Teasing out the truth about Ho Chi Minh

By Bradley Winterton
SPECIAL CONTRIBUTOR
Sunday, Nov 19, 2000, Page 18

Publication Notes: Ho Chi Minh By William J. Duiker 697 Pages Hyperion available from FNAC

With his wispy beard, high forehead and light voice, whimsical humor and unpretentious lifestyle, Ho Chi Minh achieved a worldwide fame denied to many other Asian nationalist leaders when his country battled the might of the US in the Vietnam War.

This biography, by the recently retired Liberal Arts Professor of East Asian Studies at Pennsylvania State University, is a massive achievement by any standards.

Sources such a work have always been problematic. Firstly, Ho himself wrote two autobiographies, together with many newspaper and magazine articles containing information about his life, but all under a variety of assumed names.

These have to be considered alongside the massive amount of official material published in Vietnam on the revolutionary leader's life and times -- one account is in 10 volumes. Where these differ, which is to be believed? Can either category be trusted as objective?

If anyone is fitted for the task of unraveling all this, it is William Duiker. He's the author of 13 books prior to this one, nine of them about modern Vietnam. Interestingly, he was earlier in life a US foreign service officer, and as such served for a time in Taiwan.

Ho born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890, the son of a provincial teacher of the Confucian classics. (Vietnam had been part of the Chinese empire for a thousand years prior to setting up as an independent state in AD 939). He died in 1969, when over 100,000 people attended his funeral.

The problem of names in Vietnamese is always difficult for foreigners owing to the custom of giving children a "milk name" at birth, and then another name, signifying the parents' hopes, in adolescence. Ho's second name, following in this tradition, was Nguyen Tat Thanh ("he who will succeed"). During the period of his youthful revolutionary activity he was known as Nguyen Ai Quoc.

In his youth he traveled extensively, and as a result had an international perspective not shared by the senior government officials in Vietnam who succeeded him.

During a period as a seaman prior to the First World War, for instance, he looked in on many countries, and lived briefly in the US (in New York and Boston, working in the latter as a pastry chef at the Parker House Hotel), and in London. His main experience of foreign life, however, was in France where he became active in socialist politics, calling for the release of his country from French rule 50 years before it was achieved.

Ho Chi Minh has somehow managed the impossible -- to be remembered not as a Marxist ideologue but instead as a man of the people, someone who stood up for the weak and the oppressed, and who is venerated for the simplicity of his tastes rather than the grandeur of his political designs.

This simplicity of lifestyle was very marked. As leader of the nation, he chose to live in a small garden hut rather than the palace, raking leaves and feeding his fish every day as a form of relaxation, as well as a way of remaining loyal to his rural origins. He also requested a simple funeral, to be followed by cremation. But the sections containing these wishes were quickly erased from his last testament by Party leaders, and his body was instead embalmed. It remains on display in the mausoleum in Ba Dinh square in Hanoi, attracting some 15,000 visitors a week.

There is evidence that Ho embraced Marxism-Leninism at least partly as a means to rid his country of the French colonial presence. When asked, in 1945, why he didn't adopt the ideals of democracy instead, and hence retain the friendship of the US (a country he claimed to admire), Ho replied that it was only in Moscow that he had received any practical offers of support, thereby implying it was largely a means to a patriotic end.

William Duiker, however, sees Ho as having been both revolutionary and patriot. He was certainly a man willing to qualify theory in order to achieve what was practical. His motives for decisions were usually tactical, often to the dismay of fellow communists, both in Vietnam and elsewhere.

Some have seen it as typical of Ho Chi Minh's idealism, and his innocence of the realities of power, that he believed the French might leave Vietnam voluntarily after the Second World War. But this is not as naive as it sounds. By 1950 the British had quit India, and the Dutch Indonesia. Vietnam's fate, though, was to prove more bitter, and in the 1960s it tragically became the surrogate battleground for opposing Cold War ideologies.

Ho perceived by many as having been a pragmatist and a humanist, broadly tolerant of views opposed to his own. The contrast between his style and that of his immediate successor, Le Duan, is marked, says Duiker. Between 1969 and 1986, Le Duan's policies of nationalizing industry and commerce and collectivizing agriculture, immediately following a decade of war, led to the collapse of the economy and the flight abroad of hundreds of thousands of the country's citizens, the pitiable "Vietnamese boat people."

Duiker by noting that the myth of Ho is today being used to prop up a regime in Vietnam that has little to offer its people in the new millennium. The new generation of Vietnamese, he says, have the same attitude to Ho as young Americans busy on the Internet might have to Abraham Lincoln -- a venerable figure (Duiker uses the adjective "quaint"), but one who fought along battle-lines that are no longer very meaningful.

This, however, is a distinguished book, magnificently produced, and both scholarly and highly readable. It naturally gives a comprehensive account of the independence movement in Vietnam, and should be read alongside Duong Van Mei Elliott's superb account of one Vietnamese family's experiences over four generations in the twentieth century, The Sacred Willow, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press.