ffWID HALBERSTIAN^

K^S"

"^£5
^^0 ^'^

HO
Books by David Halberstam

The Noblest Roman

The Making of a Quagmire

One Very Hot Day

The Unfinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy

Ho

The Powers That Be

The Breaks of the Game

The Amateurs

The Reckoning

The Best and the Brightest

 HO
by David Halberstam

ALFRED A. KNOPF /" ^ NEW YORK

 THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright ©1971, 1987 by David Halberstam

All rights reserved under International and

Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of
this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, without permission in writing from
the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New
York, N.Y. 10022. Published in the United States by
New York, and simultaneously
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.,
in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited,
Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc.,
New York.

ISBN: 0-394-46275-0 (hardcover)

ISBN: 0-394-36282-9 (paperbound)

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77-140708

Manufactured in the United States of America

98765432
IN MEMORY OF Mcrt PeiTy,

GOOD REPORTER, GOOD FRIEND,

AND FOR HIS WIFE, Datleiie,

AND HIS DAUGHTER, Mia

CONTENTS
Chapter 1
The Colonial Legacy of the French 3

Chapter 2
Peasant, Dishwasher, Socialist, Communist
1890-1917 12

Chapter 3
From Belief to Profession:
Ho's Path to Communism
1917-1940 36
Chapter 4
Creating a Nationalist Movement
1941-1945 62

Chapter 5
Path to Dienbienphu:
The Tiger Defeats the Elephant
1945-1954 79
Chapter 6
The Americans Arrive:
The Second Indochina War
1955-1969 105
Bibliography I i 9
 Digitized by tiie Internet Arciiive
in 2011

littp://www.arcliive.org/details/liolialbdaOOIialb
HO
 CHAPTER

1
THE COLONIAL LEGACY OF
THE FRENCH
"Your garden had nothing but grass''

AN ERA HAD JUST ENDED for the French in Indochina

in the summer of 1954, and an empire had fallen. Only the
pain of recognition was left, the counting of the casualties,
the repatriation of the prisoners, the sorting out of a
shattered spirit. In Hanoi, in a bar where once the pride
of theFrench had swaggered, mocked their
officer corps

enemy, drunk their last cognacs and boasted of the next

day's battle, a French correspondent was having a fare-
well drink with some friends. Across the bar he noticed a
famous captain of the paratroops, a man legendary for
his courage and elan, a survivor —
one of the few of —
Dienbienphu, now repatriated. The journalist, Lucien
Bodard, went over to talk to him. But it was not the same
captain. His eyes were diflPerent; his look, thought Bodard,
—
was that of a sleepwalker there was a lack of focus.
"It was all for nothing," he was saying. "I let my men

die for nothing."

 No one interrupted him. He continued, "In prison
camp the Viets told us they had won because they were
fighting for an ideal and we were not. I told them about

my paras at Dienbienphu. I told them how they fought.

And they said, 'Heroism is no answer.'
"In prison camp we faced the reality of the Vietminh.
And we saw that for eight years our generals had been
struggling against a revolution without knowing what a
revolution was. Dienbienphu was not an accident of fate,
it was a judgment."

HE WENT HOME saddcr, wiser, more bitter. For a

brief time, there was peace in Indochina, and then, in-
evitably, history repeated itself, all its mistakes. Another
white man came to the Indochinese mainland, sure once
again of his values, his ideas, his mission, willing both to
die and to kill for them.
The Americans came, and with them their great gen-
erals and diplomats. These famous men arrived at the
airport in Saigon, where American television teams rushed
forward to record their words. Their statements promised
imminent victory. had always been le
For the French it

dernier quart (Theure, for the Americans it was the light

at the end of the tunnel —
victory was just around the
corner. The enemy — —
Communist, despised was faltering
(only the voices of the weak-kneed pacifists in Paris and
New York kept him going). The local population one —
—
did not use the word "native" any more was rallying to
the cause; the Vietnamese had seen through the deceit
and duplicity of the Communists. Time is on our side; a
nodding of heads by the colonels and majors who had
come with the generals. At the edge of the crowd at the
airport, pushed back by the television teams, was a young
American reporter named Neil Sheehan, one of the few
who had understood early; after all, he had heard the same
speech many times from many famous men. He listened
with a small smile and then turned to a friend and said,

"Ah, another foolish Westerne r come to lose his reputa -

tion to Ho Chi Minh."

WESTERNERS had always arrived in Indochina sure

of themselves, proud, believing above all that that which
they were about to do was good not only for themselves
and their beloved homelands, but for the Vietnamese as
well, like it or not. The first missionaries who went there
had assured Paris that the French would be greeted not as
conquerors but as "liberators and benefactors." And what
could be more congenial for a potential conqueror than
the sure knowledge that his conquest was in the greater
interest of the conquered as well? The French, after all,
had greater learning, a superior culture, a modern lan-
guage and a modern society; they were bigger, their
sanitary habits —
could anything be more revealing? ^were —
better. The French had modern ships, modern weapons,

a modern organizational sense to fit their expansionism.

It was the height of EiKOpean expansionism, of the de-

veloped Western society that had mastered the available

technology, restlessly and relentlessly spreading itself
around the world. Powerful companies run by powerful
men dominated the governments of Europe, and these
companies demanded the raw materials for their expand-
ing markets. Their markets' interests and the national in-
terests of theEuropean nations happily coincided flags —
to be planted, minerals and raw materials to be plucked
everywhere. Europeans reached out to Africa, Asia and
the Middle East, areas far behind in economic and poHt-
ical development in the modern sense, areas where, in
contrast to the highly centralized political development of
Europe, one found a virtually tribal structure; these were
nations divided from within, living in a feudal era. The
strong became stronger; the weak nations could not com-
pete against the harnessed technology of the white man.
The white man s ideology comfortably adapted to the
expansionism. It was right; it was part of the civilizing
process. These primitive people could not govern them-
selves. The experience would be good for them, though
painful to the colonizer. For it would hurt him more than
the colonized; it was, in Kipling's words, the white man s
burden. He would uplift the poor brown and poor yellow,
teach him better, cleaner, more modern ways (teach him
to have one wife —that first). To this end the white man
came armed with his religion, which was a fine, pure and
strict religion compared with the permissive and pagan

religions of the natives (the permissiveness proved the

paganism ) would not be an easy task; there would be
. It

much backsliding, but that was the burden of the mission-

ary, indeed the very hardship of it: the difficulty, the pain,
that was the proof that it was God's work.

FEW PARTS OF THE GLOBE appeared more inviting

to an imperialist nation than Indochina. It was rich be-
yond belief in agricultural products (indeed, a later gen-
eration of Caucasians explained their stay in Vietnam
as a means of preventing an expansionist Communist
China from having the Vietnamese rice bowl). It had
raw resources and it appeared vulnerable to foreign arms,
being a typically feudal nation, divided within itself. Yet
its ferocious warriors had managed to stave off European
colonization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
first from the Dutch, and then the English. But where
economic imperialism was defeated, religious imperialism
succeeded.
In the seventeenth century a Catholic mission headed
by a French Jesuit priest was permitted in. Alexandre de
Rhodes headed the mission, converting tens of thousands
of Vietnamese to Catholicism and, equally important,
translating into the Latin alphabet the Chinese ideograms
used by the Vietnamese, a step which became vital to

the modernizing of Vietnam. Vietnamese Catholics re-

mained after the French mission was expelled, eventually
to be caught in internal wars. It was to protect the Viet-
namese Catholics from persecution that the French landed
at Danang in 1856 and began the chapter of colonial rule

which was to end with the rise of Ho Chi Minh and the
Vietminh in 1946, culminating in the defeat of the French
forces at Dienbienphu in May 1954.

THE FRENCH COLONIAL MILITARY MACHINE Organ- .

ized, centralized, had little trouble with fragmented Vie t-

narri^ It was necessary fo r the French to subdue only the

top of the structure. It was a rotting society that was be-

coming increasingly ready for an upheaval. The arrival
of the Caucasians simply postponed an inevitable revolu-
tion from within against the mandarin class, and meant
that \vhen the revolution came it was directed against the
foreigner as well as against the upper class. (In general, it

was against the upper class; a few exceptions in the man-

darin class sided with the Vietminh, but most were tied by
class, financial, religious and psychological bonds to the

French.) But the advent of the French intensified the

revolutionary forces at work in Vietnam; it sharpened
contrasts; the inequities grew greater as the French
rushed the Vietnamese into the modern world.
The French experience was typical of the colonial
era, no better and no worse: the white man had all the
privileges, and the colonized, none. Even the word "Viet-
nam" was declared illegal. The jobs, the power, belonged
to the French. A Vietnamese could only serve them. If

he hoped to rise, by moving up in the

he could only do it

French structure, under French rules and control, be-

coming, in the eyes of his compatriots, more French than
Vietnamese —a Vietnamese responding to the French
rather than to his own people.
Most positions of semiprivilege went to the Catholics;
in French eyes they were the secure ones; they got what
little education was available, and they prospered. Their
compatriots looked down on them because they had sold
out to the foreign interest, were tainted by the foreign
touch, foreign money. It was the first of a series of mis-

perceptions of Vietnam: the Westerner looked upon the

Catholic Vietnamese as the good Vietnamese, better edu-
cated, better trained,more civilized than the others, a
what the country might become. By contrast,
reflection of
the other Vietnamese seemed shiftless; they, in turn, be-
came more and more embittered, unable to rise in their
own country.
The Vietnamese were fragmented politically, their
suspicions of one another as great as their fear and hatred
of the foreigners. From the time of the French conquest
on, there were sporadic reactions against the colonial
rule — an abused Vietnamese lashing out against a par-
ticularly vicious colon: a group forming in one village
and ambushing a French unit; local insurrections lasting
—
two or three days but largely their resentment was in-
articulate. The French were white and seemed all-power- ^
/
ful, a formidable nation-at-arms, and the Vietnamese

8
 looked them and believed the myth of white superior-
at

ity; thus the resistance was frail.

, And so the servants and the tame Vietnamese officials

'^ would tell their masters that, yes, the Vietnamese liked
them and that, yes, colonialism was good for Vietnam.
Since it was what the French wanted to hear, and since
there seemed to be scant evidence to contradict it, and
that from malcontents, and since it seemed to come not
just from the loyal nha ques (the servants), but from the

—
best-educated Vietnamese why, they believed they were
benefactors, believed they were welcome, believed that
the Vietnamese thought themselves fortunate to be under
French rule.

Occasionally, however, there would be a glimpse, a

brief glimpse, of what the Vietnamese really thought and
felt. Perhaps nothing reveals their subsurface mood so
well as a single poem written in the late-nineteenth cen-
tury by an anonymous Vietnamese for the mock funeral
of Francis Garnier, an early French explorer and con-
queror who had carried out military operations in the
northern part of the country, where he was killed in an
ambush in Hanoi in 1873:

We remember you
In the days of old.
Your eyes were blue, marine-blue,
Your nose pointed up to the sky.
Your buttocks comfortably lodged against the ass's back.
Your mouth whistled noisily to the dogs.
Your house was full of bottles and bottle fragments.
Your garden had nothing but grass.
You ventured into the village of the Red Face.
You meant to pacify the Black Flags*

* A pirate group of Chinese and some Vietnamese, which was operat-

ing in the Hanoi area and which resisted French encroachment.
 So that the whole population of our country might live in
peace.
Who could have anticipated the terrible outcome:
That they would end your life!
They brought your head with them.
They abandoned there your sorry body.
Today we tremblingly obey the court's order.
We come to present in your devotion the following offer-
ings:
A bunch of bananas,
Half a dozen eggs.
We dare hope these gifts
Will feed you to fulfillment.
You will continue to lie there in eternal rest.
Oh, Oh!
Your sorry body.
Sons of bitches, those who killed you.

Thus if the anti-French, antiwhite feeling w^as sub-

y merged it existed nonetheless, deep and powerful, await-
ing only the proper catalyst at the proper time to bring
it to the surface and turn it into a political force. The
French thought they were helping the Vietnamese, by
building roads and improving communications —and it is

true that in many ways they were hastening Vietnam's

jarring entry into the modern world. Yet their very pres-
ence created severe problems. In precolonial Vietnamese
had been low, landholdings had been small,
society, taxes
and there had been few rich people. Those who were rich
—
had heavy obligations they were expected to give large
parties and banquets —
and they did not necessarily stay
rich very long. Indeed, the Vietnamese liked to quote an
old Chinese proverb to describe their traditional life: "No
one stays rich for three generations. No one stays poor for
three generations."
The French changed that; they set heavy taxes and
soon there was the growth of loans and usury, and some

lO
Vietnamese became very rich. The French concentrated
their interests in a few areas, such as finance and the rub-
ber plantations, leaving the landholdings to the upper-class
Vietnamese, who began to accumulate massive properties
at the expense of the peasants, who were living in un-
paralleled poverty in a land so extraordinarily rich. By the
beginning of the French Indochina war, in the Tonkin
area 62 percent of the peasantry owned less than one
ninth of an acre and 30 percent owned less than one fourth
of an acre.
There were other frustrations, too. As the French co-
lonial service developed and grew in Indochina, it trained
a generation of Vietnamese just enough to make them
hunger for more, just enough to teach them the inequities
of the system. It was into this era of frustration and ex-
ploitation and hardship that Ho Chi Minh was bom in
the early 1890s.

11
 —

CHAPTER

2
PEASANT, DISHWASHER,
SOCIALIST, COMMUNIST
1890-1917
"He stares disdainfully at a thousand athletes,
And bows to serve as a horse to children!'

HO CHI MiNH was One of the extraordinary figures of

v^ this era^^paft Gandhi, part Lenin, all Vietnamese. He
was, perhaps more than any single man of the century, the
living embodiment to his own people —and to the world
of their revolution. He was an old Bolshevik and a founding
member of the French Communist party (what could be
more alien to the average Vietnamese peasant?); yet to
most Vietnamese peasants he was the symbol of their
and
existence, their hopes, their struggles, their sacrifices
their (Even after Dienbienphu, when many
victories.

people of North Vietnam became angry with the Com-

munist regime, they were always careful to exclude Ho
from their blame: the Communists were responsible for
—
the bad things Ho, Uncle Ho, for the good things.) He
was a more senior member of the Communist world than
Mao, and he grouped around him an impressive assem-
blage of brilliant young men; he went through revolu-

12
tion, war, postwar development and another war without
the sHghtest touch of purge. The Vietnamese Communist
party remained to a unique degree a constant, mainly
( according to students of its history ) because of the domi-
nating quality of its leader, for he combined total com-
mitment with both tactical and long-range political skill.

Yet to the population he was always the symbol they

needed: he was the gentle Vietnamese, humble, soft-

spoken, mocking his own position, always seen in the

simplest garb, his dress making him barely distinguishable
from the poorest peasant —a style that Westerners for
many years mocked, laughing at the lack of trappings of ^^
power, of uniform, of style, until one day they woke up
and realized that this very simplicity, this cult of simplic-

ity, this capacity to walk simply among own people

his

was basic to his success. In contrast, wrote Graham Greene

in 1956 about Ngo Dinh Diem, the American-sponsored
leader in the South, "He is separated from the people by
cardinals and police cars with wailing sirens and foreign
advisers droning of global strategy when he should be
walking in the rice fields unprotected, learning the hard
way how to be loved and obeyed — the two cannot be
separated ."
. .

Time magazine, the purest expression of Christian

capitalism, in 1948 referred to Ho contemptuously as

"goat-bearded," a "Mongoloid Trotsky" and a "tubercular

agitator who was
learned his trade in Moscow." * But it

that very same contempt —

which every peasant in Vietnam
felt from every Westerner —
that would make him so

* The simplistic American view of Asians which Time magazine

exempHfied was apphed to its Asian heroes Hke Bao Dai as well. Thus
in October 1946: " 'You ask him kill bird,' said foxy little Annamite
Louis Ko. 'He no like. He like kill big.' Press agent Louis was speaking
of his master, tall, strapping, Paris-educated Bao Dai who once killed
10 elephants in three days and captured one single handed.'

13
 effective.This was Ho's great strength, the fact that he
was a Vietnamese Everyman, and it was why he shunned
monuments and marshals' uniforms and generals' stars,
for he had dealt with powerful Westerners all his Hfe, had
surely been offered countless bribes by them, but he had
chosen not to be like them, not to dress like them or live
like them. Rather, he remained a Vietnamese, a peasant,
a man like one's ancestors —pure, uncorrupted in a cor-
rupting world, a man of the land and its simple virtues.
In a country where the population had seen leaders
reach a certain plateau and then become more Western
and less Vietnamese, corrupted by Western power and
money and ways, and where, the moment they had risen
far enough to do anything for their own people, immedi-

ately sold out to the foreigners, the simplicity of Ho was

powerful stuff. The higher he rose, the simpler and purer
Ho seemed, always retaining the eternal Vietnamese
values: respect for old people, disdain for money, affection
for children. In 1951 in the middle of the war he could
close a meeting of the Vietnamese Communist party by
telling the gathering: "About a revolutionary man and a
revolutionary party, the great Chinese writer Lu-Hsun has
this couplet:

^ He stares disdainfully upon a thousand athletes,

C And bows to serve as a horse to children.

/ " 'Thousand athletes,' " he would then explain, "means

I powerful enemies like the French colonialists and the
American interventionists, or difficulties and hardships.
'Children' means the peaceful masses of people, or deeds
beneficent to the State and party."
By his leadership and brilliance. Ho helped transform
an era. In the twenties and thirties, he was one of the
chief verbal critics of colonialism, a lonely and usually
ignored voice. In the fifties, he was responsible for putting

14
together the poHtical and miHtary machinery that led an
underdeveloped peasantry in a successful revolutionary
war against a powerful Western nation —a war that ended
not only the French dominance over Vietnam but the
mystique of white supremacy and colored inferiority
throughout the colonial world. It also jarred a generation
of Westerners out of the basic confidence in their ideas
and institutions; jarred them out of the automatic assump-
tion that these were the best of all possible ideas, that it

was only a matter of transplanting them from Europe and

America, where they had flourished, and diligently apply-
ing them to Asia and Africa. What Ho set forth in his

successful revolutionary war against the French and his

war against the Americans had enormous impact on the
West and on the underdeveloped world. And in the West
the younger generation particularly would understand and
sympathize with what Ho had done far more than their
parents did. Indeed, even while America was fighting Ho's
troops, the American paperback edition of his writings,
Ho Chi Mirth on Revolution would claim, "Written in
prison, exile, and battle, this is the political bible followed
by half the world."
Throughout the underdeveloped world, after^ienbien-
phu the North Vietnamese were treated with a special
respect. They had fought their war and they had won;
there was no mistake about that. Vietnam, a small nation,
had confirmed all the things that Asians and Africans had
long wanted to believe about Western vincibility, be it
moral, physical or spiritual. ( Few, after all, could identify
—
with what Mao had done China was too large, and Mao
had simply defeated other Chinese.) But t he North
Vietnamese had defeated a great Western nation. They
had done it by bein^ braver, smarter and truer to their
own cause.

i5
 Yet for all Ho's extraordinary importance, for all of the
richness of his life and his position as a symbol of the rebel-
lion of the poor colored against the rich Caucasian, curi-
ously was known about him in the West. To Bernard
little

Fall he said in 1962, "So you are the young man who is
so much interested in all the small details about my life."

Fall: all, a public figure and

"Mr. President, you are, after
it would not be a violation of a military secret to
certainly
know whether you had a family or were in Russia at a
given date." Ho: "Ah, but you know I'm an old man, a
very old man. An old man likes to have a little air of
mystery about himself. I like to hold on to my little mys-
teries. I'm sure you will understand that . .
." There had
always been a question as to whether or not he had ever
married. He sometimes seemed to delight in creating
rumors that he had. One night in 1945 Ho took Harold
Isaacs, an American journalist, to the home of a Viet-
namese friend. During the evening the friend's children
brought out a packet of drawings inscribed to Ho. He
seemed embarrassed by the attention. "I'm all alone," he
told Isaacs afterward, "no family, nothing ... I did have
."
a wife once . .

Much of his life was cloaked in the anonymity that any

Asian possessed, as far as Westerners were concerned, at
the turn of the century. But he had as well the additional
anonymity that goes with an underground figure —staying
one step ahead of the police of several nations, changing
his name regularly (at one point it was believed that he
had died in a Hong Kong jail), then returning to his own
nation to lead an underground revolution, this time from
the mountains, so that even his wartime acts and decisions
were curiously private and secret. Even in the Communist
world more is normally known about leaders; Tito, Stalin,
Khrushchev, Mao — all had their cult of personality.

16
.,^y^ut Ho deliberately did not seek the trappings of power
and authority, as if he were so sure of himself and his rela-

tionship to both his people and history that he did not

need statues and bridges, books and photographs to prove
it to him or them. One sensed in him such a remarkable

confidence about who he was, what he had done, that

there would be no problem communicating it to his people;
indeed, to try to communicate it by any artificial means
might have created doubts among them. His abstinence
from his own was particularly remarkable in the
cult
underdeveloped world, where the jump from poor peasant
to ruler of a nation in a brief span of time often proves
very heady stuff and inspires more than the predictable
quota of self -commemoration.

THE VIETNAM INTO WHICH HO WAS BORN IN iSgO^WaS

a bitter land; the French ruled, but they ruled By force
alone. They had destroyed the pride and traditions of the
Vietnamese; they devalued what the Vietnamese vener-
ated. To the Vietnamese, France seemed a world of
policemen, soldiers, customs officials, clerks, informers.
And to those Vietnamese who were too indiscreet about
prizing their Vietnamese heritage France was represented
by the prison island of Poulo Condore ( Con Son ) a place ,

where nationalists went to serve their terms and from

which they did not always return.
Ho came from the province of Nghe Thinh in central
Vietnam, an area far from the lush delta of the north and
the even lusher one of the south. (By a somewhat Toyn-
beean rationale, other Vietnamese have always regarded
southerners as lazy, inferior soldiers and indifferent leaders,

* Though there is controversy about the date, this is the year ac-
cepted by his government.

17
the feeling being that their hfe is too easy, the soil too rich,
and that men who lead such an easy life cannot be trusted
to make the ultimate sacrifice for their country.) Nghe
Thinh, infertile, impoverished, was known for its scholars.
That area of central Vietnam was a traditional seat of
Vietnamese learning. The province of Nghe Thinh was one
of the most densely populated areas of Vietnam ( a family
might have to make do with one fifth of an acre), which
caused problems. How could a young man work the land
when there was no land to work? Naturally, hehad too
much time on his hands, and so he studied and became a
scholar, but becoming a scholar in those days meant be-
coming an angry, frustrated young man. Indeed, the area
had a time-honored reputation as a breeding ground for
the restlessness and dissatisfaction so many of them fash-
ioned out of the combination of the toughness of the land
and a lingering sense of the glorious heritage of the past. It
was an unwritten rule at the court of Hue, the capital of
Annam, that mandarins from Nghe Thinh not be given
jobs in the central government. They were too radical,
too unpredictable; they caused too much trouble.
Ho's fathe r, Nguyen Sinh Huy, was in this radical tra-
dition. There are few clear recollections of the life of Ho's
father — —
but the French
far fewer than there should be
journalist-scholar Jean Lacouture was able to interview
Paul Arnoux, a Surete official whose job it was to keep
watch on Annamese immigrants in Paris, and who later
created the Indochinese Surete. "When I first went to
Annam in Hue spoke of a man
1907 the older scholars in
of great learning who was a mandarin in Ha Tinh Prov-
ince. He was reputed to know as many Chinese characters
as any man in Vietnam, where there were many who had
this skill. His name was Nguyen Sinh Huy. A few months

later this man was dismissed from his office. In some police

18
reports he was accused of alcoholism, in others, of embez-
zlement. Rather minor failings, they were widespread in
the administration and smilingly overlooked so long as the
offenders were politically tame. In fact, Nguyen Sinh Huy
was really fired for his nationalist sympathies and because
he was one of those Annamese who refused to learn French
in order not to 'ruin' his own language —
a weak excuse for
a scholar of his calibre. One of his sons was called Nguyen
Tat Thanh; that was the future Nguyen Ai Quoc, the future
Ho Chi Minh. Thus Ho's life began in an atmosphere of
anger, bitterness, of hatred towards France ."
. .

Nguyen Sinh Huy was in his own way a revolutionary

for his time; his life was both an overt and silent protest

against the French (what better way to protest the for-

eigner than to refuse to learn his language —thus he does
not exist). He had participated in the Scholars' Revolt of
1885 and had helped propagandize the anticolonial writ-
ings of Phan Boi Chau, a nationalist who had helped
sharpen anti-French sentiment with a famous report called
Letter from Abroad Written in Blood.
Nguyen Sinh Huy was the son of peasants. He tended
buffaloes and worked on a farm, finally marrying the
owner's daughter and receiving as her dowry a tiny paddy
and a straw hut. He continued to study, passed the exam
in Chinese literature, and earned the title of pho hang (
minor doctoral degree). He seemed headed toward the
typical mandarin life: a teaching post at Thanh Hoa, then
a job in the ceremonial office of the Imperial Palace at Hue
— pleasant little functionary jobs that make a man a little

better off than most of his colleagues. But he was strong

and independent and decided not to accommodate him-
self to the colonial system. He told his family that "being
a mandarin is the ultimate form of slavery."
He was made a deputy prefect in Binh Khe, but his

^9
restlessness became work clearly reflected
evident. His
his distaste for his superiors and he was eventually dis-

missed by the French. (This would of course aflFect his

son: that the father was a scholar, a man of learning, and
yet was virtually unemployable and at the mercy of the
French, while someone else without his talent and" intelli-
gence who accommodated himself to the foreigners could
prosper. ) * Next, Nguyen Sinh Huy wandered all over the
Indochina peninsula setting bones, telling historical tales,

writing letters for people —a wise and respected traveling

scholar.
His children grew up under his influence and, while
he was away, under the influence of an uncle who was
also a fierce nationalist.Not surprisingly, Ho's sister, who
worked in a noncommissioned officers mess, stole weapons
and was jailed for life. His brother Khiem, another intense
but erratic nationalist, wrote a letter to Albert S arrant, the

Governor General, complaining about the terrible poverty

in Nghe An. Khiem was always more restless than Ho; his
revolutionary zeal was hampered by a taste for alcohol,
and his revolutionary activity was thus limited. When
Khiem died in 1950 Ho, fiving in the underground maquis,
was unable to attend the funeral and sent the local villagers
a telegram which reflected his particular modesty and
sense of Vietnamese traditions: "The onus of public affairs
has not allowed me him during his illness or
to look after
to attend his funeral today. I humbly apologize for this
failure in brotherly devotion and beg you to forgive a son

* A Vietnamese I knew
1963 in Saigon said of that period, "It
in
was a matter of you were very bright the choices were
intelligence. If
quite terrible because the brighter you were the more you understood
exactly what was happening to you, and you either accommodated your-
self to them and played on their side, or you had to leave them and fight
them, and either choice was quite terrible. It was much easier for the
ordinary man of ordinary ability."

20
who has had to put affairs of state before family feelings.
Chi Minh."
Ho's was a hard boyhood, but it was also a time when
he saw and learned much. He encountered the hardships
of the peasants, the inequities of life, the injustices in-
flicted on his family; daily he learned that most difficult

of lessons, the difference between what life is supposed to

be according to schoolbooks and poems and what it really
is. This contrasted most sharply with the Caucasians,
French and Americans, who were to be his great adver-

saries in the middle of the century. They were men who

had come from a vastly different background, men who
had lived through relative prosperity, who were middle-
class or better, led largely painless lives, men who had ex-

celled in politics and the military but who had overcome

far fewer obstacles than someone of Ho's background.
Most important, they were men who saw the world as it
was said to be, who accepted things at face value, who
saw the structure in Vietnam that Ho wanted to destroy
as working and did not challenge its very basis.
In Ho's boyhood, nothing was as it was said to be. The
feeling against the French was building all the time; the
French were conscripting forced labor to build roads, the
coolies were escaping and staying in homes of people like
Ho and his neighbors. Again and again there were minor
rebelhons which flickered and then died —because of a

betrayal, a lack of organization, a failure to carry through.

ONE OF THE GREAT INFLUENCES in Ho's homC WaS

that of Phan Boi Chau, the foremost nationalist of that
era, a man who had been a friend of Nguyen Sinh Huy.

Chau was a towering figure; in 1902 he had won the high-

est honors possible for a Vietnamese in the literary com-

21
 Then he was
petition held every three years at Vinh.
by the French, but turned them
offered high positions
down; he would not be a symbol of the willingness of
talented Vietnamese to serve the French. ("In the begin-
ning of their conquest," he wrote instead, "the French
used honeyed words and great rewards to entice the Viet-
namese. They offered high government positions and bene-
fits of all sorts to make some of us into their hunting
dogs.") Again and again the French offered him jobs plus
bribes to work for them, or at least to remain silent. Always
he refused. As Ho would be typical of the revolutionaries
of a new era, Chau symbolized the patriots of the previous
one, a transitional era from the old feudal Vietnam to the
modern society. He realized that the old parochial politics
would no longer work, that broad parties were needed,
that Vietnam must be modernized, and that his people
must understand the new science and technology. Because
of this he was drawn to Japan, the Asian nation which was
most modern, and which had also defeated the Russians.
In 1905 he began what was to be essentially an exile's life
by going there. From Japan he continued to write pas-
sionately, becoming an even more famous figure in exile,
so famous that the French leveled the death penalty
him in absentia. Chau also encouraged young Viet-
against
namese to come to Japan, and because of him it emerged
as an exile center in the early twentieth century. Where he
differed from the younger Ho was that he was essentially
a man of the old order. He thought Vietnam could be
modernized and liberated without a genuine political revo-
lution, that it all could be done through a reformed mon-
archy. He had, after all, been a full-fledged patriot before
the turn of the century, while the younger Ho would
emerge as a full-scale revolutionary only after the Rus-
sian Revolution. It was a crucial difference.

22
 As a friend of the Nguyen Sinh Huy family he had
intensified the anti-French feehng, and had encouraged
Huy and his family to go to Japan. But Ho^s fatheriirged
his sons to study French, perhaps sensing that in their life-

time the real struggle with the colonial power would

come and that they would be better off if they knew as
much as possible about France, its language and traditions.
This was a crucial decision for the embryonic revolu-
tionary, for rather than taking his revolutionary guidance
from China or Japan, learning their traditions and their
politics, he would decide to spend his early days in Europe

absorbing Western traditions and vulnerabilities, sharing

experiences with left-wing Europeans, which inevitably
brought him into the orbit of the young revolutionaries
of the SovietUnion as that revolution was being exported.
It alsomeant that in his speeches there would always be
a strong sense of Western political heritage homage to —
the French Revolution and the American Declaration of
—
Independence as if he were saying, "All right, you propa-
gated these ideas, now we are trying to make good on
them." One legacy is the fact that references to racial
hatred seldom appeared in his speeches and decisions
(there was a brief time in his Paris days when he signed
himself Nguyen O —
Phap Nguyen Who Hates the
French ) rather, there was a quiet admiration for the best
;

of Westerners and their traditions, despite the fact that

for most of his adult life he fought the West. Indeed, an
official government book published Hanoi explaining
in
Ho's Western orientation says: "What attracts [Ho] to
these [Western] countries is their ideology of freedom,
of the sovereignty of the people, of democracy, of science
and technology. He thought that to fight the French
coloniahsts with the help of the Japanese militarists
would be to 'hunt the Jiger^only to be eaten by the

23
wolves / "
Thus Ho's family did not follow Phan Boi Chau
to Japan. But Ho did listen particularly carefully to one
bit of advice from the old nationalist: to be successful

against the French, you will need a strong party, an organ-

ization in the real sense of the word.
Even before he was ready for school Ho was carrying
messages for the anti-French underground. His father
subsequently enrolled him in the French lycee in Vinh,
but itwas an arrangement which proved to be mutually
unsatisfactory and he was soon expelled. The school
oflBcials said that the reason was poor grades; his friends

said the reason was politics. His father then enrolled the
teen-aged Ho at the Lycee Quoc-Hoc in the old imperial
capital of Hue. The school was unique in that it blended
modern French education with Vietnamese culture.
Ho's nationalist feeling was strengthened at Hue,
which was a great center of learning, and where the
feeling that the great culture of Vietnam was being
crushed by the coarse, alien presence of the French was
particularly strong.* The school at Hue became a training
ground for many of the men who would serve as Ho's
lieutenants in the fight against the French. While there.
Ho continued to be active in nationalist affairs and he
finally left the school without a diploma. It had not been

a particularly happy or successful time, and he was a man

who would learn more by making his own special odyssey
through the outside world than by studying in the far
more rigid world of the French-sponsored classroom.
For a while he taught in the fishing village of Phan

* In the 1963 Buddhist riots against the government of South

Vietnam the reaction was particularly intense in Hue, where there was a
feeling that the Catholic-dominated government of the Ngo family was
depriving Buddhism of its traditional rights and prerogatives; a Catholic,
Western-oriented government seemed far more alien when viewed from
Hue than from Saigon.

24
 Thiet, badly paid like all teachers of that time, and shortly
afterward he went to Saigon to learn a trade. There is some
diflFerence of opinion about what trade he actually studied
(it is indicative of the many shadows in Ho's career that
there is a difFerence of opinion on almost every major fact
in his life: his date of birth, his father's name, his own
name, whether he ever married, etc. ) . Some believe he in-
tended to study seamanship; Bernard Fall believed he
studied cooking, since was probably the easiest way for
it

a Vietnamese to find a well-paying job, and since it was

not as demeaning as some of the other possibilities.
Then, in 1Q12, at the age of twenty- two, he decided
y to leave Vietnam for the West, to study the European
world. Some French and Americans would later be puz-
zled as to how Ho, after spending so many years outside of
Vietnam, could return to become such an immediately
viable political force in his native land. The reason is that
these were the right years to be out of Vietnam. Only by
not being there could a Vietnamese have the full freedom
to say what he felt, and what his countrymen longed to
hear. In the vacuum of Vietnamese leadership of those
years the clear and consistent voice of Ho had great im-
pact among younger Vietnamese. In contrast, in 1954 the
Americansjielped^ install Ngo Dinh Diem in the South,

unmindful of the fact that he had been out of the country

during the French-Indochina war. To the Americans this

—
was the most attractive part he was anti-Communist
but had not been tainted by being pro-French. But to
most Vietnamese these were the wrong years to be out
of Vietnam —
he was already disqualified from serious
consideration as a patriot because he had been out of the
country, un attentiste, during the most important period in
Vietnamese history, a period that separated the men from
the boys. In addition, Diem was at a tactical disadvantage.

25
for that revolutionary time with its extraordinary sense of
ferment and excitement had changed the entire style of
Vietnamese political life. Now everything was possible, but
Diem was still living in the past. He believed in a man-
darin age which had ended the moment the French-Indo-
china war had begun. Diem was intent on being above all

the good mandarin, not knowing that from 1946 on there

could be no good mandarins left in Vietnam.

HO BEGAN HIS TRAVELS as a mcss boy on the French

liner Latouche-Treville. He spent twoj^ears aboard the
ship, touring all the ports of Africa and Europe. In Africa
he saw that what applied to the French colonialism he
knew also applied in other colonies, that the problems
for the Vietnamese were the same as for the blacks. His
travels took him all over the globe and probably to Amer-
ica. Every time he saw Americans he asked questions
which implied that he knew their country very well. It is

even believed that Ho lived for a brief time in Harlem,

but it is one of those points in his life that remain some-
thing of a mystery.
He finally left the ship to work in England during
World War I. He was a pastry cook for the famous EscofiBer
at the Carlton Hotel, living the darkest and poorest kind
of life while working in the plushest kitchen and serving
the richest people in the world. At this time he also had
with exiled Asians, joining the Lao Dang
his first contact

Hoi Nagai (Overseas Workers), a Chinese-dominated

group of Asian expatriates. He also studied the Irish up-
rising and talked with some of the Fabians, but he was
restless in England: it seemed that the real problems of

his own country could be addressed from only two places,

Vietnam or France. So he went to France in 1917, the worst
and darkest days of the war.

26
 —

Now for the first time he had contact with people in

metropolitan F rance and fQimH""TlTeTr b clia vior and beliefs
quite different from the French he had met in the colonies.
It was as if they were two different breeds: the right-wing,
race-conscious Frenchmen who served their nation over-
seas, and the other French at home, far less prejudiced.
All around him during this period he saw the deprivation
of the average French workingman, and it was a revela-
tion: before, Frenchmen were rich and powerful, all
all

Asians weak and poor. Now he was looking at frightened

and hungry Frenchmen, and they seemed less aware of
racial distinctions. "He was," wrote Jean Lacouture,
"struck by the similarity between the lot of the exploited
inhabitant of a colony and that of a European worker
and it was to this parallel that he was to devote one
. . .

of his earliest articles. No one could have felt more natu-

rally drawn to organized labor and the parties of the left.

Had he stayed at home, he might never have progressed

beyond an extremist form of nationalism, without ideo-
logical perspective and concerned exclusively with evicting
—
the foreign invader a form of nationalism perhaps even
tinged with racism, as in the case of the Phu Quoc move-
ment. Living immersed for a while in a hierarchical, in-
dustrialized society broadened his outlook and gave a
political slant to his thought. Contact with the French Left

was soon to turn an angry patriot into a modern revolu-

tionary. The colonial system had made him a stranger in
his own country; the French in France were to make him

a fellow citizen."
The early years in Paris were difiBcult ones. He was a
poor man trying to find his way in a poor and stricken na-
tion, but he had already charted his course: he would be

a revolutionary. First, however, he needed a name. Since

leaving Vietnam he had simply been known as Ba. Now

27
he chose a new name: Nguyen Ai Quoc. Nguyen in Viet-
nam is the equivalent of Smith or Jones in America. Quoc
means "country," so his name really meant Nguyen the
Patriot. He would go by this name for years, as a writer,

in the Comintern records, and of course in various police

dossiers.
The Chinese calligraphy he had studied as a child was
for the first time of value as he began to earn a small
living using his manual skill in photo retouching. The
Socialist party newspaper La Vie Ouvriere in 1918 carried

a small classified advertisement saying: "You who would

like a living remembrance of your relatives, have your

photographs retouched by Nguyen Ai Quoc. Handsome

portraitsand handsome frames for 45 francs ." But . .

these were not days when poor Frenchmen were beating

down doors to have their photographs taken, let alone
retouched, and there was little money in this occupation.
He was impoverished, often hungry, usually unemployed,
often at odds with the police. His inability to pay his rent
senthim from apartment to apartment.
Although this was a diflBcult time economically, it was
an exciting time politically. The war was destroying the
old structure of society; no one knew what the new one
might be. One heard stories from Moscow, where the
Bolsheviks had seized power. Might all of Europe soon
be like this? Like other cities, Paris seethed with talk,
with late-night discussions among left-wing intellectuals.
Ho was a part of this world. He surrounded himself
with other Vietnamese revolutionaries, met with radical
workers, frequented a bookshop which Leon Trotsky him-
self reputedly had visited from time to time. Ho met
trade union oflRcials, pacifists, wrote articles for VHuma-
nite under the title "Reminiscences of an Exile" and wrote
a poHtical play called The Bamboo Dragon ( said to be so

28
bad that it is not even performed in Hanoi). He met
Marx's grandson, and he bepa^e the first Vietnamese
member of the Young Socialists. Another Vietnamese who
knew him at the time but who later became a bitter anti-
Communist described Ho as a "wraithlike figure always
—
armed with a book who read Zola, France, Shakespeare,
Dickens, Hugo, and Romain Holland. He became friends
with an old anarcho-syndicalist militant, Jules Raveau,
who had recently returned from Switzerland, where he
had been working with Lenin and Zinoviev . . . inti-

mately associated with the Bolshevik group, he was for

Ho an unfailing source of information, guidance and anec-
dotes. [Raveau] was for a long time an adviser to the
young Annamese, who as a result became a regular visitor
to the tiny editorial oflBce of La Vie Ouvriere, in the dis-
trict of Belleville, where there was a powerful revolution-

ary tradition. Tales of the men and women of the Com-

mune who were slaughtered by M. Thiers' soldiers and
now lay in Pere Lachaise cemetery merged in the young
man's mind with memories of uprisings staged by his
own countrymen."
Ho was already becoming a figure of some prominence
in the left-wing world of Paris, and French Surete officials
began to keep an eye on him. Paul Arnoux, the Surete
man who watched over the Vietnamese community, went
one evening to hear one of Ho's compatriots plead the
cause of Vietnamese independence, but he was far more
interested in a small Asian standing by the door handing
out leaflets advocating violence. This, Arnoux was told,
was Nguyen Ai Quoc. Arnoux had often heard him and
of
arranged a meeting with him, the first Arnoux
of several.
was taken with Ho, with his intensity. Ho would talk of
his country and what the French had done to his people,

and particularly to his father. "France," he would say,

29
"France was the villain/' Arnoux, impressed by his passion
and intelligence —a young man to keep an eye on —sug-
gested that Albert Sarraut, minister for colonial affairs,

meet him. But Sarraut was dubious; he even doubted

whether there was such a person as Nguyen Ai Quoc.
Instead, Ho finally met an underling, but little came of it.

Indeed a few years later, when Ho felt himself under in-

creasing police surveillance he wrote an article in an anti-
colonial newspaper to which he contributed regularly,
Le Paria ( The Outcast ) , mocking the police watch:

But "keeping-watch" alone seemed to Your Excellency's

and you wanted to do better.
fatherly solicitude insufficient
That is why for some time now you have granted each
—
Annamese dear Annamese, as Your Excellency says
private aides-de-camp. Though still novices in the art of
Sherlock Holmes, these good people are devoted and par-
ticularly sympathetic. We
have only praise to bestow on
them and compliments to pay their boss, Your Excellency.
... If Your Excellency insists on knowing what we do
every day nothing is easier: we shall publish every morn-
ing a bulletin of our movements, and Your Excellency will
have but the trouble of reading. Besides our timetable is
quite simple and almost unchanging.
Mornings: from 8 to 12 at the workshop.
Afternoons in the newspaper offices ( leftist, of course
:

or at the library.
Evenings: at home or attending educational talks.
Sundays and holidays : visiting museums or other places
of interest.
There you are! — Nguyen Ai Quoc.
The world around him was in turmoil. The Communist
seizure of power in Russia had had a potent effect on the
exile community. In addition, thought Ho and his col-

leagues, perhaps there was hope from the new colossus

of the West. America had entered the war belatedly, and
now, in January 1918, Woodrow Wilson, her almost evan-

30
gelical President, who spoke of freedom for all, of self-
determination for all peoples, was crossing the Atlantic

armed with his moral grandeur and his Fourteen Points;

he was coming to put an end to war and all of mankind's
suffering. Ho, more and more the leader pi the Vietnamese
group in Paris, prepared his own eight-point program for
freedom in Vietnam, based on Wilson's Fourteen Points.
In retrospect it seems to have been a moderate pro-
gram: the Vietnamese wanted representation in the French
parliament, freedom of the press, freedom to hold meetings
and form groups, release of political prisoners and am-
nesty for them, government by law instead of decree, and
equal rights for Vietnamese and French. Modest requests,
though, of course, if granted they would have soon made
independence a reality: for they would have released all

the pent-up longings in the country and it would have

been impossible to stop the pressure for independence.
Wilson was determined to bring a just peace and self-

determination to nations yet unborn, but it was still a white

man's world. Democracy was something for white nations;
a nation yet unborn meant a European nation yet unborn;
and besides, France was a great ally of the Americans.
In 1919 Ho and his group had their eight-point pro-
gram carefully printed (though the printer misspelled
Ho's name) and he set off for Versailles, where represent-
atives of the underdeveloped world were crowded, all

trying to gain a hearing, demanding their independence,

their boundaries restored. But the great powers at Ver-
sailles never heard Ho (the official records nowhere indi-
cate that a petition for Vietnamese independence was
even under consideration ) . Ho and the other petitioners at
Versailles reacted bitterly among themselves. The mod-
had sought was no longer viable, the
erate solution they
great powers understood only power; and lor a small

31
 —

country, power meant armed revolution, terrorism, bombs

and guns. To sit and make nice genteel requests which
should be honored in a nice genteel way was pointless
one was only brushed aside. Ho's appearance at Versailles
had made no impression on the great figures there, nor
on the Western press. In the Western field of vision he did
not exist.

But in the world of the Paris-based Vietnamese his very

failure there had enhanced his position. It was Ho who
had represented them at Versailles and tried to put for-
ward their position; it was Ho, and thus all Vietnamese, that
the great men had rejected. In the growing semi-under-
ground world of the Vietnamese community in France,
Ho had become The Figure; Bui Lam, a student in Paris
at the time, later recollected ( in an official North Vietnam-

ese publication ) "... no two Vietnamese residing in

:

France could meet after this without mentioning the name

ofNguyen Ai Quoc." Now as Vietnamese arrived in France
they were drawn to him, guided by him. He wandered
through the industrial quarters of Paris talking to workers,
seeking out the students, the young, telling them they must
be involved
—"Your studies can wait —come and work
with us."

INDECEMBER 1920 the French Socialist party held

a crucidmeetin^n the city of Tours. It was a great galaxy
of French left-wing figures. Ho felt awed by the intellec-
tual brilliance around him —
the flashing debate with minor
points representing major political schisms, much of the
discussion touching on subtleties far removed from his

own single-minded purpose: he was a Socialist so that Viet-

nam could be free. That single-mindedness came through
in his own speeches, and with it some of his doubts even

3^
about these French colleagues, so much more sympathetic
to him and his cause than most Caucasians. Yet perhaps
he sensed that sympathy was not enough. Perhaps the
feehng of urgency and the totality of commitment that
his own demanded were lacking among these intel-
cause
humane men, so concerned with their own
ligent, liberal,

special grievances against the capitalist system. They

wanted more for the workers, but did they go far enough?
Would they perhaps be willing to continue the same
exploitation of the yellow man, provided the white worker
had a fairer share of the pie? Was it only lip-service
sympathy, too genteel for the harsher commitment that
reality demanded? His speech is still recorded:

Chairman: Comrade Indochinese Delegate, you have

the floor.

Indochinese Delegate [Nguyen Ai Quoc]: Today, in-

stead of contributing, together with you, to world revolu-
tion, I come here with deep sadness to speak as amember
of the Socialist Party, against the imperialists who have
committed abhorrent crimes on my native land. You all
have known that French imperialists entered Indochina
half a century ago. In its selfish interest it conquered our
country with bayonets. Since then we have not only been
oppressed and exploited shamelessly, but also tortured and
exploited pitilessly Prisons outnumber schools and are
. . .

always overcrowded with detainees. Any natives having

socialist ideas are arrested and sometimes murdered with-
out trial. Such is the so-called justice in Indochina. In that
country, the Vietnamese are discriminated against, they
do not enjoy safety like Europeans or those having Euro-
pean citizenship. We have neither freedom of the press
nor freedom of speech. Even freedom of assembly and
freedom of association do not exist. We have no right to
live in other countries or to go abroad as tourists. We are
forced to live in utter ignorance and obscurity because we
have no right to study Comrades, such is the treat-
. . .

ment inflicted upon more than 20 million Vietnamese, that

33
 is more than half the population of France. And they are
said to be under French protection! The Socialist Party
must act realistically to support the oppressed natives.
Jean Longuet: I have spoken in favor of the natives
[i.e. we are doing our part, what more can we do?].
Indochinese Delegate: Right from the beginning of my
speech I have already asked everyone to keep absolute
silence. The party must make propaganda for socialism in
all colonial countries. We have realized that the Socialist
Party's joining the Third International means that it has
practically promised that from now on it will correctly
assess the importance of the colonial question. We are very
glad to learn that a Standing Delegation has been ap-
pointed to study the North African question, and, in the
near future, we
be very glad if the Party sends one of
will
its members to Indochina to study on the spot the ques-

tions relating to this country and the activities which

should be carried out there.
[A right-wing delegate had a contradictory opinion,
which angered Ho.]
Indochinese Delegate: Silence! . . .

Chairman: Now all delegates must keep silence! Includ-

ing those not standing for the Parliament!
Indochinese Delegate: On behalf of the whole of man-
kind, on behalf of the members, both
Socialist Party's left

and right wings, we call upon you! Comrades, save us!

Again Longuet outlined the steps he had taken in

Parliament on behalf of the colonized peoples, and this
time a radical Frenchman got up to agree with Ho that
"Parliament is not the only place where one must fight on
behalf of the oppressed nations."

THE SPEECH AND THE MEETING marked the end of

Ho the Socialist. He had realized, particularly after the
brush-off at Versailles, that harsh measures would be re-

34
quired to free Vietnam from French rule. But would these
measures be forthcoming from these Socialists, with their
humane tradition, their fondness for parliamentary action?
Jhey were good men, but did they go far enough? Did
they reject the system, or did they simply want to change
the balance a little? Were they too willing to compromise,
more bourgeois than they realized, "capitalist souls in
syndicalist bodies," as one opponent called them? This
was not a small happenstance conflict but a deep schism
that touched on one of the basic issues which would
divide the left throughout the contemporary world: at
what point does injustice merit violence? If one seeks
justice and liberty, does this give one the right to strike out

with antidemocratic, indeed violent measures? The Fr ench

SociaHst party split after Tours, and on December 3otKe
French Communist party was founded. Ho was one of
the founding members.

35
 CHAPTER

3
FROM BELIEF TO PROFESSION:
HO'S R\TH TO COMMUNISM
1917-1940
"The radical sun illuminating our path.''

HISTORY SETS OFF ITS OWN CHAIN REACTIONS; One

great event touches off another. That therewould one day
be revolution against the white man in Vietnam was in-
evitable, but the timetable was not fixed. World War I
had come, leaving in its bitter wake a Communist Russia
vX and an exhausted and decaying Europe. The aftereffects
of that war would lead to the next war and see China be-
come Communist. Ho's lifetime would span all these great
events. History to a large degree would come his way, and
when it did he would not be caught unprepared. He had
arrived in Europe a young and virtually nameless refugee
at a time when the old order had seemed secure on the

surface, when the great powers were simply involved in

traditional rivalries —a border conflict here, a sphere of
influence there, an outbreak of chauvinism here, all cul-

minating in World War I; out of that war would come

new ahgnments and a breakdown of the old order. And

36
he himself would be no immobile bystander; rather, his
own life would be a key factor in affecting changes that
would see the old order in ruins and the West learning
the limits of power —that gunboat diplomacy and colonial-
ism were finished.
As a young Socialist-turned-Communist, Ho was
drawn to the Russian experience and Lenin. Paul Mus,
the distinguished French scholar, said of him: "He be-
came a Leninist, since Lenin was faced in Russia with the
same problem of the vacuum at the village level. Ho was
successful because he remained true to Leninism and
Marxism. In this sense, straightforward according to his
view, he belongs to a proper fraternity." Not just ideology,
not just words; he had heard enough words, all of them
brilliant, each critique more incisive than the last. Here
was action and, more important, success. The Bolsheviks
had done it; blood had flowed^ j/es, but jhey had won.
T hey had not only talked revolution, they had carried it
^ut. They had brought the right organization, the right
structure, the right ideology at the right time. They were
violent; well, the times required violence. Based on his
experience at the Tours meeting, Ho knew that they had
been without illusion about the price, and they had paid it.
They were the model (they had not, after all, been in
power long enough to start failing, to form their own bu-
reaucracy ) Ho's writings in the twenties and thirties again
.

and again reflected his homage to Lenin (in a way that

they would not for Stalin), and in i960, in one of the
clearest explanations of his own ideological course, he
wrote an article entitled "The Path Which Led Me to

Leninism":

After World War I, I made my living in Paris, now as a

retoucher at a photographer's, now as a painter of "Chinese
antiquities" (made in France!). I would distribute leaflets

37
denouncing the crimes committed by the French colonial-
in Vietnam.
ists

At that time I supported the October Revolution only

instinctively, not yet grasping all its historic importance.
I loved and admired Lenin because he was a great patriot
who liberated his compatriots; until then I had read none
of his books.
The reason for my joining the French Socialist Party
was and gentlemen" as I called my
that these "ladies —
—
comrades at that moment had shown their sympathy
toward me, toward the struggle of the oppressed peoples.
But I understood neither what was a party, a trade union,
nor what was Socialism or Communism.
Heated discussions were then taking place in the
branches of the Socialist Party about the question of
whether the Socialist Party should remain in the Second
International, should a Second-and-a-half International be
founded, or should the Socialist Party join Lenin's Third
International? I attended the meetings regularly twice or
three times a week and attentively listened to the discus-
sions. First I could not understand thoroughly. Why were
the discussions so heated? Either with the Second, Second-
and-a-half or Third International the revolution could be
waged. What was the use of arguing, then? As for the First
International, what had become of it?
—
What I wanted to know most and this precisely was
—
not debated in the meetings was: Which International
sides with the peoples of colonial countries?
I raised this question —
the most important, in my
—
opinion in a meeting. Some comrades answered, "It is the
Third, not the Second International." And a comrade gave
me Lenins "Thesis on the National and Colonial Ques-
tions," published by L'Humanite, to read.
There were political terms difficult to understand in this
thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I
could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm,
clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled in me! I was
overjoyed. Though sitting alone in my room I shouted aloud
as if addressing large crowds: "Dear martyrs, compatriots!
This is what we need, this is our path to liberation!"

38
 After that I had full confidence in Lenin, in the Third
International.
Formerly during the meetings of the Party branch I
only listened to the discussions; I had a vague belief that

all were logical, and could not differentiate as to who was

right and who was wrong. But from then on I also plunged
into the debates, and discussed with fervor. Though I still
lacked French words to express all my thoughts, I smashed
the allegations attacking Lenin and the Third International
with no less vigor. My only argument was: "If you do not
condemn colonialism, if you do not side with the colonial
people, what kind of revolution are you waging? . . .

A t first pa triotism, not yet Communism, led me to have

cdnlidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by
step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism
parallel with participating in practical activities I gradu-
ally came upon the fact that only Socialism and Commu-
nism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working
people throughout the world from slavery.
There is a legend in our country, as well as in China, on
the miraculous "Book of the Wise"! When facing great
difficulties, one opens it and finds a way out. Leninism is

not only a miraculous "book of the wise," a compass for us

Vietnamese revolutionaries and people: it is also the radi-
ant sun illuminating our path to final victory, to Socialism
and Communism.

.Now Ho turned from the ideologist and the young stu-

dent rebel into the real revolutionary —he went from

belief and feeling to profession. He founded the Inter-
colonial Union in 1921 Communist front, and he wrote
as a
consistently for his paper, Le Paria. There he repeatedly
attacked the entire structure of French colonialism and
offered weekly praise to Moscow, the new center of his
universe.
Typically, he wrote: "One day a native clerk left
work reading a novel. Coming to an amusing passage,
the reader began to laugh. Just then he passed Mister

39
Overseer of Public Works and the latter flew into a rage,
first of all because the native, absorbed in his reading,

hadn't noticed him and greeted; secondly because the na-

tive had taken the liberty of laughing as he passed a white
man. Our civilizer therefore stopped the Annamese and
after asking his name, asked if he wanted a slap in the face.
Naturally the clerk declined the far too generous offer and
expressed surprise at such a storm of abuse. Without more
ado the official grabbed the native by the jacket and
dragged him before the head of the province ." An- . .

other story went: "A customs clerk obliged natives passing

by his house to doff their hats or get off their One
mounts.
day this civilizer brutalized an Annamese woman, who
though she had greeted him, had forgotten to call him
Great Mandarin. This woman was pregnant. A violent kick
right in the stomach aimed by the agent caused a mis-
carriage; the unfortunate woman died shortly after . .
."

But wijiuthe founding of the French Communist party

his life had changed in a far more basic and important

way. As Bernard Fall wrote "From an isolated young

: man
in a hostile community he was now a sought-after party
official in a world-wide charismatic movement with the
financial backing of a powerful state: the Soviet Union.
Funds suddenly became available for more lecture trips
inside France . .
." Among Asian exiles he became the
man to see, to clear had access to other power-
it with; he
ful men, to money. For a young Vietnamese angry about

the French domination and anxious to join a movement to

change it, suddenly the place to be was Paris, and the
contact man was Ho."
In 1 923 he be gan two„extraordinary decades_Q£jti:avel
and continuing exile. To Russia. Out of Russia. Into West-
ern Europe; changed names, out again. Back to Asia (but
not Vietnam). Then to Moscow again. In Moscow, hailed

40
 as an important and influential leader of an embryonic
nation, then off again, no longer a leader hailed an d ho n-
ored but a shadowy figure living a semiclandestine life,

changing hiding places, staying one step ahead of the

police. "The colonialists will be on your trail," he advised
one Vietnamese returning to the homeland, "keep away
from our friends' houses and don't hesitate to pose as a
."
degenerate if it will help put the police off the scent . .

Sometimes he fell one step behind the police, ending

up in jail, be it a British one in Hong Kong or a National-
ist one in China. (While in jail he wrote one of his best

poems about the contrast between his reception in China

and that of the American politician Wendell Willkie:
"Both of us are friends of China/ Both are going to
Chungking/ But you are given the seat of an honored
guest/ While I am a prisoner thrown under the steps/
Why are we both so differently treated?/ Coldness to one,
and warmth toward the other:/ That is the way of the
world, as from time immemorial/ The waters flow down
to the sea.") Durin g was setting up the
all that time he
yfirst stages of the political organization that would cul-
minate with the formation of the Vietminh, ^Jtask which
involved not so much finding eager recruits as preventing
the various factions of radical left-wing groups from de-
stroying each other in typically Vietnamese fratricidal

strife.

HO APPARENTLY STAYED IN PARIS throughout mOSt

of 1923, doing a good deal of writing for Le Paria, and
then went to Moscow for the first time shortly after the
death of Lenin. (In January 1924 Pravda published an
article by Ho on the death of Lenin: "Lenin is dead.

What are we going to do? That is the question the op-

41
pressed masses in the colonies are anxiously asking them-
selves . . .") To a Japanese friend Ho suggested in late
November that they go to Moscow together, "the birth-
place of revolution."The Japanese answered that he pre-
ferred to study art and literature and therefore would
remain in Paris. "What kind of art can you practice in this
rotten society?" Ho demanded. ''We will make the revolu-
tion, and then you can write for the free men in a classless
society."
He spent 1924 in the Soviet Union, taking courses at the

University of the Peoples of the East, writing for Pravda

and other Soviet publications. Ruth Fischer, the German
Communist representative in the Comintern, recalled Ho
at that time:

When he first arrived he seemed very inconsequential.

He had neither the dash nor the presence of that other
Asian revolutionary, the Indian leader Roy. But he im-
mediately won the respect and even the affection of us all.
Amid these seasoned revolutionaries and rigid intellectuals,
he struck a delightful note of goodness and simplicity. He
seemed to stand for mere common decency though he was—
—
cleverer than he let on and it was his well-earned good
name which saved him from getting caught up in internal
conflicts. Also, he was temperamentally far more inclined
towards action than towards doctrinal debates. He was
always an empiricist within the movement. But none of
this detracted from his colleagues' regard for him, and his
prestige was considerable. He played a very big part in
things, bigger than some of the better-known Asian leaders
of the time — Mao did not come to the fore till later.

During this period Ho was interviewed by the famous

poet Osip Mandelstam, now regarded as one of the most
significant poets of modern Russia. Mandelstam, who later
died a terrible death during the worst of Stalin's purges,
published his interview in Ogonek in a December 1923
issue. Part of the article follows:

42
"And how has Gandhi's movement been reflected in Indo-
china? Haven t any of the reverberations, any echoes,
reached there?" I asked Nguyen Ai Quoc.
"No," answered my companion. "The Annamese people
—peasants—Hve buried in the profoundest night, with no
newspapers, no conception of what's happening in the
world. It's night, actual night."
Nguyen Ai Quoc is the only Annamese in Moscow and
represents an ancient Malaysian race. He is practically a
boy, thin and lithe, wearing a knitted woolen jacket. He
speaks French, the language of the oppressors, but the
French words sound dim and faint, like the muffled bell of
his native language.
Nguyen Ai Quoc utters the word "civilization" with
disgust: he has travelled the length and breadth of prac-
tically the whole colonial world, been in northern and
central Africa and he's seen his fill of it. In conversation
he often uses the word "brothers." His "brothers" are the
Negroes, Hindus, Syrians, Chinese. . . .

"I come from a privileged Annamese family. In my

country such families don't do anything. The young men
study Confucianism. You know, Confucianism is not a
religion, but rather a study of moral practice and decent
behavior. In its very foundation it presupposes a 'social
world.' I was a boy of about thirteen when I first heard
the French words for liberty, equality and fraternity . . .

And I wanted to learn something about French civiliza-

tion to explore what lay concealed behind those words.

But the French are training parrots in the native schools.
They hide books and newspapers from us, and ban not only
modern writers but even Rousseau and Montesquieu ."
. .

I had a vivid image of the way these gentle people, with

their love for tact and moderation and their hatred of

excess,had been made to drink hard liquor. Nguyen Ai
Quoc's whole presence was imbued with an innate tact
and delicacy. European civilization works with bayonet
and liquor, hiding them under the soutane of a Catholic
missionary. Nguyen Ai Quoc breathes culture, not Euro-
pean culture, but perhaps the culture of the future . . .

43
 "Yes, it's interesting how the French authorities taught
our peasants the words 'Bolshevik' and *Lenin They began !

hunting down Communists among the Annamese peasantry

at a time when there wasn't a trace of a Communist. And
that way they spread the propaganda."
The Annamese are a simple courteous people. In the
nobility of his manner and in the dim soft voice of Nguyen
Ai Quoc one can hear the approach of tomorrow, the
oceanic silence of universal brotherhood. There's a manu-
script on the table. A calm, businesslike report. The tele-
graphic style of a correspondent. He's indulging his fancy
on the theme of a Congress of the International in the year
1947. He sees and hears the agenda, he's present, taking
down the minutes . . .

Sometime in late igj^^r early 1925 Ho was sent jrom

Moscow to Canton by the leaders of the International to
assist Mikhail Borodin, the Comintern envoy to the new
Chinese revolutionary government; he was assigned as
both interpreter and Canton was a geat
political adviser.

center for Vietnamese exile politics; thus Ho could meet

readily with young compatriots who had slipped over the
border into China. Ii^ Vietnam it was a time of constant
abortive incidents, all stirring powerful feelings in the pop-
ulation, but all fizzling out. A bomb had been thrown at

the Governor General; the episode created a good deal of

excitement, which soon died down, however. Ho realized
that it would take a tough-structured organization to
thieve success.
The old Vietnamese nationalist Phan Boi Chau, the
friend of Ho's father, was in Canton, where he had at-
tracted a considerable circle of young Vietnamese exiles.
Now a miUtant, Moscow-trained professional. Ho regarded
Phan Boi Chau as something of a disappointment and a
problem; he was a relic of the past. He seemed not a
revolutionary but a somewhat parochial protester against
the status quo; to Ho's group Phan seemed a man too

44
content to sit and talk when the world was changing and
the times called for action. One of Ho's associates came up
with an idea which would provide the revolutionary
groups with some funds and at the same time increase
nationalist fervor inside Vietnam. He suggested to Ho that
Chau, the most famous of the leaders in Canton be sacri-

ficed to the national cause. By selling Chau out to the

French they would get a reward, while the arrest and trial

would arouse the Vietnamese people and bring interna-

tional attention. International feeling would be so strong
that they would not be able to bring the death sentence
against Chau. Ho agr eed, and in June 1925 Chau received
an invitation to attend a special meeting of Vietnamese
revolutionaries. As he arrived in Shanghai, he was grabbed
by a group of strangers and taken to a French office and
from there to Hanoi. It is believed that Ho's intermediary
received 150,000 piasters from the French. Chai was tried i ,

given a life sentence of hard labor, and pardoned a few

weeks later; the French Governor General then invited
Chau to spend a night at the residence but the old patriot
refused even then to cooperate with the colonialists.
He was removed, however, from the political scene, and
in Canton Ho was quickly able to pick up some of the
young exiles who had gathered around Chau, and there
started his own group. To the younger men who had al-

ready become impatient with what they considered the

vagueness and softness of Chau's policies. Ho, fresh from
Moscow with his new credentials and training, seemed an
attractive alternative. With five young Vietnamese he or-

ganized the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary

Youth, or Thanh Nien (so called after its newspaper), a
group which eventually became the forerunner of the In-
dochinese Communist party. ''Thanh Nien did not imme-
diately appear to be a Marxist sheet and the topics it

45
 .

dealt with were primarily nationalistic," writes Lacouture,

"but the authors subtly incorporated some of the basic
terms and expressions of Leninist dialectics in the attempt
to pave the way for the 'second phase' of the revolution.
For Ho knew well enough that the audience he must reach
consisted, in the main, of tradition-bound peasants. There-
fore he had deliberately divided his campaign into two
stages: the first was basically national, appealing to the
'most conscientious elements in every class' with a view
to establishing a 'bourgeois-democratic' regime; the sec-
ond led to socialism only after a transformation of eco-
nomic and social conditions that might take several dec-
."
ades . .

PHAN BOI CHAU, Ho had UOt,

DESPITE THE ARREST OF
by 1925, removed all opposition among the nationalists;
indeed there was considerable suspicion of him and his
Moscow origins in some of the other fledgling groups, sev-
eral of them more parochial and upper-class oriented.

Some of the secret societies which had followed Phan Boi

Chau now broke off and formed a group called the Tan
Viet. Ho's group flirted with this new group and hoped
to absorb it. But the Tan Viet leaders were dubious, and
in 1927, in an attempt to keep from being absorbed by
the Communists, they joined forces with another party.
This was the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang or VNQDD
^ nam Nationalist party) somewhat similar to the
(Viet-
Tan Viet
in make-up (schoolteachers, functionaries) though some-
what more urban-oriented. It was particularly strong in
the Hanoi area ( there, someone like a schoolteacher could
be quite effective, even though he could not travel as
freely as a revolutionary should be able to )

The VNQDD was more sophisticated in poUtical or-

46
ganization than any of its predecessors with their de-
pendency upon the old secret societies. For the first time,
a Vietnamese pohtical party was able to get beyond its
own parochialism. By 1929 it was also numerically the
strongest party in Vietnam, with more than 1,500 persons
belonging to 120 cells. At this point it decided on a pro-
gram of public militancy to demonstrate that it was a pow-
erful, growing force; by showing strength it would gain
even more support and thus dominate the entire national-
ist scene. Itwas a bold idea, and its failure was to redound
toJH^o's advantage as much as anything Ho himself ever

The VNQDD launched its first attack against the

French on February 9, 1929, with the assassination of a
French oflBcial who recruited laborers for the rubber plan-
tations. The assassination took place publicly in Hanoi.
But the French back quickly, capturing
authorities struck
party documents and immediately arresting 229 members
of the VNQDD ( those arrested reflected the profile of the
party: more than 50 percent were in the service of the
French administration, almost all had an educated back-

ground, and almost all were involved in urban occupa-

tions). Curiously, the French did not follow up these ar-
rests with harsh measures, and most of those arrested were

soon released. The party was under the leadership of

Nguyen Thai Hoc, who, rather than retrenching and work-
ing out a better organizational system, decided to strike
again, and quickly, to show that the VNQDD was not
beaten, but on the contrary, was stronger than ever. He
decided to plan mutinies among Vietnamese garrisons in
remote outposts. These mutinies were to coincide with
demonstrations in Hanoi.
The actual uprising was a disaster. It was delayed be-
cause of communications problems, and then, only parts

47
of the network were notified. While most of the conspira-
tors did nothing, two companies of Vietnamese troops
revolted in the town of Yen Bay, killing three French offi-
cers and two noncoms before they were put down by other,
loyal Vietnamese troops. Nguyen Thai Hoc canceled the
revolt and fled with twelve of his lieutenants to the Red
River delta town of Co An, where they hoped for a peas-
ant uprising. The uprisings were not forthcoming; the
local garrisons remained loyal to the French; and the
French used air strikes against the town of Co An. It was
the first use of air power in Indochina. Though the Viet-
namese were showing increasing signs of restlessness, many
Frenchmen held on to the idea that they were politically
naive or not interested in politics. Thus at Co An a French
journalist reflected in his dispatch some of the new ten-
sions plus the prevailing French viewpoint: "Today I am
at Co An and Co An is the most seditious of all communes

in Tonkin. If any argument is needed to convince those

who believe in the political indifference of the Annamite
peasant of their error, I would say that the French author-
ities judged it necessary to punish an entire village. Co An
was bombarded on February 16, 1930, by an air squadron.

Five planes . . . after having launched fifty-seven bombs

. . . sprayed Co An and the surrounding countryside with
machine guns . .
." Soon the thirteen leaders were cap-
tured by the French and executed.
The party was in a shambles. It was in even worse
shape two years later after the French staged a raid in Hai
Duong Province and captured seventy-four members. A
few adherents managed to escape to China, and though
the VNQDD worked out an arrangement with the Kuo-
mintang a few years later, it was never to be an effective
force in Vietnam again. Thus the one non-Communist na-
tionalist group which might have rivaled Ho for power

^
was destroyed. In the late 1940s, when French oflBcials

sought a nationahst party as an alternative to Ho and his

Communists, they could find no forceful group with any
organizational sense or patriotic reputation. The French
themselves had seen to that in the early thirties; they had
done Ho's work for him and his way now was clearer than
ever.

HO WANTED THE GROUP which formed around him in

Canton to become committed activists; he made them
study Marxism, made two of them join the Chinese Com-
munist party to ensure future contact with it. He sent a
third colleague to the Moscow Military Academy so that
he in turn might help train future troops of Vietnamese
nationalists. Others were sent to China's newly established
Whampoa Academy, where, under Borodin and
Military
Chiang Kai-shek (Chiang was still cooperating with the
Communists at the time) and Chou En-lai, the Russians
were training the Chinese Army. Ho also dispatched some
young men in whom he had great confidence back to Viet-
nam, where they organized the first cells and staged minor
demonstrations against the French. Among these infiltra-

tors was the son of a high-ranking mandarin from the im-

perial court. He was the brilliant Pham Van Dong, who
eventually became Ho's most trusted deputy, and who in
intellect and knowledge of his people rivaled Ho himself.
However, the base Canton was still dependent upon
in

the tenuous relationship between Chiang and the Russians.

In 1927 Chiang broke with the Communists and crushed
the Canton commune, ruthlessly stamping out many of the

Chinese Communists. But Ho and his people, perhaps be-

cause as foreigners on Chinese soil they were more sensi-
tive to political nuances — the position of any Vietnamese

49
on Chinese soil —
was always tenuous had made contin-
gency plans and most were able to escape, some to Han-
kow, some to Shanghai and to Hong Kong.
Ho left China, met with the Comintern officials in
Moscow, toured Europe and then returned to Asia, this
time to Thailand. He worked to organize the sizable Viet-
namese community in Bangkok, and helped to create the
Comintern's Southeast Asian network. Later he moved
into the mountain regions of northern Thailand, founded
a Vietnamese paper, and then returned to Bangkok, where,
disguised as a Buddhist priest, he studied and preached,
teaching the young priests social gospel.

WITH HO IN CANTON and othcr members in Vietnam,

the Thanh Nien group had become badly splintered; it
lacked a strong hand to guide it, and events were getting
out of control. Unrest had been intensifying inside Viet-
nam. Part of it was due to greater urbanization and indus-
trialization of the society; there was the beginning of a
working class now —a brewery, a rubber plantation, a ce-
ment factory. Part of it was the era. The world was simply
a more restless, turbulent place. Things which had been
impossible before World War I were now suddenly pos-
sible. The revolutionary fervor was intensifying. There

was a sharp increase in the number of paid workers, from

an estimated 12,000 in Tonkin in 1905 to 221,000 by 1929.
Similarly the number of strikes began to increase sharply,
in part because of natural resentments, and in part be-
cause as those resentments developed, the Communists
themselves responded to the possibilities and began to
provoke more restlessness, thus constantly expanding po-
litical activism. In 1928 in all of Vietnam there were only

ten strikes with 600 participants; by 1929 there were

30
twenty- four strikes with 6000 participants; by 1930 (with
increased Communist political activity now reflected in
the figure), there were eighty-three strikes with 27,000
participants. For the Communists this posed something of
a problem: were these outbreaks in industry going to give
the Vietnamese revolution too openly Marxist (and thus
foreign ) a character for this basically traditional and rural
society? Some of the younger men, feeling that events
were outstripping them, felt that the time had come to
form a Communist party; the Leninist phase had arrived.
Ho wanted no part of this, but he was in Thailand working
with the Vietnamese community there (and also working
as the Comintern's man in dealing with other Asian coun-
tries), and thus unable to control events. He felt a Com-
munist party was premature; he wanted a broader-based
nationalist party. When the Thanh Nien party held its con-
gress in Hong Kong in May 1929, the Tonkinese (indus-
trialization was by far the heaviest in their area) de-
manded the formation of a Communist party. The other
delegates seemed to remain loyal to Ho and were against
it.Thereupon most of the Tonkinese delegation walked
out; they went back and formed their own Indochinese
Communist party, shocking the others into the knowledge
that things were getting out of control, events were mov-
Two other groups now moved
ing faster than they realized.
ahead, calling themselves Communist parties, one called
itself the Indochinese Communist Federation, the other

the Vietnamese Communist Party. The exile group from

China, now living in Hong Kong, retained the title of

Thanh Nien. This deep factionalism of the society would

be a c onstant problem for all Vietnamese political groups;

one trusted himself and his family and very few others.

Political and secret societies tended to reflect the suspi-

cions of their members and their intellectual arrogance as

51
well. Thus there was a constant problem in trying to ex-
pand any political base beyond a specific region or group.
(Only Ho's Vietminh would eventually manage to solve
this dilemma, aided in no small part by the French deci-

sion to fight a war, which gave the Vietminh their great

binding cause.) In Moscow the leaders of the Comintern
were furious about this divisiveness; the last thing they
wanted in an embryonic party was factionalism, with its
inevitable consequences —
not only would there be a waste
of effort and energy, but each faction would betray the
other to the French authorities.^
Ho, unable to enter Vietnam, was finally dispatched to
Hong Kong, where he met with who had
his colleagues,

slipped into the British territory one by one.The meeting

was held in the stands of a soccer stadium, where the roars
of the Chinese soccer fans were almost matched by the
roars of the Vietnamese politicians. Eventually Ho was
able to bring the different factions together under the
name Indochinese Communist Party. Shortly afterward he
published the party's aims

1. To overthrow French imperialism, feudalism and

the reactionary Vietnamese capitalist class.
2. To make Vietnam completely independent.
3. To establish a government composed of workers,
peasants and soldiers.
4. To confiscate the banks and other enterprises be-
longing to the imperialists and put them under control of
the government.
5. To confiscate all of the plantations and property
belonging to the imperialists and the Vietnamese reaction-
ary capitalist class, and distribute them to the poor peasants.
6. To implement the eight-hour working day.
7. To abolish public loans and the poll tax. To waive
unjust taxes burdening the poor people.
8. To bring back all freedoms to the masses.

52

\
 g. To carry out universal education.
10. To implement equality between man and woman.
Ho's was completely clandestine. He changed
life

names and disguises, moving back and forth between

Hong Kong and other parts of China and meeting col-
leagues. "Darling,'* said a note to another revolutionary,
"I await you in Thien Thi's billiard room." Now the fledg-
ling Communist party, seeing the early organizational suc-
cesses scored by the VNQDD, decided that it must counter
with demonstrations of its own, perhaps not so much to

overthrow the French as to prevent being outflanked by

the non-Communist Nationalists.
So about a year and a half after the early VNQDD
uprisings, the Communist leadership started looking for
an area where the Communists might be strong and the
Fren ch weak —unlike the VNQDD, which had struck
where the French were strongest. (It was always a mark
of the Communists to conserve resources, if at all pos-
sible. ) They decided on a combined peasants and workers'

uprising in the area of Nghe An and Ha Tinh in north-

central Vietnam. These were areas where the Communist
leadership had particularly strong ties with workers in the
towns and their relatives in the villages. The Communists
knew that the failure of several harvests had caused grow-
ing unrest among the peasants. The leadership of the party

decided to go ahead with the uprising, over the opposition

of Ho, who was out of the country and thought the demon-
stration was premature. In February 1930 the first organ-
izers were sent into Nghe An, and starting with May Day

1930 there were incidents and demonstrations for a two-

year period. The high point came after the first four
months of organizational work during which the Commu-
nists, as usual, concentrated on local issues. These pre-
Hminaries included protests against high salt prices, de-

53
mands for destruction of district tax rolls and calls for in-

creased workers' pay. On September 12, 1930, peasants

gathered in village after village, formed groups and finally
joined in a massive march on Vinh, the provincial capital.
When they reached Vinh, more than six thousand demon-
strators marched, extending along four kilometers of high-
way. The French reacted with aircraft, which attacked

the column, killing more than two hundred men and

wounding another hundred. (More than a year later a
French journalist named Andree Viollis described being
outside Vinh and seeing huge tombs along a river bank.
Her guide, a French official, told her what they were.
"They date back to September 13 of last year," he told
me. "On that morning we suddenly saw an enormous troop
of 5000-6000 individuals marching in closed ranks on
."
Vinh . .

"Were they armed?"

"Good God, I don't really know. They came suppos-
edly to carry to the Residence their complaints against the
taxes, which they considered excessive. This is always the
way revolts begin. They were told to stop, but would not
listen and crossed the barriers. It was necessary to send

planes with bombs against them. About 100 to 120 fell.

The others fled like rabbits Unfortunately in the eve-
. . .

ning, when the people of a village that had remained loyal

came to bury the dead, it was thought that this was an-
other demonstration and the planes were sent out again.
Result: Another fifteen dead. An awkward error which
had a bad effect.")
During this period the Communists also started or-
ganizing their own local Soviets in village after village in
the area. They found that it was not difficult to set them
up; village institutions had deteriorated under the French,
and both the French and the mandarin governments had

54
proved unresponsive. Though eventually the French made
a major pacification effort in the area and destroyed the
Communist network, the Communists learned greatly from
the experience. The Soviets served as a model for some of
the cells they formed when they returned to Vietnam a
little more than a decade later. In addition, there was con-
siderable reevaluation of successes and mistakes. (This
would become a Vietminh trade-
relentless self-criticism
mark.) The greatest success had been in using local issues.
The mostTenous error, they decided in retrospect, was the
use of terror against lower-echelon Vietnamese exercising
authority on behalf of the French, instead of terror aimed
^the French themselves. Rather than trying to separate
from the French as much of the bourgeoisie as possible,
the Indochinese Communist party had driven them to the
side of the French. The French were pleased with their
success in policing the outbreaks and driving the Com-
munists back into the hills. But there must have been an
ominous quality to the experience: the skill of the demon-
strators, the organizational strength, the use of peasants
as such a disciplined and active political force must have
been disquieting. For if the peasants could become a ma-
jor political force, then the future of France in Indochina
was v ery dubious.

THE FRENCH ADMINISTRATION, SCUSiug first in the

Yen Bay revolt and then in the Nghe An strikes that it had,
if anything, been too lenient, realizing that its position was

becoming hazardous, now struck back hard. Several of

Ho's deputies, including Pham Van Dong, were arrested
and sent to the dreaded island of Con Son; Tran
Phu, the party secretary-general, subsequently died in a

Cholon hospital —according to party accounts because he

ss
had been brutally tortured. Ho was still in Hong Kong,
but the Vinh court sentenced him to death in absentia,
and the Surete asked the British authorities to extradite
him. The British, worried about unrest in their own South-
east Asian territories, arrested Ho on June 6, 1931, along
with two other Comintern agents. The question immedi-
ately arose, however, whether the British would turn him
over to the French. Two Britons interested themselves in
his case: Frank Loseby, a noted anti-imperialist, and Staf-
ford Cripps, who would one day be Chancellor of the Ex-
chequer. They worked tirelessly to prevent Ho's extradi-
tion and eventually won their case. Since Ho was a po-
litical refugee, he was not subject to extradition.

At this point Ho's health was slipping; he had not been

well for several years, apparently suffering from some form
of tuberculosis, which had worsened during his stay in the
Hong Kong jail. It was typical of his shadowy existence at
this time that it was fully recorded that he had died in

jail. The French Surete marked him down as dead; VHu-

manite and the Soviet press both buried him; Vietnamese

students in Moscow held a memorial service for a fallen
comrade. (Lacouture notes that little more than a decade
later when an alert young French intelligence officer sent
a message back to Paris from Cao Bang saying that Ho's
name kept cropping up, a high official answered back:
"What kind of lunatic is sending us information like that?
Everyone knows Nguyen Ai Quoc died in Hong Kong in
the early thirties. . .
." Eventually, the Surete would later
identify the real Ho by indentations on his ear lobes.)
Loseby managed to smuggle Ho out of the prison hos-
pital in mid- 1932 and slip him aboard a boat going to
Fukien Province. He eventually made his way to Shanghai,
where he waited for an opportunity to make contact with
the Comintern apparatus. He was playing the dangerous

56
 )

game of trying to let the apparatus know who he was with-

out exposing himself to the threat of arrest by Chinese
authorities. The Comintern, was particularly sus-
of course,
picious of being involved with someone who had just left
a British prison. (Rumors that he worked for the British
intelligence service would stay with Ho for more than two
decades because of this.

He did make contact, however, and shortly afterward

he slipped back to Moscow where he attended the
, Insti-

tute for National and Colonial Questions and the well-

known graduate school for senior Communist officials, the
Lenin The years that he spent there were tur-
Institute.

bulent ones in the Communist world; it was the height of

the purges one after another of the great men of the Com-
:

munist world disappeared as Stalin lashed out again and

again. To much of the Caucasian world. Communism
would never be viewed in the same way again; the ro-
mance of the revolution was now obscured by the new
brutality, by the harshness of the one-man dictatorship
which was descending.*
But Ho was never harmed by the great Soviet terror.
"What is remarkable," wrote Bernard Fall, "is that Ho, as
a well-known member of the Comintern group, was not
purged right along with them, for hundreds of thousands
of people of lesser distinction than he became victims of

Stalin's mania. One reason for this may have been his ab-

sence from the USSR when the major break came between
StaHn and the 'internationalist' wing of the party structure;

another may be that Ho, as a doer rather than a theoreti-

There would never be anything resembling a purge of the Vietnam-

*

ese Communist leadership; indeed, in 1969 the top group was stunningly
similar to what it had been in 1945 at the start of the war. The reason
for the stability stemmed from the mutual confidence of Ho and his
colleagues. They knew each other, they never doubted each other's
legitimacy and commitment. They knew how good they were.

57
 )

cian, had never participated in the fundamental debates

between the StaHnists and their opposition; and lastly, Ho
probably was then unconditionally loyal to Stalin and
Stalin knew it."

THE PERIOD OF THE POPULAR FRONT, whcU the Soviet

Union decided to cooperate with the Western democra-
cies, was a particularly difficult time for Ho. Nationalist

feeling was seething in Vietnam, and now suddenly when

it had reached a pitch he had long hoped for, it had to be

replaced by a Moscow-based policy of cooperation with

the despised French. For Ho himself, the hardened pro-
fessional revolutionary, Moscow-trained and aware of the
importance of Moscow's support, it was a difficult burden
but one that he could understand; but for many of the
other Vietnamese nationalists it was an outrageous policy.

( Indeed, if the VNQDD had not shot its bolt so early in

the thirties this might have proved the period in which it
could have made great strides against the Communists,
for the Communists were tied to international policies,
while the VNQDD would have been able to concentrate
on local grievances and nationalism.
Ho left Moscow for Asia. Part of his job was to pacify
some of his more restless people who were angry at the
limits placed on them during the Popular Front period

which began in 1937, a period which saw them moderate

their critiques against the French, according to the line
laid down by the Soviets. But the Popular Front, with its

loosening of the restrictions against indigenous political

ambitions and drives. The
activity, intensified nationalist

Communists were active but wary. Ho himself did not

come into Vietnam, and both Giap and Dong operated as
part of a front group called the Indochinese Democratic

58
 Front, Dong himself having been arrested in 1931, but
released during the amnesty brought on with the Front.
In the fall of 1939, the Front abruptly ended, and both
Dong and Giap escaped to China, though about two hun-
dred Communists were arrested by the French.
In 1938 Ho had returned to China. Japan was defeat-
ing the Chinese in battle after battle, and the threat of
Japanese victory brought Chiang and the Communists into
another temporary rapprochement. Chiang asked the Com-
munists for guerrilla- warfare instructors, and soon Ho was
teaching Chiang's troops. But, more important, he was
reunited with Dong, and would meet Giap, the military
genius; together the three would make a revolution and
form the structure with which to defeat the French.
It had been many years since Ho and Dong had last

met, and each was checking out the other's appearance.

Ho told another Vietnamese, "Young Dong hasn't aged
much," and then, pointing to Giap, said, "He's still as fresh
as a girl of twenty." Giap, scheduled by appointment to
meet a mysterious Vietnamese sent by the Comintern,
wondered whether or not it would be the famed Nguyen
Ai Quoc; he sensed it would, and he had carried his pic-
ture with him for many years. "A man of mature years
stepped towards us, wearing European clothes and a soft
felt hat. Compared with the famous photograph, now

twenty years old, he looked livelier, more alert. He had let

his beard grow. I found myself confronted by a man of
shining simpHcity. This was the first time I had set eyes

on him, yet we were already conscious of deep bonds of

friendship ... He spoke with the accent of central Viet-
nam. I would never have believed it possible for him to
."
retain the local accent after being abroad for so long . .

Yet anyone who knew Ho and would have re-

his style

H ahzed that despite his years abroad the things he would

S9
 be most careful never to lose would be his local accent and
his sense of the country and its mores. In fact, when he

entered Hanoi in 1945 and addressed his own people for

the first time, he said, "I can't tell you what you have to do
[to achieve nationhood] but I can show it to you." He put

his thumb on the table. "If everywhere you put your

thumb on the sacred earth of Vietnam, and a plant will

grow, then we will succeed. If not, we will fail." Paul Mus,
the French expert on Vietnam, who witnessed the scene,
was struck by the fact that this man who had been absent
so long had lost no feel or touch for the life of a peasant.
"He was on the one hand a Marxist economist who knows
the importance of the basic production and on the other
hand a Confucian scholar, because what you must keep
in mind is the idea that the thumb on the earth is a simple
—
Chinese proverb a thumb-square of planting rice is more
precious than a thumb-square of gold. So you can see how
Ho Chi Minh in that situation was directly in contact with
the millions of peasants in the rice fields, who at the sight

of him were ready to give all their strength, all their de-
votion to the nation, and if needed, their blood."

NOW WITH WORLD WAR II BREAKING OUT, with the

Japanese penetrating farther and farther into Southeast
Asia, the possibilities for real revolution mounted. In Eu-

^ rope, Germany marched against France and defeated

France seemed a rotten core of a nation, as decadent as
Ho's speeches had claimed two decades earlier.
it;

Thus, IIo
knew that theFrench hold on Vietnam would be weak-
ened, but that it would be replaced by a tougher Japanese
hold. He was one of the first to see the possibilities that
France would be set back by the Japanese in Asia, that
eventually the Allies would defeat Germany and Japan,

60
and that after a warwould be particularly exhausting
that
for the major powers there would probably be a huge
vacuum not only in Vietnam but throughout the colonial
world. (The great powers, particularly America, were
probably not as exhausted as Ho, based on his knowledge
of World War I, had imagined they would be. ) He further
saw that Vietnam would go to the best-organized and best-
disciplined indigenous force, which best exploited the war
years and devoted its energies to strengthening itself rather
than unnecessarily fighting or antagonizing the Japanese
or the French. In addition he foresaw a relatively free
hand in Asia for the Vietnamese Communist party; the
Soviet Union, preoccupied with its own survival, would
not be able to issue orders demanding that Ho love the
French one month and hate them the Thus the Com-
next.
munists could once again be anti-French and no longer
worry about a local nationalist party outflanking them.
Ho worked and studied with Dong and Giap in China
from 1938 to 1940. Then in the winter of 1940 he set up
the firsFTlBefated zone" at Pac Bo in the Cao Bang area,

a mountainous region out of reach of the French; for the

first time in thirty years he slipped back into his own
country.

61
 .

CHAPTER

4
CREATING A NATIONALIST
MOVEMENT
1941-1945
"To be a man, you must endure
the pestle of misfortune!'

HIS ABSENCE had not robbed him of any relevance

or poUtical position; on the contrary, over the years he
had added steadily to his reputation. Now Ho watched
carefully and planned his strategy subtly. In the moun-
tains near the Chinese border he up headquarters in
set

a large cave. A nearby peak became Karl Marx Moun-

tain; a stream, Lenin Stream. Day after day he gave in-

struction to his aides. He published a small newspaper,

and now after many years of having to use "Indochinese''
in all titles he could call the paper simply Viet Lap (In-
dependent Vietnam )
In early May 1941, far from the world's center stage,
he convened the eighth plenum of the Indochinese Com-
munist party. In a hut, around a bamboo table, the
delegates sat on simple Here a new party
wood blocks.
came into being. Its official title was the Vietnam Doc
Lap Dong Minh, or the League for Vietnamese Inde-

62
pendence — or, for history, the Vietminh. Here, with men
who were at once dedicated Communists and ardent na-
tionalists. Ho set the basic poUcy that would enable this

small but brilliantly organized and brilliantly led minority

to capture the seething nationalism of Vietnam and make
it theirs, to war and to withstand
defeat France in one
the awesome armed might of America in another. Here
Ho told his people that the base of the Vietminh must be
as broad as possible, that it must be above all patriotic,

that, whatever else, it must be more Vietnamese than the

—
opposition the test of an idea or a policy would be how
Vietnamese it was. To form a party that was overtly
Communist, he said, would not only alienate potential Viet-
namese allies on economic or intellectual grounds, but it
might also make the Vietminh vulnerable to the criticism
from Communists were subject to for-
rival parties that

—
eign domination a damaging charge in a rebellion aimed
at evicting a foreign power. So Ho demanded and won a

broad National Front which would unite workers, peas-

ants, the petit bourgeois, and even "patriotic land-

owners."
For more than two decades Ho had been a good
international Communist, often swallowing aspects of in-
ternational Communism which he must have despised,
which hurt him politically at home. Now finally he was
ideologically free to concentrate on the one idea which
had never left his mind: the liberation of his own country.
That most powerful force in Vietnam, the longing to get
out from under foreign domination, the longing to be
Vietnamese again, would become the property of the Viet-
jninh. The flag would be a Vietnamese The Com- flag.

munist party would be a Vietnamese Communist party.

Jhe purpose of the struggle would be Cuu Quoc (Na-
tional Salvation), the program: "After the overthiow of

63
the Japanese fascists and the French imperiahsts, a revo-
lutionary government of the Democratic RepubHc of
Vietnam will be set up in the new democracy; its emblem
will be the red flag with a gold star." In June 1941 Ho
crossed over to China briefly and broadcast a famous
address which was spread throughout Vietnam, by paper,
by word of mouth, in every possible way:
Now the come for our liberation.
opportunity has
France unable to dominate our country. As to the
itself is

Japanese, on the one hand they are bogged down in China,

on the other they are hamstrung by the British and Ameri-
can forces and certainly cannot use all of their forces to
contend with us. If our entire people are united and single-
minded, we can certainly smash the picked French and
Japanese armies Several hundreds of years ago when
. . .

our country was endangered by the Mongolian invasion,

our elders under the Tran dynasty rose up indignantly and
called on their sonsand daughters throughout the country
to rise asone in order to kill the enemy Let us unite . . .

together! As one in mind and strength we shall overthrow

the Japanese and French and their jackals in order to save
people from the situation between boiling water and burn-
ing heat.

Now he and Giap were no longer just planners. They

were activists. Ho and Soviet writings
translated Chinese
on guerrilla war; Giap trained military cadres and propa-
ganda bands and sent the teams deeper and deeper into
Vietnam.

IN 1942 Ho quietly slipped back into China. His

most important reason was to work out his relations with
Chiang Kai-shek. It was crucial to do this, for it appeared
that Chiang might well be the eventual winner in China
(he enjoyed reasonably good relations with the Allies),
and there was no point in a policy that envisioned the
fall of Japan and France but saw Vietnam swallowed up

64
 —

by a hostile Chinese government. A rapprochement was

necessary because Ho had been identified with Chiang's
domestic enemies. It was at this point that he changed
hisname for the last time, probably because Nguyen Ai
Quoc was a Comintern name and would have antagonized
thenon-Communist Chinese. He had on some of his Chi-
nesevisits used the name Ho Quang and had even been

known as Uncle Ho. Now he added the Chi Minh Ho —

Who Enlightens.
On this trip he traveled in the guise of a Chinese
journalist working in Vietnam, but nonetheless was ar-

rested almost as soon as he crossed over into China.

Chiang was not particularly enthused about the prospect
of having a Communist government to the South; rather
he was interested in seeing the Vietnamese version of his
own Kuomintang strengthened. So Ho was arrested and
imprisoned.
Once again it was reported that he had died. Giap
later recounted: "One day I received a letter from Pham
Van Dong . . . informing me that Uncle Ho had just
died in the jails of the Kuomintang. We were almost
paralyzed with grief. We organized a ceremony of com-
memoration for our revered leader, and Comrade Dong
was given the task of writing his funeral oration. We
opened Uncle's rattan case in search of mementos. One
of our comrades was dispatched to China with orders to

locate his grave ... A few months later we received a

newspaper mailed from China. On the wrapper were a
few lines of verse in a hand which was well known to us:

The clouds are setting the peaks aglow

The peaks are hugging the clouds
I wander alone, roused to feelings,

Scanning the distant southern sky

I am thinking of my friends.

65
We were wild with joy and no less astonished. We fired

question after question at Comrade Dong, who had

brought the sad news to us. *But,' he insisted, 'the Chi-

nese governor told me: "Su Liu! Su Liu! (already

dead!)."' 'No, no, your ear confused the tonic accents;
what he must have said was "Chu Liu! Chu Liu! (very
fit!)."'"
For more than a year Ho was moved from jail to jail
while the Chinese tried to influence him to work for them,
to head their own Vietnamese nationalist group. It was
during this time that he kept his prison notebook, cer-
tainly the best writing he ever did: prison thoughts, ex-
pressed in poems. The thoughts are simple, edged with a
moral tone — a very sharp bite. They reflect his own sense
of irony about the injustices he suffered, and yet a com-
plete sense of confidence, as if he knew that being in
prisonwas a required part of his biography, a test to
which he was being put, which could only toughen him
and prove him more worthy of his people. Indeed, he
wrote:

The rice grain suffers under the pestle;

yet admire its when the
whiteness ordeal is over.
It is the same with human beings in our time
to be a man, you must endure the pestle of misfortune.

Of his chains he wrote in a poem called "The Leg Irons":

With hungry mouth open like a wicked monster.

Each night the irons devour the legs of people:
The jaws grip the right leg of every prisoner:
Only the left is free to bend and stretch.

Yet there is one thing stranger in this world:

People rush to place their legs in irons.
Once they are shackled, they can sleep in peace.
Otherwise they would have no place to lay their heads.

66
Or in another called "Autumn Night":

In front of the gate, the guard stands with his rifle.

Above, untidy clouds are carrying away the moon.
The bedbugs are swarming round like army tanks on ma-
neuvers.
While mosquitoes form squadrons, attacking like fighter
planes.

My heart travels a thousand toward my native land. li

My dream intertwines with sadness like a skein of a thou-

sand threads.
Innocent, I have now endured a whole year in prison.
Using my tears for ink, I turn my thoughts into verses.

And finally:
. . . Being chained is a luxury to compete for.
The chained have somewhere to sleep,
the unchained haven't . . .

The State treats me to its rice, I lodge in its palaces,

its guards take turns escorting me.
Really, the honor is too great . . .

Ho was held in prison for thirteen months. Chiang

waTTfi no mood to release him, seeking instead a Viet-
namese nationalist group which was at once pro-Chinese
"and anti- Communist. But just as Chiang's own party was to
prove too tied to the past and too feudal in style to survive
in the modem same problems
age, so did he discover the
among his Vietnamese counterparts. He wanted intelli-
gence on the Japanese from them but information was
never forthcoming. Frustrated, Chiang decided he needed
the Vietminh, after all, but created a new group, the Dong
Minh Hoi, in which the Vietminh was just one of ten po-
litical groups. By
means he hoped to use the Viet-
this

minh which was probably the best

intelligence network,
in Vietnam, without giving them political control. They
of course went along, but failed to send in very much
intelligence. Finally, reluctantly, the Chinese decided to

67
 release Ho, make him the head of the Dong Minh Hoi,
to
and to give him what was estimated at $100,000 for his
use. It was one more benefit of Ho's truly professional
training. One of the lessons Ho had learned, and learned
well, from the Russians was the importance of intelligence:
place your best men and your even better
in intelligence,
men was this kind of lesson
in counterintelligence. It

which Moscow passed on that was particularly valuable

for the young party and which allowed them to survive
during the clandestine days when other rival parties would
prove more vulnerable to the French deuxieme bureau.
Unchained, Ho returned to Vietnam.

ONE WAY World War II marked the beginning

IN
of the end for the white man in Indochina. The Vietnam-
ese had seen a modern army, but a modern Asian one,
humiliate the proud Western conqueror. White men who
had until recently related to yellow men only as master
to serf were now at the mercy of Asians. Thus a rebellion
against French authority seemed more than ever a real
possibility. It w as not jordained forever _thaL_whitj£_inen
would rule yellow men. In addition, the strength -of- the
French was limited now: they could no longer control the
whole country to the degree they had before; more and
more they had pulled back to the larger cities. They were
preoccupied with the Japanese, and their hold on the
/ countryside, always considerably weaker than their hold
on the cities, was relaxed. Thus the opportunities for in-
filtration and subversion were greater.

Other nationalist groups were forming too, sensing

that the winds were changing and that the old order was
on the verge of collapse; the competition among the po-
litical groups was heightening. But the other groups

68
tended to be upper-class and better educated; they did
not want to change the entire order, just part of it. They
wanted to throw oflF the French but keep their special
privilege. Thus —
as Ho had realized more than two dec-

ades earlier when he opted for Communism — their bour-

geois base was likely to be limited. The deep-rooted
power it would take to fight the colonialists must be based
on more than a parochial sense of injustice. Would enough
functionaries, partially blocked in their careers, lay down
their lives for a better administrative spot?
(The party which would be the greatest single rival
to the Vietminh would be the Dai Viet, but a quick
look revealed its weakness in a revolutionary era. It was
composed of upper-class Vietnamese what the Viet- —
mlhh called "bourgeois nationalists'' —men who had gone
through the French educational system, receiving the
highest degrees. As much as Vietnamese could play a
role in colonial life they had played it. They had not
worked on expanding their base by indoctrinating peas-
ants, but instead had concentrated on fighting for position

and gaining prestige. "The anti-French spirit they mani-

fested," wrote John McAlister, "was emphatically not a
result of rejection ofFrench culture, but a result of their
impatience at being blocked in their occupational mo-
bility with a French-made framework just short of man-
aging the affairs of their country . .
." The first puppet
government which the Japanese formed in April 1945, as
thewar turned badly, was a largely Dai Viet government
of Tran Trong Kim; it included four medical doctors, a
professor and a distinguished jurist. These were not the
kind of men down
to lay their lives readily, nor for whom
others would lay down theirs. Their very thin hold on
power made the way of the Vietminh easier than might
have been expected.

69
 In addition to being upper-class jhese other nationalist
,

groups were often parties or societies of the past. They

knew only one wanted to get the French out.
thing: they
But they lacked the modern skills and structure to enable
them to do it. They had not studied under the new pro-
fessional revolutionaries, who not only dreamed of revo-
lution but spent long hard hours practicing to achieve it:

how to put together a party, how to organize a cell, how

to keep one cell from knowing of the existence of another
(so that a betrayal would have a limited effect), how to
pass messages, how to blend military and political propa-

ganda, how to make the military always an arm of the

political.

The first lesson of the Vietminh was that the military

is uselessimless it is totally political, and of course the

// second lesson was that political skill is useless unless there

is comparable military Power does flow from the
force.
mouth of a gun. Thus by the time World War II was over
in 1945, the Vietminh was the one resistance group with
a strong military arm.
Much of this jprofessionalism was a reflection of the
toughness and skill of Ho. For he was the beaming father
figure of his people, the man of constant simplicity, the
soft-spoken Asian who seemed gentle, indeed almost
sweet, sometimes self -mocking, his humor and warmth in
sharp contrast to the normal bureaucratic grimness of a
high Communist ojEcial. This was the great nationalist
who reflected the traditions and aspirations of his people
— this was the Gandhi side. But there was the Communist
side too. It made him no less a nationalist; indeed he had
chosen Communism as the way not because he had any"
illusions about its harshness, but precisely because he
had believed in his youthful desperation that only a force
as strong and brutal as Communism could generate the

70
power to make hard and
his nationalism succeed. This
callous sidewas rarely seen in public, yet it was always
there. He had followed the party line when necessary.
He had seen the crimes of Stalin and never flinched. He
knew that independence demanded a terrible price, and
he was quite prepared to pay it. He was willing to have
Giap liquidate rival nationalist elements and willing to
turn over to the French Surete the names of true Viet-
namese patriots because they were rivals. It was not that
they did not have the same goal as Ho, but that their
way to achieve it was different and therefore might en-
—
danger Ho's way which he had decided was the right
one. "I am a professional revolutionary. I am always on
strict orders. My itinerary is always carefully prescribed
—and you can't deviate from the route, can you?" he
once told a French Communist friend. He was both the
great nationalist and the tough old Bolshevik. (At a fu-
neral service for a Vietnamese nationalist who had been
slain because of his Trotskyite views. Ho turned to a
friend and said, with great feeling, "He was a great
patriot and we mourn him," adding moments later, "All
those who do not follow the line which I have laid down
will be broken.''
Now as he strengthened the military arm of his party
he had the perfect aide, the brilliant, intense Giap, an
aristocrat, an educated man with a history degree, who
differed from the upper-class mandarins of the Dai Viet
in that he had become a full-time revolutionary at an
early age; he had forsaken his past while they wanted
to hold on to theirs, and to make it fuller. To Western
eyes, Giap, who would become one of the great military
leaders of the twentieth century, always seemed more
militant than Ho, more full of revolutionary fervor, more
filled with bitterness against the white man. He had es-

71
caped from Vietnam with the end of the Popular Front
in 1939, but his wife, also a revolutionary, was captured
by the French and died in prison. Giap always believed
her death resulted from mistreatment and he became even
more passionate a revolutionary. It was Giap who took
Ho's ideas and translated them into military terms, who
understood how to train and organize troops, and how to
exploit the Vietminh's political superiority against the
French military superiority. He had needed a military
base secure from both the Chinese and the French (and
the Japanese too). For this reason he fashioned a war-
time friendship with the guerrilla Chu Van Tan, the
leader of the Thos, who, unlike most montagnard tribes,
were anti-French. The physical impregnability of the
base areas of the Thos gave Giap his redoubt. There in
December 1944, with two revolvers, seventeen rifles,

fourteen flintlock rifles, one light machine gun and thirty-

four men, Giap formed the first platoon of the People's

Liberation Force.
was this army that within the next nine years was
It

to grow to six divisions and, as one of the world's great

infantry forces, defeat the French at Dienbienphu. There
in the mountain hideaway, Giap worked out his essen-
tially simple guerrilla strategy. What did his people have
above all else in a showdown with the French? Man-
power. What did they lack most? Weapons and materiel.
Therefore what should be the heart of the strategy? Go
for weapons. Where? Wherever the French were most
overextended—in tiny outposts where they were isolated
and pinned down, a perfect target, where the Vietminh
would know exactly how many Frenchmen with how
many weapons were waiting, where no Vietnamese would
warn them of the approach of the Vietminh, and finally
where the Vietminh could strike in the early morning. If

72
there were ten men inside the post the Vietminh would
strike with thirty men. The next day there would be ten

more weapons. Then they would hit posts of thirty men.

And soon a hundred, and then more. A lways striking in
superior numbers, always striking where success was al-
most certain. As Giap's forces grew, he sent them farther
into the country to organize villages, to extend the net-
work.

MEANWHILE Ho was scusiug the international mood.

He knew he had to prepare for war on two fronts. One
was the Vietnamese front. With the end of the war coming
quickly (because of the atomic bomb it would come even
more quickly than he suspected) Vietnam would be in
chaos and a vacuum would exist. The group which was
best organized, which showed itself to be the most legiti-
mate authority, both to foreigners and to Vietnamese,
might gain many long-range benefits by acting quickly.
The second, and closely connected, front was the
international one. Here again Ho's remarkable travels
would place him far ahead of other Vietnamese leaders
in gauging international moves. The French would be
weak but would probably try to reassert their authority.
The Chinese were a genuinely dangerous force and must
not be antagonized (the French were preferable to deal
with in some ways, since they were both weaker and
logistically farther away). The Americans were a puzzle:

they were at once imperialist and anticolonialist, a po-

tential counterforce to the French. So Ho would make
himself useful to the Americans. He would help return
their downed fliers and speed them useful intelligence
about the Japanese. In return they would give him arms.
This would be doubly significant. Not only were the arms

73
 :

themselves crucial, but the fact that Vietnamese peasants

would know that powerful Westerners were helping Ho
would be a great aid in gaining legitimacy. And that was
exactly what happened.
The Americans found Ho very helpful and charming
indeed. Robert Shaplen has written of the first OSS man
who was parachuted into the mountain headquarters. Ho
charmed him completely: "He was an awfully sweet old
guy. If I had to pick out one quality about that little old
man sitting on his hill in the jungle, it was his gentle-
ness,'' the American recalled. There in the hills the Ameri-

can helped Ho plan raids to free American and French

internees, helped him get in touch with French negoti-
ators in Kunming, and helped him frame a Vietnamese
declaration of independence. Typically, Ho knew more
about the American Declaration than the young Ameri-
can and, just as typically, was deadly serious about it. In
August 1945, when the Vietminh seized power, Ho would
make a speech to five hundred thousand people gathered
in Hanoi. His opening words were: "All men are created
equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain
inalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness ." Ho also kept up a surprisingly
. .

grammatical correspondence with the young American:

Dear weaker since you left. Maybe I'd have to

Lt. I feel
follow your advice —
moving to some other place where
food is easy to get to improve my health. . .

I'm sending you a bottle of wine, hope you like it.

Be so kind as to give me foreign news you got . . .

Please be good enuf to send to your H.Q. the following

wires
National Liberation Committee of VML begs U.S.A.
authorities to inform United Nations the following. We
were on the side of the United Nations.
fighting Japs Now
Japs surrendered. We beg United Nations to realize their

74
 solemn promise that all nationalities will be given democ-
racy and independence. If United Nations forget their
solemn promise and don't grant Indo-China full independ-
ence, we will keep on fighting until we get it.

Signed — National Liberation Committee of VML.

Thank you for all troubles I give you . . . best greetings.
Yours sincerely,
Hoo [sic]

In early 1945 Ho apparently visited Kunming, where

he presented his case for weapons to the American mission

there. The American in charge laid down strict conditions:

that the weapons not be used against the French, and
that American agents be permitted into the rebel-con-
trolled areas. The Americans later claimed that they gave
Ho only a few revolvers, although there is considerable
evidence that five thousand weapons were airdropped to
the Vietminh in the summer by the Allies. Also
of 1945
according to both French and Communist accounts, the
number of Vietminh troops in the country at the time
of the fall of Japan, was five thousand. Five thousand
weapons may not have been many by Western standards,
but it was far more than any other resistance group had.
The Vietminh's sense of weaponry made its organization
—
seem much more impressive the number of weapons
multiplied in the minds of the population and the op-
position (indeed, one handmade weapon could control a
village in the early days of the war). Steadily Giap in-

filtrated his troops farther into the country; by June 1945

he controlled six provinces in northern Vietnam, and he
was extending that control all the time; more important,
J^ Giap's was the only no nf oreign military force.

THE COLLAPSE OF THE JAPANESE Came vcry Sud-

denly. Of all the Vietnamese groups, only one was ready

75
with a scenario for the occasion. Only one knew how to
organize shock troops, how to stir pubUc demonstrations
and then turn the pubhc mood to its own favor. That w^s_
the Vietminh. In August 1945 they moved into the vacuum
and seized power with what in retrospect seems almost
ridiculous ease.
On August 17, immediately after the Japanese sur-
render, a coalition group of Emperor Bao Dai, re-
garded by most Vietnamese as a puppet figure, and the
Dai Viet, the largely upper-class party, held a mass meet-
ing in Hanoi. It turned out to be a massive mistake, since
the strength of this group was more in bureaucratic con-
trol than in revolutionary fervor and public demonstration.

More than 150,000 people showed up. It was a crucial

moment. Suddenly at the height of the meeting, Vietminh
flags appeared everywhere. One was on the rostrum. The

people started cheering. A Vietminh speaker attacked the

Tran Trong Kim group as weak, and proclaimed that
only a truly revolutionary group was strong enough to
wrest power from the Japanese and French. The speaker
demanded: "Let us unite together in a single bloc. The
independence of the Fatherland can be won only by
blood . . . We must was a stir-
take arms and rise up." It

ring appeal at a time when public enthusiasm and mili-

tancy ran strong. The Vietminh leaders then turned the
demonstration into a street parade through Hanoi, show-
ing Vietminh propaganda banners and the Vietminh flag.

Before the demonstration was over, about a hundred

local-government militia men had joined the parade. It
was an exciting time for all Vietnamese: war had
the
ended, the white man's grip seemed to be weakening be-
fore their eyes, and here was the Vietminh promising a
revolution —and leading it. Similar scenes were taking
place in Saigon and Hue. The Vietminh had organized

76
the cities, they had seized the initiative, seized the very
excitement' and drama of the occasion itself and made it

theirs.

The student groups had been growing more and more

powerful in the occupation years. One reason was that
the French, fearing that their influence might ebb during
the Japanese occupation, had instituted a massive sports
and physical-education program, which turned out to be
an ideal leadership-training ground for Vietnamese na-
tionalism. Studentswere now faced with a choice be-
tween the leadership of the tired old upper class that
held its mandate from the Japanese or the Vietminh,
legendary folk heroes who had always fought the colonial-
ists and who now stepped out of their mountain hideouts
and walked into Hanoi The decision was
as liberators.

inevitable. Within hours the students became a vital part

of the Vietminh shock machinery.
By August 19, having succeeded with political tactics,

the Vietminh was ready to show its military hand as well.

On that morning about a thousand armed Vietminh troops

walked into Hanoi and seized control. Somehow there
seemed to be more of them than there actually were. The
Japanese-installed government was caught by surprise.

The 30,000 Japanese troops offered no resistance. The

local Hanoi police and militia wavered at first. But soon
they became caught up in the rising tide of the day, for
they saw the force of the Vietminh in action: these sol-

diers seemed to know what they were doing; they seemed

to be already in charge. Sensing the need for a symbolic

gesture, the Vietminh stormed the official residence of

had fled the
the imperial delegate, only to find that he
city. To anyone who knew what had happened during
the Soviet takeover in Eastern Europe the pattern was
familiar: neutralization of the local armed units, takeover

77
nf i-Tift Icpy flHrmnistrativp oflBces and the public utilities.
Alljwas_jQrganized, and all was easy.The city was filled
with revolutionary excitement.
Even Bao Dai prophetically cabled De Gaulle telling
him not to send French troops to Vietnam: "You could
understand even better if you were able to see what is
happening here, if you were able to sense the desire for
independence that has been smoldering in the bottom of
all hearts, and which no human force can any longer hold

back. Even if you were to arrive to reestablish a French

administration here, it would no longer be obeyed; each
village would be a nest of resistance, every former friend
an enemy, and your officials and colonials themselves
would ask to depart from this unbreathable atmosphere."
On August 22 Bao Dai, sensing the inevitable, asked
the Vietminh to form a government. The Vietminh, wary
that Bao Dai might turn out to be a rival for legitimacy,
demanded that he withdraw. On August 25, Bao Dai abdi-
cated and accepted, under the name of citizen Vinh Thuy,
the title Supreme Political Adviser. The Vietminh were
still seeking the broadest possible base.
Now, finally, the way was set.

78
 CHAPTER

5
PATH TO DIENBIENPHU:
THE TIGER DEFEATS
THE ELEPHANT
1945-1954
''We will he like the elephant and the tiger. When the
elephant is strong and rested and near his base we will retreat.
And if the tiger ever pauses, the elephant will impale him on his
mighty tusks. But the tiger willnot pause and the elephant
will die of exhaustion and loss of blood."

FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS Ho Stayed out of Hanoi.

The powerful, tightly organized operation which he had
conceived up in the mountains had worked very well
under the careful and ruthless eye of Giap; there was no
need for Ho to lead the parade into Hanoi. In addition
he and Giap remained suspicious of the Japanese. What
game were they playing? Might they use this neutral
tactic as a means of Hushing Ho out, then grab him and
use him as a pawn in subsequent negotiations with the
French?
Ho quietly entered the city around August 25, but still

did not surface. Meanwhile, organizational meetings were

taking place throughout Hanoi as the Vietminh incorpo-
rated other groups into their structure. A student named
Nguyen Manh Ha, leader of a Catholic student group,
was appointed the first Minister of National Economy
under the Vietminh. He recalled that there was much dis-

79
 —a

cussion during those first exciting days about the actual

identity of the Vietminh leader. Some said he was Ho
Chi Minh. Some said he was the famed Nguyen Ai Quoc.
Some said Ho Chi Minh was Nguyen Ai Quoc, "the revo-
lutionary whose name had haunted and fired our imagi-
nations when we were young." On the night of the twenty-
fifth, Giap finally told Nguyen Manh Ha and his colleagues

that Ho would be present the next day. Ha recalled: "The

next day as we stood chatting in the corridors we saw a
strange-looking figure coming toward us, clad in shorts,
carrying a walking stick and wearing a most peculiar
brown-painted colonial helmet. He looked like a real char-
acter.Who was he? A rural can bo [cadre] fresh from the
paddies? A scholar from some outlying part? But our at-
tention was caught by a detail which in those days was
altogether unusual and which made it obvious that here
was no ordinary party member a packet of American —
cigarettes was sticking out of his shirt pocket ." Later, . .

Ha observed: "He was very easygoing at cabinet meet-

ings. On September i, the eve of the declaration of inde-

pendence, he arrived with a scrap of paper on which he

had drafted his proclamation to the people. He submitted
it to us, passing it around, accepting amendments
though at this stage, before the anti-Communist national-
ists came into the government, there was little that needed
debating within the cabinet ."
. .

On
August 30 the Vietminh announced the Cabinet.
The President would be Ho Chi Minh. Ho Chi Minh? —
name still barely known to most Vietnamese. Some main-
tained he was the famous Nguyen Ai Quoc* Asked about

He remained for some years sensitive about the dual identity of

*^

Ho Chi Minh and Nguyen Ai Quoc. In 1946, during talks with General
Salan, the French officer in charge of truce negotiations, Salan asked him

80
his identity by journalists in Hanoi at the time, Ho an-
swered, with vintage cult-of-simphcity: "I am a revolu-
tionary. I was born at a time when my country was al-

ready a slave state. From the days of my youth I have

fought to free it. That is my one merit. In consideration
of my past, my companions have voted me head of gov-
ernment." It was an extraordinary answer, as if he were
saying, "My name is not important, but I am your sor-
rows, your being imprisoned by the whites; I am the em-

bodiment of your revolution. I am more than your father;

I am your spirit."
On September 2, Ho made his declaration of inde-
pendence speech, blending the American Declaration of
Independence with the French Declaration of the Rights
of Man. The French, he said, had systematically violated
those rights in Vietnam. Then he said that the Vietminh,
representing the downtrodden Vietnamese people, had
seized power, not from the French but from the Japa-
nese. "Since the autumn of 1940 our country has ceased
tobe a colony and had become a Japanese outpost . . .

We have wrested our independence from the Japanese

and not from the French. The French have fled, the
Japanese have capitulated. Emperor Bao Dai has abdi-
cated, our people have broken down the fetters which for
over a century have tied us down; our people have at the
same time overthrown the monarchic constitution that
had reigned supreme for so many centuries and instead
have estabHshed the present Repubhcan government."

point-blank he was Nguyen Ai Quoc. Ho categorically denied it.

if

Similarly in 1946 when Vo Quy Huan, a technician whom Ho had

brought back from Paris to work with him, asked where Nguyen Ai Quoc
was at the moment, Ho answered, "You'd better ask him, not me." By
1958, however, official Hanoi pubHcations admitted that Ho and Nguyen
were the same man.

Si
 THUS wixmN jraN DAYS after the fall of the Japa-_
nese, the Vietminh controlled Vietnam, and Ho was Presi-
dent. Independence, of course, would not come all at

once. No one knew better than he that the hold was a

-k shaky one, that the Japanese must be dealt with, that the
French would almost surely try to reassert their authority.
And yet no one knew what a crucial coup
better than he
he had accomplished. was almost incredible to him.
It

He had sat there in the mountains and talked of it the —

decay of the French, the pull-out of the Japanese, the
weakness of the other nationalist groups —but to plan and
to accomplish were quite Ho had written the
different.

scenario and miraculously everyone had played his part

perfectly. Now, of course, there would be problems
perhaps even a war; perhaps much blood spilled and much
bitterness and pain, but that was almost secondary, for
Ho realized what few others did: that it would all derive
from August 1945. For it was then that the Vietminh had
J

in one quick stroke taken over the nationalism of the

country, that Ho had achieved the legitimacy of power.
When the French dealt with the Vietnamese from now
on, they would have to deal with him. When they chal-
lenged him now they would only increase his authority;
when they fought him in battle they would strengthen
—
him more the French would do his work for him. He had
established legitimacy over the other groups, had become
the arbiter of Vietnamese nationalism. Though it was not
inevitable that he would succeed immediately and easily,
he was sure that if it became a question of a long, drawn-
out war, the French would have to give first. He felt that
history was on his side for the first time.
Ho was President now, but his age showed. Harold

82
Isaacs, an American journalist with deep sympathy for
Vietnamese nationaUsm, had known Ho in Shanghai in
1933. Now Isaacs barely recognized his old friend. Ho
had aged immensely, Isaacs thought, in the twelve years
— had become an old man, his hair gray, his cheeks hol-
low, "his skin like old paper," many of his teeth missing.
Isaacs was a man to be trusted because he had been
friendly to a powerless Asian exile, and so Ho talked at
length with him, telling of his travels, right through to
the Chinese prisons. "All the way up to Liuchow and
Kweilin," he grinned. "It was at Kweilin that my teeth
began to fall out. I looked at myself once and then tried
never to look again. was skin on bones and covered with
I

rotten sores. I I was pretty sick." That night he

guess
took Isaacs to dinner: "Come on, you will have dinner
with the President of the Republic." They went through
a corridor and two young Vietminh guards snapped to
attention and, their revolvers showing, followed Ho to his
car. Ho laughed. "How funny life is! When I was in prison
in China I was let out for fifteen minutes in the morning
and fifteen minutes in the evening for exercise. And while
I took my exercise in the yard, there were always two
armed guards standing right over me with their guns.
Now I'm President of the Vietnam Republic, and when-
ever I leave this place there are two armed guards right

over me, with their guns."

Ho was aware that he had moved swiftly, at a time
when the French were still staggering under their own
defeats, but that sooner or later they would have to be
contended with, as would the Chinese. Eventually he
would have to make some accommodations to one of the
two powers. To his mind, France, distant and now weak,
was preferable to a China which shared a common border
and had a traditional taste for southward expansion. "It is

83
better to sniflF the French dung for a while than to eat
China's all our lives," Ho told a friend at the time. It
would not be easy to deal with France without cooling
the passion of his own people, without seeming like a
lackey. Annoyed by the virulent anti-French propaganda
of Tran Huy Lieu, the Minister of Propaganda, Ho once
lost his temper at a cabinet meeting and said: "All right,

so it's fun abusing the colonialists. And where does it get

you?" He would be dealing with the French from a po-
sition of limited strength; they had a military potential he
lacked.
The French, of course, had their own problenis.
Though they were sure they could overwhelm the Viet-
minh, there were the military and economic consider-
ations of a long war. (Leclerc, De Gaulle's man there,
well advised by the distinguished scholar Paul Mus, sensed
immediately the guerrilla possibilities for the Vietminh if

they chose to fight a rural-based war: "It would take

500,000 men to do it, and even then it could not be done,"
he told Mus even before the start of hostilities.) Could
France, not yet recovered from its disastrous experience
in World War II, absorb this struggle without paying a
prohibitive price itself? Negotiations began. Ho had made
his position clear to Paul Mus: "I have no Army. I have
no finance. I have no diplomacy. I have no public schools.
I have just hatred and I will not disarm it until you give
me confidence in you." The French wa^ representative
Jean Sainteny, and the Vietnamese was Ho. Each had his
more militant colleagues. The negotiations were long and
difficult. The main problem was the question of how much

freedom there would be for the Vietnamese, and what

the outlines of French sovereignty would be. The Viet-
minh had proclaimed doc lap on September 2. Now there
was disagreement between Ho and the French as to its

84
exact meaning. Did it mean freedom, some claimed, or
as
did it mean independence, as Ho and his colleagues
claimed? And what was the exact distinction between the
two?
During those early weeks of negotiation, Ho seemed
more anxious than the others for some kind of rapproche-
ment with the French. Perhaps it was because he saw a
genuine chance to blend the two cultures, and to use
French technology to speed Vietnam into the modern
world; perhaps because he saw that the alternative was a
long and particularly brutal war, and thought that a few
years in a semi-independent union was preferable. When-
ever he saw newspapermen he went out of his way to
emphasize common ties with France: "France and Viet-
nam were married a long time ago. The marriage has not
always been a happy one, but we have nothing to gain
from breaking it up . France is a strange country. It
. .

is a breeding ground of admirable ideas, but when it

travels it does not export them. ." Sainteny, who was

. .

to retain respect and admiration for Ho, would later

write that Ho seemed genuinely repelled by the idea of

solving the conflict by arms. "There is no doubt that he
had aspirations throughout this period of becoming the
Gandhi of Indochina."
And yet negotiations were still going badly. In March
1946, with a French convoy sailing toward Hanoi, the
tension mounted; the difference between the two sides
seemed insurmountable. Most journalists believed war was
about to start. On the last day before the convoy arrived.
Ho and Sainteny worked far into the night. Ho seemed
to be giving way on doc lap and on a relationship with
the French Union, but there was sharp disagreement on
the status of Cochin China. Finally, very early in the
morning. Ho call ed Sainteny and accepted his terms; the

85
 next day, March 6, just when war might have broken
out,an agreement was signed.
The Vietminh seemed to have given more than the
French. The French recognized the government of Viet-
nam as a free state with its own government, parhament
and finances, forming part of the Indochinese federation
and the French Union. But the Vietnamese pledged to
give a friendly welcome to French military forces as they
relieved the Chinese and remaining Japanese that was —
the painful part. The two sides agreed that frank negotia-
tions should open between them to work out the exact de-
tails. Sainteny then told Ho how pleased he was with the

agreement. "I'm not so pleased," Ho answered, "for really

it is you who have benefited; you know perfectly well I

wanted more than this . . . Still, one can't have every-

thing overnight."
The immediate reaction among the Vietnamese popu-
lation was very negative. Ho was accused of being a spy,
a French agent, a betrayer. Long accustomed to seeing
their representatives exploit their positions for selfish ad-
vantage, the Vietnamese people were supersensitive to
betrayal —they smelled it before it existed. They always
^y\^
expected the worst, and usually were not disappointed.
That night the Vietminh went before an enormous
ofiicials

audience to explain the accords. The crowd was angry

and sullen. Even when Giap spoke and said that the ac-
cords had been signed as a means of buying time, com-
paring it to the Soviet Union's signing the Treaty of Brest-
Litovsk in 1918 in order to halt the German invasion, the
crowd remained mutinous. Then Ho spoke.
There were tears in his eyes as he explained his de-
cision: he had negotiated rather than lose fifty or a

hundred thousand lives; he hoped that total freedom

would come in five years. He ended: "I, Ho Chi Minh

86
have always led you along the path to freedom; I have
spent my whole life fighting for our country's independ-
ence. You know I would sooner die than betray the na-
tion. I swear I have not betrayed you." There and then
he won a roaring acceptance of the accords from his own
people.

BUT FORCES ON BOTH would make this agree-

SIDES
ment tenuous; its strength, indeed its life, stemmed from
its vagueness. In subsequent months, as Ho and others

tried to work out further details, the French reaction

would begin to harden. Admiral d'Argenlieu, the Gover-
nor General of Indochina, a man still seeking France's
manifest imperial destiny, told Leclerc's deputy: "I am
amazed, yes, General, that is the word, I am amazed that
France has in Indochina such a fine expeditionary force,

and that its chiefs prefer to negotiate rather than to fight."

He followed up by trying to subvert the agreements in
every way — and it was not hard. Soon after the signing
of the accords, danger signals began to sound on both
sides. In May 1946, Ho left for France to negotiate the
final treaty. The outcome was to be disastrous.
France was a defeated and uncertain nation: it had
left colonial matters to "the specialists," that is, the right-
wing ultraconservatives in the Ministry of Colonies who
reflected the old order's pride and prejudices, and the
special interests of the great colonial firms.
Most of the colons were with Admiral d'Argenlieu;
they saw the Vietnamese as they had always wanted to
see them —
docile, loving, grateful for the French experi-
ence. (When war broke out and the Vietminh struck,
the
"the old Indochina hands were indignant." Lucien Bodard
quoted them: " 'Sir, if we had had the sense to cut off a

87
few dozen heads at the right moment there would still be
a French Indochina. After all before 1940 absolutely any
Frenchman could travel wherever he liked, even in the
wildest districts without carrying a weapon. The village
notables were only too happy to welcome him with deep
bows.* The speakers were men of standing, respectable,
worthy, jovial citizens with fat little bellies —the old
'colonial egg* — on spindly legs. They described the old
Indochina, the Indochina of sixty years' Protectorate, as
an earthly Paradise. What didn't we do for the nha quesT
they said to me. 'We rescued them from abject poverty,
we gave them schools, roads and hospitals; and what is

even more important, we brought them justice and se-

curity. But how can a country so overwhelmed with kind-

ness possibly have blown up Did
in our faces like this?
not these happy people really want independence more
than anything else ... If they [Paris] had only listened
to us! We who understood the Annamese so well we —
who loved them and were loved in return. But these
people accused us of exploiting the Annamese: indeed
they very nearly took their side against us.' ")

Thus the French government was not showing the

face the Vietnamese might have expected to see —nor
even the one it expected to show. Ho, for his part, ap-
parently overestimated the support and influence he would
receive from his old friends in the French Socialist and
Communist parties.
In France Ho charmed all. Reporters who visited him
found him engaging, witty, self-mocking. Women came
and were given flowers. But the strain between Ho and
his hostswas great. The French had given him a giant
red carpet at his hotel when he first arrived, as was
customary for a visiting chief of state. But David Ben
Gurion, who happened to be in Paris, noticed that "Ho's

88
descending fortunes could be measured by the progressive
shrinking of the protocolary carpet. On Ho's arrival it had
extended from the sidewalk to his room. As the summer
wore on, it was limited to the lobby, then to the staircase,
and finally simply to the corridor in front of Ho's suite."
The old problems still remained unchanged: The Viet-
namese wanted independence and a weak form of as-
sociation with the French. The French wanted guided
self-government within the French Union, with France
controlling the sovereignty of Vietnam would mean
(this

a French hold on the crucial ministries ) .Days and weeks

passed, and the gap between Ho and the French never
seemed to narrow.
In Paris Ho was interviewed by the distinguished
American journalist David Schoenbrun. "If the French do
not give you some form of independence. President Ho,
what will you do?" asked Schoenbrun.
"Why, we will fight, of course," said Ho.
"But, President Ho," continued Schoenbrun, "the
French are a powerful nation. They have airplanes and
tanks and modern weapons. You have no modern weapons,
no airplanes, no tanks. Not even uniforms. You are peas-
ants. How can you fight them?"
"We will be like the elephant and the tiger. When the
elephant is strong and rested and near his base we will

retreat. And if the tiger ever pauses, the elephant will

impale him on his mighty tusks. But the tiger will not
pause and the elephant will die of exhaustion and loss of

blood," Ho said.*
* Ho's prophecy was strikingly like that of Marshall Tran Hung

Dao, who, when the Mongols invaded Vietnam for the third time in
1284, wrote: "The enemy must fight his battles far from his home base
for a long time. We must further weaken him by drawing him into
protracted campaigns. Once his initial dash is broken, it will be easier
to destroy him." In that campaign, the Vietnamese wore the Mongols

89
 Yet the French did not take the Vietnamese determi-
natioiTseriously. The negotiations still did not go well. To
the French, a war was unthinkable; but the alternative,
giving away independence to little yellow men who could
be so was even more unthinkable. If
easily dominated,
les jaunes were to get independence ( if they were "ready"
for it —that was the phrase in those days)
then it would
be good time, when the French decided to grant it
in
—
through largesse but it would not be extorted at gun-
point. It would take Ho and Giap eight bitter years of war
to prove that this thinking was poor morality, poor politics
—
and indeed poor military logic and it would be a pain-
ful lesson for France in the learning. ( Indeed in 1954 few

would doubt that the Vietnamese were ready for inde-

pendence.) But in 1946 the French establishment was
interested in what it considered to be the restoration of
France's greatness. (Britain, which had come out of the
great war with its national pride more intact, was able
to handle the loss of its great jewel, India, with far greater
skill than that with which the humiliated French would
handle the question of Vietnam. ) At the negotiations, the
French were unyielding. Ho pleaded with the French
about the toughness of the terms: "Don't leave me this

way; arm me against those who seek to surpass me. You

will not regret it." It was a typical performance for Ho,
in that he was at once trying to show himself as more
down with a grinding, painful, frustrating war. When the Mongols were
finally ready to withdraw, Tran Hung Dao planted thousands of iron-
tipped stakes in the Bach-Dong River north of Haiphong, through which
the Mongol fleet had to pass. The ships arrived at high tide when the

stakes were submerged; a small Vietnamese naval force decoyed the

enemy into a fight and what looked like an easy Mongol victory, until
suddenly the Mongol ships found themselves stranded or gored on the
stakes. At that point the Vietnamese infantry charged and destroyed the
invaders. It was the type of battle which, in only slightly different form,
the French would see a great deal of in future years: the exploitation of
terrain, the deception, the ambush.

90
reasonable than the others on his side, such as Giap —and
all the while he was buying time for Giap. The French
did not arm him against his own; there was no softening
of the line. On September 14, 1946, in an eleventh-hour
decision not unlike the earlier one —always buying time?
always Brest-Litovsk? —Ho finally signed a modus vivendi.
It was in effect an agreement to disagree, a decision
which solved nothing and which only meant that the anti-
negotiation forces on both sides would become stronger
in the coming months. His red carpet gone. Ho left
Paris, sure that war was coming. He had not wanted war;

even those who, like Sainteny, had negotiated with him

thought he sincerely wanted peace. But it had been too
much to ask the French to grant independence; finally

one must fight for it.

At home, during the Paris negotiations, Giap had been

using his tough, brilliant organizational techniques to
quietly wipe out some rival nationalists. He had also ex-
panded the Vietminh structure village by village to a
degree that surprised even his colleagues. (At the out-
break of would be well more than 100,000
hostilities there

Vietminh under arms. Equally important, more than

75,000 of them would be north of the Seventeenth Paral-
lel, where, under the existing agreements, the French had

only 15,000 men. ) If there wereJaJbe a war, then this

was thetime—-while the French military presence was
stinslight.
On December 18, 1946, the Vietminh struck and the
Indochina war was on.

IT WAS A REVOLUTIONARY WAR, that is, it was at

once warfare and revolution. It was brilliantly conceived

and brilliantly executed. Political considerations were al-

91
 ways of the essence.The Vietminh leaders considered
that reaching the mind of the guerrilla was their most
important object. He must know who he was fighting and
why, as must the simple peasants around him. Even as the
war continued it seemed to strengthen the Vietminh po-
litically at home. The French did his recruiting for him.

Each day the war went on, the job for Ho and Giap be-
—
came easier less the minority Communist party against
the French nation, and more the Vietnamese nation
against the colonial oppressor. His opponents thus were
being swept aside: to be Ho's political opponent now was
to be an enemy of the Vietnamese people.
The French and the rest of the Western world read
the daily dispatches telling of the noble struggle of the
West against the Communists, and noted approvingly
what seemed to be an endless stream of French victories.
But for the Vietnamese it was another war; it was the
struggle not for Communism, but to throw the white
colonialist out. The most restless and patriotic men of a
generation signed up with the Vietminh, for this was the
great cause. This was the heroic war for freedom. All

¥ those long-submerged and powerful Vietnamese aspira-

tions were unleashed —and the Vietminh harnessed them
to their revolution.
The Vietminh were always sensitive to local nuance,
always sensitive to Vietnamese tradition. A captured sol-

dierwas once asked by interrogators: "When you joined

the Front did you tell your family?" This, after all, was
the critical question; the greatest loyalty is to the family.
"No, I did not," he said, "I felt it was my filial duty, but I
talked to the Front and they said to me, 'Comrade, your
words show that you are a fine son filled with filial piety
and we admire that very much, but in the face of the loss
and destruction of your country you have to choose be-

9^
tween filial duty and duty toward your country. In this

war the people are your family too, and you have to
suffer. If you do your duty toward your parents tell them —
of your decision —
then you fail your country. But if you
fulfill your duty toward your country, then by the same

act you will have completed your duty toward your

"
family, because they will be free and no longer exploited.'
For a Vietnamese of that generation there was only
one question: Which side are you on, the Vietnamese side
or the colonialist side? And from this passion, the Viet-

minh over
political
a period of eight years
and military force. To
welded an extraordinary
the peasant, consigned by /
^
birth to a life of misery, poverty, ignorance, the Vietminh
showed a way out. A man could be as good as his innate
Talent permitted; lack of privilege was for the first time
in centuries not a —
handicap if anything, it was an asset.*
One could fight and die serving the nation, liberating both
the nation and oneself. Nepotism and privilege, which had
dominated the feudal society of the past, were wiped
away. One rose only by ability. (After all, the French
had all the air power: could you really put a brother-in-
law when one false step, one
in charge of a battalion
mistake in camouflage, could mean that the battalion was
wiped out?) And in putting all this extraordinary human
machinery together, the Vietminh gave a sense of nation
to this formerly suspicious and fragmented society, until
at last that which united the Vietnamese was more power-

* I remember 1967 interviewing a Vietminh colonel who had

in
defected to the American side. He had been one of the earliest members
of the Vietminh, had risen high, had commanded a battalion. But his
father, he said, had been something of an itinerant medicine man. Al-
though the son had joined as early as 1945, he spoke with a slightly better
accent and dressed a little better than the other soldiers, and he was sure
that even though he had excelled in combat, his lack of true peasant
origins had been held against him. Perhaps, he said, "If I had been bom
a peasant, I would be a general now ." . .

d3
 —

ful than that which divided them —

were in fact
until they
a nation, just as Ho had claimed. (This would contrast
sharply with the world of French- and American-sponsored
Saigon, where even in 1969, when the fear of the city's

falling into Communist hands loomed large, that which

divided the South Vietnamese leadership was still more
powerful than that which united them. The old petty
jealousies remained; it was still a feudal society.)

\ f
The French never really understood the war; as the
^ /.^ Americans would, they thought of it in terms of terrain
controlled, bodies counted; they heard of supply problems
and shortages among the Vietminh and were sure that col-
lapse was imminent. From time to time they met with
Vietminh units face to face, and on those occasions killed
more of the enemy than they lost themselves. This they
would claim as a victory. It would be extensively reported
in the French press. They never considered that perhaps
the battle had taken place precisely because the Vietminh
had wanted it, that despite the apparent imbalance in cas-
ualties, the Vietminh might well be the winner because
the Vietnamese people would find the greater casualties
somehow more bearable than would the French people
thousands of miles away. For to the French itwas a distant
war, a war of vanity and pride, whereas to the Vietnamese
it was a war of survival; they would pay any price. "It is

the duty of my generation to die for our country," one

Vietminh soldier told an American at the time. The casu-
alty lists might be heavy but they were acceptable any-
thing as precious as independence could not come cheap.
The French never understood that the fact that they
had absolute military superiority was illusory because the
Vietminh had absolute political superiority. And ^ince this
was a political war, it meant that in the long run the Viet-
minh had the absolute superiority. The French, like the

94
Americans after them, would fight limited war against a
s mal ler nation that, in contrast, fought total war, a war of
survival. For time was on the Vietminh side. Though the
French might win a single battle, battles meant nothing; it

was not a war for control of land, but for control of people
and their minds, and here the Vietminh was unchallenged.
Indeed, the very victories of the French came back to
—
haunt them there would inevitably be dead civilians left
behind, and their relatives would see the corpses. That
night Vietminh agents would slip into the village, and sign
more recruits.
Even the white skin of the French troops was a symbol
of their alien role. Enemies seemed everywhere. Every
Vietnamese servant, houseboy or clerk was a potential
Vietminh agent; every woman in every village, a potential
spy, telling the Vietminh exactly where a French patrol
had gone, how many men were what kind of weapons
in it,

they carried, but telling the French nothing. The am-

bush was the key to Vietminh tactics; it was perfectly
^designed for their kind of war. Aided by the warnings of
the population, the Viets could blend into the scenery the
way the French could not. The very fear of an ambush
eventually became a deterrent, making the French wary
of going into the interior. This allowed the Vietminh more
time to propagandize, to recruit among the population.
Again and again it would happen: the French convoy mov-
ing slowly, ponderously ahead, watching for mines, when
suddenly thousands of Vietminh would attack. It was, said
one young French officer recounting a typical ambush,
"an execution."

For a few minutes the column fought back furiously,

weaving to and fro and breaking into thousands of separate
personal battles But there were too many Viets; the
. . .

ones who were killed didn't count there were always —

95
 —

more, coming from behind every bush and every rock. Each
of us had go through those appaUing seconds when you
to
feel there no possibility of resistance any more and that
is

now you are merely something to be killed off. And with

some of us this was mixed up with a realization of an im-
—
possible state of affairs ^that Europeans could be wiped
out in this way by Asians. But the column was already in
its death throes. There was a silence over the destroyed

column: and a smell. That silence, you know, with the

groaning in it; and that smell ... of bodies which comes
—
when there has been a great slaughter they are the first
realities of defeat. Then presently there was another reality,
—
and a far more surprising one that of the Vietminh disci-
pline. I had expected barbarity; but within a few moments
after the last shot what I saw was an extraordinary scru-
pulousness — the establishment of exact order. Viet officers
moved about the battlefield, but not at all as conquerors
merely as though one operation had been finished and an-
other was beginning. I could not make out any vanity in
them —no triumph. They looked into everything, they took
notes, they gave orders to their men. Elsewhere sol-
. . .

diers with submachine guns herded the prisoners together,

formed them up and led them off. It was all done without
savagery, without brutality, and without pity either, as
though everything that had to do with humanity or in-
humanity did not count; as though one were in a world
with new values. I was face to face with the ethics of the
Communist order; it was something of an absolute nature,
a thousand times beyond anything we call discipline. In-
stead of knocking everybody on the head from now on, the
Viets were caring for the wounded and taking prisoners;
for they had learned a new technique from the Chinese for
dealing with men, an infallible, irresistible technique that
worked even better when it was applied to the worst, most
atrocious enemies, including colonialists. This was reeduca-
tion. . . r

The Vietminh could be e verywhere and nowhere; they

did not have to be in a village to control it. They f oun^t

96
easy loinirgdu ce an excellent, co mpletely in digenniis po-
litical organization to run the village and keep it in line.
Such an organization intimidated any possibly pro-French
elements. Often these sympathizers were publicly assas-
sinated — a symbol of what might happen to friends of the
colonialist, a reminder that the French could not protect
their own. The French were weak in the.yiUages; they had
to be there physically to -dominate them. In order to con-
trol terrain, the French had to stand on it, and the terrain
absorbed them, sucked them down; it was a quagrnire, first

to the French and then to the Americans. Five hundred

thousand men sounded like a lot, but they would be tied
to fixed points, bogged down, the Vietminh always know-
ing exactly where they were, they neverTcnowing where
the Vietminh were, the Vietminh shifting, regrouping. The
terrain was the friend of the Vietminh. They could do very
few things, but they did them well: the ambush, camou-
flage, and finally the assault. To the French the jungle was
an enemy, the night was an enemy; danger was every-
where. To the Vietminh the night and the jungle were
friends, offering protection against airplanes and tanks.
And they taught this to the peasants, destroying his fear of
the night and the jungle.
And always the revolution went on —the indoctrination
against the French and-the wealthy class, and the dividing
up of land which they had taken. The Vietminh took the
young peasants who had been beaten down by the system
and told them that they were as good as the French and
the mandarins, that they were as strong and as talented as
the upper class, and that, yes, they could rise up. Above
all the Vietminh gave the peasant a sense of being a per-
son. Those who had been shown again and again their lack
of value now found that they had their rights too — even if

only the right to die for an idea, that smallest right. And

97
 —

in doing this the Vietminh finally produced an extraordi-

nary revolutionary force, whose bravery was stunning,
which believed in itself and its cause.
The Vietminh leadership understood exactly both its

own strengths and limitations, and using its strengths, it

created a new formmodern revolutionary warfare

of
political, psychological, and of course military. The Viet-

minh had decided regretfully that human life was a small

price to pay for freedom. Yes, use terror, but use it dis-
criminately. Terrorize the right person, one already de-

y spised in the village, showing the villagers that you have

the capacity to strike audaciously, and that you are on
their side against the hated officials. Whatever grievances
existed against the old order, and there were many, the
Vietminh took over and exploited politically.

In Graham Greene's The Quiet American, when Pyle,

the young CIA agent, talks about the Communists' de-
stroying the freedom of the individual, the sour British
narrator answers: "But who cared about the individuality
of theman in the paddyfield? The only man to treat
. . .

him as man is the political commissar. He'll sit in his hut

and ask his name and listen to his complaints; he'll give up
an hour a day to teach him — it doesn't matter what, he's
being treated like a man, like someone of value. Don't go
on in the East with that parrot cry about a threat to the
individual soul. Here you'd find yourself on the wrong side
— it's they who stand for the individual, and we just stand
for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy."
The Vietminh strategy was above all based on the pop-
ulatioSr The army was a people's army; it walked among
the people; it belonged to the people. The orders from Ho
were very simple: the army was to work side by side with
the population in the fields, help them with their crops,
give them courses in literacy. Above all, the army must

98
 honor the population —then and only then would they
T^ecofne'one and^^^^i^^^ Mao's fish swimming in the
'"^wafer. The passion, the religious fervor and intensity this

system produced staggered the Westerner. A French army

judge who passed sentence on Vietminh killers, the shock
troops of Giap's army, told Lucien Bodard that though he
had sent hundreds to their death, not one had ever repu-
diated the Vietminh.

According to their orders they deny everything, not so

much for themselves, as out of a last desperate loyalty ex-
pressed in negation. They do not bother to put up a de-
fense, as though they were no longer concerned with their
fate —
as though they were already beyond material things
. .These Vietminh die splendidly. It is more than
.

courage: it is the highest possible form of detachment.

Those who are condemned to death are kept in the little is-
land of Poulo Condore [Con Son], the old penal settlement.
Once I had to go there. When I arrived there were 22 men
waiting to be executed. They were shut up in special cells
. .When I went into the prison they all began singing
.

their patriotic songs together. They already knew that a

squad of legionnaires had disembarked with me to shoot
them. I had them stopped for the roll call. Then I said that
eleven reprieves had been granted, and eleven refused. So
there were eleven of them who were to be executed at once.
I went I handed out
to the office for the usual formalities.
them write letters. All this time the men
cigarettes. I let
who were about to die were laughing, not in order to insult
me, but as though the whole thing amused them. Then for
."
their last minutes they started their singing again . .

^FOR HO. NOW GUERRILLA L EADER, the wartjme^ears

were ones movement. The Vietminh leadership
of constant
went into the mountains; no two ministers stayed together.
Meetings were clandestine: officials came from different
directions for these sessions, Ho always the last to arrive.

99
There was never a betrayal. Security was absolute; the
French with airborne troops and planes were not to be
permitted to destroy or capture the Vietminh leadership.
Ho spent these years working closely with Giap, perfect-
ing the techniques which exploited the potent political
and psychological resources of the population and turned
them to Vietminh use.
Ho was already the embodiment of the simple man: if

others were wary of crossing a stream during a torrential

downpour, then Ho himself would find the best place to
ford and cross over; when the French bombers appeared,
Ho would scurry and hide in the fields like the other peas-
ants; when food suppHes were low and starvation seemed
a possibility,it was Ho who first cut his own rations to the

survival minimum.
The French in 1947 made one last attempt to meet
with Ho. They sent Paul Mus, the scholar, through the
Vietminh lines and into the jungle to ask Ho to agree to
their terms; the terms bordered on unconditional surren-
der. Mus, understanding this and the psychology of the
Vietnamese, knew was hopeless. Among other things
that it

the French were demanding that the Vietnamese turn over

any foreign specialists training Vietminh troops. This
would be a betrayal of friends, and Mus knew Ho would
never agree. Mus explained the terms; Ho looked at him
for a long time. "Monsieur le professeur, you know us very
well. If I were to accept this, I would be a coward. The
French union is an assemblage of freemen and there can
be no place in it for cowards." Then he shook hands with
Mus and disappeared into the jungle once more.

FOR EIGHT YEARS the war dragged on. To the

French it was always victories, always heavier Vietminh

100
casualties^ always winning the war. But always there were
more Viets, until slowly began to dawn on some French
it

officials that this was a war of attrition, and that despite

the heavier Vietminh casualty rolls, it was finally the

French who were being worn down„and exhausted.
It.-was^jLS_Giap and Ho had predicted: the colonial
power was war which among other things was
tiring of a

turning out to be poor economics; Indochina was costing

France far more than it was worth. Thirty years earlier in
Comintern circles, where others had presented grandiose
schemes for toppling Western powers, Ho had written that
the way to do it was through long and punishing colonial
wars which would sap the very fiber and vitality of the
colonial country until both colony and country came apart.
He was not far from wrong. That the French could not
defeat the Vietminh, the little yellow ones, was a frustrat-
ing lesson. Front-line French ofiicers cabled back their
reports of losses and of growing Vietminh strength. But
t he Frenc h high command steadfastly refused to listen; it

was sure it could win the war. At home, the opposition to

the war steadily mounted. To the French command in
Hanoi it was those politicians back home who were causing
problems, aiding a cowardly enemy who refused to come
out and fight.
Finally, as the war dragged on, as the French casualty
lists grew longer, the French command decided to set a

major trap for the Vietminh. They would position a French

garrison in a distant outpost as bait. The Vietminh, who
were new to modern warfare, simple people, really, would
gather to attack, and as they did, the French would de-
stroy them with artillery and air power. This was the set-
piece battle the French wanted so badly.
The name of the outp ost was Dienbienphu. The plan-
ning was done by men who had underestimated their

lOl
enemy from the start, who understood neither his talent,
his objectives, norTiis thinking.

A friend of mine visited the outpost shortly before the

battle began. It was in a valley, he noted, surrounded by
high peaks in the distance. It gave him a somewhat un-
easy feeling —the first rule of warfare is to take the high
ground. "Who has the high peaks?" he asked a French
oflScer.

"Who knows?" said the Frenchman, shrugging his

shoulders, implicitly indicating that if anyone had them,

it was the Vietminh.
"But what if they are there and they have artillery?"

my friend insisted.
"They do not have artillery, and even if they did, they
would not know how_to use it," the Frenchman said.
But they did have artillery. They had carried the
pieces up and down mountains, through the monsoons, at

night —hundreds of peasants, crawling over the mountain

trails like ants, carrying one part after another. This was
the Ho Chi Minh trail —not a highway that could be
bombed but the willingness of peasants to bear great bur-
dens under terrible conditions. And not only did they have
the artillery pieces, they knew how to use them. They had
created extraordinary bunkers, perfectly camouflaged, al-

most impossible to detect from the air.

On March 13, 1954, the battle began. It was, in fact,

over before itThe Vietminh held the high ground
started.
and they had the French badly outgunned. The French
artillery commander, shouting, "It is my fault! it is my

fault!" committed suicide the first night. Day after day the
battle wore on as the Vietminh cut the French up. The
French garrison made a legendary stand, substituting its

own gallantry for the incompetence of its superiors, but

all in vain. Fifty-six days later the fort fell. General

102
Navarre, the French commander, told his other troops:
"The defenders of Dienbienphu have written an epic. They
have given you a new pride and a new reason to fight. For
the struggle of free peoples against slavery does not end
today. The fight continues." His of course, knew
men,
The French had been
better, as did the rest of the world.
fighting against a revolution and had never realized it
until the end. A more accurate description than Navarre's
can be found in Jean Larteguy's novel The Centurions.
A French oflBcer named Glatigny who has just been over-
run and defeated at Dienbienphu sees his enemy counter-
part for the first time

No canvas shoes on his feet and his toes wriggled voluptu-

ously in the warm mud of the shelter. Glatigny's reaction
was that of a regular officer. He could not believe that this
nha que squatting on his haunches and smoking foul
tobacco was like him, a battalion commander with the
same rank and the same responsibilities as his own. This
was one of the officers of the 308th Division, the best unit
in the People's Army. It was this peasant from the paddy-
fields who had beaten him, Glatigny, the descendant of
one of the great military dynasties of the West, for whom
war was a profession and the only purpose in life. . . .

IT WAS OVER. Even the set-piece battle had been

lost. Now clearly the Vietminh had all the drive and in-
itiative. Each day as the war continued, the French were
pushed back farther. At the Geneva Conference, where
negotiations had been taking place simultaneously, a curi-
ous thing happened. The Vietminh, who seemed to be on
their way to taking the whole country, were persuaded by
the Russians and the French Communists to settle for a
partitioned Vietnam, divided at the Seventeenth Parallel,
with the Vietminh taking the North, with elections to be
held in 1956.

103
 It was relatively clear why Communists
the European
were willing to push for this: it was a trade that would
keep France out of the European Defense Community.
Why the Vietminh was willing to settle is not so clear.
Perhaps the Russians persuaded Ho and Giap that Amer-
ica, under the influence of John Foster Dulles, might enter

the war if the Communists proved inflexible. Perhaps

there was a belief on the part of the Vietminh leaders that
the South was such a political sewer and so fragmented
that they could succeed in taking it over politically in-

stead of militarily, and avoid further loss of their own

blood. So they settled for half a country, perhaps a little

bitterly. Nevertheless they consoled themselves that they

would win the forthcoming nationwide election.
easily
For Ho was the man who had liberated the Vietnamese
from the French. He was the national hero now, the only ,

one; the country was his. Except for a few upper-class

Vietnamese in the South, and part of the Catholic minority,
there was no one else in a position of leadership.
Ho rode into Hanoi, not as a conqueror, not at the head
of a swaggering conquering army, but in his own typically
simple style, in a captured French three-quarter-ton truck.
It seemed to be yet another gesture to show the people
that it was their victory, their spirit which had won that —
he was just one of them. He had triumphed over the
French and his revolution was a success; his minority Com-
munist party had taken clear title to the nationalism of the
country. At every level in the country, tough Communist
—
peasants like the nha que who had confronted Glatigny
— members of the battle-hardened party, would take over-
the structure of the administration. It was not just a defeat
of the French; it was a defeat of the mandarin order.

104
 "

CHAPTER

6
THE AMERICANS ARRIVE:
THE SECOND
INDOCHINA WAR
1955-1969
''That which is not a total success in
Indochina will be a total failure^

Lucien Bodard

. THEY DON T WANT COMMUNISM.

. .

"They want rice," I said, "they don't want to be shot

at. They want one day to be much the same as another.

They don't want our white skins around teUing them what
they want."
"If Indo-China goes
—
"I know that record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indo-
nesia goes. What does 'go' mean? If I beheved in your God
and another Hfe, I'd bet my future harp against your golden
crown that in five hundred years there may be no New
York or London but they'll be growing paddy in these
fields, they'll be carrying produce to market on long poles,

wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting

on buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don't like our smell,
—
the smell of Europeans. And remember from a buffalo's
point of view you are a European too."
"They'll be forced to believe what they are told; they
won t be allowed to think for themselves."
"Thoughts are luxury. Do you think the peasant sits

105
 and thinks of God and democracy when he gets inside his
mud hut at night?"
"You talk as if the whole country were peasant. What
about the educated? Are they going to be happy?"
"Oh no," I said, "we've brought them up in our ideas.
We've taught them dangerous games, and that's why we
are waiting here, hoping we don't get our own throats cut.
We deserve to have them cut. . .
."

— Graham Greene, The Quiet American, 1956

PEACE WOULD NOT COME EASILY. In the South, the

Americans, fearing an international Communist monolith,
M^orried by Mao's takeover of China, embittered by the
Korean v^ar, decided to extend to Asia the policy of con-
tainment which had worked so well for them in Western
Europe, not realizing that the very forces which had made
—
them successful in Europe the common Christian herit-
—
age and tradition would work against them in Southeast
Asia. Dulles, architect of the policy, did not realize this.
Indeed at the time of the Geneva agreement he said that
Dienbienphu was "a blessing in disguise —we enter Viet-
nam without the taint of colonialism." A decade later
Bernard Fall, watching the frustration of American combat
troops sinking in the Vietnamese quagmire, just as the
French had before, wrote, far more prophetically, that the
Americans were "dreaming different dreams than the
French but walking same footsteps."
in the
Dulles could not have been more inaccurate: eight
years of revolutionary warfare had divided Vietnam by
more than the Seventeenth Parallel. All the most vital and
ablest young men had gone over to the Vietminh; it was
they who controlled the most powerful and popular forces.
Indeed, it was recognition of this fact that caused the
Americans to work against holding nationwide elections;

106
they knew Ho would win easily. At the same time as they
were fighting a war, the Vietminh had been forging an
operative system — a modern society.

The reverse was true of the South. It was a society

made up of people who had either fought for the French
or stayed on the sidelines during those most crucial years,
men who had fought against their country, done nothing
for it, or profiteered during its war for independence.
The Americans chose Ngo Dinh Diem to be the leader of
their state. He was a symbolic choice: a Catholic in a Bud-
dhist country, a central Vietnamese in the South, a man-
darin in a land which had just been swept by revolutionary
forces that left mandarin ways smashed in their wake. He
was the wrong man for Vietnam but the right man for the
Americans: he was at once anti-French and anti-Commu-
nist. He was the perfect emblem of an attempt to turn

back the clock, a Western-oriented leader in a country

which had just gone through an anti-Western revolution.
Graham Greene wrote prophetically of him as he took
over in 1955: "One pictured him sitting there in the
Norodom Palace, sitting with his blank brown gaze, in-
corruptible, obstinate, ill-advised, going to his weekly
confession, bolstered up by his belief that God is always
on the Catholic side, waiting for a miracle. The name I
would write under his portrait is Patriot Ruined by the
West.'*
Diem, of course, had little political base (except for
his family —how much a relic of the Vietnamese past that
was), and he took over a hopelessly fragmented society.
"The thing you must remember about politicians in the

South,'' a South Vietnamese told me in 1967, "is that

they hate each other very much because that is traditional,
but they also hate themselves very much for not having
fought against the —
French. There are how do you say

10 J
it? —considerable psychological problems here.'* Diem*s
base was composed of the Americans, his own considerable
police powers, and a handful of anti-Communist national-
ists. Suspicious of the others, and hearing of endless
{^lotting around him in the Vietnamese tradition. Diem
soon relied more and more on his police powers. This
drove out some of his remaining allies, which made him
even more suspicious, which in turn drove out even more
allies and made him even more suspicious. Soon it was just

him and his family. his rule. Diem who had

Four years into
been hailed in theWest as a miracle man simply for
lasting out the first two years, found that his already nar-
row political base was shrinking rather than expanding.

DIEM AND THE AMERICANS had blockcd clcctions in

1956 and Diem had carried out massive arrests against

all his political opponents, particularly anyone who had
fought with the Vietminh. was typical of the political
It

schizophrenia of the South that no book which told about

the successful war against the French could be published
during the Diem years, that almost no Vietnamese who
had ever been with the Vietminh could work for the
Americans or the government, whereas anyone who had
fought for the French could hold whatever job he wanted
— he was safer.
In 1959 the second part of the Indochina war started.
It was fought by Southerners in the South. Some of them,

members of the Vietminh, had gone to the North in 1954,

been trained there and then infiltrated their way back.
The new Communist force was called the Vietcong, al-
though it was the direct descendant of the Vietminh. Most
observers believe that the decision to start the war was
made in Hanoi, and that the pace, strategy and orchestra-

108
 —

tion was largely set in the North. It was in all its essential
elements a continuation of the first war. The only people
who failed to perceive this were the highly placed Ameri-
cans running the war; because of their own background,
and because of political expediency, they chose to see it
more as a continuation of the Korean experience, an
essentially conventional war. Indeed at first they trained
the South Vietnamese army in classic conventional in-
fantry tactics rather than guerrilla tactics. Even after they
finally perceived the guerrilla nature of the war, they con-
veniently managed to separate it from its political roots,

as if the military operation were an end in itself.

There were few differences from the French war

just a

to allow fornew realities: the propaganda emphasis,

rather than being against the French and the colonialists,
was now on locally important issues more stress was —
placed on the failure of land reform, for example. Diem
fortunately for the Vietminh —had gone into the rich
delta areas where in the 1950s the Vietminh had dis-
tributed the land to the peasants, taken the land back
from them and returned it to its original owners. It was
not that he particularly liked the landowning class — if

anything he was more sympathetic to the peasants. The

explanation was even more painful: he had a mandarin's
notion of right and wrong, and this illegal distribution
offended his moral sense.
To Ho there was little doubt that the second war
would be a success too. No matter that the superpower
America was aiding the South; he realized that the Saigon
government had no base of popular support, that its

defeat would only be a matter of time and suffering. His

was a modern revolutionary state; that in the South was
a feudal, anachronistic one. He told Bernard Fall in 1962:
"Sir, you have studied us for ten years, you have written

log
about the Indochina war. It took us eight years of bitter
fighting to defeat you French in Indochina. Now the
Diem regime is well armed and helped by many Ameri-
cans. The Americans are stronger than the French. It

might take ten years, but our heroic compatriots in the

South will defeat them in the end. ... I think the Ameri-
cans greatly underestimate the determination of the Viet-
namese people. The Vietnamese people have always shown
great determination when faced with an invader."
The confidence was clearly there; Ho knew his side
had all the dynamism and the nationalism. Fall mentioned
—
the American aid the Americans had sent 18,000 troops
and six helicopter companies to help Saigon. Pham Van
Dong (with Ho at the interview) was still sure of success:
**Diem is unpopular and the more unpopular he is, the
more American aid he will need to remain in power. And
the more American aid he gets, the more of an American
puppet he'll look and the less likely he is to regain pop-
ularity."

"That sounds pretty much like a vicious circle, doesn't

it?" interjected Fall.

"No sir," said Dong, with a little laugh, "it is a down-

ward spiral."
In Hanoi, Ho himself was secure. Though Westerners
would write from time to time of rivalries within the
leadership, Ho's very presence seemed to smooth them
over. When Sainteny had once asked Ho about the threat
from the angry young turks like Truong Chinh and Giap,
Ho had said, "What could they possibly do without me?
It was I who made them." Right after the war, gossip had
intensified because the ofiices of Prime Minister and Head
of State which Ho had held jointly were separated —did
thismean Ho was through, doddering, replaced by the
young men? In 1956 they realized how much they needed

110
him. The party's harsh land-reform program led to a major
peasant rebellion in Ho's own province. The regime bru-
tally repressed it, and in consequence was
for the first time
in disfavor with the population. It was to Ho that the party
turned. He took over as Party Secretary, Truong Chinh
was made the scapegoat; errors in handling the rebellion
were publicly admitted. The crisis passed. His own pop-
ularity was the party's greatest asset.
He was, if anything, more genial and confident than
ever, sure of himself, sure of his relationship to history.
(He when he claimed that his wife
teased Bernard Fall
had sketched Ho: "Where? Where? Providing she's got
my goatee right. Providing the goatee looks all right.

Mmm, yes, that is very good. That looks very much like
me," and gave Fall a flower for his wife. ) And he was sure
of his relationship with the party and his people, so that he
could in i960 listen to the National Assembly debating
a new constitution and finally comment: "Well, if you
want my opinion, I consider Clause A incomprehensible.
Clause B inexplicable. Clause C a bit naive . .
." This
brought on great roars of laughter. "Oh, so you're laugh-
ing. In that case I've won my point. One has only to
achieve such an atmosphere and half one's problems are
solved ."
. .

THE SPIRAL that Pham Van Dong talked about con-

tinued downward. In 1962, under President Kennedy,
America armed the South Vietnamese with the best of
American weapons, helicopters, jet fighters, motorized
riverboats, armed personnel carriers ( to cross the paddies
most modern radio equipment.
at rice-harvest time), the
The Americans were very optimistic (the two greatest
exports of South Vietnam in the 1960s were anti-Commu-
nism and American optimism) because their modern

111
weaponry seemed so overpowering against the ill-armed,
poorly clad Vietcong units. But it meant simply that the
Vietcong captured better weapons. Again the Vietcong
touched on powerful latent forces: the abundant misery
of the population.*
The combination of indigenous grievances with the
Vietcong's capacity to exploit them made the outcome in-
evitable. The Vietcong, modern in thought but poorly
equipped, fought at night and in the jungles; the ARVN
(South Vietnamese army), modern in equipment, was
afraid of the night and the bush. The Vietcong was a pro-
duct of the new society. Its oflBcers were peasant-born,
with restless aspirations to power, reacting against age-old
grievances, taking advantage of the powerful new egalit-

arian trends sweeping the world. Vietcong officers had a

sense of cause and duty.
The ARVN officer corps was a reflection of existing
privilege, neo-mandarin, upper-class, urban, contemptuous
of the peasants. It was virtually impossible for anyone
who had first war to be
fought against the French in the
allowed to fight for Saigon now; was almost equally
it

impossible for anyone of peasant origin to become an

ARVN officer. And who were these generals that the
Americans liked so much, with their crew cuts and their
American slang? They were former French corporals. The
* An American intelligence officer interrogating a Vietcong soldier

understood part of the reason for their success. "Tell me about your
background," he said. The soldier replied: "I was the eighth of ten
children and we were very poor. We had no land of our own. I tended
ducks for other people. We were moved around a great deal. Once I
tried to save money and buy a flock of ducks to raise for myself, but
I failed. I never married. Once I fell in love with a village girl, but I

was so ashamed of my status that I did not declare my love to her."

"Were you angry at society because of this?" the American asked. "I
thought if we were poor it was our own fault. I told myself that probably
my poverty was the result of some terrible acts of my ancestors. I was
sad, but not angry."

112
 —

result was inevitable: despite all the massive American aid,

Hanoi and for Peking and Moscow

despite the fact that for
it was a shoestring war, the Vietcong turned the tide
against the ARVN in mid- 1963, capturing the better weap-
ons to use against Saigon. In late 1963 the Diem govern-
ment collapsed and he was assassinated. By 1964 the
ARVN had been defeated by an indigenous peasant army.
It was just as Ho had predicted.

WHEN THE KENNEDY COMMITMENT tO help South

Vietnam help itself failed in 1964, the Americans were
caught between two alternatives: either they could with-
draw their forces and seek a neutralized (and eventually
Communist) Vietnam or they could go ahead with a full
escalation. Their own pride and vanity even manhood —
were at stake, just as those of the French had been two
decades before. At a cocktail party in Washington some-
one mentioned that victory might take the Americans as

long as it had the British in Malaya —eight years. "We are

not the British," a high American military official answered
archly. What had happened to the French would not hap-
pen to them; they were, after all, a mighty power with a
mighty air force, whereas the French had been a second-
rate power coming out of World War II virtually without
air power. Besides, the Americans felt morally superior to
the French; like John Foster Dulles they were sure they
had no Thus in February 1965 they
taint of colonialism.
decided to bomb the North and shortly afterward to send
combat troops to South Vietnam, plunging ahead into the
same political problems the French had faced.
Once more the issue of Communist or non-Communist
was dwarfed in Vietnamese eyes; the issue of Vietnamese
or non- Vietnamese dominated instead. The Americans, as

113
 —

Fall had said, would be walking more in French footsteps

than they realized.
The machinery which Ho and Giap had set up so
effectively during the first war continued to function as

effectively in the second, with a few adjustments to ac-

count for the greater American air power. For instance,
Giap learned how to air power by
counter American
joining the battle so closely thatAmerican planes would
kill Americans as well. But the style was the same

frustrate the enemy, wear them out, bog them down in the
quagmire make victory elusive, make for the Ameri-
cans the only tangible symbol of the war their own cas-
ualty lists. Like the French, the Americans could control
only the land they stood on because, though they had
total military superiority, the other side had total political

superiority — it controlled the population.

Every American commander could report after every
battle that, despite his losses, five, six, eight, ten times as
many of the enemy had been killed — and no one would
dispute him, least of all Giap and Ho. Yet the Vietcong
kept coming. Each year the Americans started out with an
estimate of enemy in the country; if it was, say, 75,000,
that year they might kill 85,000, only to find that at the
end of the year there were 90,000. They were fighting the
birth rate of the nation. Like the French they could fight
bravely, they could and they could die but the
kill —
enemy kept coming; there was always more of him.
Lucien Bodard once wrote simple but prophetic words:
that which is not a total success in Indochina will be a
total failure. The Americans learned this too. They thought
it would be a short war, but year after year victory re-
mained elusive. In the long painful days of 1968 and 1969
the American government began to learn this most difficult
lesson of all about intervention in Vietnam. But it was

114
not a lesson a great superpower learns readily. In 1967
Lyndon Johnson, the restless powerhouse of a President,
had met with his Vietnamese overlord, Air Marshal Ngu-
yen Cao Ky, a fighter pilot. (What could be more Ameri-
can and less Vietnamese in a country where people still

lived among the water buffalo than a leader whose base of

power was a jet was a symbol of his lack of
plane? It

roots.) Carried away by the excitement and euphoria of

—
the occasion charts everywhere, all showing success, all

—
showing a beaten enemy Johnson told Ky, Hurry up and
win the war, bring those coonskins back. Like so many
others before him, he thought victory was near; like so
many others, he was wrong.
In February 1968, Vo Nguyen Giap launched what was
later called the Tet offensive, which punctured overnight
the oflBcial American illusion of an exhausted enemy and
an imminent American military victory. He used the
strategy of fighting in the cities rather than the country-
side. This limited the use of American air power. It also

advanced the Vietminh political struggle by forcing the

use of air power against Vietnamese civilians. After the
offensive, an American major, looking at the town of Ben
Tre, spoke the final epitaph for the American effort: '*We
had town to save it."
to destroy the
Ho was waging political warfare on another front:
also
it was an American election year and the Tet offensive

thus would have a special import for Americans. By

fighting in the cities, his forces had given American news
cameramen something to shoot day after day. For more
than two weeks Americans watched on their television
sets as reports of the Tet struggle came home: clearly
only American air power and artillery finally drove the
North Vietnamese and Vietcong troops from the cities.
For the first time the Vietcong and North Vietnamese

115
courage and persistence became tangible to viewing Amer-
icans.The result was predictable. Lyndon Johnson, who
had won by a landslide in 1964 (who had in 1965 boasted
to White House intimates about what he had done to Ho:
"I just cut his p off" ) , decided not to run again, his

Great Society stillborn, his ambition and hope for a

historic Presidency mired in the rice paddies of Vietnam
—one more foolish Westerner who, in the words of re-

porter Neil Sheehan, had lost his reputation to Ho Chi

Minh.

ON SEPTEMBER 3, 1969, Ho Chi Miuh, peasant-born,

most of his life an outlaw from the world around him,
died. The war was continuing much as he would have
predicted. A new American President, still unable to come
to terms with that most bitter lesson for Westerners, the
fact that if you have not defeated guerrillas you have lost

to them, was bogged down in the war. He was promising

to disengage while at the same time boasting to his coun-
trymen that they would not lose the war, and the conflict
was beginning him control of his own country. The
to cost
domestic forces which Vietnam had helped create now
tore at the very fabric of American society, and Ho, who
more than forty years before had said that the way to
weaken the West was through colonial wars, would have
taken a prophet's pleasure in his prediction. In Vietnam,
Ho's forces firmly controlled half the country and it

seemed only a matter of time before they would take

power nationwide. American oflBcials who a few short
years earlier had talked glibly about Hanoi's threshold
of pain —
how much bombing, how many troops it would
take to reach it —^were now finding that their own thresh-
old of pain was lower. ("And how long do you Ameri-

116
cans want to fight, Mr. Salisbury?" Pham Van Dong asked
Harrison Salisbury of The New
York Times in 1967. "One
year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty
years . . . we will accommodate you.")
be glad to
With Ho's death, power was transferred in Hanoi
without any crisis; his goals had always been his people's
goals, so there was no readjustment of his vision to be

made. Judged by his impact on his own poor country, his

life was an extraordinary success and a vindication; he

was the greatest patriot of his people in this century. But

his impact was far greater than this. In Europe his victory

had helped teach the French that a colonial era had come
to an end, and thus France would liquidate its sub-Sahara
African empire without a shot fired. And in the United
States, his impact was even greater. Political leaders like

Robert Kennedy, who had begun the decade convinced

that America had a right, indeed a duty, to fight brush-

fire wars in underdeveloped nations around the world,

would change their minds and not only turn against the
war, but talk of a new definition of American foreign
policy, emphasizing now the limits of power, saying that
the United States cannot be the policeman of the world.
The war thus hastened the end of two decades of Ameri-
can foreign policy based upon the sole guiding principle
of anti-Communism.
The combination of the war and domestic racial fail-
ures was having an even deeper effect upon young edu-
cated Americans (many of whom in 1970 would go to
their antiwar rallies shouting. Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh). To
a remarkable degree it changed their sense of values:
traditional armed force was now in their eyes a sign of
weakness, simple peasant resistance a strength; the con-
temporary who followed his conscience and refused to
serve in Vietnam became a hero, instead of the young

117
man who fought and won his nation's highest medals.

After Richard Nixon ordered the attack on the base

camps in Cambodia in May 1970, the disaffection of the
young indeed threatened the stabiUty of the society.
Joseph Alsop, a hawk columnist, was moved to a unique
exchange of letters with Senator Edward Kennedy. Alsop
deplored the "political lunacy" of the young in "passion-
ately demonstrating against your own country's successes
on the battlefield," and said that only Kennedy could
bring the young to their senses. To which Kennedy, polit-
ical heir of two brothers who had helped initiate the war,
wrote, "We are a nation constantly being reborn, and we
can thank our God that those newly arrived in our society
will not casually accept the views and presumptions of
their fathers, much less their errors. They do not protest
their 'country's successes on the battlefield,' doubtful as
those successes may be; they protest the very existence of
the battlefield, for it has no place in their vision of the
country that is to be theirs. And I support them in that."

IN HIS LIFETIME Ho had uot Only liberated his own

country and changed the course of colonial rule in both
Africa and Asia, he had done something even more re-

markable; he had touched the culture and the soul of his

enemy. For goat-bearded, Mongoloid-Trotsky, tubercular

agitator Ho Chi Minh, it had been a full life.

118
 Bibliography

Bodard, Lucien, The Quicksand War. Boston: Little Brown;

Published by Atlantic Monthly Press, 1967.
Buttinger, Joseph, Vietnam: A Dragon Embattled, Volumes 1

and 2. New York: Praeger, 1967.

De Antonio, Emile, The Year of the Pig (a film, 1969).
Fall, Bernard, "Ho Chi Minh, Like It or Not." New York:
Esquire magazine, November 1967.
Fall, Bernard, Ho Chi Minh on Revolution. New York: Praeger,
1967.
Greene, Graham, The Quiet American. New York: Viking,
1956.
Isaacs, Harold, No Peace for Asia. New York: Macmillan, 1947.
Lacouture, Jean, Ho Chi Minh. New York: Random House,
1968.
McAlister, John, The Origins of Revolution. New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1969.
McAlister, John, and Mus, Paul, The Vietnamese and Their
Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1970.
Shaplen, Robert, The Lost Revolution: The U.S. in Vietnam.
New York: Harper & Row, 1965.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
David Halberstam was twenty-eight years old when
he went to Vietnam as a reporter for the New York
Times in 1962, His early pessimistic dispatches for
the Times won him a Pulitzer prize in 1964. His
books on Vietnam include The Making of a
Quagmire, One Very Hot Day, and the landmark
political study y The Best and the Brightest. In Ho,
Mr. Halberstam has combined a firsthand knowledge
of Asia with his unique abilities as a political reporter.
His most recent book is The Reckoning, a story of
the Japanese challenge to American corporations.
"It is an important work in its thoroughness, its detail and its insight into how the
United States was slowly sucked deeper and deeper into the morass of Vietnam."
TEXAS POST, April 4, 1971

"Halberstam's central point, however, is indisputable. Americans never really

understood their enemy in Vietnam. If we had understood Ho Chi Minh, who
symbolized his people's determination to be rid of domineering Westerners, whether
French or American, no matter what the cost, then we might have avoided
blundering into the quagmire of Indochina."
DETROIT FREE PRESS, May 16, 1971

"Halberstam's enlightening book again shows what a catastrophe Vietnam was for
the French and is for the Americans. And it shows the faith, dedication and ability
of that country's leader, the hero of this land and a man who 'touched the culture
and the soul of his enemy.' Ho is a superb volume, one that will open the eyes and
chill the blood of us here under the stars and stripes."
ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS, October 17. 1971

"The reader may or may not accept Halberstam's basic viewpoint. Even so, this book
is a very searching analysis of what made Ho tick."
Shreveport, La., TIMES, March 21, 1971

"It is an enlightening volume, both about Ho Chi Minh and the cauldron that is

Indochina."
Nashville, Tenn., TENNESSEAN, April 18, 1971

"A short 'textbook' treatment of Vietnamese nationalism that's worthwhile. If, after
all these years of agony and confusion, many Americans have read nothing about
Vietnam except daily newspaper reports, David Halberstam's Ho might be the
place to start. It is short (118 pages), it moves fast, and it has a fascinating subject
for reader and writer alike —
Ho Chi Minh."
HOUSTON CHRONICLE, April 18, 1971

OF RELATED INTEREST
AMERICA'S LONGEST WAR: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, Second
Edition, George C. Herring (34500)

ALFRED A. KNC^PF. INC

NEW YORK. NEW YORK \0022 394'36282'9