Finding the Dragon Lady (29 page)

From then on, Madame Nhu seemed to be everywhere all at once. Helping that impression was the fact that boutiques around the city put mannequins with almond eyes and puffy hairpieces in their shop windows. One fashion designer ruefully commented that he doubted Madame Nhu would be a lasting fashion influence in New York because American women were not small enough, or flat chested enough, to pull off her look effectively.

Everywhere she went Madame Nhu stopped traffic, literally. Two hundred protesters showed up to picket the first event, but those numbers were dwarfed by the one thousand attendees at Madame Nhu's lunch at the Waldorf Astoria hosted by the Overseas Press Club.
Time
magazine reported that women in minks heavily outnumbered the working newsmen. “Is she 40?” asked one matron in the audience. Madame Nhu had just turned thirty-nine. “You don't have nails like that and do much around the house,” another woman in the audience muttered. Some of her audience had forgotten—perhaps they never knew—why Madame Nhu was in New York. She was trying to save her family. She was trying to enlist support for the fight against communism. She was not there to prove herself a capable housewife.

The next day three hundred people crowded around simply to watch her emerge from her limousine and dash into Radio City Music Hall. Madame Nhu had to travel around New York under heavy police escort, snarling traffic up and down the avenues as she made her way from midtown to Times Square, from Columbia to Sarah Lawrence to Fordham.
⁷

On her fourth day in the city, she nearly collapsed. Madame Nhu had taped a television show the day before and had just come from a lunch with the publishers of
Time
magazine. When she took the stage at Sarah Lawrence College in the late afternoon, her voice was shaky. A woman who had been in the audience said Madame Nhu was “obviously not well” and that she had to stop several times to sip from her glass and swallow some sort of pills. She wavered on her feet under the bright stage lights and excused herself from the stage before she
fainted. It was a far cry from her usual spirit. But in this case, it seemed to work in her favor.

A group of women standing around in twin sets and knee-length pencil skirts gathered after the talk outside the auditorium to chew gum, smoke cigarettes, and compare notes on their impressions. “I couldn't hate her!” one young woman exclaimed, and her friends nodded in agreement. Then they chimed in like birds pecking the same seed: “I was disarmed.” “She was pretty.” “I'm sorry she didn't feel better.” But another woman announced her disappointment. The Dragon Lady she had been expecting had not showed up. The term “just didn't seem to fit that sweet woman.”
⁸

It might have helped that the Ngo family had hired a New Yorker as program director for Madame Nhu's trip. She and two assistants worked in adjoining rooms at the Hotel Barclay during Madame Nhu's stay. They coordinated the details of the cross-country visit but protested to the media that they were not public relations consultants—and certainly “not advising anybody on what to say.”
⁹

A public relations firm had already fired Madame Nhu and the rest of the Ngo family as clients. The Oram Group was a well-known and well-respected consultant for social and political causes. Their clients included Planned Parenthood and the NAACP, as well as environmental, religious, and civil rights groups. The American Friends of Vietnam had hired the Oram Group sometime during the Eisenhower administration. For $3,000 a month, the firm was charged with promoting President Diem and making sure that the US government and taxpaying public would stand firm behind the embattled president of South Vietnam. Harold Oram himself had helped orchestrate Diem's triumphal visit to the United States in 1957, when President Eisenhower had personally greeted him at the airport in Washington, and 50,000 people had turned out to watch his motorcade pass through the city. When Diem made his way to Manhattan, the city held a ticker-tape parade. But the staff of consultants at Oram and the directors of the firm had later split among themselves on the question of Diem: was he a strong leader or a repressive dictator? By 1962, they had made up their minds. Oram ended all commitments to represent
and promote South Vietnam as a good cause. The firm wasn't going to do anything to help Madame Nhu on this trip.
¹⁰

Like any good tourist to
the Big Apple, Madame Nhu took in the sights, including a show at Times Square and dinner at a nightclub where she listened to jazz. She seemed game for it all. Madame Nhu was making a real effort to show the Americans that she appreciated their culture. The decision to play the good sport on American soil was a smart tactic. She knew she needed to soften her image. By visiting all the sights, taking in all the tastes and sounds that New York City had to offer, she was trying to say that American style and entertainment were great—in America. She wanted to show that she wasn't a militant moralist all the time. But Madame Nhu did not apologize—at least not sincerely. A few weeks before, in Rome, Madame Nhu had commented to the press that the American military in Vietnam acted “like little soldiers of fortune.” It was a terrible thing to say, even if she didn't really understand what she was implying. The new ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, had strongly condemned her for it, and the newspapers had run with the story, calling her flagrantly anti-American and accusing her of desecrating the sacrifice of the 112 American soldiers who had died in South Vietnam. All of this helped build the tension and frenzy surrounding her visit to the United States.
¹¹

Madame Nhu refused, or maybe she was unable, to tone down the defensive bristling in her voice. Even though she had apologized for causing offense, she couldn't drop the issue. Instead, she decided to hammer home what she meant to say. The “Americans bring their houses on their backs [to Vietnam]. . . . They live at great expense.”

She had a point.
South Vietnam was a country at war. Moderation would have been more appropriate. As with any couple in a troubled marriage, fights over money just exacerbated the tensions between the US and South Vietnamese governments. By 1963, the United States was pouring $1.5 million into South Vietnam every day, nearly $550 million annually. Americans thought the South Vietnamese should be doing more with the massive inflows of cash, but the South
Vietnamese argued that too much of the money earmarked for South Vietnam went to “operational expenses” for American servicemen and advisors—bringing cold Cokes, hamburgers, and color televisions to comfort the advisors stationed in the jungles. The Ngo brothers wanted a cutback in the number of American advisors; instead, the Kennedy administration signaled that it would put more men in South Vietnam but cut the overall aid package. At the same time, the Communists needed only point to the Americanization of South Vietnam—from the economy to the fashion to the shelves of the grocery stores—to make their nationalist point.

So much had been made of the phrase “the monks' barbecue” and now the “soldiers of fortune” comment that, Madame Nhu complained, her deeper meaning had been lost. “I could not make myself heard in my country.” She was heard just fine by the 4,000 to 5,000 students who packed the auditorium to hear her at Fordham University on day five of her visit. The all-male audience had given Madame Nhu a roaring welcome when she walked on stage. She wore another silk
ao dai,
this one with a boatneck, her hair tidily twisted up. She showed no signs of the shaky exhaustion of the day before. This was a different crowd altogether. Row after row of men gazed up at the little figure on the stage. They were dressed in severe suits and dark ties and rippled with appreciative laughter when Madame Nhu told them, “I'm ready to answer questions—but I don't want to deprive you of your lunch.” They were charmed and seemed more than willing to go along with Madame Nhu when she beseeched them with a final request, “Whatever you hear, please don't condemn me.” She was given a standing ovation.

In front of the men at Fordham, Madame Nhu seemed to have overcome whatever shyness or lingering doubts might have plagued her. That success was followed by cheers from a capacity audience at Columbia University. Even though detractors had repeatedly pelted her limousine with eggs and chalk as she traveled through the city, Madame Nhu seemed to realize by the end of her first week in the United States that she would be just fine, no thanks to the government that refused to acknowledge her.

On Sunday morning
, Madame Nhu and her daughter went to Mass at the Church of Saint Agnes on Forty-Third Street near Grand Central Station. Madame Nhu wore a salmon-pink
ao dai,
and Le Thuy wore turquoise; with their matching smiles the mother and daughter looked like they could have posed for a Howard Johnson ad. Madame Nhu had every reason to smile—her interview on NBC's popular show
Meet the Press
would air that evening, and she had just received a huge bouquet of flowers from the students at Columbia in apology for the protests she had encountered on campus the day before. It was a nice touch, but even nicer was a visit from New York City's public events commissioner. It would be Madame Nhu's first formal face-to-face greeting from a government official at any level. All the fuss around Madame Nhu had made her “his concern” as a New York City representative.
¹²
She must have been tickled that even he had trouble making his way through the Barclay lobby. Madame Nhu had been in the country nearly a full week, and the excitement surrounding her still hadn't died down. Curiosity seekers, media, protesters, and fans still swarmed her hotel. After his meeting with Madame Nhu, the official conceded to the press that she was “a dynamo.” She simply couldn't and wouldn't be ignored.

CHAPTER 14

Closed Doors

I
N 1943, SOONG MAY-LING
, the wife of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, travelled across America, from East Coast to West, New York to California. Her itinerary was very much like Madame Nhu's twenty years later. They had called Madame Chiang the Dragon Lady too—for being determined, daring, and deliberately alluring. And like Madame Nhu, Madame Chiang was on a crusade against the evil threat posed to her country by communism.

But the context was different
. Madame Chiang's 1943 visit took place less than two years after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The willowy Chinese woman who took the floor at the US Senate cut a dashing figure; she was an inspirational hero for the Americans—they had fought a common enemy during World War II, the Japanese. If Madame Chiang said the Communists were another threat to China's security, America was ready to believe her. The American public was enchanted with what she wore, how she spoke, and even her daily toilette. The papers chronicled every detail of her trip.

For as exotic as Madame Chiang
appeared, with her crescent-shaped eyes, glossy black hair, and fine-boned physique, she was also just familiar enough. She had gone to school at Wellesley. She knew how to talk to Americans. This wasn't her first trip to the States, and she was used to the culture.

Madame Chiang had been aware of an American paradox that made her innately skeptical of how she was treated. In her experience, Americans could profess to be charmed with the romance of the Orient but still hold racist and condescending attitudes. Madame Chiang bristled at any implied racism or condescension because she was Chinese, and she insisted on top ceremonial protocol during her visit to the United States. Like Madame Nhu, Madame Chiang was not technically the wife of a titular head of state: Chiang Kai-shek was a man of many titles, but president of China was not one of them. Regardless, President and Mrs. Roosevelt greeted Madame Chiang personally when her train pulled into the station in Washington, DC. She rode with them in their car to the White House. Once there, the Roosevelts put her up in the Rose Room and had the bed made up with silk sheets for her sensitive skin. For the entirety of her stay, nearly every night for a month, the Roosevelts invited Madame Chiang to dine with them in the evening.
¹

In stark contrast
, Madame Nhu was still getting the silent treatment from the Kennedy administration and the entire US government.

Madame Nhu arrived
in Washington, DC, on October 15, 1963. She had been speaking to Princeton University students in New Jersey earlier in the day, and the day before that she had been in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard Law School and Radcliffe College. She was going to spend one more week on the East Coast, in and around the nation's capital, before flying to Chicago. It was a grueling schedule. Increased security had been procured; maybe the protests were predicted to be worse in Washington than they had been in New York. So Madame Nhu had a whole entourage trailing her through the District of Columbia and its environs. She rode with her daughter in the lead car, a long black limousine. Streets were cleared; traffic was held up;
even the motorcade of the president of the United States had to wait for her to pass. Hearing the self-congratulatory way Madame Nhu remembered it fifty years later, you would think she had been Moses parting the Red Sea.

Madame Nhu turned up
on her parents' doorstep on Wednesday evening, the day after arriving in Washington. The Chuongs' new house was modest. After leaving the diplomatic pomp of the South Vietnamese embassy behind in August, the former ambassador and his wife had moved onto a tree-lined street in a residential corner of northwestern Washington. The solidly built brick house had two floors and only five rooms. It was a comfortable enough home, but for a couple with imperial bloodlines used to living life among servants and impeccable luxury, a middle-class American home must have seemed a huge step down.