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 commentators 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 is 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 concludes 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.
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