The Ho Chi Minh Enigma: Mysteries Surround Vietnam's Great Freedom Fighter

The private lives of few of the twentieth century’s leading political figures is as mysterious as that of Ho Chi Minh. The stick-thin ascetic continues to be regarded with awe in a country in which so few of its young people really know who he was or what he achieved. The older Vietnamese also have little real knowledge of Ho the man as opposed to Ho the great leader of the revolution against oppression.

The main contours of his life are known but many details remain vague. Those details – his real name, his marriage if any, his family relationships – are often considered in the western bourgeois sensibility. Yet in a Communist context, these are the kinds of attachments which may need to be broken in order for the revolution to succeed. Perhaps by embodying personal sacrifices in this way, Ho was demonstrating his own legitimacy as leader of the revolution.

Born into a family of some education and standing, the young Ho was continually struck by the depredations of French colonialism. While the French maintained that the Vietnamese were benefiting from French civilization and culture, on the basis that they were incapable of ruling themselves in a modern manner, Ho once asked ‘For what reason should we ever feel grateful to the French?’ In truth, the Vietnamese, who had struggled for freedom from Chinese domination throughout history, valued freedom far more than any specious arguments of how things were improved by foreign control of the country and its people, whether by Chinese, French or American.

As a young man, Ho had the chance to travel widely around the world, certainly travelling throughout Europe and parts of Africa and probably America as well. His English and French language skills were well-developed. Aware of the oppression of the working peoples he found in every country, Ho was ever more convinced of the need for revolution. He wrote about the oppression he witnessed and the need for change under the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc – a name meaning Nguyen (a very common name lending anonymity) ‘The Patriot.’ He was brought to the attention of the authorities, inevitably, and for years was subject to surveillance and occasional interrogation and detention. In China, he was held for over a year in terrible conditions in which he seems to have suffered from some form of tuberculosis. It was reported that he had died and for years people believed that Nguyen Ai Quoc was no more. Ultimately, Ho reinvented himself as Ho Chi Minh- Ho the Enlightened – almost as if he were a humble Messiah, returning from death to redeem his possible.

Jun 22, 2008 10:49 AM

Susan Cunningham :

John--

In fact, a lot is known about Ho Chi Minh's life, his parents, his names, his wives, his travels, photos. Get a hold of William Duiker's bio. For someone that age, what amazed me was how much information there was, how closely he was followed from his teenage years. Where does it come from? The dossiers compiled by the French and British spy systems, which had to be enormous and worked closely together. Then there are the Russian archives going back to the 1920's when he joined the Comintern. There must be interesting Chinese records somewhere.

I do wish someone would write a book or article on how the colonial spy system worked. It's obvious they had a tremendous number of spies but what kind of incentives were used? Blackmail? Money? Often Ho was living in the same house with a friend or fellow revolutionaries who were spying on him. How did the all these files and photos get passed from country to country, spy service to spy service before photocopies and telephones?

This book came out in 2000, so I can't recall if it included the third wife, who was a tribal woman. There was a scandal surrounding her death. Robert Templer discusses it in Shadows and Wind. Bui Tin, who defected (or whatever) around the time when the Soviet Union collapsed, also mentions that Ho's marriages were one of the subjects authorities should air. He was overruled so ...

For details on Ho's relationship with the OSS, photos from Tran Trao with US soldiers in summer 1945, etc., see David Marr's Vietnam 1945.

I don't think Ho or any non-communist Vietnamese patriots ever believed that the French had brought material progress. Quite the opposite.
I think there's ample evidence, as in other European colonies, that the Vietnamese became much poorer, lost land, suffered from tremendous taxes, were often enslaved on plantations. Marr shows in one of his books that they even became drastically more illiterate under French rule.

I don't recall that the Chinese prison was especially bad, certainly nothing like the French ones in Vietnam.

All communist revolutions have always promised great, rapid material progress. Vietnamese communism was alway proclaimed as so scientific that it would surpass capitalist societies (like Thailand or Taiwan or the US) in a blink. Because it was so disastrous economically and humanly (the re-education camps, destruction of religion and culture), I think it's hard nowadays to find any Vietnamese that have much interest in Ho.