How did all this come to pass? IndoChina was a place where the grand antagonisms of the 20th century met, joined and clashed: colonialism, nationalism, Communism interacted violently upon one another. Sometimes such cataclysms throw up one forceful man or he seizes a ready opportunity. But Indo-China was a place where one man was already waiting, a man who had spent 30 cunning. tortuous years preparing the event, weaving, dodging, converting reverses into successes and eventually triumphing. That man was a strange, blazing-eyed consumptive who called himself Ho Chi Minh.
Autumn Flutes & Saliva. "Have you net Ho Chi Minh?" an anti-Communist Vietnamese was asked. "Oh yes," the Vietnamese replied, quickening involuntarily. "He is the living example of a revolutionary. He has a blameless private life. He dresses simply. He is intelligent. He peaks French, Russian, English, Chinese and Vietnamese. He is very clever: when he speaks to the people he is direct so bat an eignt-year-old child can understand. He has infinite patience. He has sacrificed his own life completely for the revolution." Jawaharlal Nehru adds: ""Extraordinarily likable and friendly .. . a man of integrity desiring peace." And an American, who worked with Ho against the Japanese in World War II, wraps up the encomium:: "Ho was a very nice guy."
Ho Chi Minh is a wispy man (100 Ibs.), mild and slow-spoken, and disarmingly forthright. He is a man who sits on the edges of chairs, his hands folded meekly in his lap. "You must give the people an example of poverty, misery and denial," he sometimes adjures his disciples, and off he plods, ostentatiously, through the villages, with a knapsack on his back. Ho Chi Minh works from 16 to 18 hours a day, usually with a jacket slung across his shoulders as if he were perpetually cold.
Ho Chi Minh is a poet:
Suddenly I hear the autumn flute sounding
coldly like a signal on the screened hillside
He considers himself a man of the world: "Moscow is heroic," he will remark, jocosely, "but Paris is the joy of living." Ho Chi Minh is a kindly man, it seems, who calls his associates "Little Brother," while they call him "Uncle Ho." Yet Uncle Ho, it also seems, keeps his favorite Swallow's Nest-a rare and expensive delicacy made from the saliva of sea swallows-in his room so that he will not have to share it; he keeps Philip Morrises in one pocket for himself and passes poor local cigarettes from another.
Then there is the question of murder. In 1945 Uncle Ho's Communists killed off 5,000 Vietnamese Nationalists. The wives and children of the purged ones thronged before him pleading mercy, but Uncle Ho ordered troops to disperse them.. In 1946 Ho's Communists fumed on the Trotskyites. One Trotskyite leader, an old friend sent Ho a telegram asking clemency; Uncle Ho privately replied that he did not know theTrotskyite-who was promptly shot. Uncle Ho publicly maintained his reputation as a kindly man by weeping at the loss of his friend and by having the firing-squad commander replaced.
Stewpans & Silverware. Ho Chi Minh, dedicated Communist, is a matchless interplay of ruthlessness and guile. Before he was nine, in the central Viet Nam province of Nghean, Ho was tarrying messages for his fattier's anti-French underground.* In 1911 he shipped out of IndoChina as a cabin boy on a French vessel, so that he could learn the foreign techniques of revolution and "come back to help my countrymen." He was not yet a Marxist, but already showed signs of an ascetic, fanatic single-mindedness.
