By now, Ho was finding movement increasingly difficult. Always a stickler for physical conditioning, he continued his calisthenics on a daily basis. He left his stilt house on the palace grounds regularly to eat meals, tend his garden, and feed the carp in the nearby pond, as well as to greet visitors—from Western journalists, foreign dignitaries, and NLF representatives, to delegations of ordinary people from various walks of life—in a leafy arbor next to his private residence. Politburo meetings were held at a table on the ground floor of his house, open to the air. But when U.S. bombing attacks began to focus on the outskirts of Hanoi, Ho took up residence in a bomb shelter that had been constructed on the palace grounds. By then, he apparently did not regularly attend meetings, and some observers noted that he often appeared “muddled.” When important issues came up, Le Duan sometimes observed to colleagues, “Spare Uncle the worry. We should not bother our supreme leader.”
Party leaders were becoming more and more concerned about Ho’s declining condition; shortly after his seventy-seventh birthday, Le Duan convened a Politburo meeting, while Ho was receiving medical treatment in Canton, to discuss how to preserve his health. It was decided to keep the meeting strictly secret in order to avoid incurring his anger or worrying the Vietnamese people. The government assigned Ho’s old friend Nguyen Luong Bang to monitor his health and dispatched a delegation of specialists led by the Party veteran Le Thanh Nghi to Moscow for advice and training in how to preserve his remains after death.56
Ho Chi Minh returned from south China at the end of June and was brought up to date on conditions in the South. He was still occasionally involved in matters of diplomatic importance; in early 1967, he had met with U.S. peace activists Harry Ashmore and William Baggs and hinted that peace talks could begin only after Washington declared an end to its bombing raids on North Vietnam. After the two reported to the State Department on the results of the trip upon their return to the United States, President Johnson sent a letter to Ho Chi Minh expressing a willingness to terminate the bombing campaign, but only when infiltration from North Vietnam into the South had stopped. To Party leaders, who were counting on an end to the bombing as a means of increasing the shipment of personnel and matériel to the South, Washington’s proposal was unaccepable. In his March response to Johnson’s letter, Ho Chi Minh insisted on a halt to the bombing campaign on the DRV without conditions. That position was reiterated to Raymond Aubrac, his old friend from Paris, in July. Aubrac had arrived on a brief visit to test Hanoi’s receptivity to the opening of peace talks. The DRV response, as it was provided by Ho Chi Minh himself, was that negotiations could not start until the United States had unconditionally stopped its bombing of the north. In September, Ho went to China for a lengthy convalescence in the mountains near Beijing.57
In his absence, the Politburo had engaged in a momentous debate on whether to launch the long-awaited “general offensive and uprising” that had been under consideration since the beginning of the decade. Party leaders recognized the need to restore momentum to the revolution in the South, recovering ground lost as a result of the growing U.S. military presence there since the summer of 1965. Although Viet Cong forces in South Vietnam (now bolstered by the participation of more than 100,000 compatriots from the North) continued to operate at relatively high levels of effectiveness throughout the country, casualty rates were alarming and morale problems had begun to surface within the resistance movement. Recruitment was down and the number of desertions was on the rise, as Washington’s refusal to concede defear raised doubts about the inevitability of a victory by the revolutionary forces. As a result of visits to Hanoi by U.S. peace activists, the Politburo took heart from the fact that the antiwar movement was on the rise in the United States; still, there were no signs that the Johnson administration was preparing to withdraw. In fact, the number of U.S. military personnel stationed in South Vietnam had risen to almost half a million, with the prospect of more to come.
For years, Ho Chi Minh had insisted that the best time to launch such a campaign was during a U.S. presidential election year, when Hanoi could exert the maximum pressure on the American political scene. Attacks by PLAF units in the countryside were to be coordinated with a popular general uprising in the major cities. At a minimum, this would destabilize the South and force the United States to negotiate in a position of weakness, but the ultimate goal was to bring about the collapse of the Saigon regime. The decision to launch the general offensive and uprising during the Têt New Year’s holidays in early February was just being finalized by the Politburo in December, when Ho Chi Minh returned from China. Ho gave his approval to the plan and then immediately went back to Beijing for additional treatment.
The Têt offensive began on January 31, 1968. Insurgent forces assaulted major cities, provincial and district capitals, and rural villages in a nationwide campaign. Highly publicized attacks took place in Saigon, where sapper units and suicide squads assaulted government installations and briefly occupied the ground floor of the new U.S. Embassy, and in the old imperial capital of Hué, which was occupied by North Vietnamese troops for almost three weeks before they were evicted from the city by American ground troops in bloody hand-to-hand fighting. The results were somewhat disappointing in military terms: insurgent units taking part in the offensive suffered more than 30,000 casualties. Because the vast majority were local Viet Cong forces, these losses would weaken the movement for years to come. And it did not bring about the anticipated collapse of the Nguyen Van Thieu regime. However, the political consequences in the United States were more encouraging, because U.S. casualties during the offensive had been high. Nearly 2,000 Americans had been killed in the month of the Têt campaign, with an additional 3,000 seriously wounded. Antiwar fever among the American people reached new heights and compelled the White House to offer new concessions to bring about a peaceful settlement of the war. In late March, Lyndon Johnson offered a partial halt to the bombing below the Twentieth Parallel in a bid to jump-start negotiations.
As the White House was pondering its dilemma, Politburo member Le Duc Tho visited Ho Chi Minh, who was still in Beijing, to brief him on the results of the Têt offensive. Although Tho (soon to be selected as Hanoi’s chief negotiator in the upcoming peace talks) would later concede that Têt was only a qualified success, he undoubtedly presented it to President Ho as a great victory, and Ho was delighted. When Tho informed him of his own upcoming trip to the South to evaluate post-Têt conditions, Ho expressed a fervent wish to accompany him. Tho attempted to dissuade him, explaining that Ho would need a visa to pass through the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville (the route most senior Party officials now took to reach the South) and thus would be recognized because of his famous beard. Ho replied that he would shave it off. But then, Tho quickly replied, our southern compatriots won’t recognize you! Ho was persistent, suggesting that he could pose as a sailor or hide in a ship’s hold. To pacify the old revolutionary, Tho promised to look into the matter; when Tho rose to leave, Ho Chi Minh hugged him and wept. Tho later informed acquaintances that when they parted he feared he might never see his old colleague again.
Ho Chi Minh had anticipated that this request would be rejected by Party leaders because of his poor health. In a letter to Le Duan in Hanoi, he argued that a change of air would do him good. He also explained that his trip to the South would build up the spirits of the thousands of his compatriots who were sacrificing their lives for the cause. On March 19, he wrote a note to Prime Minister Zhou Enlai asking for his assistance in gaining approval for his request. In Hanoi, the request was quietly shelved.58
After he returned to North Vietnam on April 21, Ho Chi Minh was invited to attend a meeting of the Politburo to evaluate the results of the Têt offensive. Ho’s health was fragile, but he insisted on being kept abreast of the situation in the South and expressed his delight that the strains of the war had forced the resignation of U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. He was also pleased with President Johnson’s decision
, announced during his March 30 speech declaring a partial bombing halt, that he would not run for reelection in 1968. After the June assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, one of the most prominent politicians opposed to the war in the United States, Ho lamented in a brief article published in Nhan Dan that because of the war increasing numbers of ordinary Americans would be killed in Vietnam as well.59
In early May, Ho Chi Minh was informed that President Johnson had put into effect a partial bombing halt below the Twentieth Parallel and had agreed to engage in peace talks in Paris. Ho had apparently not been consulted on whether to accept the offer, but he was delighted. 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 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.60
Ho also sought to provide advice to his colleagues on how to conduct future negotiations with the United States. The issue was indeed becoming complicated; not only had Washington resisted Hanoi’s demand for a written and unconditional promise not to resume bombing the DRV, but Beijing—now mired in the throes of the Cultural Revolution—had criticized its North Vietnamese comrades for being too eager to establish contact with the United States. In April, Zhou Enlai advised Prime Minister Pham Van Dong to insist on fulfillment of his famous “four points” before opening negotiations. Zhou told him he should negotiate only from a strong position, Dong retorted that Hanoi would not compromise on its basic principles and would never engage in peace talks under disadvantageous conditions. In any case, he remarked, it was the Vietnamese who were doing the fighting.61
Ho Chi Minh did not take an active part in the deliberations, but in his comments he adopted a pragmatic attitude, counseling the Politburo in July that it should decide carefully what could be gained or lost once negotiations began. In meetings held in succeeding weeks, he warned his colleagues that, at the same time they were grasping at any opportunity for a diplomatic breakthrough, they must also focus their efforts on enhancing military preparations. He warned them to be wary of a U.S. trap, which could lead to a cease-fire in the South while enabling Washington to resume bombing the North at some time in the future.
In early November, peace talks convened in Paris after Washington agreed to a complete halt to bombing, even though Lyndon Johnson refused to put the promise in writing. There was no cease-fire in the South, although Hanoi promised not to launch a major attack similar to the Têt offensive. But the breakthrough on peace talks came too late to help Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential candidate. Humphrey, who had won the nomination during a tumultuous national convention held in Chicago in August, had become a silent critic of the war, but had been forced by his position as Johnson’s vice president to keep his reservations to himself. Growing public sentiment against the war hurt his own candidacy, while the Republican nominee, Richard M. Nixon, promised that he had a “secret plan” to bring an end to the war. In the November election, Nixon brought the Republicans back into the White House for the first time in eight years.
During the late 1960s, Ho Chi Minh periodically revised his testament, but each draft contained his wish to be cremated. The last version indicated that he wanted to have his ashes deposited at three unnamed locations in the northern, central, and southern sections of the country, a symbolic act designed to express his lifelong devotion to the cause of national reunification. Then, he wrote, he would embark on his way to meet Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and other venerable revolutionaries. Ho also expressed the desire that after the restoration of peace, agricultural taxes should be canceled for one year to reduce the hardship that the war had imposed on the Vietnamese people and to express the Party’s gratitude for their labors and sacrifices during the long, bloody conflict.62
During the 1969 Têt holidays, Ho Chi Minh took his last brief trip out of Hanoi, visiting the nearby district capital of Son Tay. After his return, his health appeared normal; he attended meetings of the Politburo in April, advising his colleagues that if the new administration decided to withdraw U.S. troops from South Vietnam, it was important to allow them to do so with honor. But in a speech at the Sixteenth Plenum of the Central Committee in mid-May, he warned Party leaders not to be hasty in their judgment, since although the U.S. position in South Vietnam was weakening (President Nixon had announced his new policy of “Vietnamization,” which called for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. forces from the RVN), it remained dangerous.
Ho continued to be concerned about the welfare of the troops in the South. In response to his long-standing request, he was finally able to meet with a delegation of southern resistance fighters at West Lake, in the northern suburbs of Hanoi. At the seventy-ninth birthday celebration held at his house, his close colleagues promised to bring about the final victory and reward him with his long-awaited visit to South Vietnam. That same month, he wrote the last draft of his testament, jotting down notes in the margins of an earlier draft. But Ho was growing increasingly feeble, and doctors decided to monitor his heart rate on a regular basis. Although the U.S. bombing halt permitted him to return to the stilt house (a location that was surrounded by several shade trees), he began to weaken during the hot, muggy summer. Party leaders urgently requested Soviet and Chinese doctors to provide assistance. Ho attempted to maintain his regular morning schedule of physical exercises; he watered his plants and fed the fish daily. Close colleagues Truong Chinh and Nguyen Luong Bang are with him regularly.63
One day in mid-August, Ho’s condition suddenly worsened, and his lungs became heavily congested. Although doctors administered penicillin, the next day he remarked of feeling a pain in his chest; on the twenty-eighth he developed an irregular heartbeat. When Politburo members arrived to report on the situation in the South, Ho told them that his physical condition had improved. Two days later, Ho asked Pham Van Dong, who had come to visit, whether preparations were complete for National Day celebrations, scheduled for September 2. After rising the following morning, he are a bowl of rice gruel and met with a group of military veterans. At 9:45 A.M. on September 2, the twenty-fourth anniversary of the restoration of Vietnamese national independence, Ho Chi Minh’s heart stopped.64
EPILOGUE | FROM MAN TO MYTH
The news of Ho Chi Minh’s death was greeted with an outpouring of comment from around the globe. Eulogies flowed in from major world capitals, and Hanoi received more than twenty-two thousand messages from 121 countries offering the Vietnamese people condolences for the death of their leader. A number of socialist states held memorial services of their own and editorial comments were predictably favorable. An official statement from Moscow lauded Ho as a “great son of the heroic Vietnamese people, the outstanding leader of the international Communist and national liberation movement, and a great friend of the Soviet Union.” From Third World countries came praise for his role as a defender of the oppressed. An article published in India described him as the essence of “the people, the embodiment of the ardent aspiration for freedom, of their endurance and struggle.” Others referred to his simplicity of manner and high moral standing. Remarked an editorial in a Uruguayan newspaper: “He had a heart as immense as the universe and a boundless love for the children. He is a model of simplicity in all fields.”1
Reaction from Western capitals was more muted. The White House refrained from comment, and senior Nixon administration officials followed suit. But attention to Ho’s death in the Western news media was intense. 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 opp
osed the Hanoi regime accorded him a measure of respect as one who had dedicated himself first and foremost to the independence and unification of his country, as well as a prominent spokesperson for the exploited peoples of the world.
One key question in the minds of many commentators was the effect that his passing would have on the course of the war in Indochina. For all his reputation as a dedicated revolutionary and veteran Communist agent, Ho Chi Minh was viewed in many quarters as a pragmatist, a man of the world who grasped the complexities of international politics and acted accordingly. Even Lyndon Johnson, perhaps his staunchest adversary during the 1960s, occasionally remarked in exasperation that if he could only sit down with “Old Ho,” the two veteran political figures could somehow manage to reach an accommodation.
Toward Ho Chi Minh’s successors in Hanoi, there was no such sense of familiarity. Few of Ho’s colleagues were well-known in the outside 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 in the Soviet Union, and their worldview was bounded by the blinkered certainties of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. First Secretary Le Duan, who had been quick to establish his credentials as Ho’s legitimate successor in Hanoi, was a virtual unknown in the West. Even in Moscow and Beijing, Duan was somewhat of an unknown quantity.
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