Ho Chi Minh

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 30th of April 1975, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon carrying a poster addressed to a man who had died years earlier. That man was Hồ Chí Minh, the revolutionary who founded North Vietnam. The poster carried the words of a song by the composer Huy Thuc. Soldiers had sung it throughout the final campaign: "Bác vẫn cùng chúng cháu hành quân." It means "You are still marching with us, Uncle Hồ."

  On the 1st of May, the veteran Australian journalist Denis Warner filed his report. "When the North Vietnamese marched into Saigon yesterday, they were led by a man who wasn't there," he wrote.

  That absent commander is hard to pin down. He is thought to have used somewhere between 50 and 200 pseudonyms. Even the official accounts of his life disagree with one another.

  So who was he really? How did a young Vietnamese who left home to work on ships come to sit down with Stalin and Mao? What did his government do to win power at home, and what did it cost? And what became of his own wishes for what should happen to his body?

  92101518

• 2. Many Names

  ›

  At least four official biographies of Hồ Chí Minh exist, and they differ on names, dates, places and other basic facts. Unofficial biographies differ even more widely. He was born Nguyễn Sinh Cung in 1890, in the village of Hoàng Trù in Kim Liên commune, Nam Đàn district, Nghệ An province. That region lay in northern Central Vietnam, then a French protectorate. Although 1890 is the accepted birth year, he himself gave four others at various times: 1891, 1892-1894 and 1895.

  His father, Nguyễn Sinh Sắc, was a Confucian scholar and teacher, and the boy first studied with him. More formal lessons followed with a scholar named Vương Thúc Quý. The child quickly mastered chữ Hán, the written Chinese script that any serious Confucian student needed, and polished his everyday Vietnamese writing. Outside the schoolroom he loved flying kites and fishing. When he turned ten, his father gave him a new name in keeping with Confucian tradition: Nguyễn Tất Thành.

  Sắc's own career was mixed. In 1909 he served as an imperial magistrate in the remote district of Bình Khê, in Bình Định province. He was demoted for abuse of power after a local man of influence died several days after receiving 102 strokes of the cane. The source describes him as both a patriot and a collaborator, someone who supported France's claimed civilizing mission. Thành's sister Bạch Liên worked as a clerk in the French Army, and his brother Nguyễn Sinh Khiêm became a geomancer and traditional herbalist.

  Thành himself received a French education at the Collège Quốc học, a secondary school in Huế. Phạm Văn Đồng and Võ Nguyên Giáp, who would later serve him, studied there too. So did Ngô Đình Diệm, the future president of South Vietnam and a political rival.

  Older accounts placed the young Thành in a 1908 demonstration in Huế against forced labor, an episode said to have endangered his place at school. A document from the Centre des archives d'Outre-mer in France complicates that story. It shows he was admitted to the school on the 8th of August 1908. The protest had run from the 9th to the 13th of April, months earlier.

  The name that finally stuck came in 1943, after Chinese Nationalist authorities released him from prison. Hồ is a common Vietnamese surname, and Chí Minh joins words meaning will or spirit with bright. It honored General Hou Zhiming, Chief Commissar of the 4th Military Region of the National Revolutionary Army, who had helped secure his release.

  1517111043

• 3. Kitchens and Paris

  ›

  On the 5th of June 1911, the steamer Amiral de Latouche-Tréville left Saigon. Aboard was a new kitchen helper who had signed on under the alias Văn Ba. The ship reached Marseille on the 5th of July, then called at Le Havre and Dunkirk before returning to Marseille in mid-September. There he applied to the French Colonial School and was turned down. Instead he spent the years from 1911 to 1917 working on ships and visiting many countries.

  A single letter dated the 15th of December 1912 and postmarked New York City is the only evidence that he reached the United States. He signed as a sailor and gave a poste restante address in Le Havre. A postcard to Phan Chu Trinh mentioned a job at the Parker House Hotel in Boston, but the hotel found no record of him. Claims that he met Korean nationalists there are, in the words of the scholar Sophie Quinn-Judge, "in the realm of conjecture". He said he attended meetings of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. One account also credits him with bringing home avocado seeds, which launched Vietnam's habit of avocado smoothies.

  In Britain, he claimed to have lived in West Ealing and later in Crouch End. He reportedly worked at the Drayton Court Hotel in West Ealing, though accounts disagree on whether he was a chef or a dishwasher. A story that the famed chef Auguste Escoffier trained him as a pastry cook at the Carlton Hotel has no documentary support. In 1913 he did work as a pastry chef on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry route.

  French police files tell a different story about Paris from the one he told. He claimed to have arrived from London in 1917, but their documents record him arriving in June 1919. There he met the scholar Phan Châu Trinh and his friend Phan Văn Trường. He joined the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites, which also counted Nguyễn Thế Truyền and Nguyễn An Ninh. The group had already published articles for Vietnamese independence under the pseudonym Nguyễn Ái Quốc, meaning "Nguyễn the Patriot".

  At the Versailles peace talks, the group asked the Western powers to recognize the civil rights of the Vietnamese and end French colonial rule. They sent their letter to leaders including Georges Clemenceau and Woodrow Wilson, citing self-determination. Nobody at Versailles took it up. Phan Văn Trường wrote the document, but Thành was its public face. He first used the name Nguyễn Ái Quốc in September, in an interview with a Chinese newspaper correspondent.

  Some authors call 1919 a lost "Wilsonian moment", when Wilson might have won him over. The source disputes this. While the conference was under way, Quốc was already giving speeches on Bolshevism in Asia and urging French socialists to join Lenin's Communist International. In October 1920, he heard that the Irish republican and Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney had died on hunger strike. He reportedly wept and said, "a country with a citizen like this will never surrender."

  In December 1920, he attended the Congress of Tours, voted for the Third International and became a founding member of the French Communist Party. On its Colonial Committee he tried to draw attention to France's colonies, mostly without success. He also edited the newspaper Le Paria, first published in Paris in 1922. In May 1922 he wrote a playful article asking Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to outlaw Franglais such as le manager, le round and le knock-out. His articles and speeches caught the eye of Dmitry Manuilsky, who would sponsor his trip to the Soviet Union.

  343893132

• 4. Comintern Years

  ›

  A passport in the name of Chen Vang, a Chinese merchant, carried him from Paris to Moscow in 1923. The Comintern employed him there, and he studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East. In January 1924 he attended Lenin's funeral, and in June he took part in the Fifth Comintern Congress.

  Sometime between late 1924 and early 1925, the Comintern sent him to Canton. There he assisted and interpreted for Mikhail Borodin, its envoy to the Kuomintang Revolutionary Committee. He organized the Association of Vietnamese Youth and opened a political training school. The newspaper Thanh Nien, meaning Youth, first appeared on the 21st of June 1925, a date Vietnam now celebrates as Revolutionary Journalism Day. In 1925-1926 he ran Youth Education Classes and sometimes lectured at the Whampoa Military Academy. Those young Vietnamese became the seeds of a communist movement at home.

  On the 18th of October 1926 he married Zeng Xueming. She was 21 and he was 36. Comrades objected. He replied: "I will get married despite your disapproval because I need a woman to teach me the language and keep house." They wed in the same place where Zhou Enlai had married and lived in Borodin's residence.

  Around then came an accusation that has never quite gone away. The anti-communist writer Hoàng Văn Chí claimed that he betrayed the rival leader Phan Bội Châu to French agents in Shanghai in June 1925. The price, he said, was 100,000 piastres. William Duiker considered the theory and rejected it. Sophie Quinn-Judge and Duncan McCargo called it likely propaganda, noting the French already had what they needed from their own spies. Châu received lifetime house arrest and never denounced him.

  After Chiang Kai-shek's anti-communist coup, he left Canton in April 1927 and went back to Moscow. He spent part of that summer recovering from tuberculosis in Crimea. By November he was in Paris again. He then traveled through Brussels, Berlin, Switzerland and Italy, and sailed to Bangkok, arriving in July 1928. He wrote to Zeng in a letter that was intercepted. "Although we have been separated for almost a year, our feelings for each other do not have to be said to be felt." He stayed in the Thai village of Nachok until late 1929, then moved on to India and Shanghai.

  In early 1930, in Hong Kong, he chaired a meeting of representatives from two Vietnamese communist parties and merged them into a single organization. He also founded the Indochinese Communist Party. That April, a young revolutionary named Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai was sent to Hong Kong to assist him. Published studies suggest a romantic relationship. He asked the Far Eastern Bureau for permission to marry her, though his earlier marriage remained legally valid. British authorities detained her in April 1931, and the plan ended.

  In June 1931, Hong Kong police arrested him in a joint operation with French authorities. The local solicitor Frank Loseby defended him against extradition to French Indochina. After appeals to the British Privy Council, he was reported dead in 1932 to avoid being sent there. A ruling said he could be deported as undesirable, but not to a place controlled by France. He was escorted to Shantou.

  Back in the Soviet Union, he studied and taught at the Lenin Institute. Accounts differ on his standing. One says he lost Comintern positions amid suspicion of betrayal. Ton That Thien's research instead describes a protégé of Manuilsky in good standing throughout the Great Purge. Either way, he lost control of the party he had founded. The Comintern then stressed class struggle over alliances with non-communists, and the new leaders criticized his nationalist tendencies. In 1937, Japanese aggression in China and Nazi policies shifted the Comintern toward anti-fascist cooperation, and he returned to favor.

  In 1938 he went back to China as an adviser to the Chinese Communist armed forces and as the senior Comintern agent for Asian affairs. He served at the Eighth Route Army branch office in Guilin and, in 1939, under Marshal Ye Jianying. When Germany defeated France in 1940, he and his lieutenants Võ Nguyên Giáp and Phạm Văn Đồng saw their chance.

  381032947

• 5. The War Against France

  ›

  In October 1940, in Guilin, Hồ and his supporters founded the League for Vietnamese Independence, known as the Việt Minh. He returned to Vietnam in 1941 to lead it, building a communist-led united front against Japan, which had occupied Indochina that year. A 10,000-member guerrilla force nicknamed the "men in black" fought alongside it. The movement staged many successful actions against Vichy French and Japanese forces, with quiet support from the American Office of Strategic Services.

  Chinese Nationalist authorities jailed him before Chinese Communists helped free him in 1943. The experience produced Poems from the Prison Diary, written in chữ Hán. The collection is Vietnam National Treasure No. 10, has been translated into many languages and is used in Vietnamese high schools.

  In April 1945 he met the OSS agent Archimedes Patti and offered intelligence, asking only for "a line of communication" with the Allies. The OSS agreed, sent a team to train his men, and had a doctor treat him for malaria and dysentery.

  After the August Revolution, he became Chairman of the Provisional Government and persuaded Emperor Bảo Đại to abdicate. On the 2nd of September 1945 he read the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. No country recognized his government. He petitioned President Harry S. Truman repeatedly, citing the Atlantic Charter, and Truman never replied. In Paris in 1946, he stayed at the same hotel as the future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. He suggested Ben-Gurion build his Jewish state in Vietnam, and Ben-Gurion declined.

  That September, 200,000 Chinese National Revolutionary Army troops arrived in Hanoi to take the Japanese surrender. He struck a bargain with their general, Lu Han: dissolve the Communist Party and hold an election yielding a coalition. On the 6th of March 1946 he signed an agreement with France recognizing Vietnam as an autonomous state. Its real purpose, for both sides, was to get Chiang's army out of the North. Once the Chinese left, fighting broke out.

  Rivals paid heavily. While he traveled abroad in 1946, his subordinates imprisoned 2,500 non-communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee. In July, hundreds of opponents were executed or exiled after a failed coup attempt. They included members of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party and the Đại Việt Nationalist Party. All rival parties were banned. The French socialist Daniel Guérin later recalled asking Hồ in Paris about the Trotskyist leader Tạ Thu Thâu. Hồ replied "with unfeigned emotion" that Thâu was "a great patriot and we mourn him". Then he added, in a steady voice: "All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken."

  French naval bombardment of Haiphong reportedly killed more than 6,000 civilians. On the 19th of December 1946, he declared war on the French, beginning the First Indochina War. Forces armed mostly with machetes and muskets attacked at once. They smoked out defenders with straw bundled with chili pepper. They destroyed tanks with lunge mines and Molotov cocktails. After two months they withdrew, wrecking valuable infrastructure as they went. During Operation Léa, French soldiers led by Jean Étienne Valluy reported capturing him at Việt Bắc. The captive was actually a Việt Minh adviser, killed while trying to escape.

  The journalist Bernard Fall described a later truce attempt. French negotiators found a mud hut with a thatched roof, a long table and a silver bucket holding champagne on ice. The French demanded that Japanese officers who had trained his troops be returned for war crimes trials. He called them allies and friends, refused, and walked out to seven more years of war.

  In February 1950 he met Stalin and Mao in Moscow after the Soviet Union recognized his government. They agreed China would back the Việt Minh. He had told a French visitor early on: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." In 1954, at Dien Bien Phu, more than 10,000 French soldiers surrendered. Arthur Dommen estimates that the Việt Minh killed 100,000-150,000 civilians during the war, while Benjamin Valentino puts French responsibility at 60,000-250,000.

  4550611048

• 6. Ruling the North

  ›

  By the afternoon of the 20th of July 1954, Geneva's negotiators had settled the last open points. Vietnam would be split at the 17th parallel, with reunification elections in July 1956. Hồ's government moved to Hanoi and became a one-party communist state.

  Arguments over how to hold the vote had dragged on. Phạm Văn Đồng proposed supervision by "local commissions", while the United States wanted United Nations supervision. Vyacheslav Molotov countered with an equal number of communist and non-communist members who could decide important issues only unanimously. An International Control Commission chaired by India, with Canada and Poland, was created. Poland's seat gave the Communists an effective veto. Of nine nations represented, only the United States and the State of Vietnam refused to accept the final declaration.

  During a 300-day window people could move freely between the two zones. Ngô Đình Diệm and the CIA adviser Colonel Edward Lansdale campaigned to persuade Northerners, especially Catholics, to go south. Between 800,000 and 1 million people did. The source says the CIA's efforts mattered little, since migrants were driven by their own convictions and circumstances.

  Inside the North, land reform ran from 1953 to 1956, with rent reduction and redistribution. It came with executions of landlords labeled "reactionary and evil". The death toll is still argued over. Witness testimony suggesting one execution per 160 villagers implied nearly 100,000 nationwide. Scholars at the time widely accepted 50,000. Declassified Vietnamese and Hungarian archives indicate far fewer, though likely more than 13,500 including suicides after arrest. In 1973 Gareth Porter estimated 800-2,500. In 1990 the economist Vo Nhan Tri reported a party-archive document giving 15,000 wrongful executions, and concluded the true total was considerably higher. In 2007 Balázs Szalontai drew on Hungarian diplomats' records. Of 62,182 identified "landlords", 1,337 were executed by December 1955. The third stage, in early 1956, was likely deadlier still.

  Then the government reversed course. In early 1956 it ended the campaign and began a "correction of errors", and Hồ apologised for the serious mistakes. By September 1957, as many as 23,748 political prisoners had been released. By 1958, land had been returned to many of the people harmed.

  1213697066

• 7. The War in the South

  ›

  As early as June 1956, a Politburo meeting heard the idea of overthrowing the government of the Republic of Vietnam. In 1959 Hồ began urging the Politburo to send aid to the Việt Cộng. A "people's war" on the South was approved that January and confirmed in March. In July, North Vietnam moved into Laos with the Pathet Lao and used 30,000 men to build supply routes through Laos and Cambodia. That network became the Hồ Chí Minh trail. In December 1960 the North created the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam as a "united front" to draw in non-Communists.

  Behind the scenes, his own power was shifting. At the end of 1959 he informally chose Lê Duẩn as the next party leader. Western analysts read this as a loss of influence, since Hồ was said to prefer the more moderate Võ Nguyên Giáp. That year, worried about his age, he wrote down his will. In September 1960 he stepped down as General Secretary, though he kept real influence. Lê Duẩn, Tố Hữu, Trường Chinh and Phạm Văn Đồng often shared dinner with him.

  The year 1963 brought the "Maneli Affair", a French-led effort to create a neutral federation of the two Vietnams. The Polish commissioner Mieczysław Maneli reported Hồ's attitude. "Our real enemies are the Americans. Get rid of them, and we can cope with Diệm and Nhu afterward." Hồ told the Indian commissioner Ramchundur Goburdhun that Diệm was "in his way a patriot". He asked him to "shake hands with him for me" at their next meeting. On the 2nd of September 1963, Maneli met Diệm's brother Ngô Đình Nhu, who leaked the talks to the columnist Joseph Alsop. Alsop's column was titled "Very Ugly Stuff". On the 1st of November 1963 a coup overthrew Diệm, who was killed the next day with his brother. American Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reported that "there is no organized government worthy of the name" in Saigon. In December, the "South first" faction of Lê Duẩn won in the Politburo, and its "North first" opponents were dismissed.

  In June 1964, the Canadian diplomat J. Blair Seaborn arrived in Hanoi with an offer from President Lyndon Johnson of aid and recognition if the North stopped trying to topple the South. He also warned of "greatest devastation" from bombing. Seaborn was never allowed to meet Hồ. By March 1965 American combat troops were arriving, and Operation Rolling Thunder began bombing the North. On the 8th and the 9th of April 1965, Hồ secretly visited Beijing and met Mao Zedong. China would send support troops to maintain infrastructure, but no combat troops unless the United States invaded. The Politburo, deeply distrustful of China, was outraged, and he needed all his moral authority to win approval. Women mobilized in vast teams repaired roads and bridges, sometimes faster than the Americans thought possible.

  Peace feelers failed on one issue. Hồ insisted on an unconditional halt to the bombing, regarding it as a violation of sovereignty. The Canadian Chester Ronning's mission in March 1966 foundered on it. So did Operation Marigold, the channel through the Polish commissioner Janusz Lewandowski, which nearly produced talks in Warsaw in December 1966.

  In January 1967 General Nguyễn Chí Thanh presented the plan that became the Tet Offensive. Giáp opposed it. By July 1967, Hồ and most of the Politburo judged the war a stalemate. He seems to have agreed because he wanted to see Vietnam reunified in his lifetime. The offensive began on the 31st of January 1968 at heavy cost, but it shocked the world and ended the American command's optimistic spin. Bombing of the North and the trail was halted, and negotiators began discussions.

  He suffered a heart attack in early 1969. In July, Jean Sainteny passed him a letter from President Richard Nixon. It proposed ending the "tragic war" but threatened "measures of great consequence and force" if the Paris talks produced no concessions by the 1st of November. Hồ's reply reached Nixon on the 30th of August 1969. It welcomed talks and conceded nothing.

  1865818310

• 8. Uncle Hồ Remembered

  ›

  At 9:47 on the morning of the 2nd of September 1969, Hồ Chí Minh died of heart failure at his home in Hanoi. He was 79. Diabetes and other ailments had sidelined him that year, yet he insisted his forces keep fighting however long it took. Because the 2nd of September was Independence Day, the government delayed the announcement until the 3rd. A week of mourning followed, from the 4th to the 11th of September. About 250,000 people attended his funeral, along with 5,000 official guests and representatives from 40 countries and regions. More than 22,000 condolence letters arrived from 20 organizations and 110 countries. No new president replaced him. A collective leadership took over.

  His will asked for cremation, with ashes scattered across North, Central and South Vietnam. Instead his embalmed body lies in the President Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Ba Đình Square. Saigon, the city those tanks entered, was later renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honor.

  The man behind the monument had modest habits. As president he received foreign guests at the Presidential Palace but never lived there. He ordered a stilt house built behind it. His secretary Vũ Kỳ listed his hobbies as reading, gardening, feeding fish, many of which are still living, and visiting schools and children's homes. He wrote verse in modern Vietnamese for ordinary readers. Each year until his health failed, a short poem of his ran in the Tết edition of the newspaper Nhân Dân.

  He was a gifted linguist. He spoke French, Russian, English, Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese fluently, and reportedly conversational Esperanto. On visits to Moscow and Beijing he reportedly spoke to leaders in Russian and Mandarin without interpreters, even on secret matters. With Western journalists he often used French. His Vietnamese kept the strong accent of Nghệ An, but people could still understand him nationwide.

  The reverence has taken several forms. His image hangs in public buildings and schoolrooms. A temple to him went up in Vĩnh Long in 1970, in territory then held by the Việt Cộng. Duiker argued that this cult drew on Confucian ideas about authority. He saw Vietnamese Marxism under Hồ as a kind of "reformed Confucianism". Folk religion goes further. Some believers hold that the Jade Emperor was reincarnated as Hồ and speaks through spirit mediums. Madam Lang was the first, in the 1990s. Madam Xoan founded the Way of Uncle Hồ on the 1st of January 2001. Its home is the Peace Temple in Hải Dương province. By 2014 the movement reportedly had around 24,000 followers. The government tolerates it uneasily. It is also sensitive about his private life. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life appeared in 2000. Officials sought cuts to the Vietnamese translation and banned an issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review.

  Abroad, he became a muse. The folk singer Pete Seeger wrote "Teacher Uncle Ho", and Ewan MacColl produced "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh" in 1954. The Chilean Víctor Jara referenced him in "El derecho de vivir en paz". Time listed him among its 100 most important people of the twentieth century in 1998. In 1987 UNESCO urged member states to join in marking the centenary of his birth. Debate continues over whether he was fundamentally a nationalist or a communist. In Kolkata, the West Bengal government renamed Harrington Street as Ho Chi Minh Sarani during the Vietnam War. The United States consulate general now stands on that street.

  9092939610