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 proletarian internationalism in a 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. Ho Chi Minh 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 Ho Chi Minh, in the apt phrase of the British social scientist Walter Bagehot, the best was sometimes the enemy of the good. Ho applied this pragmatic attitude in foreign policy: when, for example, he accepted compromise solutions in 1946 and 1954 rather than fight under disadvantageous conditions. He was also pragmatic in domestic affairs, always believing that the transition to a socialist society should be undertaken gradually in a bid to win broad popular support.
Like U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, Ho Chi Minh saw himself as a Great Communicator, a leader who, given the opportunity, could achieve his objectives not by force, but by reason. In some instances, he succeeded. On several occasions, his willingness to compromise disarmed his adversaries and enabled him to turn military weakness into political advantage. At the same time, his image of simplicity, goodness, and selflessness exerted an enormous appeal, thus contributing significantly to the widespread approval at home and abroad for the Vietnamese revolution and struggle for independence. It is difficult to imagine the global outpouring of support for the Vietnamese war of national liberation during the 1960s had it been identified with the face of Le Duan or Truong Chinh rather than that of Ho Chi Minh.
Was Ho Chi Minh’s image genuine? There is probably no easy answer to that question. There seems little doubt that he was genuinely uncomfortable in an atmosphere of luxury and preferred to live in simple, unpretentious surroundings. Still, many of Ho’s more discerning acquaintances have observed that there was often an element of artifice in his pose as the simple ascetic, the Confucian scholar turned Marxist revolutionary. While in France after the end of World War II he told his private secretary, Vu Dinh Huynh, that sometimes fake tears were useful in getting a point across in a speech. Many years later the Polish ICC representative in Hanoi observed that, despite his public protests, Ho appeared to enjoy the adulation that he received from his compatriots. Ego was undoubtedly involved when, during the 1940s and 1950s, he wrote two self-congratulatory autobiographies under assumed names. Ho Chi Minh’s image of saintliness was not just a trait ascribed to him by others, but was carefully cultivated by the man himself.
There were, of course, sound political reasons for him to encourage this cult of personality. When in 1947 an American correspondent asked Ho why he was the object of so much adulation, he replied that it was partly because the people viewed him as a symbol for realizing their own aspirations. Or perhaps, he added, it was because he loved all Vietnamese children as if they were his own nephews, and in return they had a special love for “Uncle Ho.” 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.12
Whatever the political benefits that accrued from that decision, Ho Chi Minh 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 Indochinese Communist Party he relied from the outset on the tactic of collective leadership rather than on the assertion of personal dominance in the manner of a Lenin, a Stalin, or a Mao Zedong. During the 1930s and 1940s, his powers of persuasion—bolstered by his immense prestige and long experience as a Comintern agent—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, Ho Chi Minh was virtually reduced to a figure of impotence. His ideas were greeted with consideration by his colleagues, but were increasingly rejected as inappropriate.
Was Ho Chi Minh naïve in believing Sun Tzu’s aphorism that the most successful victories are those that are achieved without violence? In retrospect, it might be said that he had been somewhat credulous in his expectation that the French could be persuaded to withdraw from Vietnam peacefully after World War II. Several years later, Ho similarly miscalculated when he argued that the United States might decide to accept a Communist-dominated government in Vietnam, if it could be achieved without U.S. humiliation. Yet the evidence suggests that Ho’s assessment of the international situation was usually clear-sighted, and he was cognizant of the need for flexible policies to take account of varying possibilities. Although he sought to achieve his objectives without recourse to violence, he was prepared to resort to military force when the occasion demanded. 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.
It has often been said that the United States lost a golden opportunity to avoid a future conflict in Indochina when it failed to respond to Ho Chi Minh’s overtures at the end of World War II. After all, as a pragmatist, Ho must have recognized that his country had more to gain in the postwar environment in terms of practical assistance from Washington than from Moscow. He was also a professed admirer of American civilization and had incorporated its ideals in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence. By viewing Indochina in the context of growing ideological competition with Moscow, many critics contend, the Truman administration set the stage for the Vietnam War.
Although there is some plausibility to this argument, it may be partly a case of Americans having their own myths about Ho Chi Minh. In the first place, the evidence suggests that Ho’s oft expressed admiration for the United States 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 U.S. 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,13
The question assumes that Ho Chi Minh had carte blanche to formulate strategy in Hanoi, much as Stalin dominated the scene in Moscow. In fact, many of Ho’s colleagues did not share his confidence in the possibility of a nonviolent road to national liberation and might well have resisted what they viewed as his unprincipled compromises with the class enemy. As U.S. presidents have to consider domestic matters when they formulate their own foreign policy objectives, so Ho Chi Minh had to contend with his own constituency—notably his restless colleagues in the Politburo—many of whom, like Truong Chinh and Le Duan, did not share his credulous faith in the powers of reason.
There is good reason for skepticism, then, that a conciliatory gesture from the White House in 1945 or 1946 would have been sufficient to lure Ho Chi Minh and his
colleagues onto the capitalist road. While U.S. recognition of the DRV would undoubtedly have been welcome in Hanoi, it would not have been enough to wean the Indochinese Communist Party from its primary allegiance to Moscow or its dedication to the doctrine of Marx and Lenin. As Hanoi in later years artfully played off Moscow against Beijing, so Ho and his colleagues would have attempted to manipulate Washington in the interests of achieving their own objectives. Some of those objectives, as we have seen, involved other countries. Southeast Asia at the end of the Pacific War went through a period of considerable political and social instability. Whether U.S. policy makers would have been willing to sit by while Hanoi sought to promote the budding revolutionary movements in neighboring Laos and Cambodia is highly doubtful.
Still, the failure of policy makers in Paris and Washington to grasp the hand offered to them by Ho Chi Minh after World War II had tragic consequences for the Vietnamese people, and for the world as a whole. While there were risks involved in granting legitimacy to the new government in Hanoi, it seems clear in retrospect that they were preferable to the alternative. While the political and moral superiority of Ho Chi Minh’s ideological principles over those of his rivals is a legitimate matter for debate, it is hard to dispute the contention that in the conditions of the time, Vietminh leaders were the best prepared to deal with the multitude of problems afflicting their compatriots. The depth of popular support for the DRV, at least in the north, seems amply demonstrated by its ability to maintain that allegiance in a generation of struggle against the concerted efforts of France and later the United States.
Today, three decades after his death, the state cult of Ho Chi Minh is still in existence in Hanoi, where it serves primarily as a prop for a regime desperately seeking to maintain its relevance in changing times. For many Vietnamese (especially in the north, where reverence for Uncle Ho is still quite strong), the image still succeeds. It is less successful in the south, where the central government is often viewed suspiciously, its representatives deemed carpetbaggers from Hanoi. In any event, Ho’s dying vision of a Party motivated by revolutionary purity and concern for the people lies today in tatters. Little has been done in recent years to curtail the endemic level of official corruption that threatens to swamp the revolution in a rising tide of popular anger and resentment.
Future prospects for maintaining the Ho cult are equally dim. There are clear signs that while most younger Vietnamese respect Ho Chi Minh 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, Ho Chi Minh probably has no more relevance than does Abraham Lincoln to the average American.
Even among those who see the value of the Ho Chi Minh cult, many view it as an opiate for the people. As one Vietnamese intellectual has remarked: All people at war must have their founding myths. And many feel today that the official view of Uncle Ho as the unsullied paragon of revolutionary virtue should be replaced by a more realistic image that portrays him as a fallible human being. In recent years, unconfirmed rumors about his past marriages and love affairs—and even his reputed illegitimate children—have circulated widely, despite vigorous denials of their accuracy from official sources. In April 2001, the relatively unknown government official Nong Due Manh, widely rumored to be the illegitimate son of Ho Chi Minh, was elected general secretary of the VCP.14
On the world scene as well, the image of Ho Chi Minh as a seminal twentieth-century figure no longer has the emotive power that it possessed a generation ago, although the appearance of his portrait in a shop run by a Vietnamese émigré in California recently was sufficient to provoke anger among fellow Vietnamese-Americans. A generation ago, wars of national liberation were breaking out all over the Third World, and the United States seemed to be a civilization in decline. In those conditions, Ho Chi Minh appeared to be the voice of the future. With communism widely discredited and capitalism ascendant at the turn of the millennium, Ho’s distinctive amalgam of patriotism and socialism appears almost quaint, like Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution or the spiritual ideas of Mahatma Gandhi. Today, Ho Chi Minh is often viewed as a clever tactician of revolution and no more; his writings are dismissed as pedestrian in style and devoid of ideological content. His vision of a world revolution appears as distant in time as the Marxist vision of an angry proletariat beating at the door of its capitalist oppressors.
Such attitudes, however, fail to do justice to Ho Chi Minh’s legitimate importance to our times. While his vision of a future world community of Communist societies was flawed (at least, so it appears from today’s, perspective), it still cannot be denied that the cause that he promoted and directed provided a defining moment of the twentieth century, representing both the culmination of an era of national liberation in the Third World and the first clear recognition of the limits of the U.S. policy of containment of communism. After Vietnam, the world would never be the same.
It is difficult to imagine the Vietnamese revolution without the active participation of Ho Chi Minh. Although the current historical fashion emphasizes the importance of great underlying social forces in unleashing the major events of our time, it remains clear that in many instances, such as the Bolshevik revolution and the Chinese Civil War, the role of the individual can sometimes be paramount. Such was the case in Vietnam. Not only was Ho the founder of his party and later the president of the country, but he was its chief strategist and its most inspiring symbol. A talented organizer as well as an astute strategist and a charismatic leader, Ho Chi Minh’s image was part Lenin and part Gandhi, with perhaps a dash of Confucius. It was a dynamic combination. While the Vietnamese war of national liberation is an ineluctable fact that transcends the fate of individual human beings, without his presence it would have been a far different affair, with far different consequences.
For many observers, the tragedy of Ho Chi Minh is that such a wondrous talent for exercising the art of leadership should have been applied to the benefit of a flawed ideology—indeed, one that has now been abandoned even by many of its most sincere adherents around the world, although not yet in Ho’s own country. 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. However, many of his philosophical beliefs appear to be more compatible with Western ideals than with those of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Although he sought to portray himself to colleagues as an orthodox Marxist, it seems clear that he had little interest in doctrinal matters and frequently made sincere efforts to soften communism’s hard edges when applied in Vietnam. Nonetheless, as the founder of his party and the president of his country, Ho Chi Minh must bear full responsibility for the consequences of his actions, for good or ill. In the light of the conditions that prevail in Vietnam today, even many of his more ardent defenders must admit that his legacy is a mixed one.
Why did Ho Chi Minh, with his lifelong appreciation for the humanistic aspects of the Confucian and Western traditions, continue to embrace Marxism-Leninism even after its severe limitations in protecting such values had become clear? Some critics contend that Ho’s alleged humanism was simply a pose to delude the gullible. But perhaps a more persuasive explanation is that he felt confident that he could avoid the pitfalls of Stalinism and synthesize the positive aspects of classical Marxism and humanist values in a future socialist Vietnam. By the time it had become clear that Vietnamese socialism was subject to many of the same flaws as its Soviet counterpart, Ho apparently lacked the clarity of vision or the political courage to speak out firmly in opposition.
Ho
Chi Minh, then, was (in the American philosopher Sidney Hook’s memorable phrases) an “event-making man,” a “child of crisis” who combined in his own person two of the central forces in the history of modern Vietnam: the desire for national independence and the quest for social and economic justice. Because these forces transcended the borders of his own country, Ho was able to project his message to colonial peoples all over the world and speak to their demand for dignity and freedom from imperialist oppression. Whatever the final judgment on his legacy to his own people, he has taken his place in the pantheon of revolutionary heroes who have struggled mightily to give the pariahs of the world their true voice.15
A NOTE ON SOURCES
There are a number of bibliographic problems that afflict any prospective biographer of Ho Chi Minh. Not the least among them is the fact that Ho wrote two brief autobiographies, as well as numerous articles in newspapers and magazines, under assumed names. One of the autobiographies, Vua di duong vua ke chuyen, authored by T. Lan, has apparently never been translated into a foreign language. The other, Nhung mau chuyen ve dot hoat dong cua Ho Chu tich, by the fictitious historian Tran Dan Tien, was written by Ho in the late 1940s and has been translated into several foreign languages. An abridged English-language version, known as Glimpses of the Life of Ho Chi Minh: President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was published in Hanoi by the Foreign Languages Press in 1958. A somewhat longer French-language translation appeared in Souvenirs sur Ho Chi Minh (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Press, 1967) under the title “Nguyen Ai Quoc,” by Tran Dan Tien. A Chinese-language version, published in Shanghai by the August Publishing House in 1949 under the title Hu Zhih-ming Zhuan [A Biography of Ho Chi Minh], is apparently the most complete, but is difficult to obtain. Because the English- and French-language versions are the most readily available for the use of most readers, I have decided to cite them in the endnotes.
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