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Apprenticeship served, Ho commenced his indefatigable career as "traveling salesman of revolution." In 1925 he was in Canton, setting up the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth. Three years later, wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk, he turned up in Bangkok, organizing cells in the pagodas. Everywhere he went, he left behind a network of indoctrination schools and newspapers.
Every prophet-leader has his period of withdrawal and retreat. Ho's came when he got out of a Hong Kong prison with an aggravated case of TB. He spent the next four years (1934-38) in Russia, savoring recuperation as a "scholar recluse." In 1941, he slipped back into his homeland. For him, the return marked a kind of reincarnation, and after setting up the League for Vietnamese Independence (nicknamed the Viet Minh), he renamed himself Ho Chi Minh ("Ho who enlightens").
His drive for enlightenment was momentarily interrupted when he incautiously crossed back into China and was promptly clapped into jail by the local warlord. Often chained and sometimes yoked, he languished there for 15 months until his colleagues wangled his release. He seized the chance to write 100 poems in classical Chinese, including one verse that compared man to a kernel of rice polished white and hard by the pestle.
Favorable Moment. How much has Ho been an international Communist revolutionary? How much has he been a patriot using the revolution as a handy tool? Obviously he has been both. Lacouture examines both sides of the case and settles for calling him an "ingenious empiricist," a "highly unusual practitioner of Marxism," a master strategist of the "favorable moment." But there is not much doubt that the autonomy of Viet Nam has been the one uncompromising goal of Ho's long, tenacious career.
Lacouture portrays Ho in the years after his release as a tough moderate. World War IFs end had brought 200,000 Nationalist Chinese troops into Indo-China as an occupation force. Ho, "resisting the temptation to play the romantic revolutionary," in Lacouture's words, cagily started negotiating with the French to lever the Chinese out.
"It is better to sniff the French dung for a while than eat China's all our lives," he is said to have remarked at the time. But even before Dienbienphu, Ho had spotted "American imperialism," in Lenin's classically Communist thinking, as the "main adversary."
Actor as Director. It is stunning to think that a man who had his first direct encounter with U.S. power in an anteroom at the Versailles peace conference is now, 50 years later, fighting a mighty U.S. army to a stalemate in Viet Nam. Just what gave him his enduring tenacity, this book cannot completely explain. To his followers, he is "Uncle Ho" when he writes burbling public letters to children: "You are rejoicing, and your Uncle Ho rejoices with you. Guess why? First, because I love you . . . '" To his political enemies, many of them dead, thanks to his ruthless purges, he has been a southern Maoist whose authority "issued from the muzzle of a rifle." Lacouture's final summation, which is something of a copout: in political role playing, an actor finally becomes the sum of all his favorite parts.