Books: The Historical Ho

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HO CHI MINH: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY by Jean Lacouture. 313 pages. Random House. $5.95.

For most of his career, Ho Chi Minh has been playing a kind of political character part: power disguised as innocence. A harmless-looking old party with a ridiculous beard and a peasant's jacket, the leader of North Viet Nam conjures up for many people the image of "a Franciscan Gandhi" or "Chaplin at his most affecting." So says Le Monde Journalist Jean Lacouture, who adds: "This is a man so fragile that he seems to survive only by the sheer force of his imagination."

The U.S. knows better. Not since Mao Tse-tung managed to pass himself off as an agrarian reformer has power masqueraded in such an artful impostor. A Viet Nam-watcher for two decades (Vietnam: Between Two Truces) and a student of other power styles (De Gaulle), Biographer Lacouture has the difficult job of estimating a man who has made a career out of being underestimated and who wears ambiguity as practically his uniform. No wonder Ho and the book occasionally seem to dissolve into mist. But the tracking is never dull as Lacouture chases down his Asian escape artist.

Wandering Wraith. Ho was born in French Indo-China, not far from the Gulf of Tonkin, 78 years ago. His father was a celebrated scholar and minor official—following the mandarin tradition—in the imperial puppet government. He was fired because the French suspected him of "patriotic" sympathies. Embittered, he used to declare that "being a mandarin is the ultimate form of slavery." He went on to eke out an existence as a nomadic marketplace storyteller, scribe and sometime bonesetter, but he somehow had contrived to send his son to schools in Hue and Saigon. At the age of 21, Ho signed on as a mess boy on a France-bound liner. He was not to set foot in his homeland again for 30 years.

For two years, he barnstormed among the world's ports, then came ashore in London. There he washed dishes, cooked under Escoffier, and met Fabian socialists; he moved on to Paris in 1917. "The French left," says Lacouture, turned "an angry patriot into a modern revolutionary." Setting himself up as a retoucher of photographs and a painter of "Chinese antiquities" manufactured in France, Ho changed his name from Nguyen Tat Thanh to Nguyen Ai Quoc—"Nguyen the patriot." A wraithlike figure "always armed with a book" (Zola, Shakespeare, Dickens, as well as Marx), he was nicknamed, unaccountably, "little M. Ferdinand."

Withdrawal & Retreat. Ho began to build his legend by demanding an audience with Woodrow Wilson himself at the Versailles peace conference. He was, says Lacouture, "unceremoniously shown the door." Not long after, he joined the French Communist Party and began to fire journalistic broadsides at French colonials. "The disreputable old fogy," he is said to have written of one officer, "is leaving Morocco so that he can nurse his 'syph' in France."