The Lives of Dictators’ Wives
The fancy clothes and charitable works aren’t incidental: The dictator’s spouse is an important part of maintaining power.
Michèle Duvalier leaves Haiti. (PHOTO: PUBLIC DOMAIN)
By Daniel Luzer
As
the United States reacts to allegations that Syrian President Bashar al
Assad used chemical weapons against his own people last month, one of
the more interesting controversies, as least for journalists, has to do
with the president’s wife, Asma al Assad, the British-born first lady of
Syria.
In March 2011
Vogue ran an article about Assad (reproduced by Gawker
here)
that praised her stylishness, grace, and enthusiasm for modern ideas.
The article, by Joan Juliet Buck, said the dictator’s wife—who met her
future husband in London, where she was working as an investment banker
while he was studying ophthalmology—was “glamorous, young, and very
chic—the freshest and most magnetic of first ladies.”
It was, Buck
later wrote, part of a campaign by the public relations firm Brown Lloyd James for the
purpose of
“handling and improving the public image of the regime.” We’ve seen
this person before. The beautiful, stylish woman married to an insecure,
awkward, or pudgy dictator and in charge of improving his reputation is
a familiar feature of the world’s authoritarian regimes.
According to research by German academics, there are certain
characteristics dictatorships need to last, and spouses can play an
important role in keeping them in office and reasonably powerful.
While often associated with strange stereotypes of excessive
femininity—Imelda Marcos and her massive shoe collection, Chantal
Biya of Cameroon and her
enormous hair—the more common spouse of a dictator is someone like Assad: attractive, well tailored, and foreign educated.
Soong May-ling, the wife of China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek,
provided perhaps America’s first significant exposure to a glamorous
dictator spouse. May-ling’s husband presided over China during a
tumultuous period in the country’s history. He took over right before
World War II and then found himself in the midst of a huge civil war and
struggle to keep the communists from seizing power. To maintain control
Chiang Kai-shek committed horrible atrocities. Some claim he is
responsible for at least one million deaths.
Madame Nhu, the de facto first lady of South Vietnam from 1955 to 1963, and Lyndon Johnson, 1961. (PHOTO: PUBLIC DOMAIN)
His wife, however, worked hard to smooth over slaughters with charm
and pure ambition. She married the general in 1927 shortly after he
became commander-in-chief of the Chinese army. The Wellesley
College-educated woman established special orphanages for children of
parents killed in the Chinese Civil War. The children of Nationalist
soldiers (orphans of Communist soldiers weren’t allowed) enjoyed
well-appointed facilities with playgrounds and swimming pools, built on a
thousand-acre site in Nanjing. May-ling referred to these children,
rather patronizingly, as “warphans” and frequently referenced them in
her appeals for additional foreign aid.
Her address to the House of Representatives in 1943 helped to promote
continued American support for the Nationalist forces. When her
husband’s regime was finally overthrown in 1949 she went into exile with
him, becoming, effectively, the first lady of Taiwan until her
husband’s death in 1975.
Another member of this very exclusive club was South Vietnam’s Trần
Lệ Xuân, popularly known as Madame Nhu, the French-educated
sister-in-law of President Ngô Đình Diệm. (Because Diem never married,
Madame Nhu was seen as the most powerful female figure in Vietnam
through the early 1960s, and was treated as such.)
She was well known (one of my great-grandmothers apparently named her
cat Madame Nhu), if not particularly well liked, in America, and
frequently critiqued. After she won election to the National Assembly in
1956, she was a major force in legislation that increased women’s
rights. Despite her famously tight and low-cut dresses, she also took it
upon herself to try improve the country’s morality. She tried to get
the government to ban contraceptives, abortion, adultery, and divorce,
as well as close opium dens and brothels.
She was, according to her
New York Times obituary,
“beautiful, well coiffed and petite. She made the form-fitting ao dai
her signature outfit, modifying the national dress with a deep neckline.
Whether giving a speech, receiving diplomats … she drew photographers
like a magnet.”
She was also famous for her ability to charm foreign leaders, who were crucial for securing foreign aid.
After the regime collapsed she fled into exile in Rome where she died in 2011, at the age of 86.
The dictator consort exists for a reason, and can have a very
important role to play in the success or failure of a regime. According
to 2011
research by Wolfgang Merkel and Johannes Gerschewski, there are three things that dictatorships need to survive:
Legitimacy, co-optation, and repression. Referring to
historical institutionalism’s key concept of critical juncture, the
hypothesis is based on the observation that these junctures become
regime threatening when a serious crisis in one pillar occurs and the
two other pillars can no longer sufficiently compensate this
instability.
Looking at 42 different countries over the course of the last
half-century the researchers determined that regimes with these three
characteristics can survive, despite general opposition to such forms of
government. And first ladies can be particularly useful in helping to
secure at least two of these things. Legitimacy “has essentially two
foundations,” according to the researchers:
[O]ne that is normative-ideological and one related to
performance. Anti-liberalism, anti-parliamentarianism, racism,
nationalism, law and order, religious-anachronistic orders of salvation,
and Marxist-Leninist future designs are at least temporarily capable of
creating a normative approval amongst those who are subjected to the
rule.
The glamorous spouse can help cement legitimacy by establishing and
reinforcing the cult of personality often surrounding a dictator. Their
role as positive representative of the nation, and as a benevolent
“mother figure” for the state, is a large part of securing that
“normative approval amongst those who are subjected to the rule.”
The first lady can also provide an advantage for dictators trying to
retain power when it comes to the second element—co-optation—of the
researchers’ three-part guide, particularly by winning over or
neutralizing opposition groups. Merkel and Gerschewski:
The selective use of co-optation enables the autocratic
ruling elites to tie important actors and groups from outside the
original regime core to the dictatorship so that they do not employ
their resources against the regime. Those strategically important actors
consist mainly of economic elites, the security apparatus and the
military.
Because the dictator spouse often doesn’t come from a political or
military background she can help secure the support of opposition groups
and deflect criticism of the regime.
Closer to home we’ve got one of the Western hemisphere’s more
infamous dictator spouses in American-educated Michele Duvalier, who
came to power in Haiti when she married Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”)
Duvalier in 1980 and made a strong effort to improve perception of one
of the world’s poorest and most corrupt countries.
Baby Doc’s new wife set up hospitals and orphanages, including one
specializing in treating Haiti’s children. This earned her lines like
this, from
an 1981 article in the
Palm Beach Post:
“[she] presses her husband to ‘democratize’ Haiti, and asks Haitians to
call them by their Christian names. The couple are now building their
own medical-church-school center near Port-au-Prince, at a personal cost
of $1 million.” Apparently she was also “determined to pull her people
and her country out of their poverty.”
This was part of a carefully orchestrated public relations campaign
to show the country off as new, prosperous, and stylish. “She was the
first one in those 30 years to understand that show business was the
name of the business. And her show business was very well done,” said
Haitian painter Bernard Séjourné
in 1986. She was the face of the new Haiti.
Even Mother Teresa got involved, visiting Haiti in 1981 and
praising Michele Duvalier because she had “never seen the poor people
being so familiar with their head of state as they were with her. It was
a beautiful lesson to me.” Mother Teresa said that she could tell that
the first lady really cared and was “someone who feels, who knows, who
wishes to demonstrate her love not only with words but also with
concrete and tangible actions.”
The first lady’s feelings didn’t stop her from spending millions on
things that didn’t appear to have much to do with “demonstrating her
love” for the Haitian poor. In 1985, as her country faced bankruptcy and
reeled from food shortages, she flew to Paris to go shopping. She spent
$1 million in a week. “And she asked for another million from the
governor of the central bank. And she got it.” So she spent $1.7
million, over two weeks, “on clothes, on paintings, on fur coats,” said
Raymond Joseph, editor of the
Haiti Observateur and later
Haitian ambassador to the United States, in 1986.
Duvalier was overthrown in 1986 and his family fled into exile in France.
But if the glamorous first lady so often can’t stop a coup d’etat anyway, what’s she there for?
She’s supposed to be doing what all first ladies are supposed to be
doing, if we accept the literature: making the president and the country
look good. As the George W. Bush Presidential Library
puts it
in describing the American first lady, such people are “often the most
famous women … and were able to influence, or at least were perceived to
be able to influence, the President.” The president’s spouse also
represents, or is supposed to represent, the leader and the nation
itself. This is true even if the country is overseen by a dictator.
Does it work? Can a well-regarded first lady generate enough positive press to make a dictatorship look good? As
Harper’s
contributing editor Ken Silverstein discovered back when he went
undercover to investigate two PR firms in 2007 with a fake project to
try and win good press for dictators, there’s
only so much you can do with pretty dresses and sophisticated PR:
These lobbyists will tell the countries that they can
make great achievements and that they can really impact public opinion
and political opinion. And in some cases, they can achieve real results.
But for the most part, when you’re dealing about a thuggish regime …
that is just not going to fly. They really can’t achieve a lot in a
terrible situation.
Despite the use of the glamour spouse in attempts to improve foreign
perception of autocratic regimes, some have suggested that the very
existence of such people is itself a big part of the problems with such
dictatorships. As Elizabeth Abbott wrote of Baby Doc’s wife in
Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy:
“That [such] a woman … could have such an impact on so many is one of
the most convincing arguments that exist against the very nature of
dictatorship, which invites such tragedies and also provides the
mechanics to keep such regimes in place.”
In a regime where the people’s rights are limited, atrocities are
common, and one person has total control over the entire state,
everything everyone even remotely tied to the dictator does takes on
huge importance. The problem isn’t how much money Asma al Assad or
Michele Duvalier spend on clothes; it is that where the first lady shops
or how she raises her children (according to the
Vogue article, in the Assad household “Seven-year-old Zein watches Tim Burton’s
Alice in Wonderland on
the president’s iMac; her brother Karim, six, builds a shark out of
Legos; and nine-year-old Hafez tries out his new electric violin. All
three go to a Montessori school.”) can be thought to say anything
meaningful about the country at all.
