Given the controversial nature of the topic and the paucity of reliable sources, it is hardly surprising that no serious biography of Ho Chi Minh has been published in English over the last twenty years. At the height of the Vietnam War a number of biographical studies were published, but most of these were aimed at the mass market and did not attempt to make detailed use of existing source materials. In North Vietnam several official or semiofficial biographies were published, but all were marred by a blatant effort to present their subject in mythic proportions, as a saint rather than as a political figure, more caricature than reality.5
Today, as the passions of the Vietnam War have begun to subside and additional source materials have become available in various parts of the world, there are modest grounds for optimism that a more definitive understanding of Ho’s life is becoming possible. (The nature of those sources is discussed briefly in a note on sources at the end of this book.) While by no means have all of the mysteries about his life been resolved, the assiduous biographer is now in a position to piece together a number of hypotheses to explain several of the questions that have persistently been raised about his life and character. I have tried to address these questions, either in the text or, for those issues of more academic interest, in the endnotes.
It is at once clear that for much of Ho’s early life—the period prior to his arrival in Paris at the end of World War I—almost the only available source material comes from those autobiographical works mentioned above or from historical sources in Vietnam, where the attempt to present him as a legend and a gift to the ages remains a growth industry supported by the regime. Some critics raise doubts as to whether any of the information on his life that has been published by official sources in Vietnam can be trusted. After carefully examining the evidence, I have decided that significant parts of this material are reliable, although the details often remain in doubt, and some accounts are undoubtedly apocryphal. To avoid endless discussions of the reliability of various facts regarding his activities, I have therefore decided to present my own account of his life in narrative form, while relegating debates about the evidence to the endnotes. Where there are reasonable grounds to doubt a particular version of events, the issue is dealt with in the text. I hope that this will also help to convey the dramatic character of Ho Chi Minh’s life and its importance in shaping the history of Vietnam and the twentieth century.
There remains the issue of political bias. Just as it has been impossible for the last generation to approach the Vietnam War in a dispassionate manner, it is equally difficult for the biographer to paint a picture of the man who brought about the Communist victory there without exposing his own political leanings. Over the decades since I have become familiar with Ho Chi Minh’s life, I have developed a respect for his talent and his commitment as a revolutionary without suspending my ability to judge him as a revolutionary, as a politician, and as a man. I have gradually become convinced that, as is so often the case, the truth is much more complex than the public image would lead one to believe. Although it is always tempting to seek out some single thread (the “hidden figure in the carpet,” in Leon Edel’s classic phrase), I prefer to let the facts speak for themselves. I have therefore not tried to invent imaginary thoughts or conversations that might have suited my own interpretation of his inner character. Like so many great figures in history, the real Ho Chi Minh was a man of complexities and contrasts, with some unique gifts and characteristics that set him apart from other important individuals of his time.
Some readers will undoubtedly be disappointed that there is not a greater focus on the final years of his life at the height of the Vietnam War. In fact, Ho Chi Minh’s role in creating the conditions for that conflict are vastly more important than his influence in Hanoi during the course of the war itself, when he was frequently ill or in China for medical treatment. Many readers will find, therefore, that substantial parts of this book refer to individuals and events with which they are not familiar. I hope that they will feel compensated by a greater awareness of the underlying causes of the war and its consequences.
There is an element of mystery in all great men. And few enjoyed that mystery more than Ho Chi Minh 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,”6 From his seat in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes, Ho Chi Minh will be delighted to know that, at least in this biography, the air of mystery that has always surrounded him remains intact.
I | IN A LOST LAND
He entered the city quietly, with no fanfare. While his followers roamed the streets, celebrating their victory or accepting the surrender of enemy troops, he settled in a nondescript two-story commercial building in the Chinese section of town. There he spent several days in virtual seclusion, huddled over the battered typewriter that he had carried with him during a decade of travels from Moscow to south China and finally, in the first weeks of 1941, back to his homeland, which he had left thirty years before.
By the end of the month he had completed the speech that he planned to make to his people announcing the creation of a new nation. Shortly after 2:00 P.M. on September 2, he mounted the rostrum of a makeshift platform hastily erected in a spacious park soon to be known as Ba Dinh Square on the western edge of the city. He was dressed in a faded khaki suit that amply encased his spare emaciated body, and he wore a pair of rubber thongs. Thousands had gathered since the early morning hours to hear him speak. In a high-pitched voice that clearly reflected his regional origins, he announced the independence of his country and read the text of its new constitution. To the few Americans who happened to be in the audience, his first words were startling: “All men are created equal; they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The time was the late summer of 1945, shortly after the surrender of Japanese imperial forces throughout Asia. The place was Hanoi, onetime capital of the Vietnamese empire, now a sleepy colonial city in the heart of the Red River delta in what was then generally known as French Indochina. For two decades, Nguyen the Patriot had aroused devotion, fear, and hatred among his compatriots and the French colonial officials who ruled over them. Now, under a new name, he introduced himself to the Vietnamese people as the first president of a new country.
At the time, the name Ho Chi Minh 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 (the revolutionary organization, also known as the Third International, founded by the Bolshevik leader Lenin twenty-six years before) and the founder in 1930 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 the measure of the man.
The forces that initiated his long journey to Ba Dinh Square had begun to germinate in the late summer of 1858, when a small flotilla of French warships, joined by a small contingent from Spain, launched a sudden attack on the city of Da Nang, a commercial seaport of medium size on the central coast of Vietnam, The action was not totally unexpected. For decades covetous French eyes had periodically focused their gaze on Vietnam: missionaries on the lookout for souls to save, merchants scouring the globe for new consumer markets and a river route to the riches of China, politicians convinced that only the acquisition of colonies in Asia would guarantee the survival of France as a great power. Until midcentury, the French government had sought to establish a presence in Vietnam by diplomatic means and had even sent a mission to the imperial capital at Hué, about fifty miles north of Da Nang, in an effort to persuade the Vietnamese emperor to open his country to French influence. When the negotiations stalled, the government of Emperor Louis Napoleon decided to resort to force.
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br /> The country that French warships had attacked was no stranger to war or foreign invasion. Indeed, few peoples in Asia had been compelled to fight longer and harder to retain their identity as a separate and independent state than had the Vietnamese. A paramount fact in the history of the country is its long and frequently bitter struggle against the expansionist tendencies of its northern neighbor, China. In the second century B.C., at a time when the Roman republic was still in its infancy, the Chinese empire had conquered Vietnam and exposed it to an intensive program of political, cultural, and economic assimilation. Although the Vietnamese managed to restore their independence in the tenth century A.D., it took several hundred years for Chinese emperors to accept the reality of Vietnam’s separate existence; in fact, this happened only after Vietnam’s reluctant acceptance of a tributary relationship with the imperial dynasty in China.
Vietnam’s long association with China had enduring consequences. Over a millennium, Chinese political institutions, literature, art and music, religion and philosophy, and even the Chinese language sank deep roots into Vietnamese soil. The result was a “Confucianized” Vietnam that to the untutored observer effectively transformed the country into a miniature China, a “smaller dragon” imitating its powerful and brilliant northern neighbor. The Vietnamese monarch himself set the pace, taking on the trappings of a smaller and less august Son of Heaven, as the emperor was styled in China. The Vietnamese ruling elite was gradually transformed into a meritocracy in the Chinese mold, its members (frequently known as mandarins) selected (at least in theory) on the basis of their ability to pass stiff examinations on their knowledge of the Confucian classics. Generations of young Vietnamese males were educated in the very classical texts studied—and often memorized—by their counterparts in China. Their sisters, prohibited by rigidly patriarchal Confucian mores from pursuing official careers—or indeed almost any profession—were secluded within the confines of the family homestead and admonished to direct their ambitions to becoming good wives and mothers.
Vietnam’s passage into the Chinese cultural universe was probably not an especially wrenching experience, for the social and economic conditions that had helped to produce Confucian civilization in China existed to a considerable degree in Vietnam as well. Like its counterpart to the north, Vietnamese society was fundamentally agrarian. Almost nine of every ten Vietnamese were rice farmers, living in tiny villages scattered throughout the marshy delta of the Red River as it wound its way languidly to the Gulf of Tonkin. Hard work, the subordination of the desires of the individual to the needs of the group, and a stable social and political hierarchy were of utmost importance. The existence of a trained bureaucracy to maintain the irrigation system and the road network was considered essential, but there was relatively little need for commerce and manufacturing. Although indigenous elements were never eliminated in Vietnamese culture, to untutored eyes the country appeared to be a mirror image in microcosm of its giant neighbor to the north.
But if the Vietnamese people appeared willing to absorb almost whole the great tradition of powerful China, they proved adamant on the issue of self-rule. The heroic figures of traditional Vietnam—rebel leaders such as the Trung sisters (who resisted Chinese rule in the first century A.D.), the emperor Le Loi, and his brilliant strategist Nguyen Trai, who fought against the Ming dynasty 1400 years later—were all closely identified with resistance to Chinese domination. Out of the crucible of this effort emerged a people with a tenacious sense of their national identity and a willingness to defend their homeland against outside invasion.
One of the lasting consequences of the Vietnamese struggle for national survival was undoubtedly the emergence of a strong military tradition and a willingness to use force to secure and protect national interests. In the centuries after the restoration of national independence from China in A.D. 939, the new Vietnamese state, which called itself Dai Viet (Great Viet), engaged in a lengthy conflict with its neighbor to the south, the trading state of Champa. Eventually the Vietnamese gained the upper hand, and beginning in the thirteenth century they pushed southward along the coast. By the seventeenth century, Champa had been conquered and the territory of Dai Viet had been extended to the Ca Mau Peninsula on the Gulf of Siam. Vietnamese settlers, many of them ex-soldiers, migrated southward to create new rice-farming communities in the fertile lands of the Mekong River delta. Dai Viet had become one of the most powerful states in mainland Southeast Asia, and the Vietnamese monarch in his relations with neighboring rulers began to style himself not simply as a king but as an emperor.
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. For two centuries, the country was rent by civil war between ruling families in the north and the south. In the early nineteenth century the empire was reunified under a descendant of the southern ruling family bearing the name of Nguyen Anh, who adopted the reign title Gia Long. At first the new Nguyen dynasty attempted to address the enduring legacy of civil strife, but by midcentury regional frictions began to multiply, supplemented by growing economic problems such as the concentration of farmlands in the hands of the wealthy, and exacerbated by incompetent leadership in the imperial capital of Hué.
The Vietnamese civil war had occurred at a momentous period in the history of Southeast Asia, as fleets from Europe, sailing in the wake of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama, began to prowl along the coast of the South China Sea and the Gulf of Siam in search of spices, precious metals, and heathen souls to save. Among the Europeans most interested in the area were the French, and when in the nineteenth century their bitter rivals, the British, began to consolidate their hold on India and Burma, French leaders turned covetous eyes toward Vietnam.
In 1853 the third emperor of the Nguyen dynasty died, and the Vietnamese throne passed into the hands of a new ruler, the young and inexperienced Tu Duc. It was his misfortune, and that of his people, that on his shoulders was placed the responsibility of repulsing the first serious threat to Vietnamese independence in several centuries. Although well-meaning and intelligent, he was often indecisive and nagged by ill health. When French troops landed at Da Nang harbor in the summer of 1858, Tu Duc’s first instinct was to fight. Contemptuously rejecting an offer to negotiate, he massed imperial troops just beyond French defenses on the outskirts of the city. Admiral Charles Rigault de Genouilly, the French commander, had been assured by French missionaries operating in the area that a native uprising against imperial authority would take place, but it failed to materialize. At first, the admiral hoped to wait out his adversary, but when cholera and dysentery began to thin out the European ranks, he decided to abandon the city and seek a more vulnerable spot farther to the south. Early the following year the French resumed their attack at Saigon, a small but growing commercial port on a small river a few miles north of the Mekong River delta. Imperial troops in the area attempted to counterattack, but their outdated weapons were no match for the invaders, and after two weeks Vietnamese resistance collapsed.
Although the first reaction of the emperor had been to fend off the aggressors with military force, the defeat in the south left him disheartened. Despite appeals from advisers at court for a policy of continuing defiance, Tu Duc decided to negotiate, and in 1862 he agreed to cede three provinces in the Mekong delta to the French, eventually to be known (with the addition of three more provinces a few years later) as the French colony of Cochin China. The first round had gone to Paris.
For a few years the imperial court at Hué maintained a precarious grip on independence, but when the French resumed their advance in the early 1880s, launching an attack on the citadel at Hanoi and occupying several major cities in the Red River delta, the court seemed paralyzed. The sickly Tu Duc had died just before the reopening of hostilities,
and in the subsequent leadership crisis the court split into opposing factions. Over the next few months several new monarchs, most of them children, were enthroned and unseated in rapid succession. Ultimately, power was seized by the influential regent Ton That Thuyet, who put his own protégé, Ham Nghi, on the throne in hopes of continuing the resistance. In response to a Vietnamese request, the Qing dynasty in China sent imperial troops to aid its vassal, but the Vietnamese were nonetheless unable to prevail. In 1885 China withdrew its armed forces and signed a treaty with France expressly abandoning its longstanding tributary relationship with Vietnam, In Hué, a more pliant emperor was placed on the throne to replace the young Ham Nghi, who fled with his recalcitrant adviser Ton That Tuyet into the mountains in the interior to continue the struggle. In the meantime, the now dominant peace faction at court concluded a new treaty with France conceding to the latter political influence throughout the entire remaining territory of Vietnam. The French transformed their new possession into the protectorates of Tonkin (comprising the provinces in the Red River delta and the surrounding mountains) and Annam (consisting of the coastal provinces down to the colony of Cochin China far to the south). In Annam, the French allowed the puppet emperor and his bureaucracy to retain the tattered remnants of their once august authority. In Tonkin, colonial rule reigned virtually supreme. For all intents and purposes, Vietnam had become a French possession.
The French conquest of Vietnam was a manifestation of a process of European colonial expansion which had begun after the Napoleonic Wars and accelerated during the remainder of the nineteenth century as advanced Western states began to enter the industrial age. Driven by a desperate search for cheap raw materials and consumer markets for their own manufactured goods, the capitalist nations of the West turned to military force to establish their hegemony throughout the region. By the end of the century, all of the countries of South and Southeast Asia except the kingdom of Siam—later to be known as Thailand—were under some form of colonial rule.
Ho Chi Minh Page 3
