profoundly affected Ho, and he looked for alternatives to help the anti-colonial struggle. He joined the French Socialist Party, but “quickly grew discouraged by the party’s lack of interest in colonial problems” and was influenced by the Communists in the newly formed Soviet Union. He became a founder of the French Communist Party in 1920 and was invited to live and study in Moscow. Lawrence writes that Ho had a mixed experience in the Soviet Union, commencing “an ambivalent relationship with communist powers” that continued for the rest of his life. He also had to deal with the “pervasive scorn” Soviet leaders felt toward agricultural societies such as Vietnam.5
From the beginning, French colonialism rested on economic exploitation, but justified it with the argument that it helped the Vietnamese materially and morally. Like all other colonial rulers, the French believed that they were civilizing people even while they brutally exploited Vietnamese workers. More than one in four rubber workers died laboring on the harshest plantations and those who ran away faced execution. This colonial rule, therefore, profoundly changed life for the overwhelming majority of Vietnamese, while it enriched the small elite who worked as colonial administrators for the French. The peasants suffered greatly, and the disparity between the wealthy few and the many poor grew. Out of this oppression, however, arose a militant, Communist-led nationalist movement that would eventually defeat French colonialism.6
Brutal prison conditions were a key aspect of this harsh rule, according to historian Peter Zinoman. This brutality backfired for the French, however, as these prisons became places of resistance for a growing and militant Communist Party that organized thousands of jailed activists in political education and action. These inmates “contributed decisively” to the revolutionary movement throughout Vietnam, providing a base for later military struggle against the French after the formation of the Viet Minh. Released, escaped, and amnestied prisoners became the “hardened core of disciplined, experienced, and fiercely loyal cadres skilled in the arts of underground organization.”7
The 1930s brought a “dramatic expansion of anticolonial policies in Indochina. It was reflected in the rise of labor activism, the flowering of the radical press, the growth of the Communist Party, the formation of hundreds of popular Action Committees, and a campaign to establish an Indochinese Congress.” These efforts were led by thousands of former political prisoners, many of whom were released in 1939 as part of a widespread amnesty policy implemented by the new French Popular (Left) Front government.8
During the Second World War, the French administered the country for the Japanese, and the colonial prison “resumed its role as a focal point of anticolonial activism” as thousands of Communist Party members were imprisoned. As during the early 1930s, this led to a resumption of agitation as political prisoners renewed their organizational and political work. Once again, the Communists took the lead in the anticolonial resistance against the French.9
It was during the Second World War that Viet Minh cadre, who were “armed, carefully trained and indoctrinated,” made contact with local village leaders and, as David Marr writes, “began convincing them of the inevitable collapse of the Japanese, of Allied support for the independence of colonial peoples, and of the necessity for village participation in taking over the government and defending it against all enemies.” Serious economic problems played a major role in these dramatic and historic changes, especially during the winter of 1944–45 when the increasing demand for rice by the Japanese and the French, breaches in the Red River dike system, and disruption of communications between northern and southern Vietnam because of Allied bombing produced a terrible famine in northern Vietnam, killing an estimated one to two million people.10
Near the end of the Second World War, in March 1945, the Japanese disarmed French troops and interned French civilians there; combined with the economic crises and famine, this created a political vacuum that helped to produce the revolutionary movement that would lead to the end of French colonialism. This occurred in part because “enough Vietnamese knew that a proud history and a proud culture were worth fighting for,” but also because a revolution had arisen during the French absence that gave “millions of poorer peasants a vision of massive social and economic readjustment once the ‘barbarians’ were ejected.”11
In the late 1940s, the French began to fear a Communist victory in China, and they shifted to anti-Communism as the key to their gaining U.S. support on Vietnam. They played this card because they knew that this shift to an anti-Communist rather than a colonial war helped make their case for U.S. assistance. The Eisenhower administration supported them, as it saw the Viet Minh as simply a tool of Soviet and Chinese expansion, even though the Soviet Union had ignored the Vietnamese struggle for independence in its critical early years, and the Viet Minh had gained power four years before the Chinese revolution could possibly provide any material assistance.12
Despite all the propaganda about Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh as tools of the Soviet Union, historian Fredrick Logevall points out that Ho could not obtain “meaningful assistance” from Soviet dictator Stalin, who was more concerned about Europe and thought that Ho was “too independent-minded to be trusted.” The French Communist Party, “anxious to appear patriotic and moderate before the metropolitan electorate, repeatedly refused [Ho’s] pleas for support, and indeed connived in the venture of reconquest.”13
Logevall discusses the visit that John F. Kennedy, then a Massachusetts congressman, made to Vietnam in 1951. About his trip, Kennedy noted: “We are more and more becoming colonialists in the minds of the people.” The United States should take a different path from the collapsing British and French empires and show that the enemy is not merely Communism but “poverty and want,” “sickness and disease,” and “injustice and inequality.” After returning home, he stated, “In Indochina we have allied ourselves to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire.… There is no broad general support [for] the native Vietnamese government among the people of that area.” It is “a puppet government” and every neutral observer believes that Ho and the Communists would win a “free election.”14 A decade later Kennedy administration officials and the corporate media harshly criticized those citizens who made similar criticisms of Kennedy’s support of the U.S.-backed Diem regime.
Some two decades after Kennedy’s first assessment of French colonialism, Ho, and U.S. options in Vietnam, Abbot Low Moffat, who had been there at the end of the Second World War, and later headed the State Department’s Division of Southeast Asian Affairs, offered the following assessment of Ho Chi Minh:
I have never met an American … who had ever met Ho Chi Minh who did not reach the same belief: that Ho Chi Minh was first and foremost a Vietnamese nationalist. He was also a Communist and believed that Communism offered the best hope for the Vietnamese people. But his loyalty was to his people. When I was in Indo-China it was striking how the top echelon of competent French officials held almost exclusively the same view.15
Despite Moffat’s glowing comment about Ho Chi Minh, there were different views among OSS personnel in Vietnam regarding him and the Viet Minh, ranging from admiration and sympathy to outright condemnation and hostility based on his Communist philosophy and activism.
Truoung Nhu Tang, a founder of the National Liberation Front who spent thirty years in the resistance movement against the French, Diem, and the United States, was a double agent. After the war ended in 1975, he became “profoundly disillusioned by the massive political repression and economic chaos the new government brought with it,” fleeing Vietnam and living in exile in Paris. A longtime admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Truoung felt that Ho’s motivations were similar to his own, and that the former’s Communism ultimately served the cause of Vietnamese nationalism. Ho had the welfare of the people at heart, and Truoung gave “[the] Northern government the benefit of the doubt on this score, knowing that the restoration of nationhood would be a long and difficult process..” Although Ho was deeply involved with the international Communist movement, he had forged the struggle
