In his final testament, as in his life, Ho Chi Minh had sought to balance his commitment to Vietnamese national independence with a similar dedication to the world revolution. In this document, which he first drafted in 1965 and then amended by hand in 1968 and 1969, Ho reaffirmed the dual importance of nationalism and socialism, although he emphasized that the immediate priority was to heal the wounds of war and improve the living standards of the Vietnamese people. He paid particular attention to the importance of realizing equality of the sexes. He praised the Party for having played the leading role in the Vietnamese revolution, but called for a campaign of rectification and self-criticism to democratize the organization and raise the level of morality among Party cadres after the end of the war. Finally, he included a fervent plea to restore the unity of the world Communist movement on the basis of the principle of proletarian internationalism.
Funeral ceremonies for Ho Chi Minh were held at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi on September 8, 1969, with more than 100,000 people in attendance, including representatives from the socialist countries. In a speech before the National Assembly, Le Duan pledged that Party leaders would seek to fulfill Ho Chi Minh’s fervent request to defeat the U.S. aggressors, liberate the South, and reunify the country. Then, he promised, the Party would devote all its efforts to bring about the creation of a socialist society in Vietnam and restore the spirit of unity within the socialist camp.2
In some respects, Le Duan was as good as his word. Under his firm leadership, in the years following Ho Chi Minh’s death the DRV continued to pursue final victory in the South. Hanoi’s immediate objective was to strengthen its forces in the South in preparation for the launching of a new military offensive during the U.S. presidential campaign in 1972. North Vietnamese representatives held talks with their U.S. counterparts in Paris, but with little result, as both sides sought to bring about a military breakthrough in South Vietnam as a means of gaining an advantage at the conference table. Although Hanoi’s war casualties remained high, Party leaders were optimistic, since rising antiwar sentiment in the United States had compelled President Nixon to announce a program calling for the progressive withdrawal of U.S. combat troops by the end of his first term.
During the Easter holidays of 1972, with fewer than 50,000 U.S. troops remaining in South Vietnam, Hanoi launched a new military campaign in South Vietnam. Like its more famous predecessor in 1968, the Easter offensive did not result in total victory, but it set in motion forces on both sides that hastened the peace process. In January 1973, Hanoi and Washington finally reached a compromise agreement. The Paris peace treaty called for a cease-fire in place and the removal of remaining U.S. combat units. Nothing was said about the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. The division of territory under the control of the NLF and the Saigon government was to be decided in negotiations between the two sides, through the formation of a subgovernmental administrative structure (known as the National Council for Reconciliation and Concord) including representatives of both sides, as well as neutralists. The council would then turn to the issue of holding new national elections.
As with the Geneva Accords two decades previously, the Paris treaty did not end the Vietnam War. It simply facilitated the final departure of U.S. troops and returned the situation in South Vietnam to what it had been in the early 1960s. When neither side appeared willing to honor the Paris provisions, conflict in the countryside resumed. In early 1975, Hanoi launched a new offensive with the objective of completing a takeover of the South by the following year. The United States had been weakened by the resignation of Richard Nixon the previous summer, and his successor, Gerald Ford, was reluctant to reintroduce American combat troops into South Vietnam. Flushed with success, North Vietnamese troops advanced out of the Central Highlands in March and poured south toward Saigon, while others occupied Da Nang and the northern half of the country. By the last week of April, Communist forces were poised on the edge of victory, as Saigon’s resistance crumbled and the remaining Americans were evacuated by helicopter from the rooftop of the U.S. Embassy to aircraft carriers waiting offshore. After a bitter struggle that had lasted fifteen years and left more than 1 million Vietnamese dead, it was, in President Ford’s phrase, “a war that is finished.” Meanwhile, the Khmer Rouge had seized power in Phnom Penh two weeks previously; a revolutionary government would take office in Laos before the end of the year.
In early July 1976, the two zones of Vietnam were reunified into a single Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), thus fulfilling Le Duan’s pledge to carry out one of Ho Chi Minh’s wishes. But Duan’s success in carrying out Ho Chi Minh’s testament was not as impressive in other areas. In 1968, a Soviet specialist had secretly arrived in Hanoi to advise the Vietnamese on embalming procedures. The following March, a team of Vietnamese traveled to Moscow to hold further consultations and report on their progress in mastering the technique. According to one account, however, the issue remained a sensitive one within the Party leadership, since Ho Chi Minh himself would have vigorously objected to any plans that contradicted his desire to be cremated. At the moment of Ho Chi Minh’s death, the Politburo had not yet reached a final decision on how to deal with the matter. After urgent consultations with Moscow, a second Soviet specialist arrived in Hanoi in mid-September to assist Vietnamese medical personnel in preserving Ho’s body.3
On November 29, 1969, the Politburo formally approved plans to erect a mausoleum to display Ho Chi Minh’s embalmed body for the edification of future generations. A committee composed of representatives from the Ministries of Construction and National Defense was appointed to oversee the project with the assistance of Soviet advisers. In its final report to Party leaders, the committee concluded that the mausoleum should be contemporary in style but imbued with a national flavor. In conformity with the president’s character, it should be solemn and simple in appearance, and placed in a convenient, accessible location. In drawing up its recommendations for the design for the building, the committee had studied a number of other commemorative structures, including the Pyramids in Egypt, the Monument to Victor Emmanuel in Rome, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and Lenin’s Tomb in Moscow. After additional suggestions from the Politburo, models of the projected structure were then displayed throughout the country to solicit public comment. Over thirty thousand suggestions were eventually submitted to the committee.
In December 1971, the Politburo gave its final approval, and construction began shortly after the signing of the Paris peace treaty. The site chosen for the mausoleum was one of the most sacred precincts of the Vietnamese revolution—at Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi, adjacent to the Presidential Palace and Ho’s stilt house. When it was finally opened to the public on August 29, 1975, the mausoleum was reminiscent above all of the Lenin mausoleum in Red Square. The facing was of gray marble, much of it quarried at Marble Mountain, a limestone outcropping south of Da Nang, where Viet Cong troops housed in a cave inside the mountain could watch American GIs swimming at famous China Beach, one of the most popular resorts in the area. The mausoleum was intended to reflect the shape of a lotus flower rising from the primeval mud, thus providing a modern counterpoint to an eleventh-century Buddhist pagoda in a nearby park. Many observers, however, found the style of the mausoleum to be heavy and ponderous, in total contrast to the whimsical humor and unpretentious character of its occupant who was lying in state inside, hands crossed, and dressed in a simple Sun Yat-sen tunic. As the historian Hue-Tam Ho Tai observed, the overall effect was to portray Ho Chi Minh as the international Communist leader rather than the more approachable Uncle Ho beloved by millions of Vietnamese. The results have apparently not deterred his compatriots, however—more than fifteen thousand visit the mausoleum each week.4
In proceeding with their plans to preserve Ho Chi Minh’s body in a mausoleum, Party leaders had clearly ignored Ho’s requests for a simple funeral ceremony and cremation. He had always disdained the luxurious trappings of high office, and in 1959, shortl
y after disclosing his real identity as the famous revolutionary Nguyen Ai Quoc, he had even vetoed a proposal to construct a small museum at Kim Lien village to commemorate his life, arguing that scarce funds could be better used to build a school. 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. The version of the testament published in 1969 also omitted Ho’s request for a one-year reduction in the agricultural tax and his warning to his compatriots that the war in the South could last for several more years. The Party also announced that Ho had died on September 3, one day later than its actual occurrence, in order to preserve the mood of the national holiday of independence, which celebrated the anniversary of September 2, 1945, when Ho Chi Minh had read the Declaration of Independence in Ba Dinh Square.5
After the Fourth Party Congress in December 1976, Party leaders announced that socialism should be achieved “in the main” throughout the country before the end of the decade. To symbolize the new stage of the revolution, the VWP was renamed the Vietnamese Communist Party (Dang Cong san Viet Nam, or VCP). Ho Chi Minh’s successors attempted to make liberal use of his image to mobilize popular support for their ambitious program. Portraits of the late president appeared on postage stamps, the national currency, and the walls of buildings throughout the country, while books and pamphlets in profusion were published about his life, his ideas, and his revolutionary morality. Party leaders like Truong Chinh, Pham Van Dong, and Vo Nguyen Giap recounted their memories of Uncle Ho, and stressed the importance of “Ho Chi Minh thought” (tu tuong Ho Chi Minh) as a crucial tool for building the future Vietnam. Young people were urged to follow the path of Ho Chi Minh in guiding their everyday actions, and youth organizations were established throughout the country in his name. Several other socialist countries attempted to appropriate his reputation for their own purposes, naming schools, factories, streets, and squares after him and holding seminars to study his testament and his career achievements.6
The putative values of Ho Chi Minh thought were embodied in the new Ho Chi Minh Museum, which was completed in the fall of 1990, on the centenary of his birth. Placed just behind the mausoleum near Ba Dinh Square, the museum was imposing in size, but not as heavy in style as its neighbor. With a facing of white marble, it too was designed to resemble a lotus flower, although to some observers the four-sided structure with the entryway at one corner was more reminiscent of the prow of a ship.7
Despite the Party’s monumental effort to enshrine Ho Chi Minh thought as the very embodiment of the new Vietnam, many observers found significant differences between the style of Le Duan and that of his illustrious predecessor. Where Ho had persistently urged a gradual approach to carrying out the Vietnamese revolution in order to maximize popular support across a broad spectrum of society, Le Duan frequently adopted more ambitious tactics that accentuated divisions within the Party leadership and alienated significant segments of the population. And where Ho Chi Minh had always sought to calibrate his own strategy with due regard to the realities of the international situation, his successors adopted an aggressive approach in the realm of foreign affairs that not only antagonized Hanoi’s neighbors in Southeast Asia but also irritated China, once Hanoi’s closest ally and strongest supporter. Those who objected to Le Duan’s policies were dismissed from the Party leadership (a prominent example was Vo Nguyen Giap) or chose to go into exile abroad (as in the case of Hoang Van Hoan).8
The results were tragic for a country just emerging from a generation of war. When the regime suddenly announced the nationalization of industry and commerce in March 1978, thousands fled to seek refuge overseas. A program to begin the collectivization of agriculture antagonized much of the rural population in the South. By the close of the 1970s, the Vietnamese economy, shaken by the Party’s ill-advised effort to lay the foundations of a fully socialist society before the decade ended, was in a shambles.
The country’s internal problems were exacerbated by crises abroad. When the fanatical and genocidal Pol Pot regime that had come into power in Cambodia rejected Vietnamese overtures to form the projected militant alliance of the three Indochinese states, in December 1978, Hanoi launched an invasion of Cambodia and installed a puppet regime in Phnom Penh. In retaliation, Chinese forces crossed the Vietnamese border in a campaign that, however brief, forced the SRV to devote precious resources to the cause of military defense. By the mid-1980s, popular resentment of the Party leadership—a group who had singularly failed to follow Ho Chi Minh’s advice to provide the people with the fruits of victory—had reached alarming levels.
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 opening the country to foreign investment, while encouraging a more tolerant attitude toward the expression of ideas among the populace. Known as doi moi (“renovation”), the new program was highly reminiscent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika in the USSR, although sources in Hanoi insisted that the strategy was Vietnamese in inspiration.
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 Vietnamese economy, it also led (at least in the view of ideological conservatives) to the increased presence of drugs, prostitution, AIDS, and hedonistic attitudes among young people, as well as to heightened criticism of the Party’s dominance over all aspects of national affairs. Alarmed at the collapse of Communist systems in Eastern Europe and increasingly concerned at the corrosive impact of Western culture on socialist institutions in Vietnam, the Party began to crack down on political dissent and what conservative elements labeled the “poisonous weeds of bourgeois capitalism.” Under Nguyen Van Linh’s successor, the veteran apparatchik Do Muoi, Hanoi followed the lead of post-Tiananmen China and cracked down on dissident activities under a policy of “economic reform, political stability.” While economic liberalization continued at a modest pace, the Party reasserted its traditional role as the only political force in the country.9
Vietnamese advocates of reform were quick to appropriate the legacy of Ho Chi Minh in promoting their own cause. Citing Ho’s reputation as a pragmatist, they argued that he would have recognized the need to raise the standard of living before embarking on the road to a fully socialist society. Pointing to his image as a humanist with a broad tolerance for opposing ideas, they asserted that he would have prevented the split that had developed within the Party leadership and adopted a more inclusive approach to winning the support of the people. In the late 1980s, the reformist case was strengthened when Ho Chi Minh’s last private secretary, Vu Ky, revealed that Le Duan and some of his colleagues had tampered with Ho’s testament by deleting his plea for a tax reduction and a simple funeral ceremony. A chastised Politburo was forced to admit its culpability, but rationalized its own actions as being ultimately in the best interests of the Vietnamese people and in accordance with Ho Chi Minh’s own lifetime objectives.10
The confusion about Ho Chi Minh’s true character and legacy exists not only in Vietnam but abroad, where he is viewed variously as a saint dedicated to the liberation of the oppressed masses from the yoke of Western imperialism, a sinner committed to the spread of Communist totalitarianism throughout the world, or (perhaps most damaging of all) an unprincipled opportunist who exploited his reputation for integrity and simplicity of character in order to secure his own self-glorification. When UNESCO sponsored a conference in Hanoi in 1990 to celebrate the centennial of his birth, praise of Uncle Ho at the conference was countered by a spate of criticisms from those around the world who objected to the deification of a man they felt bore ultimate responsibility for the deaths of so many of his
compatriots.
To many observers, the crux of the debate over Ho Chi Minh has centered on the issue of whether he should be identified as a Communist or a nationalist. Many of his foreign acquaintances insist that Ho was more a patriot than a Marxist revolutionary. Ho appeared to confirm this view in 1961, when he publicly declared that it was the desire to save his compatriots that initially led him to Leninism. While he voiced such sentiments on numerous other occasions, there is perhaps no clearer exposition than his remark to the U.S. intelligence officer Charles Fenn in 1945 that he viewed communism as the means to reach a nationalist end. When asked to explain himself, Ho replied:
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 United States, a country he claimed to admire so much? Ho Chi Minh 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 and a friend in deed.” Its loyalty won his loyalty.11
There seems little doubt that for Ho Chi Minh the survival of his country was first and always his primary concern. Indeed, such views aroused the suspicion of other senior Party leaders in Hanoi, Beijing, and Moscow, who sometimes questioned whether Ho was a genuine Marxist. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that, whether or not he was an orthodox Marxist, under his patriotic exterior beat the heart of a dedicated revolutionary. The revolutionary strain in his outlook was probably triggered by his shipboard experience before World War I, when he discovered that the sufferings of his compatriots were shared by peoples elsewhere in Asia and Africa living under the yoke of world imperialism. It was undoubtedly accentuated by his period of residence in Paris, when he discovered the hypocrisy of the French, who failed to apply their own ideals to their colonial peoples. Two years in Moscow during the early heady days of the Soviet experiment appear to have aroused his naïve 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.
Ho Chi Minh Page 79
