The history of Viet Nam is full of heroines. Women often served as gen erals. In the 1st century A.D., the Trung sisters raised an army and started a rebellion against Viet Nam's Chinese overlords; one of their female com manders gave birth to a child on the battlefield, then strapping her infant on her back and brandishing a sword in each hand, led her troops against the Chinese. In 248, a 23-year-old girl put on a suit of golden armor, climbed on the back of an elephant, and led her army into the field against Viet Nam's foreign invaders.
Today the most formidable and in some ways the bravest woman in South Viet Nam wears tapered satin trousers and a torso-hugging ao-dai, split from ankle to waist, and rides to meet her foes in a chauffeur-driven black Mer cedes. Instead of swords, her weapons are bottomless energy, a devastating charm, a tough, relentless mind, an acid tongue, a militant Roman Catholi cism — and, most important, the power of the family into which she married. She is Mme. Ngo Dinh Nhu, wife of President Ngo Dinh Diem's younger brother and closest brain-truster. In ad dition to acting as official First Lady for the bachelor President, she is in her own right one of the two or three most powerful people in the country and in a sense embodies all its problems.
In any Western nation she would be a political force to be reckoned with. In an Oriental country burdened with cen turies of ignorance and bloodshed, she is probably more feared than any other man or woman — and fear under such conditions can mean power beyond ei ther respect or popularity.
American Ivanhoes. A fragile, ex citing beauty who stands only 5 ft. 2 in. in high heels — who has kept her girlish grace though she is the mother of four — Mme. Nhu does not look the part. To her critics she symbolizes everything that is wrong with the remote, authoritarian, family-dominated Diem regime. But if she is vain, arbitrary, puritanical, imperious and devious, she also exudes strength, dedication and courage. To some it seems that she belongs in an intrigue-encrusted 18th century court, or that she should wear the robes of a Chinese empress — or both.
Her only official positions are those of Deputy in the National Assembly and chief of South Viet Nam's women's movements, but Mme. Nhu orders around army generals, Cabinet minis ters, and even the President. Though he is often reluctant to go along with her, Diem regularly yields to her when she bursts imperiously into his study, and even allows her to countermand his own orders, because he desperately fears a public display of family friction.
When a group of disaffected South Vietnamese paratroopers attempted a coup against Diem three years ago, one of their first demands was that Mme.
Nhu be removed from the presidential palace. She was flattered by the attention, and also brags that the U.S. has tried unsuccessfully for years to get Diem to curb her power. She bitterly attacks the anti-Diem U.S. press corps in Saigon and accuses Americans generally of being a lot of "Ivanhoes"—perpetually in love with the underdog but confused about just who the underdog is.