Finding the Dragon Lady (33 page)

I really had a lot of respect for [him], because he rose to the occasion very well. He wasn't crying, sort of an Asian outward passivity or composure on the thing [the coup]. . . . And the kid read the account of the condition in which his father and his uncle had been found in the back of this armored personnel carrier, with their heads squashed by rifle butts, and all kinds of bayonet wounds in them and everything else, all
cut up, and their heads squashed. And he was reading this with complete calm. He read English quite well, although we talked in French. But he didn't understand the word “squashed,” so he said to me in French, “What's the word for squashed?” I said, “Ecrabouille.” I said, “It means squashed, but you don't want to pay too much attention to the details, because the reporters probably didn't even see it, and it's the way they write their things.” And he took it very calmly, went on and talked and eventually I got them to Rome.

Their uncle, Archbishop Thuc
, was waiting for the children in Rome. Madame Nhu was still in Los Angeles. Flott recalled the handoff of the Ngo children to Thuc with bitterness:

Archbishop Thuc met us there, at planeside. He was very hostile, because he knew I was sent by [Ambassador] Cabot Lodge to accompany the children. There were about 150 Italian newsmen there and other press people. I went up to the Archbishop to pay my respects, pay my condolences, and tell him I'd been asked by Ambassador Lodge to deliver the children to him, so they could rejoin their mother, so their mother could rejoin them. He wouldn't speak to me, wouldn't shake hands, nothing. Total distance, total ice treatment. Packed them into the car, not a word of thanks, nothing. . . . We had protected these kids from all possible trauma; there had been no scene, nobody came up and talked to them during the whole trip. But not a word of thanks to Lodge, to me, to Pan Am, or anybody. Archbishop Thuc packed them into a big limousine he had and tore off.
¹⁸

It's hard to believe Flott felt
entitled to any thanks from the Ngo family. After all, he had helped orchestrate their overthrow. Entire books have explored the extent to which the United States was directly responsible for the 1963 coup in South Vietnam and, by extension, the murder of the Ngo brothers. Few people have put it more succinctly than President Lyndon Johnson, when he grumbled during a February 1, 1966, telephone conversation with Senator Eugene McCarthy, “We killed him [Diem]. We all got together and got a goddamn bunch
of thugs and we went in and assassinated him. Now, we've really had no political stability since then.” Did the fall of the Ngo regime really make the war much worse than it ever would have been if Diem had stayed in power? Former CIA director William Colby thought so. He said, “The overthrow of Diem was the worst mistake we made.” If the United States had sustained support for Diem, and if he had not been killed, Colby believed, the Americans “could have avoided most of the rest of the war, which is a hell of a note.”
¹⁹

Clearly, the Americans
were involved in the Saigon coup. Some in the government were more for it, some more against, but everyone can agree that there was, at minimum, an implication that the United States, from President Kennedy on down, would support a coup against Diem. Because of that, America has had to bear the responsibility for it.

By all accounts, President Kennedy was profoundly disturbed by the Ngo brothers' deaths. In the cabinet room of the White House, General Maxwell Taylor recalled that “Kennedy leaped to his feet and rushed from the room with a look of shock and dismay on his face which I had never seen before.” CIA man Colby confirmed the reaction, saying the president had “blanched and walked out of the room to compose himself.”
²⁰
But others wondered how the president could possibly be surprised. Had he really failed to comprehend that a coup would have enormous implications?

As Kennedy's friend Red Fay would recall, the president didn't just blame himself for the deaths of Diem and Nhu. He blamed Madame Nhu. “That goddamn bitch. She's responsible for the death of that kind man [Diem]. You know, it's so totally unnecessary to have that kind man die because that bitch stuck her nose in and boiled up the whole situation down there.”
²¹

On the day after the coup, President Kennedy dictated a memo for his records. He called Diem's and Nhu's deaths “particularly abhorrent” and accepted responsibility for having “encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined.” His presidential thoughts on the Saigon assassinations were then interrupted by three-year-old John Jr. and six-year-old Caroline, who came squealing into the office for a moment with their daddy. Behind the crinkling of the tapes, you
can hear little voices saying, “Hello,” into Kennedy's Dictaphone. Just a moment later their father asked the children all about the changing of the seasons: “Why are leaves green? How is snow on the ground?” The exchange is all the more touching when you remember that these children would never see the change of seasons with their father again. Kennedy would be assassinated just three weeks later.
²²

CHAPTER 16

In Exile

M
ADAME NHU AND HER DAUGHTER
lingered in California through the terrible, early days after the coup. The three other children had already arrived in Rome, but Madame Nhu just couldn't bring herself to follow them yet. She couldn't accept the news coming out of South Vietnam: that Diem and Nhu were dead and that the military had taken control of the government. Madame Nhu kept hoping for some sign that her husband and his brother had survived. A faked death could have been a page in another of her husband's ingenious schemes. The photos of the slumped, dead bodies left Madame Nhu unconvinced. The corpses were too badly mangled to identify. She would take three more years to fully accept their deaths and to accept that she would never be the First Lady of South Vietnam again. In the days after the coup, Madame Nhu relied on anger and indignation to keep her going.

On November 5, four days after the coup, she held a press conference in a room off the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Madame Nhu wore dark sunglasses, a simple pearl necklace, and a shimmering
ao dai,
captured in a poem by Laurence Goldstein as “the color of moonlight.”

Her voice caught as Madame Nhu tried to read from her prepared statement. “Whoever has the Americans as allies does not need any enemies.” She accused the United States of bearing responsibility for the coup and, clenching a tissue, composed herself enough to issue an eerie prediction. “I can predict to you all that the story in Vietnam is only at its beginning.”

Her father, Tran Van Chuong, who had refused to see her at any other point on her monthlong tour of the United States, climbed a back staircase to Madame Nhu's hotel suite on the eighth floor. Father and daughter were reunited in private, and afterwards Chuong told the press that there was “no need for a reconciliation”; they had set aside their differences in light of the tragedy. Madame Nhu told Clare Booth Luce a quite different, and far more believable, version. Her father had come to visit her, she said, because he wanted to go back to Vietnam and join the new government, but obviously he could not do so without his daughter's blessing. Not even Chuong could talk his way out of that kind of political scandal. He couldn't just join forces with the people who had killed his son-in-law without some kind of explanation or Madame Nhu's help. He came to her hotel room at the Beverly Wilshire to ask if he could he tell the public that his widowed daughter had forgiven him.

But Madame Nhu would do no such thing. She wouldn't forgive him for quitting on the regime in August, and she wouldn't forgive him for not receiving her and Le Thuy on his doorstep. She would never, ever forgive him or her mother for having made her childhood as the invisible middle daughter so miserable.

Presumably, Madame Nhu knew that Chuong and his wife had been undermining the Diem government for years, but she might not have known all the details. Wesley Fishel, head of the Michigan State University Vietnam Advisory Group and contracted to consult for the Diem regime, became a close friend of Diem's during the early years of his presidency. His group advised on everything from public administration and personnel to economics and trade decisions, and many of its proposals shaped how the Diem administration ran. But
Diem didn't seem to have registered much of a response to Fishel's frank letter in 1960, a warning about Chuong's obvious “ambitions for higher office.” Fishel told Diem that Chuong had “virtually succeeded in destroying the organization of your friends in America” from the moment he arrived in Washington as ambassador.
¹
No one can answer why Diem kept Chuong in place, but at least after the coup Madame Nhu could take some small solace in the fact that her parents would not benefit from their betrayal. The coup her parents had helped lay the groundwork for would condemn them to a life in exile.

Madame Nhu couldn't have known that their lives would end in murder just twenty-three years later. She couldn't have known that the prized son they had cast her aside for would be their killer. The Shakespearean plays that Chuong had enjoyed listening to so much during his life, tales of madness, betrayal, family tragedy, and revenge, were in retrospect tales that foreshadowed his fate.

Quite suddenly, Madame Nhu
found herself with practical concerns—like money. Her room at the hotel was $98 a night. A source close to Madame Nhu revealed to the
New York Times
that she had arrived in the United States with $5,000 in cash for what was supposed to be a three-week tour. The source also whispered that her wealth in South Vietnam had been greatly overestimated—all the funds had gone into the coffers of her husband's political party. There were no savings and few overseas holdings. “Money is definitely a worry,” the associate confided to the
New York Times
. While sorting out what to do after the coup, Madame Nhu continued to rack up debts—and she no longer had a government to send the bill to. Allen Chase, a financier with a home at the end of a long, winding private drive in the Los Angeles Bel Air neighborhood, invited her to check out of the hotel and become his houseguest. Chase and his wife let Madame Nhu move into their bedroom while they themselves moved into a guest room.

James McFadden, publisher of the conservative magazine
National Review,
had been one of the few visitors to Madame Nhu, and the newspapers reported that she had been in negotiations with book publishers and, it being Los Angeles, movie people about selling her story.
But Madame Nhu's highest value might be realized if she stayed in the United States long enough to exert an influence on the upcoming election year. In a telephone conversation, Clare Booth Luce and Richard Nixon shared the sentiment that Madame Nhu had real potential to damage President Kennedy. Luce told Nixon that she was convinced “Jack Kennedy wants a negotiated peace!” and once Americans found out about his real intentions, a neutral South Vietnam, he would be unelectable. Madame Nhu, the grieving widow, was “still a figure in the puzzle.”

But Madame Nhu had no real choice in the end. She had no money, and her Republican friends couldn't support her forever. She left half of her $1,000 bill at the Beverly Wilshire unpaid, and left the United States for Rome to be reunited with her three other children. Before leaving, Madame Nhu read a long farewell statement at the airport. “Judas has sold the Christ for 30 pieces of silver. The Ngo brothers have been sold for a few dollars.”

While Madame Nhu blamed the United States for the coup in Saigon, others were blaming her. President John F. Kennedy wasn't the only one who faulted Madame Nhu for the coup in Saigon. United States Information Agency officer Everett Bumgardner called Madame Nhu the “friction point” between the Americans and the regime. She instituted “almost everything that I think went wrong with the Diem government that eventually led to his downfall.”
²
Vietnam historian Joseph Buttinger is no kinder in his two-volume history on the Vietnam War: he describes Madame Nhu as the rock around the neck of a drowning man.
³

But in the end, Madame Nhu was right about a lot of things that she never got credit for. She was right that the millions of dollars pouring into South Vietnam were hurting as much as helping in the war against communism. The “Americanization” of South Vietnam turned many nationalists toward the Communists, who warned that capitalism merely disguised American colonial intent. Madame Nhu had said that the Americans were conspiring against the regime, and indeed, from the ambassador in Saigon to the president in the White House, they were. As for the Communists “intoxicating” the Buddhists, they
did have some influence in the Pagodas. Communist sources after the war revealed that their agents had indeed infiltrated the Buddhists and they could well have had a part in inspiring the uprising in the summer of 1963. By getting rid of Diem, the Americans, it seemed, had played right into the Communists' hands.

Madame Nhu also accused the press of being “intoxicated” by communism. There was the case of Pham Xuan An, who worked for
Time Magazine
and did circulate widely among prominent journalists who regarded him as a knowledgeable analyst. After the war, An was named a Hero of the People's Armed Forces by the Hanoi government, awarded four military-exploit medals and elevated to the rank of brigadier general in the North Vietnamese army. But whatever access An had to the reporters over the years, their expert views undoubtedly reflected what, they, themselves saw there. Nonetheless, it was a shock to learn that for all those years of contacts with American journalists, An had been a North Vietnamese agent.