(3 of 3)
In fact, Evan Hunter's apparently modest suspense tale is about quite a different sort of assassination plot. It works as well as it does because the academics he portrays are teasingly out of character in their commitment to violence, yet touched by an anger and frustration now frighteningly familiar. It would be unfair to Hunter and his readers to reveal his sleight-of-hand device. But the result is an intriguing handicapper's book, a second-guessing game of truth and its consequences.
HO by David Halberstam. 118 pages. Random House. $4.95.
While chatting about the details of his life with the late Bernard Fall in 1962, Ho Chi Minh said, "I like to hold on to my little mysteries. I'm sure you will understand." Now Ho is dead and the little mysteries are his forever.
Even larger ones are ours: Why did the U.S. become so deeply mired in Ho's country? Why is success so elusive? Those questions have tantalized David Halberstam since he returned in 1964 from 15 months in South Viet Nam as a New York Times reporter. The answer, essentially, is always the same: from John F. Kennedy to William Westmoreland to the freshest shavetail just off the jet at Bien Hoa, "They" underestimated Ho. That is to say, they failed to understand the Vietnamese, for in his own artfully complex personality, Ho was Viet Nam.
Halberstam's slender but tough book suffers from lack of biographic detail. Much of his data had to be cobbled together from existing works on Ho and Viet Nam—from Fall, Robert Shaplen, Jean Lacouture and the late Paul Mus, a French-born Yale professor who grew up in Viet Nam. Ho was awfully good at simply dropping out of sight. Too often, as a result, Halberstam has had to make mere chronology do the work of biography. Though he mercifully avoids the rah-rah, gung-Ho, Holy-Ho rhetoric of the New Left, Halberstam makes it clear that he admires his subject. The value of his book lies in the fact that it briskly enumerates Ho's strengths and U.S. weaknesses, Ho's sure manipulative grasp of Vietnamese xenophobia, his deceptive simplicity, as well as his complete dedication to the cause of an independent Viet Nam.