Finding the Dragon Lady (34 page)

Madame Nhu's parting words at the press conference at the Beverly Wilshire—“I can predict to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning”—also came true. US President John F. Kennedy wanted to get out of Vietnam. A trail of documents shows that he intended to reverse the American military commitment to South Vietnam. Scholars think that Kennedy might have promoted the coup against Diem and Nhu in a miscalculated effort to advance that withdrawal, but of course they can only speculate as Kennedy was assassinated three weeks after the Ngo brothers. Because of his early death, Kennedy escaped ultimate responsibility for Vietnam.

On November 24, 1963, Madame Nhu sent a condolence letter from Rome to Jacqueline Kennedy, writing of her “profound sympathy for you and your little ones.” But she couldn't help but inject in a barbed reminder of the grief she was suffering herself. “The wounds inflicted on President Kennedy were identical to those of President Ngo Dinh Diem, and of my husband, and [came] only 20 days after the Vietnamese tragedy.” Madame Nhu suggested that she was somehow stronger or better equipped to deal with tragedy than Mrs. Kennedy when she wrote, “I sympathize the more for I understand that that
ordeal might seem to you even more unbearable because of your habitually well-sheltered life.” In other words, now you see how it feels.

Soon after taking the oath
of office aboard Air Force One in November 1963, the new American president, Lyndon Johnson, oversaw the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He would not, he said, “be the president who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went”; nor would he let the United States lose to North Vietnam, “some raggedy-ass, fourth-rate country.” In the year that followed, Johnson authorized support for raids against North Vietnam, increased the troop levels from 12,000 Americans to 75,000, and used the reported attacks on an American vessel in the Gulf of Tonkin as justification for presidential war making. Things only got worse from there. US combat units were deployed in 1965, and the war in Vietnam turned into a proxy war between the United States and the Reds; China and the Soviet Union had also begun sending troops to help North Vietnam. By 1969, more than 500,000 US military personnel were stationed in Vietnam, but they still couldn't save the country from communism. The United States withdrew its forces in 1973, and on April 30, 1975, the Communist tanks rolled into Saigon. Vietnam was finally unified, but at devastating human cost. As many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians died, as did 1.1 million North Vietnamese and Communist South Vietnamese fighters and close to 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers; in 1982 the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, was inscribed with the names of more than 58,200 members of the American Armed Forces who died or are listed as missing as a result of the war. The sobering lessons of Vietnam still haunt American policy in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the war in Vietnam
exploded and the world focused on Tonkin, then Tet and My Lai and the Christmas Bombings, Madame Nhu faded into the background. Her life got stranger and sadder still. She had been given, anonymously after the coup, an apartment in Paris. Madame Nhu hadn't questioned the gift; after all, she figured the Americans owed her more than an apartment, and she was too busy fighting off extradition attempts. The new government in South Vietnam was
petitioning the French government to abide by a 1954 judiciary convention agreement that provides for the extradition of alleged criminals, and the junta leaders had already issued a warrant for her arrest. They wanted Madame Nhu to stand trial in Saigon for “damaging the national economy” and “violating foreign exchange regulations.” If the French sent her back to South Vietnam, she could all too easily guess what would happen next. Her brother-in-law, Ngo Dinh Can, had remained in Vietnam after the coup. Can had turned himself in to the American consul in Hue, where he had hoped to receive some protection. But the Americans turned Can over to the military junta, which convicted him of running the Diem regime's Hue operations. Can was imprisoned at Chi Hoa Prison in Saigon for months before being dragged into a courtyard and placed in front of a firing squad. Can was so ill from untreated diabetes that he had to be propped up to be shot.

Renting out the brand-new four-room apartment, light filled and facing the Eiffel Tower, was Madame Nhu's only potential income—and it would get her out of France before the new government made up its mind about whether to extradite her or not. The Americans were advising the French to go along with the new government in South Vietnam. Desperate to leave, Madame Nhu accepted the first offer she got, well below the 3,000 francs a month she was hoping for but enough to cover basic expenses. She moved to a patch of arid land on the outskirts of Rome, a property that her husband had bought in the hope of one day building a kind of Catholic retreat for government workers in the Diem government.

The oldest Ngo brother, Archbishop Thuc, helped Madame Nhu secure tenancy on the Roman land before moving on to his next church assignment: a parish in the South of France. In 1981, Thuc went rogue. He splintered from the mainstream Catholics and began consecrating bishops without the approval of the Holy See. Thuc was involved in a plot to appoint bishops to a council in Mexico, where they would appoint a new pope to overthrow the one in the Vatican. Needless to say, that didn't go over well with the church. Thuc died, penniless and in obscurity, at eighty-seven years old in 1984 at a monastery in Carthage, Missouri.

Things hadn't gone well for Madame Nhu either. On April 12, 1967, her beloved daughter, Le Thuy, died in a car crash outside of Longjumeau, France. She was only twenty-two years old. Madame Nhu always believed that her daughter was murdered. Le Thuy had been working toward her law degree. Imbued with passion and a sense of vengeance, Le Thuy had written in her diary that she would kill those who had hurt her country and killed her father. When Madame Nhu talked to me about her suspicions surrounding Le Thuy's death, I found her logic hard to follow, but she mentioned that four trucks had converged on Le Thuy's car on a twisty country road, an event so improbable that, in Madame Nhu's mind, it had to have been planned. The most damning evidence of Le Thuy's murder, and a conspiracy to cover it up, was that Madame Nhu's own lawyer afterward asked for her forgiveness; if he had done his best, Madame Nhu reasoned, he wouldn't have needed it. Her conclusions about Le Thuy's death were outrageous—and yet understandable. Of course Madame Nhu thought of her daughter's death as one more episode in the cloak-and-dagger drama that had ruined her life.

Luckily, to Madame Nhu's mind, her three remaining children had no interest in reliving history. Trac, Quynh, and Le Quyen were trying to make their lives over as European citizens. They attended prestigious schools, and two of them got jobs with international organizations: Quynh worked for a major American manufacturing corporation in Brussels, and Le Quyen worked for the Italian aid organization Caritas on refugee and migration issues. It seemed that after the Saigon coup and the assassinations of their father and uncle in 1963, the death of their sister in 1967, and the murder of their grandparents by their uncle in 1986, the three remaining Ngo children might be able to move beyond their terrible legacy. But on April 16, 2012, Madame Nhu's youngest daughter, Le Quyen, was killed on a Roman highway when her scooter collided with a bus. The Italian news channel Roma Uno uploaded a video to YouTube of the accident scene, rivulets of blood still seeping from under a white sheet on the road. It was viewed over 50,000 times in the weeks and months after her death. I can't help but draw parallels to the infamous Kennedy Curse: the Kennedys are the only other high-profile
family I can think of whose members seem to suffer disproportionately tragic fates.

Madame Nhu was spared
the anguish of burying another child. She had died nearly a year before, on Easter Sunday, April 24, 2011. She was eighty-six years old and passed away peacefully, her son assured me, taking comfort in the fact that she was going to be reunited with her husband and daughter in heaven.

For perhaps the last time in her own right, Madame Nhu made headlines around the world. Pictures of her from half a century earlier ran alongside her obituary; from there, they were uploaded to blogs and assembled into grainy video montages. The death of the so-called Dragon Lady of South Vietnam made the front page of the
New York Times
. She was “liked” on Facebook, tweeted, and “tumblred.” Svelte and sinister and scheming—all the old clichés came roaring back. The media lingered on Madame Nhu's almost cartoonish Dragon Lady character for about a week—a pretty grand finale for someone who had been living in obscurity for the last forty-eight years. But Madame Nhu's resurgence couldn't last. The spectacular capture and death of Osama bin Laden turned attention away from what had happened in Vietnam in 1963 and back to America's contemporary wars.

It felt very lonely being back
in the corner of my apartment that I called my office. I thought of Madame Nhu every time the landline rang. I had to remind myself not to scramble for the pad and pencil—it wouldn't be her. Tacked to the wall were dozens of pictures of Madame Nhu. I just couldn't bring myself to put them away; I couldn't even face the papers still strewn about the floor. Newspaper clippings and State Department memoranda and personal letters remained fanned out chronologically, and I kept averting my eyes from where Madame Nhu's memoir weighted down the west end of my desk. Before she died, I had begun a laborious process of cataloging the whos, whats, and whens, affixing a rainbow of Post-its along the way. Without her, the stack of white pages looked insurmountable.

And yet, as horrible and disrespectful as it felt to say it out loud, Madame Nhu's death was somehow liberating. I was not going to hurt
her feelings, and she would no longer sit in judgment of my efforts. In hindsight, it seemed obvious. Madame Nhu kept refusing to meet me because she had known that to do so would have broken part of the mystery—and the mystery kept me coming back for her. Once she showed herself fully, she would have lost control. And she would never do that—at least not on purpose. Until the very end she kept herself just out of reach.

I struggled with what to do. Madame Nhu had trusted me with her memoirs and photographs, and after her death, I felt that responsibility keenly. I couldn't just let her last words collect dust in my possession; after all, she had told me over and over that she wanted one last chance to be heard. And yet, in her memoir, she was simply perpetuating her own version of the Dragon Lady myth. She wrote as if she were already far removed from reality. For example, in her memoirs, Madame Nhu comes off as self-centered and self-aggrandizing when she writes, “It is therefore for myself that, out of personal curiosity to uncover my long life, I try to remember, bit by bit, my passage as the Predestined little one of the Lord. . . . I think I will be better understood, and can help others on their journey, by recalling mine.” She also credits herself with wholly redefining what it meant to be a modern Vietnamese woman: “I never stopped innovating, given the rules of modernity, what was known as the life of a woman.”

Madame Nhu idealized herself and her family's history in her memoir's pages, never once questioning the dark shadow of the family's good intentions. The only fault she ever came close to admitting to me she almost whispered into the phone: “Perhaps I should have been a little more humble about our family's greatness.”

But in the context of our relationship, which I would call a friendship, I saw Madame Nhu as a more complicated and more sensitive woman than she was willing to express in the pages she had sent me. I had found ways to respect her for her tenacity without excusing her bad behavior, and now I felt like I had been handed the chance to breathe some life into the remote, exotic place in history to which she had been assigned.

I had a dream about Madame Nhu not long after she died. I was at a villa in Rome, standing in front of a tiled atrium that looked like
something out of my eighth-grade Latin book. From there I was led to a velvet couch by a graceful young woman I took to be Madame Nhu's long dead daughter, Le Thuy. She was most unfriendly to me, and I was suddenly scared of the tongue-lashing I would surely receive from Madame Nhu. I was kept waiting and waiting, until finally a shrunken and grey old woman appeared on the threshold of the hallway. I had the bizarre impulse to go and throw my arms around her, but she waved me back to my seat. She never came into the room, but I could hear her voice as clearly as if she were speaking into my ear: “I am far too busy here to receive you.” Then the old woman linked arms with the young one, and they walked away from me. They had almost disappeared into the dark recess of the hall when the little old lady turned back to me with a genuine smile. She was happy where she was. Of course I am fully aware of all the tricks the subconscious can play, but I woke up with the strangest certainty that Madame Nhu was at peace. She no longer cared what I said or did.

After Madame Nhu's death, when her diary turned up in the Bronx, I found in its pages confirmation of the fascinating, contradictory character I had come to know over the phone. I have no doubt that she would not have wanted the diary to surface. Why, she'd have chided, would any one care about the petty fights of a bad marriage? Who would want to hear about these small cruelties when they should be so dwarfed by the larger looming politics of the Cold War and fighting communism. She could not have seen that her intensely personal tale of marital woe was a window into the psychology of a woman with ambition to forge an identity and all the complications that she generated.

In the very first entry of her diary, on January 28, 1959, the thirty-four-year-old Madame Nhu, still youthful and not yet trapped in the despair of a doomed regime, nonetheless asks herself, isn't the best time to die right after one has been baptized? The depth of her depression was at absolute odds with the self-confident image she had always presented so carefully to the world. A few days later, she writes that she has come to a hard resolution. She has decided to accept that she will never be something more than she is. Her description of the resolution is vague, “renouncing pink and blue dreams,” an end maybe to childish
hopes and dreams, but the cryptic entry has a definite finality. “I can no longer be more, I will no longer be more.”