Author William J. Duiker worked in Saigon’s U.S. embassy during the Vietnam war years, and has penned an exhaustive review of the life of Ho Chi Minh in Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2001, ISBN 978-0786887019). The text is 577 pages long, and what really emerges is essentially the story of a conciliator who played off a dizzying array of individuals, countries, and political dogmas in his struggle to obtain independence for Vietnam. Ho was a master in “working the room” of 20^th century politics. He was seen as an ally of Stalin’s Russia and Mao’s China and an enemy to France and the U.S., and yet his attempted alliances with western powers were most often promoted with a sense of anti-colonialism and liberty that he felt would somehow, ultimately, strike a chord. 

Undoubtedly, many U.S. readers of this book will second-guess their country’s entrance into the war. The South Vietnamese government was never viable, in its several iterations. Ho was a communist, but a moderate, whose essential philosophy was focused on chasing colonial forces away from his country. He understood certain elements of the American political system better than more than a few Americans: 

Lieutenant [Dan] Phelan of AGAS himself had initially been reluctant to take part in the operation because he felt that Ho Chi Minh probably had Communist leanings, but Ho soon put to rest the young American officer’s suspicions. On one occasion he asked Phelan if he knew the opening words in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which Ho intended to incorporate into the declaration for his own country. “But he actually seemed to know more about it than I did,” Phelan reported. In one cable sent from Pac Bo to Kunming, Phelan described the Vietminh in telegraphese as “not anti-French merely patriots deserve full trust and support.” Phelan apparently never changed his mind. Many years later he described Ho to the journalist Robert Shaplen as “an awfully sweet guy. If I had to pick out the one quality about that little old man sitting on his hill in the jungle, it was his gentleness.”

And in his Declaration of Independence speech in 1945, Ho began his talk with a reference: 

“All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the citizen, made at the rime of the French Revolution, in 1791, also states: “All men are born free and with equal rights, and must always remain free and have equal rights.” 

Today’s reader of this book is faced with these sobering facts: more than 1 million Vietnamese died, more than 55,000 U.S. personnel were killed in the Vietnam war, and Vietnam is a unified, non-colonial country. This perplexing thought remains, and underlies every chapter of the book: how many opportunities did the U.S. mis-identify or ignore that if taken, would have changed the course of history for the better? Buy this book now at the WoWasis eStore.