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s Jack Kennedy prepared for his inauguration, a frail 70-year-old leader of an impoverished peasant nation watched from halfway around the world, wondering what the election of this young Democrat would mean for his country. From Woodrow Wilson to Harry Truman, Ho Chi Minh had seldom succeeded in engaging Washington’s sympathies. Now, frustrated but determined, he had just delivered a speech in Hanoi that amounted to a declaration of war against the United States. Eisenhower’s policy-makers, preparing to leave office, found Ho’s challenge easy to dismiss as the last cry of an old revolutionary. But had they looked past his stooped shoulders, they would have seen eyes that still glittered with visions of a united and independent Vietnam.
Ho was saddened that late in life he should be fighting America, since for decades it was France that had been his enemy. Not long before Ho’s birth in 1890, the French had succeeded in a 30-year campaign to claim all of Indochina as their colony. The conquerors set little value on Laos or Cambodia, the two other kingdoms that made up the Indochinese peninsula. It was Vietnam, with its fine seaports and a lively population, that became the center of French rule. Vietnam itself was made up of three territories – to the north, Tonkin, with Hanoi as its capital; to the south, Cochin China, with Saigon the capital. Ho had grown up in the middle sector, called Annam and governed by French appointees from the city of Hue.
But centuries before France coveted Indochina, China had already conquered Tonkin. Invading from the north in 111 B.C., the Chinese held the land for more than a thousand years. Vietwas the Chinese word for a tribe of barbarians who had moved to the south – or nam– side of the Yangtze River. During their rule, the Chinese introduced the plow and other farming tools to the Red River Delta, where the city of Hanoi would one day rise. The delta’s rich land was washed out each year by monsoon rains that flooded the rice paddies and ruined the crops. To survive, the Vietnamese built thousands of miles of dikes along the Red River and its tributaries. Besides its fertile soil, Vietnam had such luster that its poets claimed they could identify where China began by the heightened sheen to their side of the border. The shades of green alone seemed infinite – rice paddies of a green that melted across the horizon into a yellow haze. Seagreen palms rising above apple-green grasses, and rubber trees spreading oval leaves of pea-pod green. On distant hills, pine trees shimmered with needles that changed with the light from blue-green to the green that was almost black.
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The Vietnamese themselves were smaller and more lithe than the Chinese, and yet the Chinese never succeeded either in absorbing or quelling them. Children of Ho’s generation were taught about his nation’s many uprisings for independence. As early as 39 A.D., the Trung sisters gathered enough troops to overwhelm the Chinese governor’s residence and, for a brief time, proclaim themselves Vietnam’s queens. After a dozen more failed rebellions, a revolt succeeded in the year 939. Except for brief returns of Chinese rule in the 15th century and again late in the 1700s, Vietnam struggled along, independent, under several native dynasties – the Ngo, the Dinh, the Le. But the country was often convulsed by civil war until north and south were finally unified in 1802 under the Nguyen family. It was the Nguyens who resisted the French up to the day that Vietnam officially became a French protectorate in 1883.
With France’s victory, a new class of Frenchmen arrived to run the country, taking over many of the positions that had been held by those Vietnamese public officials called mandarins. For centuries, education had been the path for an ambitious Vietnamese to escape from his village. Examinations were given every three years, and the few who passed and became mandarins were provided an official residence, state-paid servants and the gilded trappings worthy of agents of their Imperial Majesty.
Ho’s father had achieved mandarin status, even though he had been born to a second wife rather than a first. That misfortune usually restricted a man’s opportunities. But while tending water buffalo on a farm, he impressed the landowner with his intelligence and hard work and was allowed to marry a daughter of the household. She brought to the marriage the highly prized dowry of a rice paddy – the Chinese word for “happiness” included the symbol for a rice field. In heavily populated regions of Vietnam, entire families supported themselves on the yield from one-eighth of an acre.
With his new prosperity, Ho’s father undertook studies to better himself. He moved the family to Hue for the mandarin examinations but was serving in a distant province when he learned that his wife had died. Ho, a grieving 10-year-old, went to live with his mother’s family. Although his father seldom saw his son, he followed tradition by sending him a new adult name. Ho would keep only the very common surname of Nguyen; otherwise, the boy born Nguyen Sinh Cung became Nguyen Tat Thanh – “he who will succeed.”
Entering the mandarin class, Ho’s father was appointed secretary to a government minister in Hue. Mandarins were no longer serving their Vietnamese emperor, however, and he chafed at being nothing more than France’s educated lackey. “Being a mandarin,” Ho’s father complained, “is the ultimate form of slavery.”
The degree of his contempt was exposed when he was discovered shielding Vietnamese who had broken French law. Removed from his post, he roamed throughout southern Vietnam and Cambodia for the next 20 years, until his death in 1930, earning his keep by writing letters for illiterate farmers. Although they were separated from him, their father’s bitter courage inspired all three children. Ho’s sister was suspected by the police of harboring dissidents who had rioted against the French, and Ho’s brother, kicked by a French official, fought back and was sent to prison for treasonous activities.
Ho had grown up gifted in languages and greedy for books. In his mid-teens, he came to the attention of a rebellious mandarin, a man whose followers had once tried to seize control of several towns on Bastille Day, assuming that the French would be off their guard. The attempt failed, but the leader escaped and was now offering Ho a chance to study in Japan with other insurgent Vietnamese.
Ho chose instead to stay at a high school in Hue. He soon learned that his headmaster had served in the Foreign Legion and that the lessons were heavily biased toward the French. After four years of protesting that indoctrination, Ho drifted south to become a teacher himself. He ended up at a school for workers in a factory that produced nuoc mam,Vietnam’s pungent fish sauce. Less than a year passed before a mutiny within the Chinese army in 1911 alarmed the French, who thought that the uprising across the border might threaten Indochina’s stability. They shut down Ho’s school. Since the French police already knew about Ho’s political leanings, he dropped the name Thanh and sailed out of the port of Saigon on a French liner headed for Marseilles. He had become an assistant cook called Van Ba – “third child.”
DURING THE NEXT few years, the young man docked in ports around the Mediterranean and North Africa. His voyage to the United States in 1912 fulfilled the dream of a boy who had grown up inspired by America’s revolutionary war against England. After a stop in Boston, Ho reached New York, where he was thrilled to see the Statue of Liberty, his pleasure dimmed only by the fact that it had been the French who donated it. Otherwise, Ho was awed by the marvels of New York – the subway system; the great bridges spanning the East River; the skyline, dominated by the new Metropolitan Life Insurance Building.
Even more stirring was an excursion with a shipmate from the Hoboken docks to Chinatown, where Ho spoke in Cantonese with immigrant workers. The men told him that although they knew no English, they enjoyed equal protection under American law. Decades later, Ho could recall his trip to the United States in affectionate detail.
Excerpted from Our Vietnam by A.J. Langguth. Copyright © 2000 by A.J. Langguth. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
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