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Ho Chi Minh He married
nationalism to communism and perfected the deadly art of guerrilla
warfare By STANLEY
KARNOW An
emaciated, goateed figure in a thread-bare bush jacket and frayed
rubber
sandals, Ho Chi Minh cultivated the image of a humble, benign "Uncle
Ho." But he was a seasoned revolutionary and passionate nationalist
obsessed by a single goal: independence for his country. Sharing his
fervor,
his tattered guerrillas vaulted daunting obstacles to crush France's
desperate
attempt to retrieve its empire in Indochina; later, built into a
largely
conventional army, they frustrated the massive U.S. effort to prevent
Ho's
communist followers from controlling Vietnam. For Americans, it was the
longest
war-and the first defeat-in their history, and it drastically changed
the way
they perceived their role in the world. To Western
eyes, it seemed inconceivable that Ho would make the tremendous
sacrifices he
did. But in 1946, as war with the French loomed, he cautioned them,
"You
can kill 10 of my men for every one I kill of yours, yet even at those
odds,
you will lose and I will win." The French, convinced of their
superiority,
ignored his warning and suffered grievously as a result. Senior
American
officers similarly nurtured the illusion that their sophisticated
weapons would
inevitably break enemy morale. But, as Ho's brilliant commander,
General Vo
Nguyen Giap, told me in Hanoi in 1990, his principal concern had been
victory.
When I asked him how long he would have resisted the U.S. onslaught, he
thundered, "Twenty years, maybe 100 years-as long as it took to win,
regardless of cost." The human toll was horrendous. An estimated 3
million
North and South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians died. The youngest
of three children, Ho was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in a village in
central
Vietnam. The area was indirectly ruled by the French through a puppet
emperor.
Its impoverished peasants, traditional dissidents, opposed France's
presence;
and Ho's father, a functionary at the imperial court, manifested his
sympathy
for them by quitting his position and becoming an itinerant teacher.
Inheriting
his father's rebellious bent, Ho participated in a series of tax
revolts,
acquiring a reputation as a troublemaker. But he was familiar with the
lofty
French principles of liberté, égalité, fraternité and yearned to see
them in
practice in France. In 1911 he sailed for Marseilles as a galley boy
aboard a
passenger liner. His record of dissent had already earned him a file in
the
French police dossiers. It was scarcely flattering: "Appearance awkward
... mouth half-open." In Paris, Ho
worked as a photo retoucher. The city's fancy restaurants were beyond
his
means, but he indulged in one luxury American cigarettes, preferably
Camels or
Lucky Strikes. Occasionally he would drop into a music hall to listen
to
Maurice Chevalier, whose charming songs he would never forget. In 1919,
Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to sign the treaty ending World War I,
and Ho,
supposing that the President's doctrine of self determination applied
to Asia,
donned a cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a lengthy list
of French
abuses in Vietnam. Rebuffed, Ho joined the newly created French
Communist
Party. "It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me," he later
explained. Soon Ho was
roaming the earth as a covert agent for Moscow. Disguised as a Chinese
journalist or a Buddhist monk, he would surface in Canton, Rangoon or
Calcutta
then vanish to nurse his tuberculosis and other chronic diseases. As
befit a
professional conspirator, he employed a baffling assortment of aliases.
Again
and again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a new place. In 1929
he
assembled a few militants in Hong Kong and formed the Indochinese
Communist
Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate, a pose calculated to
epitomize his
moral fiber, but he had at least two wives or perhaps concubines. One
was a
Chinese woman; the other was Giap's sister-in-law, who was guillotined
by the
French. In 1940,
Japan's legions swept into Indochina and French officials in Vietnam,
loyal to
the pro-German Vichy administration in France, collaborated with them.
Nationalists in the region greeted the Japanese as liberators, but to
Ho they
were no better than the French. Slipping across the Chinese frontier
into
Vietnam-his first return home in three decades he urged his disciples
to fight
both the Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp, he founded
the Viet
Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League, from which he
derived his
nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh thoroughly "Bringer of Light." What he
brought was a spirit of rebellion-against first the French and later
the
Americans. As Ho's war escalated in the mid-1960s, it became clear to
Lyndon
Johnson that Vietnam would imperil his presidency. In 1965, Johnson
tried a
diplomatic approach. Accustomed to dispensing patronage to recalcitrant
Congressmen, he was confident that the tactic would work. "Old Ho can't
turn me down," L.B.J. said. But Ho did. Any settlement, he realized,
would
mean accepting a permanent partition and forfeiting his dream to unify
Vietnam
under his flag. There was no
flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will. Even as the war
increasingly destroyed the country, he remained committed to Vietnam's
independence. And millions of Vietnamese fought and died to attain the
same
goal. Ho died on
Sept. 2, 1969, at the age of 79, some six years before his battalions
surged
into Saigon. Aspiring to bask in the reflected glory of his posthumous
triumph,
his heirs put his embalmed body on display in a hideous granite
mausoleum
copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow. They violated his final wishes. In
his will
he specified that his ashes be buried in urns on three hill tops in
Vietnam,
saying, "Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene,
but
it also saves farmland." • • And Ho,
supposing that the President's doctrine
of self determination applied to Asia, donned a cutaway coat and tried
to
present Wilson with a lengthy list of French abuses in Vietnam.
Rebuffed, Ho
joined the newly created French Communist Party. "It was patriotism,
not
communism, that inspired me," he later explained. Soon Ho was
roaming the earth as a covert agent for Moscow. Disguised as a Chinese
journalist or a Buddhist monk, he would surface in Canton, Rangoon or
Calcutta
then vanish to nurse his tuberculosis and other chronic diseases. As
befit a
professional conspirator, he employed a baffling assortment of aliases.
Again
and again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a new place. In 1929
he
assembled a few militants in Hong Kong and formed the Indochinese
Communist
Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate, a pose calculated to
epitomize his
moral fiber, but both the Japanese and the French. There, in a remote
camp, he
founded the Viet Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League,
from
which he derived his nom de guerre, Ho Chi Minh thoroughly "Bringer of
Light." What he brought was a spirit of rebellion-against first the French and later the Americans. As Ho's war escalated in the mid-1960s, it became clear to Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam would imperil his presidency. In 1965, Johnson tried a diplomatic approach. Accustomed to dispensing patronage to recalcitrant Congressmen, he was confident that the tactic would work. "Old Ho can't turn me down," L.B.J. said. But Ho did. Any settlement, he realized, would mean accepting a permanent partition and forfeiting his dream to unify Vietnam under his flag. There was no
flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will. Even as the war
increasingly destroyed the country, he remained committed to Vietnam’s
independence. And millions of Vietnamese fought and died to attain the
same
goal. Ho died on
Sept. 2, 1969, at the age of 79, some six years before his battalions
surged
into Saigon. Aspiring to bask in the reflected glory of his posthumous
triumph,
his heirs put his embalmed body on display in a hideous granite
mausoleum
copied from Lenin's tomb in Moscow. They violated his final wishes. In
his will
he specified that his ashes be buried in urns on three hillltops in
Vietnam,
saying, "Not only is cremation good from the point of view of hygiene,
but
it also saves farmland." • Stanley
Karnow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for In Our Image: America's
Empire in
the Philippines, is the author of Vietnam: A History BOMBS AWAY A champion
of air power, General Curtis Le May perfected strategic bombing during
World War
II. His most lethal inspiration: the 1945 fire bombing of Tokyo, which
killed
100,000 Japanese. He was, perhaps, too eager for the decisive battle.
As head
of the Strategic Air Command, Le May favored a first strike against the
Soviets. He later called for bombing North Vietnam "back into the Stone
Ages" KILLING
GOLIATH When General Vo Nguyen
Giap assembled his army from North Vietnam's
poorest villages, Westerners watched with contempt. But Giap's tactical
genius
turned the guerrillas into a sharp anti-imperialist weapon. His mastery
of
jungle tactics and battlefield psychology terrified and eventually
defeated the
French and Americans. Western scorn was replaced with horror and, as
time
passed, respect. France
undervalued ... the power [Ho] wielded. There's no doubt that he
aspired ... to
become the Gandhi of Indochina. JEAN
SAINTENY, De Gaulle's special emissary to Vietnam, 1953 |