Half Lenin, Half Gandhi
Ho Chi Minh, by William J. Duiker
Byline: By Frances FitzGerald
Date: October 15, 2000
Confucian humanist and Communist revolutionary, the architect of
Vietnamese independence and of the successful struggle against the
French, the United States and the Saigon government, Ho Chi Minh
was one of the most influential political leaders of the 20th century.
Yet even after his death in 1969 -- and for all the years the American
troops fought in Vietnam -- he remained a shadowy figure, his life
and career shrouded in myth and in the myriad guises he assumed
during his many years in exile and in the maquis of Vietnam. As the
French journalist Jean Lacouture wrote in his 1967 biography,
''Everything known about Ho's life prior to 1941 is fragmentary,
controversial and approximate.'' Thanks to William J. Duiker's
magnificent new biography, this is no longer the case.
A retired professor of history who served as a United States foreign
service officer in Saigon in the mid-1960's, Duiker spent over 20
years gleaning new information from interviews and from archives
in Vietnam, China, Russia and the United States. Other Western
historians have come closer to Ho as a person and to the cultural
context of his revolution, but Duiker has managed not only to fill
in the missing pieces of Ho's life but to provide the best account
of Ho as a diplomat and a strategist.
The Vietnam War -- as we call it -- was a watershed in 20th-century
American history, and we assume it was one in the history of Vietnam.
But as Duiker's biography reminds us, the major problem for the
Vietnamese, as for many others on this planet, was how to respond to
the colonial power and the destruction of traditional society. Ho Chi
Minh dedicated his life to this task.
Ho's childhood lay in a world lost in time. Born in 1890, just five years
after the French consolidated their control over all of Vietnam, Ho --
whose given name was Nguyen Tat Thanh -- grew up in Nghe An
province, on the narrow and mountainous coast of north-central
Vietnam. One of the most beautiful regions of the country, it was
also one of the poorest and most rebellious. Ho's father, Nguyen Sinh
Sac, was a scholar from a peasant family who managed to work his way
up through the imperial examination system. Under his tutelage, Ho
studied the classical Chinese texts that taught governance as the Dao
of Confucius. According to Duiker, Sac was well acquainted with the
scholars Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh, the most important
Vietnamese nationalists in the first two decades of the century. Like
many of the patriotic scholar-gentry, Sac refused to serve at court
during a time of national humiliation, and by 1905 it had become
clear to him that the imperial system, preserved by the French, was
inadequate to cope with the new realities. That year he sent Ho off to
a Franco-Vietnamese school with the admonition of the 15th-century
scholar Nguyen Trai that one must understand the enemy in order
to defeat him.
When Ho entered the prestigious National Academy in Hue in 1907,
he was already a rebel. The following year he was thrown out of school
for lending support to peasants demonstrating against high agricultural
taxes and corvee labor. Pursued by the police, he traveled south, taking
jobs where he could. In 1911 he signed on as an assistant cook on a
steamer bound for France, under the name of Ba -- the first of his 50
or more aliases. ''I wanted to become acquainted with French civilization
to see what meaning lay in those words,'' he later told a Soviet journalist.
Ho's travels took him to ports in Asia and Africa, to New York and London.
He stayed for some time in New York, working as a laborer and going to
meetings of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Trust in Harlem.
In London he landed a job as a pastry cook under Auguste Escoffier at the
Carlton Hotel. Toward the end of World War I he settled in Paris, the heart
of the French empire. While earning his living as a photo retoucher, he
formed an association of Vietnamese emigres and denounced France's
treatment of its colonies at gatherings of the French Socialist Party. In
1919 he presented a petition to the Allied governments at the Versailles
conference, asking them to apply President Woodrow Wilson's principle
of self-determination to Vietnam. Only the French police paid attention
to the petition and its author, ''Nguyen Ai Quoc'' (''Nguyen the Patriot'').
They followed Ho everywhere, though ''Nguyen the Patriot'' was a
penniless scribe, a frail young man in ill-fitting suits who cut a
Chaplinesque figure.
Ho came to Marxism in the summer of 1920, via Lenin's ''Theses on the
National and Colonial Questions.'' He had read Marxist works before, but, as
Duiker explains, Lenin's arguments about the connection between
capitalism and imperialism and about the importance of nationalist
movements in Asia and Africa to world revolution struck him forcefully,
setting him ''on a course that transformed him from a simple patriot
with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary.'' When the French
Socialist Party split over the issue of joining Lenin's Third International
at its 1921 congress, he became a founding member of the French
Communist Party. Still writing as Nguyen the Patriot, he argued not
only that Communism could be applied to Asia but that it was in
keeping with Asian traditions based on ideas of community and
social equality.
For three years Ho pressed the new party for action on the colonial
question, but the French Communists proved to be ''Eurocentric,''
as Duiker delicately puts it, so in 1924 he went to Moscow at the
invitation of the Comintern. The Soviet leadership was, however,
preoccupied by its own internal struggles, and it took Ho almost a
year to persuade officials to send him to southern China, where an
uneasy alliance between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists
would permit him to begin organizing the Vietnamese.
Ho Chi Minh spent the next 15 years working for revolution in Vietnam
as an agent of the Comintern. According to Duiker's original and highly
detailed account of this period, Ho's emphasis on nationalism and his
patient, pragmatic approach to organizing often put him at odds with
Moscow. Yet he singlemindedly pursued his own agenda, waiting out
periods of adversity and seizing opportunities as they arose. In
Canton, Ho published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary
Youth League and set up a training institute that attracted students
from all over Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism he taught his own
brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning,
modesty and generosity -- virtues that, as Duiker notes, had far more
to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism. To his students Ho
seemed to embody these qualities, and the teaching of his precepts
later became a distinguishing feature of the Vietnamese revolution.
In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left,
the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong
Kong and from there to Moscow. He was sent by the Comintern to
France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years
organizing Vietnamese expatriates. In 1930 he returned to China and
worked as he could while hiding out from the Chinese police and the
French Srete. Arrested in Hong Kong by the British, he spent a year
in jail, and had once more to escape to Moscow. But there was little help
to be found there. In the midst of Stalin's purges the Comintern
repudiated Lenin's theses, insisted that the Asian Communist parties
pursue the wholly unrealistic goal of a international proletarian revolution
and ordered the Vietnamese to form an ''Indochinese'' Communist Party
-- though the word signified nothing more nor less than the French
colonial project in the region. Ho was personally criticized, investigated
and sidelined.
In 1938 Ho's fortunes changed. With the rise of Nazi Germany the Soviets
changed their line on nationalism and called for an alliance of ''progressive
forces'' to oppose fascism. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek created a
united front with the Communist Party to resist Japanese aggression.
His strategy vindicated, Ho returned to head the Vietnamese movement,
and with the Japanese invasion of Indochina, he created a nationalis
front of workers and peasants for the independence of Vietnam, the
Vietminh. In 1941 he re-entered the country he had not seen in 30 years
to set up a guerrilla base in the mountains.
In August 1945, three months after the Japanese deposed the Vichy
French administration and just two days after the Japanese surrender
to the Allies, the Vietminh moved into Hanoi, and amid cheering
crowds Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent country.
But that was just the beginning.
Ho Chi Minh did not want war with the French. He did everything he could
to prevent it. He courted United States support through the O.S.S. officers
he had cultivated during the war -- going so far as to offer the United
States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. He created a coalition government,
reined in the hotheads and agreed to accept a French military presence
and membership in the French Union so long as the French agreed to
the eventual goal of Vietnamese independence. But after the French
humiliations in World War II even the French Socialists could not accept
the idea of giving up the colonies. So at the beginning of 1947 Ho
went back to the maquis. He had told his friend Jean Sainteny, ''You will
kill ten of my men while we will kill one of yours, but you will be the
ones to end up exhausted.'' And so it was.
During the French war, as during World War II, Ho and his companions
lived in caves or thatched shelters in the mountains, moving frequently
to avoid French patrols, often hungry, often suffering from malaria
or dysentery. In 1954 the Vietminh won a decisive victory at Dien Bien
Phu, but still the war dragged on. Mao Zedong had begun to provide
the poorly equipped Vietminh with training and war materiel, and the
United States had begun to finance the French war effort. The great
powers were now heavily involved in Vietnam, and in 1954 they met
in Geneva to negotiate a settlement.
Under pressure from Beijing and Moscow, the Vietminh agreed to a
cease-fire and to the division of the country into two regroupment
zones at the 17th parallel. By the terms of the accord an election was
to be held in two years to unify the country. However, Beijing and
Moscow did not guarantee the election, the United States did not
sign the agreement and, soon after the conference ended, Secretary
of State John Foster Dulles announced that the United States would
begin to foster a non-Communist state in the South. In the view of
Vietnam's revolutionaries, the Geneva Conference was the first step
on the road to the second Indochina war.
In Hanoi, Ho lived almost as simply as he had in the maquis. Refusing to
install himself in the governor general's residence, he inhabited the
gardener's cottage and then a house on stilts beside a pond. He was
President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but the title he preferred
was Uncle Ho. Often he could be seen in his worn khaki uniform and
sandals talking with peasants or groups of delighted children. To many
foreign observers there seemed to be more than a touch of artifice in
his self-presentation. After all, he was a sophisticate who charmed his
interlocutors in many languages and a man not immune to praise or
the love of women. (While in China he had, Duiker tells us, been married
twice, and in Hanoi he fathered a child.) Duiker does not explain Ho's
play-acting, but then there is much about Confucianism that eludes
him. In the Confucian tradition, the emperor must provide a model
of correct behavior. By rejecting imperial extravagance, Ho was
demonstrating the Dao of his revolution to his countrymen, its break
with the past.
In the late 1950's and early 60's Ho spent much of his time abroad engaged
in the delicate negotiations required to bring the Soviet Union as well as
China to the aid of his government as the Sino-Soviet split deepened. Bu
his role was increasingly a ceremonial one. Le Duan, a southerner who
had spent many years in French prisons, had seized the reins of power
and proceeded to marginalize Ho and his long-term companions --
among them Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Duiker suggests that Ho's decline
in authority began during the brutal land reform campaign of 1955-56,
at a time of rising Chinese influence over the revolution. According to
Duiker, Ho was not directly involved in the campaign, but ''his prestige
as an all-knowing and all-caring leader had been severely damaged.''
During the early 1960's Ho warned his colleagues against launching a
premature uprising in South Vietnam and against overemphasizing the
military struggle. He wanted to avoid bringing the United States into
the war, and until the Johnson administration began bombing the North,
he remained hopeful that Washington would withdraw its support for
the regime in Saigon. But it was not to be. When American troops
began to arrive in Vietnam in 1965, Ho was a 75-year-old man and
no longer in charge of his government.
''Ho Chi Minh was half Lenin and half Gandhi,'' Duiker writes. Ho always
sought to achieve his objectives without resort to military force and,
unlike some of his colleagues, he had a clear-eyed view of international
and domestic realities, a flexible, pragmatic approach and the patience
and subtlety to seek diplomatic solutions. Unfortunately, as Duiker
might have added, neither the French nor the American leadership
had the sense to respond in kind.
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company.