Finding the Dragon Lady (19 page)

She could tell me that she usually woke at 7:30 a.m., took a light breakfast of tea and rice or bread, then dressed for the day. She devoted the rest of the morning to work. If she wasn't drafting letters with her secretary in her study, she was out visiting her constituents, but she was almost always back by noon. Lunch was the main meal of the day, eaten under the massive chandeliers with linens and formal china. Although the president usually ate simple meals in his office, when there were guests, or once or twice a week on his own, he might dine more formally with his brother and sister-in-law in their dining room on the second floor. Semiofficial evenings were also hosted in the Nhus' dining room; it was spacious and elegant but more personal, without the ceremonial pomp of the official presidential dining room on the first floor. Madame Nhu wished the family's five rooms in the palace were just a little bigger. They had a spacious parlor, two large bedrooms, and two other sitting rooms with balconies, but Madame Nhu wanted a kitchen a little closer. By the time the food made it to the dining room from the kitchen on the first floor at the back of the palace, it was cold.

After lunch, Madame Nhu usually went to lie down in her bedroom. It was too mind-numbingly hot to do anything else. This was the time of day when she was most nostalgic for the seasons in Hanoi. She missed the lakes and wide boulevards and having a place to stroll. In Saigon, she felt like she stared from behind the palace's massive gates at life passing her by. She thought about how different things would be if she were just living a normal life. What would she do if she weren't trapped? Madame Nhu imagined that she would be content to live in a small house as long as it had a big garden for the children to play in; she would cook simple meals for her family and spend her days writing children's stories.

In response to her daydream, I suppose I must have clucked sympathetically into the telephone as she was speaking. But the eighty-three-year-old wasn't after sympathy. Her life as First Lady in the palace might not have been the one she would have chosen, but it was the life chosen for her by God. As such, she required not compassion but determination. “How else can I explain my powerful drive? My agenda
to change the lives of women? I, myself, would have been content with a peaceful life! I have told you that over and over. But God had different plans for me. It was my duty to see it through.”

Madame Nhu had another test for me. “I want to see it again. If you can help me, find pictures of my rooms in the palace for me, then you really are sent by God.” The mission was perfectly clear: find photographs of the rooms circa 1961. Get them to Madame Nhu, make an old lady happy, and get her memoirs. Easy enough. Except Madame Nhu's quarters had taken a direct hit when Independence Palace had been destroyed in the bombing of 1962. Anything retrieved from the rubble was lost again eighteen months later.

“I never showed my bedroom to anyone. No visitors were ever allowed in my private quarters.” Madame Nhu let a wry laugh escape. “But there was one time, I really wanted to make an impression on my guests. It was so spontaneous for me.”

The guests that she had wanted to impress so badly had been part of the American vice presidential delegation. Lyndon Johnson and a diplomatic entourage had come to South Vietnam in May 1961.

“Ooh, they were so surprised!” Madame Nhu's voice brightened recalling the moment the vice president's wife, Lady Bird Johnson, and Mrs. Jean Smith, President Kennedy's sister, had walked into the room.

“When I opened the door to my room, they could see a long row of tiger skins [laid out on the floor]. The paws all lined up. The heads attached.” It sounded pretty gruesome to me, but she breathed in deeply, as if recalling the smell of the orange blossoms at Tet instead of taxidermy specimens.

I understood a moment later, when she continued, “If I had the photographs, I would at least have something of my husband. He was such a skilled hunter. Magnificent. He killed the most beautiful beasts, and every one of his prizes, he turned over to me.”

The irony of Madame Nhu's lost tiger skins didn't escape me. I knew that while the Americans had called her the Dragon Lady, those Vietnamese who had dared speak out against Madame Nhu referred to her instead as the Tiger Lady—out of cultural respect for the dragon.

I wonder now at all my continued enthusiasm for her. After all, she had stood me up—literally, at the church, and figuratively. She
continued to dangle the promise of her memoirs in front of me, but I kept running into doubts that they existed outside her imagination. She had been referring to these so-called memoirs since 1963. She said she had written so many hundreds of pages that papers were collected all over her apartment, even under the couch. Why on earth should I believe that now, nearly fifty years later, she was finally ready to gather them together into a manuscript? When I tried to press her, she snapped at me. It was a quick flick of the sharp tongue I had heard so much about. “You should not speak about what you don't understand,” she had chided, and it stung. But the truth was, I knew that if I didn't play along, I would never have anything to show. And her desire to have something of her husband again, I have to say, tugged at my heart strings, just as she had guessed it might.

Madame Nhu's challenge
turned out to be fairly easy. After a couple of e-mails and telephone calls to the archivists at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin, Texas, I got what I was looking for.

When I opened the attachments on my computer, my breath caught in my throat. The sepia-toned photos brought a destroyed world back to life.

Four women stand in
what is clearly a bedroom, a satiny upholstered creampuff of a place with endless curtains hanging over windows and around doorways. Elaborate moldings and parquet floors finalize the palace feel. And there they are: a row of gaping-mouthed tiger hides laid out end to end, running the length of the room right to the foot of the bed. What did it feel like to touch bare feet to them? Were their hides coarse and wiry? I puzzled over how Madame Nhu remembered to avoid tripping over ears, eyes, and teeth when she got out of bed in the morning.

I recognized three of the women in the photograph easily, and I assumed the fourth must be the ambassador's wife or the wife of another highly placed American official. The vice president's wife, Lady Bird Johnson, stands backed up against the edge of the bed, her white pumps planted squarely on the parquet, as if she has taken care to walk around the dead beasts instead of across them. Nicely dressed for a
palace visit in a sleeveless sheath and heels, Lady Bird smiles gamely for the camera, but she looks just a little wilted by the heat. Her gloves are off, her hat is askew, and her curls droop in the humidity. She looks right into the camera, her eyebrows hitched in surprise.

Madame Nhu seems much more at ease. Wearing a long-sleeved
ao dai
with a scooped neckline instead of the mandarin collar, she welcomes her guests into the draped room with an open palm. In the next picture, she stands with her hips squared toward the camera, her shoulders thrown back. She seems to possess a ballet dancer's physical awareness. Madame Nhu looks like she might be ready to smile—at least her chin is lifted in the camera's direction. The strength of her presence distracted me from noticing her size compared to the Americans until much later. She was tiny. Without her heels and elaborate beehive, she might not have made it to Lady Bird's shoulder.

President Kennedy's sister,
Jean Smith, has the same square jaw as her brother. She is wearing a full-skirted gingham dress and pearls, and she seems unable to tear her eyes from the tiger hides surrounding her feet—not even to look up for a photograph—as though afraid they might spring to life and attack. Her elbows tucked tightly to her body, one arm holds onto the other, like a security belt, her knees pressed together as though they might buckle otherwise.

Jean Smith was the youngest of the Kennedy siblings. Her husband, Stephen, was the president's political advisor and finance chairman, but Jean had pitched in her time and energy for Jack too. She worked tirelessly on the campaign, hosting tea parties and knocking on doors. After the election, President Kennedy would inscribe a photo to his youngest sister, thanking her for all her hard work. Jean had been thrilled, honored, she said, to have her hard work recognized—until she found out that all her sisters and her brothers' wives had gotten the same.
¹

Madame Nhu, the glamorous Asian dynamo, and Mrs. Jean Smith, the all-American woman, had more in common than could be supposed from a casual glance at the picture of them standing together. Both women were carried along by their families' strong ties to politics. Both had husbands who worked for family; both families were Catholic
and anti-Communist and committed to doing the “right” thing. Both women were charming and savvy, and both professed a seriousness of purpose. It seemed like there should have been a natural affinity, not only between the women but between the newly inaugurated Kennedy administration in Washington and the Diem regime in Saigon.

President Kennedy himself had announced Johnson's trip to Southeast Asia, calling it a “fact-finding mission.” There were conflicting reports about what was actually happening in South Vietnam. What was there to show for the millions of aid dollars the United States had poured into the tiny country since 1954? Were these Ngo brothers helping the fight against communism as they claimed, or were they hindering it? The last year had seen an uptick in violence and Communist activity, which may have been why Vice President Johnson didn't want to go. “Mr. President,” Johnson had said, “I don't want to embarrass you by getting my head blown off in Saigon.”
²

Of course, no harm came to anyone in Johnson's entourage in South Vietnam. The Diem regime took good care of the Americans, hosting them in the guesthouse on the palace grounds. That first night in Saigon, the Johnsons, the Smiths, and Kennedy's new ambassador to South Vietnam, Frederick Nolting and his wife, enjoyed a fine French dinner in the rooftop restaurant of the Caravelle Hotel.
³
As they looked out over their wineglasses at the city's twinkling lights, the view convinced them that, indeed, this was a charming place worth saving from the Reds. Graceful women drifted under the acacias along wide tree-lined streets; the happy sounds of children frolicking in the square floated up to them on the cool evening breeze. But there was also a distinct tension in the air, an awareness of imminent danger, of Communists lurking in the shadows. Intelligence reports had confirmed that many of the people who had fought with the Viet Minh during the war against the French and had stayed in the South were now determined to unify the country under one leadership: Hanoi's. The Communists were having more success than anyone was comfortable admitting.

The Communists were said to control about one-third of the southern countryside. They had created bases in the delta and the highlands; the same Viet Minh weapons used against the French, wrapped in plastic and buried in the rice paddies for nearly fifteen years, were dug
out and repurposed. Le Duan, South Vietnam's Communist chief, was in charge of organizing the old fighters into new squads. He had an impressive revolutionary pedigree, having spent seven years in French jails before meeting up with Ho Chi Minh in China in the 1940s. So although a southerner, Le Duan had the ear of his comrades in Hanoi. He was able to plead his fellow southerners' case: Our people are suffering under Diem and ready to fight. They must rise up. If we do not lead them, they will form their own resistance, and we will become irrelevant. The Politburo agreed with Le Duan and resolved to fight a military struggle in the south in addition to its political efforts. In 1959, a secret mission was authorized to travel down the Truong Son Route to bring arms and other supplies for waging war. The West would come to call the treacherous jungle path that snaked down the western edge of the country the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
⁴

A year later, the Communist Party Congress in Hanoi committed itself to the military struggle even further. In December 1960, Hanoi formed the National Liberation Front (NLF), the proper name for the southern Communist effort to reunify the country, though the Americans would simply call them the Viet Cong. Regardless of their name, the downfall of the Diem regime was their number one goal. Hanoi had authorized them to overthrow the South Vietnamese president and his “colonial master,” the United States, by whatever means necessary. By the time of the Johnsons' visit to Saigon, Communists were killing an average of five to eight hundred South Vietnamese army soldiers, government workers, and civilians a month. The figures were kept secret.

The grim numbers coming out of Vietnam were manipulated for two reasons, and both had to do with politics. On the American side, the US ambassador to Vietnam, Frederick Nolting, and the senior military commander, General Paul Harkins, were concerned that negative evaluations might undermine President Kennedy's resolve to keep American aid money and advisors flowing to Vietnam. When Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara went on a two-day fact-finding mission around the country, Nolting and Harkins prohibited their staffs from telling him anything that might give less than a favorable impression. Evasions were a slippery slope leading to the
kind of outright manipulations that later took place, such as basing enemy casualty counts on intuition and peeling red stickers off a map that were supposed to indicate where the Communists had a foothold when it looked like there were “too many.” American newsmen, while not censored outright, were made aware of US guidelines when it came to filing “undesirable dispatches.” Specific numbers were to be avoided, as were indications of tactical strengths and weaknesses. Anyone who violated those ground rules would not be taken on missions anymore.
⁵