. Hearing about it later in Saigon, Nhu was enraged by his older brother's thoughtlessness. “Why did my brother insist on sending such a stupid order about the flags? Who cares what flags they hang out?”

The Buddhist leaders cared very much. They had been waiting for a chance like this and quickly made the most of it. The Buddha's birthday celebration quickly turned into a protest. Thousands of people streamed over the bridges into the center of town. They waved banners for
religious equality, but many were likely only too glad for an excuse to join a protest against the government. It was pretty clear that the Buddhist protests could not be characterized as a purely religious expression. The fact that the marchers had written their banners in English showed that they aimed to capture Western photographers' attention. The Buddhists knew that if they wanted regime change, then they needed the sympathy of the foreign press.

Government troops and city law enforcement officials were waiting in the city center to make sure nothing got out of hand. And then, all of a sudden, it did. Two explosions erupted. No one knew where they had come from or which side had detonated them. The crowd was ordered to disperse, and when it didn't, fire hoses were turned on them; civil guardsmen fired shots into the air. Chaos descended. Grenades were tossed into the crowd. A wave of human screaming followed the crack of explosions closely. When the smoke cleared, nine people had been killed, including two children, and fourteen were injured.
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As a knee-jerk reaction, the government in Saigon blamed the episode on the Viet Cong. Diem and Nhu claimed Communists were responsible for the mess in Hue. Communists had exploited the situation, they said.

Perhaps if the brothers had only made a sincere effort to apologize, the crisis might have stopped there. But instead, Diem and the Nhus applied the lessons they had learned throughout the years, from standing up to the Binh Xuyen in 1955 to facing down the paratroopers in 1960: Show no weakness. Do not negotiate. In the face of instability, apply more pressure.

The Ngos felt wrongly accused. Wasn't it enough that freedom of religion was spelled out in the constitution of South Vietnam? Why did the Buddhists have to insist on new and separate treatment for their religion over everyone else's? Would the other religions and religious sects—the Hoa Hao and Cao Dai and the few Protestants and Muslims—demand the same? Their demands were divisive, and South Vietnam needed unity to fight the Communists. The Ngos just didn't see religious persecution as a legitimate complaint and viewed the Buddhists as political opportunists. Security forces, layered with secret militias and spy networks, together with general repression under
Madame Nhu's morality laws, made the situation ripe for an explosion, but the Ngo regime treated the Buddhists as they had the gangsters and the coup plotters. It was a colossal misjudgment.

The Buddhists kept gathering. In cities all over South Vietnam, they took up the fight against the Diem regime. They protested for their right to public assembly and called for the right to fly the Buddhist flag in public. They also called the Ngo regime out for its Catholic bias. Bald monks gathered in their saffron robes and addressed crowds of curious onlookers with battery-powered bullhorns. The police would show up and disperse the crowds, but they were careful. Beating and arresting monks would be terrible public relations for a regime already under close watch.

Killing and violence
are anathema to the Buddhist philosophy of peace, with one great exception: self-immolation. The sacrifice of one's mortal flesh for the collective cause of others is permitted. As one Buddhist spokesperson put it, “A Buddhist monk has certain responsibilities that he must take care of in this life on his way to the next life.”

One month after the May protests, an elderly monk named Thich Quang Duc emerged from a white car at the busy intersection of Phan Dinh Phung and Le Van Duyet in the center of Saigon. Two young monks walked alongside him and helped the old man lower himself onto a square, tufted pillow. He folded his legs into the lotus position, his knees a few inches from the ground. Then, working hastily, his young assistants closed in again, dousing the old man's orange robes with pink fluid, even sloshing his face and the back of his bald head. When they had stepped a safe distance back, Thich Quang Duc struck a match and let it fall into his folded robes. The fireball engulfed him. The bonze sat unmoving, like a pillar, as the smoky yellow flames consumed him.

The monks had tipped off some members of the international media that “something very important” was going to happen, but Malcolm Browne was the only journalist in Saigon to show up. The Buddhists had left the specifics deliberately vague—they did not want the police alerted—and they had guessed correctly that their spectator would not
intervene, although he certainly had time. Unlike a regular gasoline fire, which burns furiously bright for just a moment, this blaze was intense and sustained. Browne looked on in horror at the blackening figure surrounded by licking flames, but if he felt compelled to act, he was also keenly aware of his duty as the only camera-toting journalist present to document the travesty in Saigon. “I could see that although his eyes were closed his features were contorted with agony. But throughout his ordeal he never uttered a sound or changed his position, even as the smell of burning flesh filled the air.” Behind the burning body, two monks unfurled a banner in English: “A Buddhist Priest Burns for Buddhist Demands.” Another bonze spoke into a microphone in both English and Vietnamese: “A Buddhist priest becomes a martyr.” Browne guessed that the ordeal lasted ten minutes before the flames subsided. Thich Quang Duc pitched over, twitched, and was still. He was the first and most famous, but he wouldn't be the last. By the end of that terrible summer, six more Buddhists, including monks, a nun, and a young student, had lit themselves on fire.
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As the Buddhist situation
flared in Saigon, the United States, on whose support South Vietnam depended completely, was threatening to dissociate itself from the regime. The Americans wanted Diem to open up his government, to talk with his political opponents and bring them into the fold—in other words, they wanted him to behave more like a democrat than a dictator. Diem was taking “considerable action” on some matters, but on others, the Americans felt he was stalling or making matters worse. And he was refusing to cooperate with the foreign press—to “retrograde effect.” The regime's “attitude towards the US press reflects [its] attitude in general towards the US government and people,” and if the Nhus were “openly contemptuous,” Diem was simply “indifferent.” As American ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge reflected in his 1967
Vietnam Memoir,
“The United States can get along with corrupt dictators who manage to stay out of the newspapers,” but Diem and the Nhus couldn't follow those rules.

Diem was frankly tired of steeling himself against demands from Washington. He wasn't a puppet and resented being treated like one.
Born under French colonialism, he wasn't going to be a victim of American “colonial imperialism,” so Diem was very sensitive to any encroachments on his sovereignty. As Edward Lansdale pointed out in a secret memorandum to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in 1961, “If the next American official to talk to President Diem would have the good sense to see him as a human being who has been through a lot of hell for years—and not as an opponent to be beaten to his knees—we would start regaining our influence with him.” Americans already criticized the way he ran his army, they disparaged his family and closest advisors, Nhu and Madame Nhu, as “evil influences,” and now they were pressing Diem to quiet the mess with the Buddhists. Diem couldn't help but frame any concession to the Buddhists as a concession to the Americans: “If we make a concession now, the United States will ask for more,” he rationalized. “How many concessions do we have to make to satisfy them? . . . I wish to increase the army; the United States refuses to supply weapons and other means. The United States only wants to send troops to Vietnam.”
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Madame Nhu's
Women's Solidarity Movement issued a declaration that the
Times of Vietnam
printed in full the very next day: a robe does not make a bonze. It admonished Vietnamese and Americans to take a hard look at the real motives behind the monks' demonstrations. Madame Nhu charged the Buddhists with using their religion as a cover for communism. The Buddhists were “exploited and controlled by Communism and oriented to sowing disorder and neutralism.”
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To accuse someone of communism in the Cold War chill of Saigon in 1963 was an incredible insult. But it didn't end there. Included in the pronouncement was a passing swipe at “those inclined to take Vietnam for a satellite of a foreign power,” by which Madame Nhu clearly meant the United States. Officials in the US embassy were stunned that such a diplomatic gaffe could go unpunished. “If that statement is policy, it's a disaster,” they warned.
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But Madame Nhu's most offensive pronouncement was yet to come. And this time it was not buried in any women's group declaration; she came out and said it herself. The Buddhist suicides were “barbecues,” she declared. With that one sentence, Madame Nhu
sealed her fate. The varied grievances against the government suddenly all became believable after Madame Nhu gave such a cruel voice to the regime.

President Diem tried to control the damage by going on the radio to say how profoundly troubled he was by the death of Thich Quang Duc. Then he reiterated that as the constitution protected Buddhism, he was personally its guardian. Negotiations with the Buddhists continued, and a document that would come to be known as the Joint Communiqué of June 16 resolved the Buddhist flag-flying issue—at least in theory. On religious holidays, the Buddhist flag could be flown outside pagoda walls as long as it was accompanied by a larger national flag. The Buddhist flag could be flown alone only inside the pagoda. On national holidays, no religious flags were to fly at all. Most tellingly, in a revealing moment of weakness, Diem made a point to tell reporters that Madame Nhu did not speak for the government. To most people the Diem presidency really comprised three people: Diem, Nhu, and Madame Nhu. This attempt to silence the most visible member reduced his power, especially when, as quickly became apparent, Madame Nhu showed her complete unwillingness to be silenced.

Madame Nhu couldn't let it go. It seemed too unfair: the Buddhists got concessions when the regime had done, in her mind, nothing wrong. She refused to apologize and dug herself in deeper. “I would beat them [the Buddhist activists] ten times more,” she said to David Halberstam. If there was another suicide, even if there were another thirty, Madame Nhu said she would clap her hands in delight.

Privately, the Ngo brothers continued to depend on Madame Nhu, who had advised the brothers well in the past. Keeping with that tradition, Nhu came to his wife in the middle of the night on June 15, the night before the communiqué was signed to resolve the flag-flying issue, and asked, “What should we do?” Madame Nhu had already told Diem what she thought of the document—and him. “You are a coward,” she had spat at the president. Diem just shook his head and told her she didn't understand. This time, the problem had international implications. It was too big for her.
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That night she was too tired to argue more. She told her husband that they were in an impossible situation. To fight the Buddhists would
cause more trouble, but to sign the document revising the flag order would admit guilt and open them up to further risk if the Buddhists wanted them to make amends or demanded retribution. “Get Diem to sign it,” she sighed about the joint communiqué. But it was very important to her that one thing not be overlooked. When Diem signed the document, he should write in that none of what he was agreeing to had ever been illegal in the first place—reiterating the fact that the constitution protected religious freedom. Presumably Nhu passed the advice on to Diem because the president did just that, in his neat tight script: “The points put down in the Joint Communiqué were approved in principle by me at the very beginning.” Madame Nhu's solution appeased the Buddhists on the flag flying without ever admitting that the government had behaved badly, and Madame Nhu thought the brothers ought to be grateful to her for getting them out of a tight spot, again.
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With the communiqué
signed, the Buddhist mess should have been settled. But the flag flying was never the real problem. It was simply the spark that had ignited the underlying issues, and those continued to smolder. The palace was infuriated that the foreign press, the Americans especially, couldn't let the issue go. Reporters were giving voice to people dissatisfied with the regime, and the more voice they received, the more they protested. There were mass demonstrations in Saigon, Dalat, Nha Trang, Qui Nhon, and Hue. Monks continued to stage public suicides. Their banners no longer asked the Ngos for religious tolerance; now they called for an overthrow of the government. People seemed to respond with enthusiasm. How was the government supposed to react? Its authority was being flouted daily. Nhu confided to his wife his fear that negotiating with the Buddhists had looked like weakness. At the hint of impotence, the brothers would lose political allies; people once too scared to defy them would be no longer so afraid. The palace was vulnerable to attack. The Vietnamese people needed to be reminded who was in charge, and so did the Americans.

On August 20,
President Diem enacted martial law. Troops would occupy strategic points in Saigon, but the pagodas, Diem said, were to be handled with special care. Diem didn't want any of the monks hurt.
He said he didn't want any more trouble, and his generals seemed to believe him. But Nhu had a different plan.