Ho Chi Minh contributed to the confusion by assuming a tantalizing mystery about his life. For years he denied that the unknown public figure who emerged immediately after WW2 as President Ho Chi Minh was in actuality the same person as Nguyen Ai Quoc, the founder of the ICP and a prominent Comintern agent of the prewar period. Even after his true identity was revealed, Ho remained extraordinarily secretive about key events in his past life.
Yet another question about HCM concerns the character of his leadership. Although Ho was the founder of the ICA and a leading figure of the international Communist movement, he was not as dominant a personality as many other modern revolutionary leaders, such as Lenin, Stalin, or Mao; he appeared to lead by persuasion and consensus rather than by imposing his will through force of personality. Nor did he write frequently about his ideas or inner motivations. In contrast to other prominent revolutionary figures, HCM expressed little interest in ideology or intellectual debate and focused his thoughts and activities on the practical issue of freeing his country and other colonial societies from Western imperialism.
There is an element of mystery in all great men. And few enjoyed that mystery more than HCM himself. In an interview with the Vietnam scholar Bernard Fall in 1962, Ho responded to one of Fall’s questions: “An old man likes to have a little air of mystery about himself. I like to hold on to my little mysteries. I’m sure you will understand that.”
For 2 decades, Nguyen the Patriot had aroused devotion, fear, and hatred among this compatriots and the French colonial officials who ruled over them. Now, under a new name, he introduced himself to the Vietnamese people as the first president of a new country.
At the time, the name HCM was unknown to all but a handful of his compatriots. Few in the audience, or throughout the country, knew of his previous identity as an agent of the Comintern, and the founder of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Now he described himself simply as “a patriot who has long served his country.” For the next quarter of a century, the Vietnamese people and the world at large would try to take measure of the man.
But there was a price to pay for the nation’s military success, as territorial expansion led to a growing cultural and political split between the traditional-minded population in the heartland provinces of the Red River delta and the more independent-minded settlers in the newly acquired frontier regions to the south.
Ah! If even China, which shares a common border with our territory and is a thousand times more powerful than Vietnam, could not rely upon her strength to swallow us, it was surely because the destiny of our country had been willed by Heaven itself.
Crowded into a narrow waist between the coast and the mountains, the Vietnamese who lived in this land, over 90% of whom were peasants scratching out their living from the soil, found life, at best, a struggle. The soil is thin in depth and weak in nutrients, and frequently the land is flooded by seawater. The threat of disaster is never far away, and when it occurs, it sometimes drives the farmer to desperate measures.
Perhaps that explains why the inhabitants of Nghe An have historically been known as the most obdurate and rebellious of Vietnamese, richly earning their traditional sobriquet among their compatriots as “the buffalos of Nghe An.”
The event was hardly an unusual one, since it was customary for the talented sons of poor farmers to be taken under the wing of more affluent relatives or neighbors and provided with a Confucian education in a local school. Should the child succeed in his studies and rise to the level of a scholar or government official, relatives and neighbors alike could all bask in the glow of the recipient’s prestige and influence.
As the wife of a local scholar, Kep was a respected and envied member of the local community. In most respects, however, her life, and that of her daughters, differed little from their less fortunate neighbors, who spent their days knee-deep in the muddy fields beyond the village hedgerow, painstakingly nursing the rice seedlings through the annual harvest cycle.
Like his friend Vuong Thuc Qui, Sac was critical of the technique of rote memorization and once remarked that studying a text “branch and leaf” was a worthless activity far removed from the reality of life. Don’t just follow the road to an official career, he advised his students, but try to understand the inner content of the Confucian classics in order to learn how to help your fellow human beings. To a friend Sac once remarked, “Why should I force my students to memorize the classics just to take the exams? I won’t teach my kids that way.”
HCM later explained that he preferred to go to France to see the secret of Western success at its source.
Thanh’s decision to reject Phan Boi Chau’s offer may have been motivated by one of Chau’s own remarks. When Thanh had asked how Japan had realized its own technological achievements, Chau replied that the Japanese had learned from the West.
It was not an especially prestigious position for someone of his academic rank, sine most of the pho bang in the class of 1901 had by now moved on to become district magistrates or to assume more senior positions in the bureaucracy. But Nguyen Sinh Sac’s long refusal to accept an official appointment had undoubtedly drawn attention at court and perhaps triggered suspicion of his loyalty to the imperial house.
Eventually, Trinh crossed paths with Phan Boi Chau in Hong Kong and followed Chau to Japan, where he approved of Chau’s efforts to train a new generation of Vietnamese intellectuals to save the country from extinction, but not of his friend’s decision to rely on the support of a member of the imperial family. In Trinh’s viet, it made more sense to cooperate with the French in the hope that they would launch reforms to transform traditional Vietnamese society.
A friend recollected many years later that Thanh studied hard and played little. He asked permission to write his exercises after classes at an instructor’s home and reviewed his lessons with friends at night, “Only through hardship can we succeed.” He worked especially hard on the French language, practicing his accent with his friends and writing the French and Chinese equivalents to Vietnamese words in his notebook. The hard work apparently paid off: He needed only one year to finish a two-year course.
To avoid arrest Thanh had walked the entire distance from Hue, performing odd jobs to obtain food. by some accounts, however, the meeting with his father was apparently not very successful, for Sac had become increasingly morose and had taken to drink. Sac scolded his son for his recent actions and caned him.
- Hey, Le, do you love your country?
- Well, of course!
- Can you keep a secret?
- Yes.
- I want to go abroad, to visit France and other countries. Do you want to come with me?
- But where will we find the money for the voyage?
- Here’s our money. We will work. We’ll do whatever is necessary to live and travel.
At the time, I thought all white people were French. Since a Frenchman had written those words, I wanted to become acquainted with French civilization to see what meaning lay in those words.
The people of Vietnam, including my own father, often wondered who would help them to remove the yoke of French control. Some said Japan, others Great Britain, and some said the US. I saw that I must go abroad to see for myself. After I had found out how they lived, I would return to help my countrymen.
As a cook’s help he had to work daily as follows: From 4 o’clock in the morning he cleaned the big kitchen, then lit the boilers in the hold, brought the coal in, fetched vegetables, meat, fish, ice, etc., from the hold. The work was pretty heavy because it was very hot in the kitchen and very cold in the hold. It was particularly arduous when the ship was tossing in a rough sea and he had to climb up the gangway with a heavy bag on his shoulders.
Yet Thanh seemed to bear it all with good humor and enthusiasm. In a letter written to one of his acquaintances in Saigon, he joked: “The hero goes joyfully through his day doing what he pleases, polishing the brass and the washroom and emptying the buckets of human waste.”
For the first time, too, he was addressed as “monsieur” when he stopped at a cafe on the city’s famous Rue Cannebiere for a cup of coffee. The experience inspired him to remark to his friend: “The French in France are better and more polite than those in Indochina.” At the same time, he discovered that there was poverty in France, just as there was in French Indochina. Then, as now, Marseilles was a rough city, its streets filled with sailors, vagabonds, merchants, and thieves of all races. Seeing prostitutes board the ship to consort with the sailors, he remarked to his friend: “Why don’t the French civilize their compatriots before doing it to us?”
Although a friend warned him that it was hotter in Africa than in Vietnam, Thanh still suffered from wanderlust (“I want to see the world,” he replied) and decided to go. During the next several months, he visited countries throughout Africa and Asia, including Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, India, Indochina, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, Sudan, Dahomey, and Madagascar.
According to his own account and in recollections to acquaintances, he spent a period of time in NYC, staring in awe at the modern skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline and strolling with friends in Chinatown, where he was impressed by the fact that Asian immigrants in the US appeared to have equal rights in law if not in fact.
Many years later he told a Cuban acquaintance that he had visited Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires. At some point, his ship stopped at ports cities along the East Coast of the US, including NYC, where Thanh decided to leave the ship and seek employment. He eventually stayed several months in the US.
From fewer than one hundred in 1911, the number of Vietnamese living in France had grown rapidly during the war. For a patriot determined to play a role in the liberation of his country, France was a logical site for operation and for the recruitment of avid followers.
He was painfully shy (Souvanrine recalled that he was “a timid, almost humble young man, very gentle, avid for learning”) that other participants dubbed him the “mute of Montmartre.”
On his first occasion, when he was called upon to describe the suffering of his compatriots under colonialism, Thanh was so nervous that he stuttered.
Than was a voracious reader, and he especially enjoyed the works of Shakespeare, Charles Dicken, Victor Hugo, Emile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, and Lu Xun, in addition to those of Barbusse. He was living almost literally out of a suitcase, and apparently moved frequently from one shabby hotel or flat to another in working-class sections of the city.
Paris at war’s end was a fascinating place for a young Asian interested in politics. The French capital still had some pretensions of being the political as well as the cultural hub of the Western world. Many of the most famous radical figures of the 19th century had lived and operated in Paris, and the brutalities of the recent war had energized their ideological heirs into escalating their verbal attacks on the capitalist system. Along the Left Bank, intellectuals and students from France and the world over gathered in cafes and restaurants to discuss politics and plan revolutions. Some had been secretly recruited as French agents to spy on their colleagues and report any subversive activities to the police.
By the end of the war there were approximately 50K Vietnamese in France. While most worked in factories, a few hundred, often the children of wealthy families, had come to study; because of the highly politicized atmosphere within the intellectual community in France, such students were ripe for political agitation.
Up until 1919, although he had made the acquaintance of a few of the great figures of the Vietnamese anticolonial movement, his only political achievement was to serve briefly as an interpreter during the peasant demonstrations in Hue. Un-imposing in appearance, shabbily dressed, Thanh was hardly an arresting figure to a casual passerby. Yet friends remember that he did possesses one remarkable physical characteristic, which implied that this was no ordinary man — a pair of dark eyes that flashed with intensity when he spoke and seemed to penetrate the soul of the observer. One acquaintance even mentioned that Thanh’s intensity frightened his wife.
On the surface, the association did not espouse radical objectives. Indeed, the founders hoped to avoid such an orientation in order to win broad support within the Vietnamese community and avoid suspicion by the authorities. The adoption of the word “Annam” instead of the traditional “Vietnam” into the title was probably a signal to the government that it did not represent a serious danger to the colonial enterprise. Yet from the start Thanh was determined to use the association to turn the Vietnamese community into an effective force directed against the colonial regime in Indochina.
He had an optimistic side to his character and seemed determined to believe the best about his fellow human beings, and even about his adversaries. This attitude was not limited to his compatriots, or even to his fellow Asians, but extended to Europeans as well. During a brief trip to Germany, Switzerland, and Italy that he took around this time, he remarked to a friend that “all are human beings. Everywhere we meet good people and bad people, honest and crooked people. If we are good people, we will meet good people everywhere.” It was, he was convinced, the colonial relationship that debased and corrupted human nature. There is no doubt, however, that he was disappointed by the lack of response to his petition: Nguyen Ai Quoc complained to colleagues a decade later that many people had been deceived by Woodrow Wilson’s “song of freedom.”
Thanh had complained about the deplorable conditions in Indochina, but conceded that the first step was to obtain freedom of speech in order to seek to educate the population and then work for autonomy and national independence.
Older patriots marveled at the audacity of the young photo retoucher. Younger ones showed new enthusiasm for the cause. The more prudent viewed him as a “wild man” and began to avoid him. What, they may have whispered, could you expect from a hardheaded buffalo from Nghe An?
Frustrated demands for national independence drove countless patriotic intellectuals from colonial countries in Asia and Africa into radical politics. Although it is probable that HCM was no exception, in his case it also is clear that his interest in socialist politics predated his involvement in the drafting of the petition.
HCM was probably attracted to the French socialists because, in his words, they “had shown their sympathy toward me, toward the struggle of the oppressed peoples.” At the same time, his ideological bent toward socialism can be seen as a natural consequence of his dislike of capitalism and imperialism. In later years he frequently commented on the exploitative nature of American capitalism, although he occasionally expressed admiration for the dynamism and energy of the American people. It seems likely that, as with many Asian nationalists, his initial interest in socialism came as a result of discovering its hostility toward the capitalist order.
Yet the trend in Asian nationalist circles toward socialism should not be ascribed totally to expediency. For many Asian intellectuals, the group ethic of Western socialist theory corresponded better to their own inherited ideals than did the individualist and profit-motivated ethic of Western capitalism. And nowhere was this more pronounced than in Confucian societies like China and Vietnam. Chinese and Vietnamese nationalists from scholar-gentry families often found the glitter of the new commercial cities more than vaguely distasteful. In the Confucian mind, Western industrialism was too easily translated into greed and an unseemly desire for self-aggrandizement. By contrast, socialism stressed community effort, simplicity of lifestyle, equalization of wealth and opportunity, all of which had strong overtones in the Confucian tradition. Under such conditions, the philosophical transition from Confucius to Marx was easier to make than that to Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill, who stressed such unfamiliar concepts as materialism and individualism.
He discovered that for most of his French acquaintances, colonialism was viewed as only a peripheral aspect of a broader problem — the issue of world capitalism. Marx had been inclined toward Eurocentrism, and most of his progeny in Europe had followed his lead. The colonies, after all, represented economic wealth to France, and jobs to her workers. So Monsieur Nguyen elicited little response when he raised the colonial questions at political meetings, leading him to exclaim to one colleague in his frustration, “If you don’t accuse colonialism, if you don’t side with the colonial peoples, how can you make revolution?”
NAQ was still a novice in the world of radical politics. A number of his colleagues during those formative years later remarked that at the time he knew almost nothing about theory, or the differences between the Second and Third Internationals. On one occasion he asked Jean Longuet to explain the meaning of Marxism. Longuet demurred, saying that the question was too complex and suggesting that he read Marx’s Das Kapital. NAQ thereupon went to a library near the Place d’Italie and borrowed a copy of that magnum opus, which he read along with a number of other Marxist works. Afterward, he remarked in his autobiography, he kept a copy of Das Kapital under his head as a pillow.
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 to tears. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted aloud as if addressing a large crowds: Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation.
The local bourgeoisie, prevented from playing an active role in industrial and commercial development in their own society by the Western imperialist dominance, remained weak and undeveloped; it was thus unable to play its assigned progressive role in waging the capitalist revolution against feudal forces in society, a necessary first step in the advance to global communism. The colonial middle class would need help from other progressive forces — such as the poor peasantry and the small but growing urban proletariat — to overthrow feudalism and open the door to industrial and commercial development.
In effect, Lenin was calling on his fellow Communists in the West to join hands with Asian and African nationalists in a common revolutionary endeavor. The alliance was temporary; once imperialism and its feudal allies in underdeveloped societies were overthrown, the Communist movement should detach itself from its alliance with the bourgeois political forces, who would now become increasingly reactionary, and struggle to achieve the second, socialist stage of the revolution.
Socialists in Paris, with few exceptions, tended to dwell on words rather than deeds. Lenin was not a theorist, but a man of action. To NAQ, he was clearly an extraordinarily inspiring figure, and one worthy of his allegiance.
Although in theory the French were performing a civilizing mission, in actuality their educational policies were simple indoctrination and kept the Vietnamese people unprepared for future competition with their neighbors. In the meantime, the Japanese government had astutely prepared its own people to develop their economic capacities. Eventually, he note prophetically, Japanese businessmen will arrive in Indochina and make Vietnamese lives even more difficult.
When Lenin issued his challenge to socialists everywhere to follow him in a holy war against capitalism, he forced party members to choose sides.
Quoc was badly beaten by the police, but managed to flee the scene. News of the incident made a number of his acquaintances nervous to be seen in his company. A couple of weeks later Tran Tien Nam, one of the more moderate members of the group, moved out of the apartment, claiming that NAQ’s political views had become too radical for his comfort.
When the news reached Indochina, it served to further divide NAQ from his father. On being informed of Quoc’s comments, Sac’s reportedly remarked that any son who did not recognize his sovereign did not recognize his father.
But he argued that Quoc was wasting his time by remaining abroad and writing articles in a language that few Vietnamese understood. That, he said, was Phan Boi Chau’s error when he sought to recruit patriots to study in Japan. Quoc should go home, he advised, and appeal to the people inside the country. If so, he concluded, “I am convinced that the doctrine that you cherish so much can be diffused among our people. Even if you fail, others will take up the task.”
Quoc had chosen the lonely and difficult part of liberating his compatriots, Trinh concluded, and all must respect his stout heart.
As the country tried to recover from the Civil War, Lenin reluctantly recognized that Soviet Russia needed to go through its own capitalist stage before beginning the difficult transition to socialism. In 1921 he pushed through a moderate program of social and economic development known as the New Economic Policy, or NEP. The key elements of the program were the use of a combination of capitalist and socialist techniques to increase production, while at the same time promoting the concept of socialist ownership and maintaining firm Party control over the political system. Key industries and utilities and the banks remained in the hands of the state, but private enterprise operated at lower levels. The forced requisition of grain, which had caused serious unrest in rural areas, was replaced by a tax on production. The land remained in private hands.
The petty bourgeoisie, consisting of small merchants, clerks, low-level government functionaries, and artisans, were small in number and indecisive in their political views, although they did tend to support the cause of national independence. The peasants were severely oppressed and, if organized, had a high revolutionary potential. But the primary source for political activism was intellectuals and the patriot scholar-gentry. If was they, he said, who had fomented all revolts in the past.
As NAQ described it in his article, the school was an idyllic place to study. There were two libraries containing over 47K books, and each major nationality represented at the school possessed its own section with books and periodicals in its own national language. The students were “serious and full of enthusiasm,” and “passionately longed to acquire knowledge and to study.” The staff and the instructors treated the foreign students “like brothers” and even invited them to “participate in the political life of the country.”
He noted that the slight young man, so imbued with the subtle qualities of the Confucian intellectual class, had large and penetrating dark eyes, and when he spoke of conditions in his country his whole body appeared to go into convulsion and his eyes seemed to reflect a strange fierce brilliance. In the interview, Quoc pronounced the word “civilization” with an attitude of supreme disgust, and harshly criticized the Catholic Church in Indochina for appropriating almost one fifth of the country’s arable land.
In all of his public utterances, NAQ still seemed to be a true believer. His writings on the Soviet Union are uniformly full of praise, and his admiration for Lenin seemed boundless. He had apparently been very disappointed at being unable to meet the Bolshevik leader before his death.
Ai Quoc said he had just seen Comrade Lenin. He was trembling from the cold as he explained that he could not wait until tomorrow to pay homage to the best friend of the colonial peoples. He finished by asking if we didn’t happen to have some hot tea.
After returning from Lenin’s funeral NAQ locked himself in his room and wrote an essay expressing his grief at the death of the generous Bolshevik leader who had spared his time and effort to concern himself with the liberation of the colonial peoples. “In his life, he was our father, teacher, comrade, and adviser. Now he is our guiding star that leads to social revolution. Lenin lives on in our deeds. He is immortal.”
You must excuse my frankness, but I cannot help but observe that the speeches by comrades from the mother countries give me the impression that they wish to kill a snake by stepping on its tail. Your all know that today the poison and life energy of the capitalist snake is concentrated more in the colonies than in the mother countries. They colonies supply the raw materials for industry. The colonies supply soldiers for the armies. In the future, the colonies will be bastions of the counterrevolution. Yet in our discussions of the revolution you neglect to talk about the colonies.
NAQ’s attendance at the Fifth Comintern Congress symbolized the end of his apprenticeship as a revolutionary and the beginning of his emergence as an Asian leader of international standing in the world communist movement. He was now the recognized spokesman for the Eastern question and for increased attention to the problems of the peasantry. As gratifying as that may have been to his ego and to his desire to orient the Comintern toward assigning greater attention to the colonial question, he now felt that he had accomplished his task in Moscow and was ready to return to Asia to launch the process of building a revolutionary movement in Indochina.
Still, the bureaucratic wheels moved slowly. In a letter to Grigory, Quoc complained that his trip to China had been delayed “for this and that reason” and “from one week to the next,” and then “from one month to the next.”
With his hopes of foreign assistance once again dashed, Phan Boi Chau appeared to lose his bearings. In despair, he even offered to cooperate with the French, provided that they lived up to their promises to carry out political and economic reforms in Indochina. By the early 1920s, his revolutionary apparatus in Vietnam had virtually disintegrate. He remained in exile in China, surrounded by a small coterie of loyal followers, a figure of increasing irrelevance. The era of Phan Boi Chau had clearly come to an end.
Phan Boi Chau enthused in print over a movement comprising “ten thousand nameless heroes” who would drive the French into the sea, but to the end his party was composed primarily of the well-born and the well-educated, and few peasants took part. Although his movement attempted to promote commerce and industry as a means of enriching Vietnamese society, its senior members were representative of the traditional landed aristocracy. Well-meaning patriotic scholars in flowing robes opened shops to raise funds and encourage local commerce and then alienated customers with their condescending ways.
As the French journalist Paul Monet wrote, members of this new generation were “the prototypes of our [French] culture, deprived of traditional beliefs and uprooted from ancestral soil, totally ignorant of Confucian morality, which they despise because they don’t understand it.” French colonials frequently referred to such developments as a sign that the civilizing mission was succeeding, but they would soon find out that this generation would represent a more formidable challenge than its parents’.
In the mid-1920s, only about 5K students throughout the entire country had received the equivalent of a high school education. Such statistics underlined the hypocrisy of the French claim that they were carrying out a civilizing mission in Indochina; whereas under the traditional system about a quarter of the population was able to decipher texts written in Chinese characters, in the decade following WW1 the literacy rate in either quoc ngu or the traditional characters has been estimated at only about 5 percent of the population.
Many among the 40K Europeans who lived and worked in Indochina — some of whom had arrived with little more than the shirts on their backs — all too often behaved with arrogance and condescension toward the local population. Foreigners, including over 200K overseas Chinese who had settled predominantly in the cities and market towns, continued to dominate the urban economy.
The impact of Nguyen An Ninh’s activities on the youth of Cochin China was increasingly worrisome for the French authorities; eventually he was summoned to talk with Lieutenant Govenor Maurice Cognacq, who warned him that his efforts were closely monitored by the authorities, and that if he persisted in his activities they would use the necessary means to compel him to desist. The Vietnamese people were too simpleminded, Cognacq suggested, to understand Ninh’s message. If Ninh wanted to make intellectuals, he added sarcastically, go to Moscow. Cognacq’s warning, however, was ignored; Nguyen An Ninh resumed his campaign.
In political awareness, Vietnamese workers were well behind their counterparts in neighboring China and manifestly lacked the capacity to take the lead in waging a popular uprising against French colonial rule.
As one Vietnamese nationalist said, “We will not go to communism, but to the Communists, for here, as in other countries, since the Communists promise to bring self-determination to all peoples, they will be awaited as saviors.” But as a rule, their attitude was fairly naive. Another Vietnamese patriot was quoted as saying: “If the West hates them, the Russians and Communists must be good.”
The implication was that Vietnam was not yet ready for the formation of a Communist Party. The masses “are thoroughly rebellious, but completely ignorant. They want to free themselves, but do not know how to go about doing so.” The educated elite was restive but not ready for Karl Marx. Time was needed so that the Vietnamese people could be brought gradually to realize that social revolution was the answer to their problems. In the meantime, a political party should be formed that could represent, in embryonic form, the ideals of Marx and Lenin but that could appeal to the public on the basis of the one major issue that could elicit a favorable response: national independence.
In an interview with a Soviet journalist just before his death, HCM conceded that his youthful revolutionary zeal might have been excessive, remarking ruefully that on one occasion while he was living in the USSR, he had scolded a young woman for wearing a silk dress and high-heeled shoes. As the recalled, she responded spiritedly that she had made everything with her own hands. “Is it really so bad,” she asked, “that young people now have the chance to eat and dress well?” After decades, he comment still remained in his memory.
Vuong was the most popular teacher in the school. They remembered him as slender, with bright eyes and a warm voice, friendly and good-humored, although he rarely laughed. Vuong was exceptionally approachable and patient with his student. He would explain difficult words and give long explanations of unfamiliar concepts. He seemed unusually well read, and a walking almanac when it came to statistics.
As in Paris, NAQ was not only instructor, but also moral adviser, surrogate parent, and resident cheerleader. He taught his charges how to talk and behave in a morally upright manner (so as to do credit to the revolutionary cause), how to speak in public, how to address gatherings of workers, peasants, children, and women, how to emphasize the national cause as well as the need for a social revolution, how to behave without condescension to the poor and illiterate.
By 1928, the Revolutionary Youth League had an estimated 300 members inside Indochina, with 150 in Cochin China, 80 in Annam, and 70 in Tonkin. A year later, the number had increased to over 1700.
In the pamphlet, NAQ’s message was tantalizingly simple. Given the lack of sophistication of his students and their unfamiliarity with Western terminology (the Vietnamese kach menh was only introduced in the early 20th century, which literally means “to change the mandate”), it is not surprising that he began with a brief definition of revolution. Revolution, he stated, is to destroy the old and build the new, or to destroy the bad and construct the good.
If defeated, they would only lose their miserable life; if they win, they would have the whole world. That is why the workers and farmers are the roots of the revolution, while the students, small merchants, and landowners, though oppressed, do not suffer as much as the workers and farmers, that is why these three classes are only the revolutionary friends of the workers and farmers.
As a boat cannot advance without good oarsman, he wrote, the revolution could not succeed without a solid party. A handful of rebels, he continued, can achieve little simply by assassinating a few government officials. Such actions lead only to more repression, not to liberation. The key to a solid party lay in its doctrine. A party should have an ideology that can be understood and followed by all party members. A party without ideology is like a man without intelligence, or a boat without compass.
To many of his colleagues, it was Quoc’s personal demeanor, his image of goodness and simplicity, his unfailing optimism, his seriousness and devotion to the cause, that were best remembered after his death. NAQ’s revolutionary ethics became the hallmark of his influence on his party and, for many, served as a distinguishing characteristic of Vietnamese communism.
Buddhism, which denied the essential reality of the material world and preached a philosophy of denial, had little relevance as an agent for change. Confucianism, although deeply entrenched as a set of social and political maxims among the Vietnamese elite, had been widely discredited as a result of the pusillanimous surrender of the imperial court to the French invaders. As a result, most non-Communist nationalist organizations tended to be defined by regional identity, by tactics, or by personality. The actions of their members, while sometimes courageous, often seemed meaningless gestures of hatred against an all-powerful enemy who could scatter the rebel forces with a slap of the hand.
It would be a mistake, however, to attempt to read too much into Quoc’s views as expressed in this book. He was attempting to popularize Marxist ideas in a society that was predominantly rural and lacking in political sophistication. It was probable that NAQ — along the lines of his now familiar conviction that in propaganda, simpler is better — was making a deliberate effort to create a popular “vulgar” Marxism that could be understood by the Vietnamese people in the context of their own circumstances.
I told him if there were no operational funds, at least give travel money so I can leave, because for over a year I have wandered aimlessly from country to country while there is much to do in Indochina.
The arduous trip took 15 days, including 10-day trek along jungle paths. The travelers in the small group carried their own provisions, as well as their luggage. At first, Father Chin had difficulties and lagged behind the others, his feet raw and his breath short. But through sheer willpower he persisted; by the end of the trip he showed his mettle, managing on occasion to walk as far as 70km in a single day.
Quoc himself made an effort to learn the Thai language, setting a strict schedule to memorize 10 words a day, and he established schools for Vietnamese residents to learn Thai and to appreciate local customs.
And who ever should wish to seize Vietnam, must first kill us to the last man.
Cung had attended the meeting at Lam Due Thu’s house in HK and had been distressed by what he considered the ideological flabbiness of the line adopted by the new league leadership. He didn’t believe it possible to talk of national independence and love of country and expect to earn the support of poor peasants and workers. He felt it necessary to address their practical economic interests. Cung’s argument was not well received at the meeting.
The decisions of the 6th Congress, when they became available in Vietnam at the end of the year, sharpened the debate and intensified the determination of the radical faction in Tonkin to further its bid to transform the league into a more ideologically focused Communist Party. The leader of the agitation continued to be Tran Van Cung, who had become convinced by his own experience working as a factory laborer that vague patriotic slogans would not induce urban workers to support the league. The organization must emphasize issues of primal importance to workers — higher salaries, better working conditions, reduced working hours — in order to win strong labor support. And this could not be done, he felt, without the transformation of the league into a full-fledged Communist Party.
From the start, the leaders of the VNQDD had appeared to be in a hurry. Scorning the painstaking Leninist approach of building up a mass organization with popular roots throughout the country, they created an elite corps of revolutionaries dedicated to the violent overthrow of French colonial authority by means of a military insurrection. Crucial to their plans was the subversion of native Vietnamese troops serving in the colonial army.
Students were also frustrated at the lack of attractive job opportunities after graduation, and the fact that in many vocations Vietnamese were paid less than their European counterparts for similar work. Such sentiments undoubtedly added to the rising chorus of protest among Vietnamese in all three regions against foreign domination.
The social effects of early industrialization are rarely pleasant in any society — conditions in the industrial cities of the 19th-century Europe amply attest to that.
Village commune lands, long used as a safety valve to provide small plots for the landless poor, were absorbed by influential landlords through legal and illegal manipulation. When the plundered peasants lodged a complaint, they were jailed.
Asked why the peasants resented the French, he replied, “The people know nothing about the French administration, which is too far removed from their daily lives. They know only the mandarins, whom they despise.”
But the Nghe An provincial committee, the primary unit in charge of directing Party operations on the spot, had a different perspective. In a circular issued in early October, it instructed its own local units to continue carrying out a policy of armed violence against reactionary elements, arguing that otherwise the masses would become discouraged and betray Party cadres to the authorities. Violence, it concluded, inspired fear in the Party’s enemies and lent strength to the revolutionary cause, while struggle was the movement’s only current means of subsistence. The committee circular instructed all units to continue with the confiscation of communal lands still in the hands of landlords and to carry out selective assassinations of reactionary officials.
Ngo Tri Duc and Nguyen Trong Nghia, the other members of the Standing Committee, were both in prison. With Nguyen Phong Sac having been executed in April, the Party was almost totally bereft of leadership inside the country.
Although NAQ was not visibly ill, he was worn out and emaciated. In his memoirs, he complained that in HK he was housed in a virtual dungeon, where he was regularly maltreated and was fed meals of bad rice, rotten fish, and a little beef. Sometimes he fell momentarily into despair when it appeared that he would not be released. Hunting for bugs, he related, was his only amusement. To pass the time he also sang songs or wrote poetry and letters to friends on scraps of paper that he managed to find in prison.
He maintained an extremely close contact with the Vietnamese group. Normally, he came during the evening to recount his experiences in putting an emphasis on revolutionary morality and, in particular, on solidarity. Some of the youngest members, out of pique or arrogance, used to squabble over minor issues. It was Uncle Ho who arbitrated such conflicts. He sought to inculcate in everyone a few essential principles: to combat pride, egoism and egocentrism, indiscipline, anarchism, and to reinforce unity and the need to place the interests of the revolution above all else. He often advised us: “If you are incapable of maintaining solidarity in this little group, how will you able to talk of unifying the masses to combat the colonialists and save the nation after you return to your country?”
Over 30 Vietnamese students currently enrolled in various training programs in Moscow were instructed to return by various routes to Indochina in order to provide the foundation for a new Party central committee. Most were arrested en route or deserted to the French.
Some of the new recruits were former members of the ICP who had recently been released from prison, but in general Party leaders were suspicious of the loyalty of ex-prisoners. According to a contemporary report by the provincial committee of Nghe An, “of 100 old Communists, only 1 is capable of staying true to the doctrine of the Party.”
Ha Huy Tap also criticized Party cadres inside Indochina for placing too much attention on mobilizing peasants in rural areas and called for more emphasis on recruiting workers into the movement. Peasants, the author charged, were “greedy for personal property; very amorphous and slow from an ideological and practical point of view, very disunited, i.e., very badly qualified to assume the direction of the revolutionary movement.”
NAQ had already complained that Party members who lacked any formal education often found it difficult to grasp the ideological complexities of Marxist-Leninist doctrine and were sometimes unreliable under pressure. Prejudice against those Party members from rural backgrounds was especially strong within the leadership, a legacy of accepted wisdom in Moscow as well as of traditional attitudes within the Vietnamese scholar-gentry class. Workers and peasants could be highly useful, however, as a means of facilitating the effort to penetrate factories and farm villages to spread propaganda for the cause.
NAQ probably read such reports after their arrival in Moscow. What he thought about Tap’s criticisms of his own actions is now known, but his general attitude is indicated in a letter that he wrote in January 1935 to someone in the Dalburo, complaining that the theoretical knowledge of students from Southeast Asia who had been studying in Moscow was quite low. Many did not understand the bourgeois democratic revolution, or why the land revolution and the cause of anti-imperialism were linked together. Although Quoc admitted that such shortcomings had been true within the ICP in 1930 and 1931, the problem had recently become more serious because of the youth and lack of experience of many Party members.
His role as observer at the congress was not necessarily inconsistent with his continuing responsibility as the Comintern’s senior spokesman for Southeast Asian affairs. Still, it must have been galling to sit on the sidelines while one of his proteges emerged in the limelight as the leader of the ICP in the new era.
To make matters worse, NAQ’s intimate relationship with his young colleague Nguyen Thi Minh Khai had apparently come to an end. Letters and confidential reports from the ICP leadership in Macao to the Dalburo in the months leading up to the congress had mentioned that “Quoc’s wife” would be among the delegates attending the meeting, thus implying that the two had been married prior to their arrest in HK in 1931.
Whether the combination of losing his Party leadership role and his wife to Le Hong Phong was “doubly humiliating,” as one observer suggests, is another matter. In his long career Quoc had already demonstrated a predilection for casual affairs so long as they did not interfere with his political objectives, and he may have seen the relationship as a temporary one from the start.
After two decades of revolutionary work, NAQ chafed at his current situation. For an activist with little interest in theory, months spent on translating the works of Communist luminaries or attending classes dealing with abstract ideological matters must have been a trying experience. It had been 7 years since he was arrested, and the beginning of the 8th year of his inactivity. Quoc asked for help in changing his sad situation. “Send me somewhere, or keep me here. Do of me what you consider useful. But I beg you not to leave me too long without activity and aside and outside the Party.”
The Party should not demand that the Front acknowledge its leadership. It must instead show itself to be the organization that makes the greatest sacrifices, and is the most active and loyal. It is only through daily struggle and work that the masses of the people will acknowledge the correct policies and capability for leadership of the Party and that it can win the leading position.
After all, no less an authority than Lenin had declared that the best time to launch a revolution was during a world war.
Dong, a veteran Party member who had attended the Revolutionary Youth League Congress in HK in May 1929, had been born in Quang Ngai province, south of Da Nang, in 1908. The son of a mandarin who served as chief of staff for Emperor Duy Tan, Dong had graduated from the National Academy in Hue, but then joined the revolutionary movement and fled to Canton, where he studied at the Whampoa Academy. With his prominent cheekbones and deep-set eyes, Dong had a quiet and unassuming demeanor that disguised a fierce determination, and he soon came to the attention of his colleagues as a potential leader. Arrested during a government sweep operation in Saigon in 1931, he spent several years in prison on the island of Poulo Condore. After several years in the “tiger cages,” the infamous jail cells that were used by the French to house dangerous political prisoners during the colonial era, he was granted amnesty in 1937 and served as a journalist during the Popular Front era.
The new focus on national themes was reflected in the front’s formal name, the league for the Independence Vietnam, which not only stressed the issue of independence but also replaced the term “Indochina” in the name of the Communist Party with the more emotive word “Vietnam,” the use of which had for so long been forbidden by the French colonial regime.
Yet in establishing the new front inside Indochina, Quoc was gambling that conditions throughout the world would turn favorable to the cause of revolution in Vietnam. Would Japanese occupation lead to the weakening of the French colonial regime? Would the Japanese fascists themselves ultimately be defeated by an alliance of democratic forces around the world? Would the victorious Allies be sympathetic to the establishment of a new independent government of peasants and workers in Hanoi? All that remain to be seen.
The task of communications, he frequently declared to his colleagues, was “the most important task” for their revolutionary work, since it was decisive for maintaining the principle of unified command and the proper deployment of forces, thus guaranteeing final success.
The Vietnamese people, he claimed, had nothing to fear from communism, which would gradually carry the idea of economic equality throughout the entire world, just as democracy had spread the concept of political equality throughout Europe after the French Revolution. The result would be a future state of great world unity.
By now Zhang Fakui had decided that HCM was the best choice to lead the Vietnamese anti-Japanese resistance movement. He once said that while HO was hardworking, the others were lazy and careless, and squabbled so much that they gave him a headache.
We should guard against the illusion that the Chiang Kai-shek and Anglo-American troops will bring us our freedom. In our struggle for national liberation we must obviously seek allies — even if they are temporary, vacillating, or conditional — but the struggle must no less be the fruit of our own efforts.
However tragic its impact on the population of Vietnam, the crisis was a potential godsend to the Vietminh, who could now argue with little fear of contradiction that neither the French nor the Japanese authorities were capable of looking out for the interests of the Vietnamese people. During the winter, Vietminh activists urged local peasants to raid warehouses throughout the northern and central provinces, seizing the grain stored there and distributing it to the needy.
With living costs rising and the food shortage continuing, many middle-class residents in Hanoi and other major cities began to turn their eyes to the Vietminh, and some even began to buy Vietminh “revolutionary bonds” to curry favor with the potential new revolutionary authorities.
Although he must have shared the common jubilation over the stunning events taking place throughout the country, he was undoubtedly conscious of the intimidating challenges ahead, and quoted Lenin’s famous words of warning his own colleagues: “Seizing power is difficult, but keeping it is even harder.”
Accommodations had been arranged for HCM on the top floor. It was the first time in his 55 years that HCM had been in Hanoi.
According to one source, 90% of the Vietnamese people were estimated to be illiterate in 1945, a damning indictment of French educational policies in a society where literacy rates had traditionally been among the highest in Asia. A decree was now issued requiring that all Vietnamese learn to read and write the national script (quoc ngu) within one year.
The decision by the provisional government to present a moderate face to the Vietnamese people was a calculated move by HCM and his senior colleagues to win the support of a broad cross-section of the people in order to focus on the key problem of containing the threat of foreign imperialism. Despite Ho’s effort to avoid offending moderates, however, the government was not always been able to control radical elements at the local level who wanted to settle personal scores or engage in class warfare.
Long accustomed to taking action according to local circumstances, southern leaders did not respond with enthusiasm to Viet’s suggestions. In return, Hoang Quoc Viet, a labor leader from a worker background with a strong bent toward ideological orthodoxy, apparently viewed Giau and his associates as petty bourgeois adventurers heavily tainted by the decadent character of life in capitalist Saigon. The mutual distrust between the northern and southern branches of the Party that had begun to emerge in the late 1930s was reinforced by the separate tracks followed by the two regions during and after the August Revolution.
The economic situation in the north was still dire, and although no French troops were stationed in the area, nationalist parties represented an increasingly vocal challenge. Behind them loomed the Chinese. Faced with threats from all sides, HCM maneuvered desperately to seek out allies and isolate adversaries. To placate Lu Han, the commander of the Chinese occupation troops, he ordered a subordinate to provide him with opium. To furnish an additional symbol of legitimacy for his fragile government, he asked former emperor Bao Dai, now citizen Vinh Thuy, to serve as his political adviser.
Conceding that many Americans viewed him as a “Moscow puppet,” Ho denied that he was a Communist in the American sense. Having repaid his debt to the Soviet Union with 15 years of Party work, he now considered himself a free agent. In recent months, he pointed out, the DRV had received more support from the US than from the USSR. Why should it be indebted to Moscow?
Still, although the road ahead was strewn with obstacles, the first step had been taken, and a newly independent Vietnamese government held tenuous power in Hanoi. In later years, the August Revolution would become inflated to almost mythic proportions, as Party historians in Hanoi portrayed the events at the end of the Pacific War as a testimony to the genius of the Communist Party and its great leader. The strategy behind the uprising — described as a combination of political and military struggle to seize power in both urban and rural areas — became a prototype for future struggles of national liberation, not only in Vietnam but also in other parts of the Third World.
In recent years, that view has come under close scrutiny from a number of Western scholars, some of whom have argued that the element of planning was relatively limited in what was essentially a spontaneous popular uprising. Others contend that the events of August did not constitute a revolution, but a mere coup d’etat. There is some truth in both observations, for there is an element of chance in all revolutions. Lenin once noted that revolution is much more complex in theory than in reality; despite all the careful planning that had gone into the Party’s efforts in its mountain base at Tan Trao, there was a distinct aura of spontaneity and improvisation about the insurrection that erupted at the moment of Japanese surrender to Allied forces in Asia.
In the two months following the close of the Pacific War, the situation in Hanoi slipped perilously closer to disaster. The trying conditions placed a severe strain on HCM, and on his position as a leader of the Party and the government. While the hotbloods within the ICP called for vigorous action to suppress rival groups, Ho argued tirelessly for a policy of conciliation and negotiations with the eventual goal of dividing and isolating the Party’s adversaries. Although many Vietnamese called for an attitude of uncompromising hostility to the return of the French in the north, he signaled a willingness to accept a French presence — provided that they came as friends, and not as conquerors.
According to Archimedes Patti, HCM was not particularly enthused about the plan to solicit funds from the general populace, believing that the poor would sacrifice out of patriotic duty while the rich would give just token amounts. His fears were apparently justified, since relatively little was provided by affluent residents in the north, and Ho “felt like a traitor” for letting “the whole farce” take place.
HCM may have been motivated in part by a desire to win support from the Catholic community, many of whom were among the most educated and affluent people in the country. He had appointed a Catholic to his cabinet and on occasion attended Catholic ceremonies in Hanoi. But he also sent conciliatory signals to other groups as well, visiting with representatives of mountain peoples and taking part in the celebration of the birth of Confucius at the Temple of Literature.
According to a communique issued at the end of the meeting, the VNQDD was guaranteed 50 seats and the Dong Minh Hoi 20 seats in the future national assembly, regardless of the results of the voting. HCM was to be named president and Nguyen Hai Than vice president. The cabinet was to be composed of 2 members of the Vietminh Front, along with 2 each from the VNQDD, the Democratic Party, the Dong Minh Hoi, and 2 independents. The Vietminh and the nationalists then agreed to stop their mutual attacks and to settle differences by negotiations.
Bao Dai eventually began to suspect that he was being used as a pawn to provide the government with an aura of legitimacy with the Americans.
But Ho was also under pressure from within his own constituency not to give in to the French, Nationalist publications criticized him incessantly for engaging in discussions with the French and called for the dissolution of his “government of traitors,” who would sell out the interests of Vietnamese independence in order to keep themselves in power.
My Lord, please forget all that I told you this morning. I have no right to abandon my responsibilities just because the situation is difficult. To return power to you now would be an act of treason on my part. I beg you to excuse this moment of weakness and to forgive me for having thought in such circumstances to discharge myself of my duties to you. I had planned to resign above all because of the opposition of nationalist parties to the accords that we are preparing with the French.
Can’t you understand what would happen if the Chinese stayed? You are forgetting our past history. Whenever the Chinese came, they stayed for a thousand years. The French, on the other hand, can stay only for a short time. Eventually, they will have to leave. It is better to sniff French shit for a while than to eat China’s for the rest of our lives.
The problem now is not whether we wish to fight. The problem is to know ourselves and know others, to realize objectively all conditions which are favorable and unfavorable in the country and abroad, and then to advocate correctly.
After the ceremony, Sainteny expressed his satisfaction regarding the agreement, but Ho replied: “And I am sorry, because fundamentally you have won the contest. You were well aware that I wanted more than this. But I realize well that we cannot have everything at once.”
News of the agreement appeared in the Hanoi newspapers the following morning. According to reports, it was greeted with a combination of surprise, anger, and indifference. Despite the government’s appeal to the populace to remain calm and avoid provocative actions against French residents, the tension in the capital was palpable. Nationalists charged that HCM had been duped by the French, and some even called him a traitor (Viet gian). To counter such charges, Party leaders planned a mass rally in front of the Municipal Theater to explain the decision.
According to a French source, one Vietnamese observer, on seeing the modern weapons and disciplined carriage of Leclerc’s troops, remarked despondently, “We’re lost, they’re too strong.” But Leclerc was not so confident, expressing his fear that in case of a breakdown in the agreement, one division would not be sufficient to pacify the area. Many of the local French colons, however, were jubilant, arguing that the Vietnamese made poor soldiers.
On the flight back to Hanoi, Ho commented to d’Argenlieu’s subordinate, General Raoul Salan, who had participated in the meeting, “If the admiral thinks I was cowed by the might of his fleet, he is wrong. Your dreadnoughts will never be able to sail up our rivers.”
Under Sainteny’s patient persuasion, HCM began to relax, and for the next several days submitted with good humor to Sainteny’s tireless efforts to provide him with distractions. In later years, HCM occasionally commented that those were among the happiest days of his life.
The French were evasive on the issue of Cochin China, demanding the withdrawal of all north Vietnamese troops from the region as a precondition for a cease-fire, and adopted a narrow interpretation of the concept of the Vietnamese “free state” within the French Union. As if to symbolize their arrogance, many French delegates began to absent themselves from committee meetings.
Thorez expressed his approval of the terms of the agreement, but added that “if the Vietnamese do not respect these terms, we will take the necessary measures and let guns speak for us, if need be.”
When a US reporter asked if it was true that he was a Communist, Ho replied that he was indeed a student of Karl Marx, but that communism required an advanced industrial and agricultural base, and Vietnam possessed neither of these conditions. Who knows, he remarked, when the dream of Karl Marx will be realized; two thousand years ago, Jesus Christ taught the importance of lovign one’s enemies, and that has yet to come true.
This modus vivendi was precious little for HCM to have obtained after 2 months of talks at Fontainebleau. Sainteny later described it as a “pathetic” piece of paper that had been drawn up hastily in his own office and gave Ho “much less than he had hoped for when he came to France.” In Indochina, French residents were delighted, but Vietnamese attitudes were ambivalent, with some convinced that it represented a national humiliation. Ho tacitly admitted as much, remarking to Sainteny as they left the meeting at three in the morning, “I have just signed my death warrant.”
Ho must have had mixed feelings about the way his Party colleagues administered the country while he was away for 4 months. (He had repeatedly asked them to avoid provoking any problems until his return.) The consolidation of Vietminh authority and the suppression of rival elements would undoubtedly make it easier to adopt policies during the crucial months to come. But at the same time, the narrowing of the government’s popular base — a base that Ho had so assiduously cultivated in the months following the August Revolution — could make it more difficult to mobilize national unity in the event of an armed confrontation with the French.
HCM may have also become increasingly aware that his efforts to secure a peace agreement in France had undercut his reputation and prestige with senior colleagues within his Party, many of whom were more skeptical than he that a compromise solution could be achieved, and more inclined to engage in a test of arms and wills with the French.
Whatever the reality of his relations with his senior colleagues, there seems little doubt that the vast majority of the people of north Vietnam were still devoted to him. HCM’s fervent dedication to the cause of national independence, his personal simplicity, and his avuncular style had struck a responsive chord among the population, and he was already assuming an almost mystic role as bearer of the national destiny.
Ho listened politely to his visitor, but flatly rejected the French demands. “In the French Union there is no place for cowards. If I accepted these terms, I would be one.”
He alluded to HCM’s reluctance to admit he was really NAQ as an indication that Ho realized that he must deal with the West. O’Sullivan concluded that Ho was trying to obtain aid wherever he could get it and would tend to orient his policies toward whatever source the assistance came from.
In estimating that the military situation was favorable to the French, Coste-Floret was not entirely off the mark. In fact, Vietnamese efforts to maintain cohesion and strength in the opening stage of the war had been a disappointment, and Vietminh forces were frequently in a state of disarray as they faced the French. In some cases, main-force units had been overused or were overly aggressive, leading to heavy casualties. In others, Vietminh commanders displayed a poor grasp of the tactics of guerrilla war, resulting in confusion and widespread troop desertion on the battlefield. Adding to the problem was a continuing lack of firepower. For the most part, Vietnamese units were limited to locally manufactured weapons, or to those captured from the Japanese or the French. Vietminh leaders also tended to overestimate the importance of support from the rural gentry, many of whom refused to declare their allegiance to the cause.
Still, Salan reported to his superiors that the operation had been a success, since the main route to China via Cao (the last remaining Vietminh contact with the outside world) was severed. HCM was now totally isolated. All that remained, he general averred, were “isolated bands of varying levels of importance, and susceptible to simple police operations.” The Vietminh redoubt, he declared, had practically ceased to exist.
When they were forced to cross a river or a stream, the group stayed near him, especially if the current was strong; nonetheless, he was generally able to keep up, and one deserter claimed to French interviewers that HCM had more capacity to endure hardship than most of his younger colleagues.
Although US officials had little faith in Bao Dai (most viewed him as a playboy who lacked the stomach for political confrontation), they welcomed the signing of the Ha Long Bay agreement as a “forward step.”
According to a Party document written in August 1948, if the Rhine River was viewed as Britain’s first line of defense for Great Britain in WW2, the Mekong served the same purpose for the Vietnamese.
All of this, of course, was good news to the Vietminh. But HCM was undoubtedly conscious that any open identification of his movement with the Chinese Communists could poison the relations with Vietnamese moderates and provide an important incentive for a US entry into the war on the French side.
According to confidants, Stalin had harbored doubts about HCM’s own ideological orthodoxy for many years and became especially suspicious when Ho sought to establish a relationship with the US in the months immediately following the Pacific War.
Stalin’s skepticism about Ho and the Vietminh’s prospect was clearly on display during Ho’s visit to Moscow. According to Khrushchev, Stalin treated the Vietnamese revolutionary with open contempt during the visit.
Whether Ho was a nationalist or a Communist was purely academic, Acheson argued, because in colonial societies all Communists were nationalists as well. Once they had come to power, their Stalinist proclivities would clearly become evident.
In his messages to Chinese leaders during the remainder of the year, Ho was fulsome in his praise of the new government in Beijing and its wise leadership, suggesting strongly that his government and Party would follow the Chinese model. By now, of course, he had become a master at the art of flattering his benefactors by implying that their advice and experience would be taken to heart in the new Vietnam.
As for the new Vietnamese government in Saigon under Chief of State Bao Dai, Heath declared that it possessed neither dynamism nor the confidence of public opinion. Bao Dai himself lacked both energy and the know-how of leadership.
Ho himself advised one of his headstrong commanders that a major offensive, like a woman’s pregnancy, must await its proper time.
With the threat to Hanoi now at least temporarily relieved, de Lattre confessed that his decision to cancel the evacuation order had been just “whistling in the dark” and a grandstand play to restore public confidence.
Far from opening the road to Hanoi, the general offensive had been a bruising setback for Vietminh forces, and an especially humiliating personal defeat for Vo Nguyen Giap.
Vietnamese political commissars were assigned to all units in the army to watch over the ideological motivation of the troops. In the event of a disagreement between a political commissar and the commanding officer of a unit, the former had the final say.
The future of Vietnam, declared Truong Chinh, would adopt the Chinese label of a “people’s democratic dictatorship,” rather than following the Soviet-style Eastern European “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Under the Chinese model, the immediate objective was to carry out the first stage of national democratic revolution in preparation for the later socialist revolution, but there would be no extended period of transition between the two stages. Rather, the national democratic revolution, in Leninist parlance, would “grow over” into a socialist stage.
In its turn, the Central Committee created a new executive body (called, in imitation of Soviet practice, the Politburo), composed of 7 leading Party members and one alternate, that would direct the affairs of the Party and the government.
Ho continued to change his residence every 3 to 5 days to avoid detection or capture. Although he was now over 60, Ho was still capable of walking 30 miles a day, a pack on his back, over twisting mountain trails. He arose early to do exercises. After the worker was over, he played volleyball or swam and read in the evening.
One of the problems encountered in soliciting aid and support from the rural population was that many peasants were indifferent to the struggle, because they could not see how it affected them.
Many observers at the conference noted an attitude of bitterness within the DRV delegation over the alleged betrayal of Vietnamese interests by China and the Soviet Union. In his reminiscences, Chinese diplomat Wang Bingan later remarked that some members of the delegation “hoped to unify the whole of Vietnam at one stroke.”
Although the exodus served to spare the new regime a potential source of opposition, it also deprived the northern provinces of a substantial proportion of their most affluent, creative, and industrious people, since Catholics made up a high percentage of the commercial, professional, and intellectual elite of the country. One observer estimated that in October 1954 the new government had within its ranks only 50 college graduates; no more than an additional 200 possessed a high school diploma. Most factories were shut, and many of the owners had left the country. According to one report, 29 of 30 factories owned by French in Haiphong had been closed. Transportation was a serious problem. Gasoline for motor vehicles was in short supply, and the railroads were not working.
Many members of the Vietminh movement — notably in the South — had been sorely disappointed with the results of the peace conference. Partly leaders undoubtedly shared the dismay that years of sacrifice had resulted in only a partial victory, but they were able to console themselves with the conviction that, because of the overall popularity of HCM and the general ineptitude of the Bao Dai government, the provisions for future national elections at the Geneva conference obviously operated to their advantage.
Then too, the public perception of HCM and his regime had shifted significantly in the US in the years since the beginning of the Franco-Vietminh conflict. The earlier view that the Vietminh were selfless patriots struggling to throw off the yoke of an oppressive colonial regime had been replaced in the popular mind by a more somber image of Ho and his colleagues ad committed agents of international communism.
As Le Duc Tho, then a leading Party cadre in the South, had remarked in 1952, “If one wishes to lead the peasants to take up arms, it is first necessary to arouse in them a hatred of the enemy,” as well as to express a concern for their practical interests.
Landlords were made the scapegoats for the harsh life of the poor peasants. In my uncle’s village, people persecuted him with zeal to show how ardently they supported land reform and to be in the good graces of the militant peasants now holding power. Others who had envied his wealth and his influence now took pleasure in humiliating him.
In the official view, the issue of the cult of the personality was an affair for the Soviet Union and was not relevant in the Vietnamese context, where HCM ruled in a collegial style.
Ranked third in the hierarchy after Ho and Truong Chinh, Giap enjoyed high esteem among the people as hero of the battle of Dien Bien Phu. He and the army had avoided being tarnished by the failures of the land reform campaign. But Giap’s very popularity may have worked against him among jealous colleagues. Moreover, there was a tradition within the leadership to avoid combining Party authority with military command. As a result, Giap was passed over, and HCM agreed temporarily to occupy the position.
Perhaps the most that can be said is that HCM had become a prisoner of his own creation, a fly in amber, unable in his state of declining influence to escape the inexorable logic of a system that sacrifice the fate of individuals to the “higher morality” of the master plan.
A long editorial that appeared in Nhan Dan in mid-July noted that many people still harbored “complex ideas and illusions” about the question. Some, it said, had been “simple in their thoughts” and were sure elections would be held. Now they were disillusioned and pessimistic. Others were “reluctant to carry on a long and hard struggle” and continued to hope that unity could be achieved peacefully.
Some have speculated that Le Duan was preferred over Giap because he had spent several years in prison during WW2. A stint in the famous “schools of bolshevism” was considered a necessary rite of passage among the leading Party faithful at the time, many of whom had paid their own blood debt by spending time in French prisons. Giap not only had avoided arrest, but had been tainted by having applied for a scholarship to study in France.
After 12 years of disguising his real identity, at the age of 67, Ho now finally confessed that he was indeed the famous revolutionary NAQ.
In conditions in which the exploiting classes resort to violence against the people, it is necessary to bear in mind another possibility — the nonpeaceful transition to socialism. Lenin teaches and history confirms that the ruling classes never relinquish power voluntarily.
Born near Hanoi in 1911 in a scholar-gentry family, Tho had joined the revolutionary movement in the late 1920s, but was soon arrested and spent most of the next two decades in prison. Released in 1945, he was sent to the South and served as Le Duan’s deputy during the Franco-Vietminh conflict. Narrow-minded in outlook, devious in manner, and dour in his public image, Tho soon became known as “Sau Bua” (Sau the Hammer) for his toughness in dealing with his colleagues.
Secretive and resentful of his superiors, Hoan lacked both culture and intellect, and became known as “the Vietnamese Beria” for his thoroughness and brutality in ferreting out alleged counterrevolutionaries within the ranks. Le Duc Tho was quick to see his promise as an ally and an instrument of power.
During most of 1958, the issue of national unification attracted little attention from Party leaders in Hanoi. Although a key reason for the neglect was the need to pay attention to domestic needs in the North, certainly another factor was the attitude of the regime’s patrons in Moscow and Beijing. Khrushchev’s views were well known. In private conversations with North Vietnamese officials, Mao Zedong had offered similar advice. The problem of a divided Vietnam could not be resolved in a brief period, but would require a protracted struggle lasting many years. “If 10 years is not enough, it may take 100.”
At the instigation of the US, in 1956 Diem agreed to promulgate a constitution to create an aura of legitimacy for his new government. The constitution of the RVN called for a combination of the presidential and parliamentary forms of government and included provisions to protect individual human rights. However, Diem lacked the instincts of a democratic politician. Stiff in demeanor and uncomfortable in large crowds, he found it difficult to mingle with his constituents. Distrustful of southerners, he surrounded himself with his fellow Catholics, many of whom were recent refugees from the North and shared his deep distrust of communism. Sensitive to criticism, he was quick to suppress any potential opposition to his rule. Opposition parties were declared illegal and critics of the regime were routinely silenced or put in prison.
HCM remained one of the strongest voice stressing the need for caution. He warned his colleagues not to rely simply on armed violence, for that would create a pretext for US intervention. He pointed out the importance of placing the Vietnamese revolution in a global context. With the strength of American imperialism steadily weakening throughout the world, Ho argued that a gradual approach was preferable. He promised that when opportunity struck, Vietminh forces in the South would be in a position to achieve a swift and decisive victory. In the meantime, he urged that they be satisfied with small victories.
The farther along we got, the worse the hunger we faced. As food grew scarcer, comradeship broke down. People became more and more intent on saving their own lives.
As an indication of its displeasure with Beijing’s uncooperative attitude, Moscow had just refused a formal request from China for a sample atomic bomb, as had been promised in a mutual agreement a few years previously. In the future, the North Vietnamese would learn how to play one ally against the other, but in these early stages of the dispute they were reduced to pleading with their allies for fraternal unity.
HCM could not have been pleased at the meager results of his lengthy trip abroad. Neither Moscow nor Beijing had expressed more than polite sympathy at the breakdown of the Geneva Accords, nor had they indicated any firm support for Hanoi’s decision to resort to a policy of revolutionary violence to complete the task of national reunification. He must have been particularly incensed at his treatment in China, where Mao had not even bothered to return to the capital to greet him. But Ho was accustomed to condescension on the part of Chinese comrades, and in remarks to his colleagues he occasionally referred sarcastically to Mao as the “Celestial Emperor.”
How much weight Ho’s words carried within Party councils, however, is difficult to ascertain. His influence over decision relating to domestic affairs had waned considerably, and senior Party leaders had decided that he would devote the bulk of his time to foreign policy concerns and the issue of national reunification.
Charismatic and ambitious, Thanh had been promoted to the highest grade of General of the Army in the late 1950s, thus equaling in rank his rival Vo Nguyen Giap. Unlike Giap, Thanh was a political creature, having previously served as head of the army’s Political Department, which was charged with maintaining ideological purity among the troops.
Most vocal were dissident intellectuals in Saigon and other cities, who criticized Diem’s dictatorial tendencies and his intolerance of any form of opposition to his rule. The constitution, drafted in 1956 with the assistance of US advisers, appeared to many to be a dead letter.
The weakness of the imperialists, and the strength of the revolutionary forces, he argued, was in the realm of politics. Ho recommended a strategy based on guerrilla warfare, the mobilization of the support of the masses, and winning the battle of public opinion in the world arena.
HCM did not lose hope. At a meeting of the Politburo in February 1963, he argued the importance of intensifying political efforts in the South in order to promote a negotiated settlement and the formation of a neutral government, with strong participation by the NLF. Washington, he pointed out, was confused and was trying not to win, but to save face.
While Chinese leaders were hardly eager for a confrontation of their own with Washington, they were determined to replace Moscow as the natural leader of the oppressed peoples of the world. To Chairman Mao, the increasing American military presence in South Vietnam would ultimately weaken its overall position in Asia, thus creating a “hangman’s noose” to strangle US imperialism by its own overcommitment abroad.
Le Duan, in fact, had ridiculed HCM for his reluctance to turn to the military option, and his reliance on diplomacy, which Duan apparently viewed as naive. “Uncle wavers, but when I left South Vietnam I had already prepared everything. I have only one goal — just final victory.”
The decision to escalate at a moderate rate remained fraught with risks, not only of a possible confrontation with the US, but also of serious problems with Moscow. For years, Party leaders had carefully sought to avoid antagonizing either of their chief allies, but there had recently been warning signs that some Party leaders were getting restive.
The most dangerous potential opponent of the Le Duan faction may have been HCM himself, but by now, Le Duan and his allies clearly harbored a condescending and even contemptuous attitude toward the president, who, in their view, had in recent years lost his acute grasp of politics and was now increasingly muddled in his thinking.
Although Party leaders had made a belated effort to placate Moscow, sentiment against the Soviet Union and its Vietnamese defenders was hardening in Hanoi. After the plenum adjourned in mid-December, a secret tribunal was established under the authority of the Politburo to remove “revisionists” from the Party; many senior political figures who were considered sympathetic to the Soviet point of view or suspected of opposing the official line were dismissed from their posts or even placed under arrest. Among those suspected of harboring such views was Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap himself. Although Giap was too popular to attack directly, a number of his protege, including Le Liem, were purged because of their allegedly pro-Soviet views.
Although the Party’s strategy in the South had now shifted perceptibly in the direction of an armed conflict, the role of political struggle remained central to the equation, notably because it was here that the revolutionary forces were seen to operate at a decisive advantage. Although the PLAF did not possess the firepower or the numerical strength of its adversary, it benefited from the inherent political weakness of the Saigon government. The goal of the resistance was now to wage a combined “general offensive and uprising,” based on the Party’s plan to launch military attacks on rural areas in conjunction with a popular uprising against the government in the major cities and towns. The anticipated result was the collapse of Saigon regime and the formation, through negotiations, of a tripartite coalition government consisting of a mixture of officials from the Saigon regime, neutralists, and members of the NLF. Because the Party had already managed to win the secret allegiance of a number of prominent neutralists in South Vietnam and abroad, it was confident that this coalition government would serve as a springboard for the gradual takeover of the South by political forces loyal to the Party.
“Americans greatly fear death,” he told his colleagues, so it was important that they should not feel immune from the consequences of the struggle.
In Beijing, Mao Zedong encouraged his visitor to pursue an aggressive strategy in South Vietnam, expressing his confidence that the US, despite the recent passage by Congress of the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, did not wish to become directly involved in the conflict in South Vietnam, since it was overextended in the world and lacked available troops to send to Southeast Asia.
The Tonkin Gulf incident had served to strengthen Hanoi’s relations with Beijing, but it led to a further deterioration in its ties with Moscow. Soviet officials had reacted to the news with equivocation, simply condemning the US attacks and renewing their appeal for peaceful reunification. When Le Duan arrived in Moscow after his visit to Beijing in mid-August, Soviet officials emphasized the need for a negotiated settlement to end the Vietnam conflict, but then compounded the problem by procrastinating on a request by the NLF for formal diplomatic recognition as the sole legal government of South Vietnam.
In a letter to General Nguyen Chi Thanh, Duan concluded that the introduction of US combat troops indicated that conditions were not ripe for negotiations. “Only when the insurrection is successful, will the problem of establishing a ‘neutral central administration’ be posed again.” Although the “four points” remained on the table, they were only “intended to pave the way for a US withdrawal with a lesser loss of face.”
While Soviet assistance could provide Hanoi with advanced weaponry to defend North Vietnamese air space against US air strikes, China was important both as a source of military and economic assistance and as a deterrent to Washington’s taking the war directly to the North. In both public and private statements, Chinese leaders had promised that the PRC would serve as Vietnam’s “great rear,” providing various forms of support for the cause of Vietnamese national reunification. Equally important to Hanoi, however, was Beijing’s implied threat that should the US decide to extend its operations north of the DMZ, China would intervene in the war directly on the side of the DRV.
Mao’s interview had caused anxiety among Vietnamese Party leaders, who feared that his comments would simply encourage Washington to believe that it could escalate the conflict inside the South with impunity. Then, in July, Beijing rejected Hanoi’s request for Chinese combat pilots to take part in the defense of DRV airspace. In an article that served as an elliptical message to Hanoi, Marshal Lin Biao called on the Vietnamese to practice “self-reliance,” as China had done during its own civil war with Chiang Kai-shek. Le Duan reacted angrily and went off to Moscow, where he praised the USSR as a “second motherland.”
Chinese admonitions to Vietnamese leaders to be wary of Soviet perfidy rankled. Beijing’s advice on how to wage revolutionary war and when to open peace talks with the US — Zhou Enlai liked to point out that the Chinese had more experience in dealing with Washington than the Vietnamese — aroused bitter memories in Hanoi of Chinese arrogance and condescension.
The house evidently reminded Ho of the romantic early years of the liberation struggle and demonstrated his determination to live simply during a time of extreme hardship for his people. It served as his office and residence for the remainder of his life.
Despite his protests, Chinese leaders also arranged for an elaborate birthday celebration for their guest, with a number of young women included a guests (because, as Vu Ky remarked enigmatically in his recollections of the incident, HCM “respect them”).
Nevertheless, he warned his colleagues that after victory was achieved, it would be vitally important to heal the wounds of the Vietnamese nation, a task that “would be complicated and difficult.” To prevent serious mistakes, he recommended that a concrete plan to be drawn up to reorganize the Party, so that each member would recognize the sacred task of serving the people. Important tasks included healing the wounds of war among the population and successfully transforming the “dregs” of southern society — thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts — into useful citizens through indoctrination and, if possible, other legal means.
Newspapers that supported the antiwar cause tended to describe him in favorable terms as a worthy adversary and a defender of the weak and oppressed. Even those who had adamantly opposed the Hanoi regime accorded him a measure of respect as one who had dedicated himself first and foremost tot he independence and unification of his country, as well as a prominent spokesperson for the exploited peoples of the world.
Except for Ho, no senior Party official had ever lived or traveled extensively in France, much less in other Western countries. Of those who had been abroad, most had received their training in China or the Soviet Union, and their worldview was bounded by the blinkered certainties of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy.
To avoid the possibility of public criticism for their decision to contravene his request, Party leaders deleted those sections in his testament that dealt with the disposal of his body.
After the death of Le Duan in the summer of 1986, Party leaders belatedly recognized their error (described by one as “triumphalism”) and embarked upon a new path. Guided by a new general secretary, a former southern militant named Nguyen Van Linh, the Politburo approved plans to stimulate the stagnant economy by adopting market socialism and the opening the country to foreign investment, while encouraging a more tolerant attitude toward the expression of ideas among the populace.
Before the end of the decade, however, conservative forces within the Party had second thoughts. Although the introduction of foreign ideas had stimulated the growth of the economy, it also led to the increased presence of drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and hedonistic attitude among young people, as well as to heightened criticism of the Party’s dominance over all aspects of national affairs.
While he voiced such sentiments on numerous other occasions, there is perhaps no clearer expression than his remark to the US intelligence officer Charles Fenn in 1945 that he viewed communism as the means to reach a nationalist end:
First, you must understand that to gain independence from a great power like France is a formidable task that cannot be achieved without some outside help, not necessarily in things like arms, but in the nature of advice and contacts. One doesn’t in fact gain independence by throwing bombs and such. That was the mistake the early revolutionaries all too often made. One must gain it through organization, propaganda, training and discipline. One also needs a set of beliefs, a gospel, a practical analysis, you might even say a bible. Marxism-Leninism gave me that framework.
Fenn asked Ho why he did not select democracy or some other form of political system, rather than an ideology that so clearly would forfeit the goodwill of the US, a country he claimed to admire so much? HCM replied that it was only when he arrived in Moscow that he received any practical support. The Soviet Union alone of the major powers was “a friend in need is a friend in deed.” Its loyalty won his loyalty.
Two years in Moscow during the early heady days of the Soviet experiment appear to have aroused his naive enthusiasm for a future Communist society. In Ho’s brave new world, patriotism would be replaced by the Leninist concept of a future global federation of Communist societies.
Later events undoubtedly had a sobering effect on his attitude. The purge trials in Moscow — which apparently came perilously close to endangering his own safety — must have undermined his faith in the Soviet experiment. Moscow’s failure to live up to its own commitment to give active support to the liberation of colonial peoples must have aroused doubts in his mind as to the relevance of the proletarian internationalism in s world of power politics. But nothing appeared to shake his faith in the ultimate superiority of the socialist system. To the end of his life, he held tenaciously to the view that the capitalist model had brought untold suffering to millions of oppressed peoples throughout Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The issue is thus not whether he was a nationalist or a Communist — in his own way, he was both. It is more a question of his tactics. HCM was a believer in the art of the possible, of adjusting his ideals to the conditions of the moment. To many, even within his own party, his behavior often appeared as an absence of principle, but in his own mind progress could often be most effectively realized by infinitesimal steps. To HCM, the best was sometimes the enemy of the good.
Early in life, when his nation and its culture appeared to be on the verge of extinction, he had observed the reverence that young Vietnamese bestowed on the rustic village scholars who sought in their lives and their teachings to carry out the timeless principles of Confucian humanism. To the end of his days, Ho adopted that persona as a means to bring about the salvation of his people and the resurrection of their nation.
Whatever the political benefits that accrued from that decision, HCM sometimes paid a price for his image of selflessness and pragmatism. By nature a conciliator who believed in the power of persuasion rather than intimidation, in directing the ICP he relied from the outset on the tactic of collective leadership rather than on the assertion of personal domination in the manner of a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Mao Zedong. During the 1930s and 1940s, his powers of persuasion were generally successful. But they began to fail him in the 1950s, when senior colleagues started to question the aptness of his recommendations and assert their own claim to a major role in formulating strategy. In the end, HCM was virtually reduced to a figure of impotence. His ideas were greeted with consideration by his colleagues, but were increasingly rejected as inappropriate.
The same could not be said about some of his colleagues, who lacked the subtlety and the patience to pursue a solution by diplomatic means.
Although there is some plausibility to this argument, it may be partly a case of Americans having their own myths about HCM. In the first place, the evidence suggests that Ho’s oft expressed admiration for the US was more a matter of calculation than of ideological conviction. Ho lavished praises on American civilization, as he praised many of his country’s allies and potential adversaries, primarily in order to gain tactical advantage. Although he always entertained the possibility that US leaders might eventually recognize the futility of intervention in Indochina, he was also convinced that those same leaders were representatives of an exploitative capitalist system that at some point might enter into mortal conflict with the member states of the socialist community. Ho left little doubt as to his own allegiance in that potential confrontation.
Future prospects for maintaining the Ho cult are equally dim. There are clear signs that while most younger Vietnamese respect HCM for his contribution to the cause of national independence and reunification, many no longer see him as a figure of central importance in their lives. As one young Vietnamese remarked to me recently, “We respect Ho, but we are not interested in politics.” To the new generation raised in the shadow of the next millennium, HCM probably has no more relevance than does Lincoln to the average American.
Whether under different conditions the young Nguyen Tat Thanh might have decided to adopt the ideals and practices of contemporary Western civilization is a question that cannot be answered. Like many other Asian leaders of the day, his experience with capitalism was not a happy one, and the brutalities perpetrated by Western colonialism that he observed during his early years deeply offended his sensibilities.