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British Orientalist P. J. Honey relates how in 1925 Ho betrayed a rival nationalist leader, who was seized by the French and executed in Hanoi. Answering "sentimentalists" who criticized his treachery, Ho offered three justifications for his act: 1) a dangerous rival had been removed; 2) his execution, occurring within Viet Nam, had helped create a revolutionary climate; and 3) the reward that Ho had collected for tipping off the French helped finance his revolutionary organization.
There were setbacks in China: Ho was forced to flee to Moscow in 1927, after the Chinese Nationalists broke with their Soviet advisers and began massacring Communists. A year later, disguised as a shaven-headed Buddhist monk, Ho turned up in the Thai Northeast to organize support among Vietnamese, then traveled to Hong Kong on Moscow's orders to end a quarrel among other Vietnamese Communists. Ho succeeded: the party that he founded there in 1930 has survived—with two changes of name—down to the present. He was jailed briefly by the British, then fled to Shanghai and on to Moscow. Four years later, he was back in China, a temporary ally of the Chinese Nationalists in the battle against Japan. Early in 1941, Ho returned to Viet Nam, then occupied by the Japanese, for the first time in 30 years. He was accompanied by Dong and a young ex-teacher named Vo Nguyen Giap, now the North's military leader. A few months later, Ho founded an independence league called the Viet Minh, and established a base area conveniently near the Chinese border. Ostensibly, the front was intended to lead the anti-Japanese resistance; in fact, it was a sword at the throats of the French.
There were few dramatic successes for the Viet Minh during the war years, and Ho, on a journey back into China, was jailed by a Nationalist warlord. He spent a year in prison, finally won his freedom and promptly began seeking support from American elements then in South China. He got in touch with an extraordinary number of U.S. officers, skillfully promoting his cause. His growing reputation led the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) to make contact with Ho in 1945 in the jungles along the China-Viet Nam border. Under the code name "Lucius," Ho provided the OSS with intelligence about Japanese forces and, a generation before U.S. air attacks on North Viet Nam, his guerrillas rescued 17 downed American flyers. An OSS medic probably saved Ho's life by treating his tropical fevers with sulfa drugs.
His cordial contacts with Americans encouraged Ho to hope for U.S. support for his Viet Minh. Former TIME Correspondent Frank White, now a Time Inc. executive, recalls that early in 1946, when he was a U.S. Army major, he was invited by Ho to an official dinner in Hanoi. The guests included the top French, Chinese and British commanders and officials. White, the most junior officer and the only American, was seated next to Ho. "Mr. President," White whispered to Ho, "I think there is some resentment over the seating arrangements." "Yes," replied Ho, "I can see that. But whom else could I talk to?" Plainly, Ho still thought of Americans as people he could talk to.
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