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The Ugly Mug. There he fell for the Red recipe. "At first it was my patriotism and not Communism that drew me to Lenin and the Third International," he explained years later on his 70th birthday. "Step by step along the path of the struggle, I came to understand that only Communism could free the oppressed peoples and workers of the world from the yoke of slavery." In Paris just after World War I, Ho hung out in the caves, palled around with a Chinese student named Chou Enlai, wrote pamphlets for the Communist International denouncing the "ugly mug of capitalism," edited a strident, anticolonial weekly called Le Paria (The Untouchable), wrote a bitter, anti-French comedy called Le Dragon de Bambou. In 1918 he rented a suit and trotted out to Versailles to badger Woodrow Wilson for the "liberation" of "Viet Nam"—the ancient name for the region that all Frenchmen divided into partes tres: Tonkin China, Annam and Cochin China. His pleas were lost in the shuffle of more immediate history, and he never got to see Wilson. But the farsighted Bolsheviks in Moscow saw promise in the skinny, ardent Annamite.
In 1924, after an intensive course in subversive techniques at Moscow's University of the Toilers of the East (during which he established the beginnings of a close friendship with Stalin), Ho struck the theme that would resound throughout his career. Addressing the Fifth Comintern Congress that summer, he took European Communists to task for failing to appreciate the potential for revolution in underdeveloped areas. "You will forgive my frankness," he said, "but I cannot avoid explaining that the speeches of my comrades from the mother countries have given me the impression that they are trying to kill a snake by stepping on its tail. For you all know that the venom and the energy of the capitalist snake is concentrated more in the colonies than in the mother countries." At that time, Mao Tse-tung—the man who claims most of the credit for "wars of national liberation"—was a budding subversive in China.
Teacher's Pet. Giving up the soft life of a Moscow student, with its "party spouses" and anticapitalist polemics, Ho set out for China under the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc (roughly, "Smith the Patriot"), as agitator and translator for Stalin's agent Mikhail Borodin. Their mission: to penetrate the Kuomintang and train Communist can bo (cadres) to infiltrate French Indo-China. At Canton's Whampoa Military Academy, Ho demonstrated his skills as a disciplinarian. Any student-agitator who failed to show sufficient diligence was promptly betrayed to the French when he infiltrated Viet Nam. Most of Ho's pupils quickly learned to do their homework, but teacher's pet was the son of an Indo-Chinese Cabinet chief, a lad named Pham Van Dong, who today serves as Ho's Premier.
Ho's academic career ended abruptly in 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Chinese Communists and drove them underground. Ho's hegira took him back and forth between Moscow and China for the next 13 years, forming new parties, resting in British or Chinese jails, organizing hunger strikes, taking a concubine who later bore him a daughter, and writing inspirational poetry when nothing more inspiring could be done.
Sample inspiration: