Confucian humanist and
Communist revolutionary, the architect of Vietnamese independence and of the
successful struggle against the French, the United States and the Saigon
government, Ho Chi Minh was one of the most influential political leaders of
the 20th century. Yet even after his death in 1969 -- and for all the years the
American troops fought in Vietnam -- he remained a shadowy figure, his life and
career shrouded in myth and in the myriad guises he assumed during his many
years in exile and in the maquis of Vietnam. As the French journalist Jean
Lacouture wrote in his 1967 biography, ''Everything known about Ho's life prior
to 1941 is fragmentary, controversial and approximate.'' Thanks to William J.
Duiker's magnificent new biography, this is no longer the case.
A retired professor of
history who served as a United States foreign service officer in Saigon in the
mid-1960's, Duiker spent over 20 years gleaning new information from interviews
and from archives in Vietnam, China, Russia and the United States. Other
Western historians have come closer to Ho as a person and to the cultural
context of his revolution, but Duiker has managed not only to fill in the
missing pieces of Ho's life but to provide the best account of Ho as a diplomat
and a strategist.
The Vietnam War -- as
we call it -- was a watershed in 20th-century American history, and we assume
it was one in the history of Vietnam. But as Duiker's biography reminds us, the
major problem for the Vietnamese, as for many others on this planet, was how to
respond to the colonial power and the destruction of traditional society. Ho
Chi Minh dedicated his life to this task.
Ho's childhood lay in a
world lost in time. Born in 1890, just five years after the French consolidated
their control over all of Vietnam, Ho -- whose given name was Nguyen Tat Thanh
-- grew up in Nghe An province, on the narrow and mountainous coast of
north-central Vietnam. One of the most beautiful regions of the country, it was
also one of the poorest and most rebellious. Ho's father, Nguyen Sinh Sac, was
a scholar from a peasant family who managed to work his way up through the
imperial examination system. Under his tutelage, Ho studied the classical
Chinese texts that taught governance as the Dao of Confucius. According to
Duiker, Sac was well acquainted with the scholars Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu
Trinh, the most important Vietnamese nationalists in the first two decades of
the century. Like many of the patriotic scholar-gentry, Sac refused to serve at
court during a time of national humiliation, and by 1905 it had become clear to
him that the imperial system, preserved by the French, was inadequate to cope
with the new realities. That year he sent Ho off to a Franco-Vietnamese school
with the admonition of the 15th-century scholar Nguyen Trai that one must
understand the enemy in order to defeat him.
When Ho entered the
prestigious National Academy in Hue in 1907, he was already a rebel. The
following year he was thrown out of school for lending support to peasants
demonstrating against high agricultural taxes and corvee labor. Pursued by the
police, he traveled south, taking jobs where he could. In 1911 he signed on as
an assistant cook on a steamer bound for France, under the name of Ba -- the
first of his 50 or more aliases. ''I wanted to become acquainted with French
civilization to see what meaning lay in those words,'' he later told a Soviet
journalist.
Ho's travels took him
to ports in Asia and Africa, to New York and London. He stayed for some time in
New York, working as a laborer and going to meetings of Marcus Garvey's
Universal Negro Improvement Trust in Harlem. In London he landed a job as a
pastry cook under Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel. Toward the end of
World War I he settled in Paris, the heart of the French empire. While earning
his living as a photo retoucher, he formed an association of Vietnamese émigrés
and denounced France's treatment of its colonies at gatherings of the French
Socialist Party. In 1919 he presented a petition to the Allied governments at
the Versailles conference, asking them to apply President Woodrow Wilson's
principle of self-determination to Vietnam. Only the French police paid
attention to the petition and its author, ''Nguyen Ai Quoc'' (''Nguyen the
Patriot''). They followed Ho everywhere, though ''Nguyen the Patriot'' was a
penniless scribe, a frail young man in ill-fitting suits who cut a Chaplinesque
figure.
Ho came to Marxism in
the summer of 1920, via Lenin's ''Theses on the National and Colonial
Questions.'' He had read Marxist works before, but, as Duiker explains, Lenin's
arguments about the connection between capitalism and imperialism and about the
importance of nationalist movements in Asia and Africa to world revolution
struck him forcefully, setting him ''on a course that transformed him from a
simple patriot with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary.'' When the
French Socialist Party split over the issue of joining Lenin's Third
International at its 1921 congress, he became a founding member of the French
Communist Party. Still writing as Nguyen the Patriot, he argued not only that
Communism could be applied to Asia but that it was in keeping with Asian
traditions based on ideas of community and social equality.
For three years Ho
pressed the new party for action on the colonial question, but the French
Communists proved to be ''Eurocentric,'' as Duiker delicately puts it, so in
1924 he went to Moscow at the invitation of the Comintern. The Soviet
leadership was, however, preoccupied by its own internal struggles, and it took
Ho almost a year to persuade officials to send him to southern China, where an
uneasy alliance between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists would
permit him to begin organizing the Vietnamese.
Ho Chi Minh spent the
next 15 years working for revolution in Vietnam as an agent of the Comintern.
According to Duiker's original and highly detailed account of this period, Ho's
emphasis on nationalism and his patient, pragmatic approach to organizing often
put him at odds with Moscow. Yet he singlemindedly pursued his own agenda,
waiting out periods of adversity and seizing opportunities as they arose. In
Canton, Ho published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth
League and set up a training institute that attracted students from all over
Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism he taught his own brand of revolutionary
ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, modesty and generosity --
virtues that, as Duiker notes, had far more to do with Confucian morality than
with Leninism. To his students Ho seemed to embody these qualities, and the
teaching of his precepts later became a distinguishing feature of the
Vietnamese revolution.
In 1927, when Chiang
Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left, the institute was disbanded
and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong Kong and from there to Moscow. He
was sent by the Comintern to France and then, at his request, to Thailand,
where he spent two years organizing Vietnamese expatriates. In 1930 he returned
to China and worked as he could while hiding out from the Chinese police and
the French Sûreté. Arrested in Hong Kong by the British, he spent a year in
jail, and had once more to escape to Moscow. But there was little help to be
found there. In the midst of Stalin's purges the Comintern repudiated Lenin's
theses, insisted that the Asian Communist parties pursue the wholly unrealistic
goal of a international proletarian revolution and ordered the Vietnamese to
form an ''Indochinese'' Communist Party -- though the word signified nothing
more nor less than the French colonial project in the region. Ho was personally
criticized, investigated and sidelined.
In 1938 Ho's fortunes
changed. With the rise of Nazi Germany the Soviets changed their line on
nationalism and called for an alliance of ''progressive forces'' to oppose
fascism. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek created a united front with the
Communist Party to resist Japanese aggression. His strategy vindicated, Ho
returned to head the Vietnamese movement, and with the Japanese invasion of
Indochina, he created a nationalist front of workers and peasants for the
independence of Vietnam, the Vietminh. In 1941 he re-entered the country he had
not seen in 30 years to set up a guerrilla base in the mountains.
BOOK EXCERPT
"The time was the
late summer of 1945, shortly after the surrender of Japanese imperial forces
throughout Asia. The place was Hanoi, onetime capital of the Vietnamese empire,
now a sleepy colonial city in the heart of the Red River delta in what was then
generally known as French Indochina. For two decades, Nguyen the Patriot had
aroused devotion, fear, and hatred among his compatriots and the French
colonial officials who ruled over them. Now, under a new name, he introduced
himself to the Vietnamese people as the first president of a new country."
-- from the first
chapter of 'Ho Chi Minh'
In August 1945, three
months after the Japanese deposed the Vichy French administration and just two
days after the Japanese surrender to the Allies, the Vietminh moved into Hanoi,
and amid cheering crowds Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent country.
But that was just the beginning.
Ho Chi Minh did not
want war with the French. He did everything he could to prevent it. He courted
United States support through the O.S.S. officers he had cultivated during the
war -- going so far as to offer the United States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay.
He created a coalition government, reined in the hotheads and agreed to accept
a French military presence and membership in the French Union so long as the
French agreed to the eventual goal of Vietnamese independence. But after the
French humiliations in World War II even the French Socialists could not accept
the idea of giving up the colonies. So at the beginning of 1947 Ho went back to
the maquis. He had told his friend Jean Sainteny, ''You will kill ten of my men
while we will kill one of yours, but you will be the ones to end up
exhausted.'' And so it was.
During the French war,
as during World War II, Ho and his companions lived in caves or thatched
shelters in the mountains, moving frequently to avoid French patrols, often
hungry, often suffering from malaria or dysentery. In 1954 the Vietminh won a
decisive victory at Dien Bien Phu, but still the war dragged on. Mao Zedong had
begun to provide the poorly equipped Vietminh with training and war matériel,
and the United States had begun to finance the French war effort. The great
powers were now heavily involved in Vietnam, and in 1954 they met in Geneva to
negotiate a settlement.
Under pressure from
Beijing and Moscow, the Vietminh agreed to a cease-fire and to the division of
the country into two regroupment zones at the 17th parallel. By the terms of
the accord an election was to be held in two years to unify the country. However,
Beijing and Moscow did not guarantee the election, the United States did not
sign the agreement and, soon after the conference ended, Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles announced that the United States would begin to foster a
non-Communist state in the South. In the view of Vietnam's revolutionaries, the
Geneva Conference was the first step on the road to the second Indochina war.
In Hanoi, Ho lived
almost as simply as he had in the maquis. Refusing to install himself in the
governor general's residence, he inhabited the gardener's cottage and then a
house on stilts beside a pond. He was President of the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam, but the title he preferred was Uncle Ho. Often he could be seen in his
worn khaki uniform and sandals talking with peasants or groups of delighted
children. To many foreign observers there seemed to be more than a touch of
artifice in his self-presentation. After all, he was a sophisticate who charmed
his interlocutors in many languages and a man not immune to praise or the love
of women. (While in China he had, Duiker tells us, been married twice, and in
Hanoi he fathered a child.) Duiker does not explain Ho's play-acting, but then
there is much about Confucianism that eludes him. In the Confucian tradition,
the emperor must provide a model of correct behavior. By rejecting imperial
extravagance, Ho was demonstrating the Dao of his revolution to his countrymen,
its break with the past.
In the late 1950's and
early 60's Ho spent much of his time abroad engaged in the delicate
negotiations required to bring the Soviet Union as well as China to the aid of
his government as the Sino-Soviet split deepened. But his role was increasingly
a ceremonial one. Le Duan, a southerner who had spent many years in French
prisons, had seized the reins of power and proceeded to marginalize Ho and his
long-term companions -- among them Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Duiker suggests that
Ho's decline in authority began during the brutal land reform campaign of
1955-56, at a time of rising Chinese influence over the revolution. According
to Duiker, Ho was not directly involved in the campaign, but ''his prestige as
an all-knowing and all-caring leader had been severely damaged.''
During the early 1960's
Ho warned his colleagues against launching a premature uprising in South
Vietnam and against overemphasizing the military struggle. He wanted to avoid
bringing the United States into the war, and until the Johnson administration
began bombing the North, he remained hopeful that Washington would withdraw its
support for the regime in Saigon. But it was not to be. When American troops
began to arrive in Vietnam in 1965, Ho was a 75-year-old man and no longer in
charge of his government.
''Ho Chi Minh was half
Lenin and half Gandhi,'' Duiker writes. Ho always sought to achieve his
objectives without resort to military force and, unlike some of his colleagues,
he had a cleareyed view of international and domestic realities, a flexible,
pragmatic approach and the patience and subtlety to seek diplomatic solutions.
Unfortunately, as Duiker might have added, neither the French nor the American
leadership had the sense to respond in kind.
By FRANCES FITZGERALD
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