HO CHI MINH
By William J. Duiker
Hyperion, 695 pages, $35
After a great long life as a revolutionary, Ho Chi Minh ate a bowl of rice gruel one morning in Hanoi and died of heart failure at 79, six years before his goal of independence and communist victory in Vietnam was achieved.
Ho slips elusively through the pages of William J. Duiker’s sweeping biography in innumerable guises, physical and ideological. He assumes, for his own safety, as many as 50 different pseudonyms and identities that coincidentally lend a certain mystery, romance and clandestine gravitas to his enterprise. Ho proves skittish in allying himself forthrightly with Moscow and Beijing, a practice they heartily reciprocate. He flirts promiscuously, when revolutionary conditions warrant, with France and the U.S., later enemies in two agonizing wars.
Doubt and duplicity are constant companions in Ho’s nomadic search, and his supple, pragmatic skills en route mark him as one of the extraordinary nationalist practitioners of our time.
Yet in the end, “Uncle” Ho is largely reduced to the sidelines and political impotence, a convenient, charismatic symbol in Hanoi, leaving his remorseless generals to finish the job on the Saigon government and that of a reunified nation in the hands of faceless and parochial apparatchiks. In “the American War,” as the Vietnamese call it, Duiker estimates more than 1 million Vietnamese died; Americans hardly need reminding there are more than 58,000 names of U.S. dead inscribed on the doleful memorial wall in Washington.
Ho’s tragedy was his choice of Marxist-Leninism as the vehicle to deliver national independence from the successive presence of France, Japan and the U.S., a shopworn doctrine that has, to say the least, been rather roundly repudiated since 1990 by many of its most ardent proponents worldwide–if not in Vietnam itself.
“Ho’s dying vision of a Party motivated by revolutionary purity and concern for the people today lies in tatters,” Duiker writes. He quotes the recent observation of a young Vietnamese who admits, ” `We respect Ho, but we are not interested in politics.’ ” Duiker goes on to report that to the new generation of Vietnamese, “Ho Chi Minh probably has no more relevance than does Abraham Lincoln to the average American.”
Duiker’s book–the first full-scale treatment of Ho from start to finish–has an unusual and not unwelcome perspective for American readers. A retired professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and author of three previous books on Indochina, Duiker has studied Vietnam’s tortured history for 30 years. He has picked the brains and experience of other experts on his many-faceted subject. He has delved into documents, some lately declassified, in Hanoi, Washington, Paris, Moscow, Beijing and London. As an academic’s history, the viewpoint is correctly dispassionate, for some readers perhaps maddeningly so. But it is almost exclusively focused on the dynamics of Vietnam, even to the point there is little consideration of the impact of U.S. anti-war protests and only passing mention of President Lyndon Johnson’s decision to abandon an attempt at reelection in 1968.
The absence of dramatic battlefield reporting as seen from Hanoi’s side is glaring. But it is an omission that is hardly surprising since the author was not there and neither was reliable, independent journalism. Duiker has rejected any attempt to reconstruct intimate conversations or perceived mindsets of the principal players as speculative and therefore gratuitous. The result is a highly convincing account, graced with lucid prose that will appeal to general readers curious about the man, his myth and the often-disingenuous maneuvers of the major powers. I would have to assume Duiker’s work will be a gold mine for scholars, particularly those ready to go spelunking in the 90 pages of numbered notes.
Duiker’s text wanders occasionally into one more party plenum or indistinguishable Vietnamese village than seems absolutely necessary to the narrative. As a reader, I yearned for more detail on the private thoughts and hours of Ho and his communist cronies, material that likely will remain stolidly inaccessible. But the book surely is an impressive cross-cultural feat, nimbly gliding over the hurdles of deadly animosity, five languages, doctrinal cant and the passage of time. Duiker modestly notes, “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.”
As portrayed by Duiker, Ho was born a revolutionary just waiting to happen. The son of a Confucian scholar contemptuous of France’s puppet emperor, he plunged into student protests against the government, quickly attracting the attention of colonial authorities as one of the usual troublemaking suspects. Adept at languages, Ho learned French, coming to wonder how it was that the concepts of liberte, egalite et fraternite applied to his dysfunctioning homeland. At 21 he sailed for Marseille as a scullery boy on a French passenger ship, the better to know his enemy. Then, in two years working at sea, Ho witnessed at close hand the drudgery and degradation of steamy ports in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where, writes Duiker, he was appalled by exploited workers “doing the bidding of the white man. It may have been during this period of travel abroad that the foundations of his later revolutionary career were first laid.”
Duiker dismisses as inconclusive Ho’s brief months in 1913 as a laborer and pastry chef in New York and Boston. Yet something of America must have rubbed off. When Ho proclaimed himself president of a new country in Hanoi in 1945, he began his historic speech by quoting the Declaration of Independence verbatim. He took up English in London during World War I, claiming in an autobiography that he worked cleaning up in the Carlton Hotel kitchen of the great chef Auguste Escoffier. In Paris, choosing to work in the metaphorically suitable trade of retouching photographs, Ho made such a pest of himself he was constantly tailed by plainclothes gendarmes. Enraging the French, he presented an anti-colonial petition to the 1919 Versailles conference, signed with the pseudonym he proudly wore for the next three decades: Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot).
There ensued an abrupt uprooting to the Soviet Union and then to China, an endless litany of narrow escapes, onerous periods of indoctrination, police beatings and an overfamiliarity with jail cells. Ho eventually became the Comintern’s top secret agent in Asia. Sounds glamorous; but it was a lonely, fugitive life lived in swiftly changing, nondescript apartments, of vexation cooling his heels awaiting instructions from the home office in Moscow and of ceaseless travel between dozey Asian capitals, often tracked by the surprisingly intrepid zealots of French intelligence.
Vietnam itself was scrupulously to be avoided because Ho was under death sentence there–avoided, that is, until 1941, when he finally set up a secret base camp in a damp cave at Pac Bo, inside his own country a half mile from the Chinese border. En route he traveled disguised as a Chinese journalist named Ho Chi Minh (He Who Enlightens), the title he would carry to his grave. More tactician than theorist, Ho lectured his comrades on world history and modern revolution. ” `Hour after hour, seated around the fire . . . we listened to him, like children listening to a legend,’ ” recalled Vo Nguyen Giap, later the military hero against the French and Hanoi’s strategist in America’s longest war.
Ho’s ambivalence was part of the legend. In a secret meeting with U.S. military operatives in south China in 1945 before Hiroshima and Japan’s surrender, Duiker reports, Ho declared irascibly, “Although ten million Americans would be welcomed [in Vietnam], . . . no French would be allowed.” Yet when the prospect of aid from China in postwar reconstruction came up before party leaders a year later, Ho intoned that Vietnam’s history showed when the Chinese came, “they stayed a thousand years”; the French, by contrast, remained only a comparatively short period. “It is better to sniff French [excrement] for a while than to eat China’s for the rest of our lives,” Ho said in 1952, two years before the rout of France at Dien Bien Phu.
Ambivalence also suffused a dispute that has raged for decades: Was Ho mostly a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary or essentially an indefatigable nationalist? Duiker concludes he was both, arguing that Ho was “half Lenin and half Gandhi. It was a dynamic combination.”
The surviving Politburo in Hanoi clearly thought otherwise. The ruling group blithely ignored Ho’s formally expressed wish to be cremated and have his ashes strewn in the countryside. Instead his body was embedded in a ponderous mausoleum of gray marble, in style reminiscent of Lenin’s tomb in Red Square. The forward-thinking talents of party officialdom were instinctive. Eleven years before Ho died, a Soviet specialist already had secretly arrived in Hanoi to provide instructions on embalming techniques.
