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.
