in the garret room, the name of the tune suddenly came to me. Was it Ellington? Was it Basie? No, it was the theme music from The Flintstones.
— THE MAN IN THE GLASS COFFIN —
Many of Ho Chi Minh’s enemies could not help but admire him. One example is William J. Duiker, an American diplomat who served in the U.S. Embassy in Saigon and then devoted thirty years to writing a highly sympathetic Ho biography. Another is Jean Sainteny, a French official charged with negotiating with Ho on terms for ending the Franco-Indochinese war. He praised Ho as an “ascetic man, whose face revealed at once intelligence, energy, cleverness, and finesse …” That seemed to me a pretty accurate description of how Ho looks in death, lying in his mausoleum in Hanoi. I have seen the preserved bodies of two of the other three communist leaders that were put on display this way, as patriotic shrines, but also as evidence of Russian embalming prowess. But neither Lenin’s corpse nor Mao’s conveys the humanity of Ho’s. (I can’t pass a judgment on the body of Stalin, who used to share space with the dead Lenin, but was then removed to a simple slot in the Kremlin wall.)
Ho was born in 1890, seven years before Conchinchina, Annam, Tonkin, Laos, and Cambodia were finally united under the official name Indochine Française. He died in 1969, the year that President Lyndon Johnson, knowing he couldn’t win re-election while also losing the war in Vietnam, announced that he would quit politics and return to his ranch. Between the bookends of these two dates one can read the story of one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary lives.
Ho was born Nguyen Sinh Cung. When he was ten, however, his parents changed his name to Nguyen Tat Thanh (“Nguyen the Accomplished”) when his father, a poor Confucian scholar, became the first person in his district to earn a doctorate. Ho had two siblings, a brother who was geomancer and a sister who was a clerk for the French military. Their father knew French as well as Chinese. To support the family, he accepted trivial posts in the colonial civil service, but did so with the utmost reluctance, for he despised French rule, which had become ever harsher during his lifetime.
Like his father, Ho was of scholarly temperament and had a great gift for languages. At seventeen, he graduated from the most prestigious French-language school in Vietnam, the Quoc Hoc, or National Academy. In time he also became proficient in English, Russian, Japanese, and Czech, as well as in three Chinese languages and an unknown number of Annamite dialects. During the American War, President Ho forsook the idea of occupying the former governor general’s palace in Hanoi, but lived nearby, in a small stilted house that is today a memorial and museum. There is one tiny bedroom, almost bare of furniture or ornament, and a somewhat larger room dominated by a meeting table with eleven chairs. Important personages from elsewhere in Asia and abroad would call on him there. One day he received a representative from Germany, and astonished his young aides by conducting a long conversation in fluent German, a language they had no idea he knew. But then as a professional revolutionary, determined to give his country back to the Vietnamese people, he was of necessity a man of many secrets.
At first his resistance to French rule was passive, but later, in Hué, he participated in a coup attempt organized by a well-established nationalist group. The leader and others were arrested, but Ho, now a fugitive, hid in a remote hamlet on the coast where he taught classical French literature in Chinese. Later he slipped down to Saigon, struggling to remain inconspicuous in a series of menial jobs, but finally he had to flee. He signed on to work in the galley of the steamer Admiral Latouche-Tréville, bound for Marseilles. He was twenty-one years old. But his first stay in France was brief, as he knew he dare not linger and so found passage to the United States. He worked variously as a labourer and a household servant, subsequently finding employment at a famous American hotel, the Parker House in Boston. He became interested in the plight of African-Americans, joining the activists of the Universal Negro Improvement Trust and travelling to the southern states, where he was horrified to witness a lynching. But then much in America and in France horrified him, particularly a level of urban poverty he had never experienced in Vietnam. He found another ship and worked his way to London. His experience in ships’ galleys was sufficient to secure him a dishwashing job at the Carlton Hotel. There he impressed himself upon the famous restaurateur Auguste Escoffier, known as “le roi des cuisiniers et cuisinier des rois” who taught him how to be a pastry chef. The profession suited him well while he studied Marx in the off-duty hours.
When the Great War erupted, Ho ran toward it, returning to France, where he set himself up as a professional photographer in Montmartre, joined the Socialist Party, contributed to radical newspapers, wrote a play, became addicted to American cigarettes, and changed his name to Nguyen Ai Quoc (“Nguyen the Patriot”). After the war, he composed a manifesto calling for Vietnamese independence. He tried to deliver it at the Versailles peace conference, but was turned away at the gate, even though he was wearing a claw-hammer coat borrowed from one of his bohemian friends. The National Assembly also denied him admittance. One of the progressive newspapers printed his demands as a pamphlet and distributed it throughout Paris. The document provoked a scandal whose effects were certainly felt in Hanoi, as well, and led Ho to undertake a European speaking tour. From that point on, he was forever on the minds of the French secret service.
In 1923, as a rather unorthodox student of Marxism, Ho entered university in Moscow where he was instructed in strategy, propaganda, and political organization. He met Lenin, Trotsky, and Bukharin, as well as some famous fellow foreigners, Chiang Kai-shek and Zhou Enlai (who were not yet each other’s adversaries). With his extraordinary capacity for impressing people, he became a protégé of Mikhail Borodin, the legendary spy and agitator. Borodin had travelled the world in the service of the Comintern, or Third International, charged with fomenting communism wherever he went. He had already completed long assignments in the United States (where he was known as “Mike Gruzenberg”), Britain, Scandinavia, and Mexico, and now was being sent to China. He took Ho with him to Canton to organize Vietnamese communists exiled there. But Ho’s interest lay entirely with the cause of Vietnamese independence, not with that of international communism as such, and he made another recruiting and speech-making tour of Europe, covering his tracks as usual. In 1928, he turned up in Thailand, posing as a Buddhist monk, to organize expat Vietnamese there. (By that time, Borodin’s career had taken an unfortunate turn. The previous year, Chiang Kai-shek had shown his true colours and massacred communists in Shanghai. Borodin had to flee, escaping to Russia by motorcycle across the Gobi Desert; he died in 1951 in one of Stalin’s Siberian prison camps.)
I knew the basic outlines of Ho’s story as M and I looked through the glass sarcophagus at his remains. In 1930, he went to China once more, to reinvigorate the Vietnamese Communist Party from Hong Kong. He nearly died of tuberculosis in a British prison the next year. But then, once free, he simply disappeared. There were unconfirmed sightings of him in places as far apart as East Africa and Indonesia. Some reports suggested he was travelling under entirely new aliases, such as Nguyen O Phap, Nguyen Sihh Chin, Song Man Tcho, and Ly Thuy. Just as there are seven missing years in Shakespeare’s life, so there are ten in Ho’s — until he suddenly turned up back in Vietnam in 1941, astonishing all those who had heard he was dead, and set about building an umbrella organization of all the anti-French and anti-Japanese factions. For the Nazis had installed a puppet Vichy government in Indochina. It was at this point that Nguyen Vo Giap, wearing a homburg, appeared in Ho’s jungle clearing. He was a former Hanoi high school history teacher whose father died in one of the French colonial prisons, and he agreed to form a Vietnamese army. At the beginning there were thirty-one male recruits and three female ones. One year later, with Ho and Giap organizing, the combined total was more than ten thousand. The Office of Strategic Services, the U.S. intelligence presence in the area, kept refusing to supply the Vietnamese with arms or money to harass the Japanese. But once Ho began rescuing downed American pilots and getting them safely back into American hands, the position changed slightly: He was given half a dozen revolvers and twenty thousand rounds of ammunition. It was a start.
