Ho Chi Minh

President of North Vietnam (1945-1969)

• Born: May 19, 1890
• Birthplace: Kim Lien, Vietnam, French Indochina (now Vietnam)
• Died: September 3, 1969
• Place of death: Hanoi, North Vietnam (now Vietnam)

Ho was the chief architect, founder, and leader of the Indochinese Communist Party, an organizer of the Viet Minh, and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). An ardent proponent of his country’s independence, Ho was recognized as one of the twentieth century’s greatest anticolonial revolutionaries and most influential Communist leaders.

Early Life

Ho Chi Minh (hoh chee mihn) was a native of the village of Kim Lien, in the province of Nghe An, in central Vietnam (then part of French Indochina), an area long noted for its poverty, rebellious spirit, antiforeign leaders, and anticolonial activity. He was originally named Nguyen Sinh Cung and called by several other names before adopting the name Ho Chi Minh in the early 1940’s. Ho’s father, Nguyen Sinh Sac (sometimes Nguyen Sinh Huy), was a Mandarin and man of letters like his father before him. Nguyen Sinh Sac was dismissed from his civil service post for anti-French activities and nationalist leanings. Ho’s mother, Hoang Thi Loan, was the eldest daughter of a village scholar with whom Ho’s father studied as a young man.

Ho was the youngest of three surviving children. Like both his brother, Khiem, and his sister, Thanh, Ho espoused anticolonial ideas in his youth. He was sent initially to a public school to study the Vietnamese and French languages in addition to Chinese ideograms. When Ho was nine, he, his siblings, and his mother, who had been charged with stealing French weapons for rebels, fled to Hue, the imperial city. Ho’s father had left for Saigon, where he earned a meager living by practicing Asian medicine.

Ho’s stay in Hue was short. His mother died suddenly, and the young boy (age ten) found himself back in Kim Lien. Also, at age ten, according to custom, Ho’s birth name was changed to Nguyen That Thanh (Nguyen who is destined to succeed). At age fifteen, Ho started attending Quoc Hoc Secondary School studying Quoc Ngu (the romanized form of Vietnamese) and French. The school was then considered the best in the country. While there, he was involved in some insurrectional movements that swept across central Vietnam in 1908. After four troubled and disappointing years of study, Ho headed southward to the town of Phan Tiet, where he taught French and Vietnamese at an elementary school.

After several months Ho went to Saigon, was enrolled in a vocational school, and then decided to leave Vietnam after the first Chinese Revolution broke out in October of 1911. Under the name of Ba, he took work on a French steamer. He was a seaman for more than three years, visiting ports in France, Spain, North Africa, and the United States. At the outset of World War I, Ho gave up his seafaring career and took up residence in London. In 1917, he moved yet again. When he set foot on French soil toward the end of World War I, he saw his future mapped out before him.

Life’s Work

Ho’s life was dedicated to improving conditions in his own country, working to force colonial regimes to introduce reform, and promoting revolution (ultimately worldwide revolution) against imperialism. Adopting the new name of Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the patriot) in Paris, Ho immediately took up the struggle for the political rights of the Vietnamese people, a struggle that lasted five decades. During the six years Ho spent in France (1917-1923), he became an active socialist, and then a communist. In 1919, he organized a group of Vietnamese living in France and, with others, drafted an eight-point petition addressed to the Versailles Peace Conference that demanded that the Vietnamese people be given legal equality with the French colonials; freedom of assembly, press, speech, and emigration; better educational facilities; and permanent Indochinese representation in the French parliament. He also requested a general amnesty for political detainees. There was, in the modest document, no explicit mention of independence or of self-determination.

Because the petition brought no response, except to make Ho a hero among certain Vietnamese, he took more drastic measures. In 1920, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party. He then began to denounce the evils of British and French colonialism in his new French journal, Le Paria (the outcast). The journal was the voice of the Intercolonial Union founded in 1921 to acquaint the public with the problems of the colonial people. When Ho went to Moscow at the end of 1923, his friends considered him a thoroughgoing revolutionary. He participated in revolutionary and anti-imperial organizations and took an active part in the Fifth World Congress of the Communist International. Under the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc, Ho was the first of a series of Vietnamese revolutionaries to attend Moscow University for Oriental Workers, studying political theory. Although throughout his life Ho considered theory less important than revolutionary practice, he felt at home at the university as his emotional ties with the Soviet Communists grew stronger.

In December, 1924, Ho’s first visit to Russia ended when he departed for the southern Chinese port of Canton. This area was a hotbed of agitation and a center of Vietnamese nationalist activities. There he organized the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth Association, known as the Thanh Nien. Almost all of its members had been exiled from Indochina because of anticolonial beliefs and actions against the French. Canton became the first real home of organized Indochinese nationalism.

After expulsion from China at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, Ho sought refuge in the Soviet Union. In 1928, he was off again to Brussels, Paris, and finally Siam (Thailand), where he spent two years as the Southeast Asian representative of the Communist International Organization. In February of 1930, Ho was brought back from Siam to Hong Kong to preside over the founding of the Indochinese Communist Party. Ho’s achievement was his unification of three separate Communist groups into one organization. Ho, still using the name of Nguyen Ai Quoc, summarized and published the results of his and others’ efforts by issuing a call for support of the new Communist Party among the workers, peasants, soldiers, youth, and students of Vietnam. This document also contained Ho’s first demand for the complete political independence of Indochina.

In the summer of 1930 there occurred the Nghe-Tinh Revolt, the first mass revolutionary uprising in Vietnam brought about by the peasants (something Ho had advocated earlier). It followed on the heels of a less successful rebellion in February of 1930 and originated in the provinces of Ha Tinh and Nghe An (where Ho was born). The French reacted brutally, executing without trial some seven hundred anticolonials and torturing others. Though Ho was outside the country during the summer rebellion and his role was probably nil, the French condemned him to death in absentia. In June, 1931, Ho was arrested in Hong Kong, where French officials arranged with the British to have him extradited. He was finally released, but not before he had spent one year in prison and had contracted tuberculosis.

In 1934, Ho returned to Moscow, and in 1935 he participated in the Seventh Congress of the Communist International as chief delegate for the Indochinese Communist Party. The congress sanctioned the idea of the Popular Front (an alliance of leftist organizations to combat fascism), which Ho had advocated for some time. Relations eased in 1936 between Communists in Indochina and the French because of the formation of Premier Léon Blum’s Popular Front government in France. With the fall of the Blum government in 1937, however, French repression in Indochina returned, and Ho’s era of relative quiet (1934-1938) came to an end.

In 1938, Ho returned to China, stayed with Mao Zedong for a time, and traveled throughout the land. With the German defeat of France in 1940, along with Japan’s attempt to occupy and rule Indochina, Ho returned to his homeland for the first time in thirty years in January, 1941. With the help of his lieutenants, Vo Nguyen Giap and Pham Vam Dong, Ho organized in May, 1941, the League for the Independence of Vietnam, better known as the Viet Minh .

This new organization promoted Vietnamese nationalism with renewed zeal. In June, 1941, Ho issued the clarion call for national insurrection and liberation. In an important letter to all Vietnamese, Ho pledged his modest abilities to follow them in their revolutionary efforts. Although the concrete results of the June appeal were not immediately apparent the Viet Minh had few guns the events of 1941 were the most important in Vietnamese revolutionary history. For Ho, who had celebrated his fifty-first birthday on the day of the founding of the Viet Minh, those events meant the end of thirty years of leadership of revolution from outside his own country, with the exception of some time he spent in a Chinese prison. Ho’s new organization sought help from China in 1942. When Ho crossed the border in the summer of 1942, he had already taken the name of Ho Chi Minh (Ho who enlightens). Because Chiang Kai-shek distrusted Ho, the latter was imprisoned for eighteen months. During this time, he wrote his famous prison diary as friends were arranging his release.

In 1945, Ho established his first contacts with Americans and began to collaborate with them against the Japanese who had overrun Indochina and imprisoned or executed all French officials. At the same time, Giap and his commandos, under Ho’s direction, moved against Hanoi, the Vietnamese capital. The moment Ho had been waiting for finally came following Japan’s surrender to the United States after the atomic bombings in August. On September 2, before an enormous crowd gathered in Ba Dinh square, Hanoi, Ho declared Vietnam independent and proclaimed the inauguration of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, which included the entire country. The declaration, drafted by Ho himself, opened with words intended to garner United States support. After September 2, 1945, Ho became more than merely a revolutionary; he became a statesman. Nationwide elections held on January 6, 1946, conferred the presidency on Ho. In July, 1946, a liberal constitution was adopted, modeled in part on the United States Constitution.

France, under the leadership of Charles de Gaulle, did not accept Vietnamese independence, nor did the Chinese. The Chinese were supposed to replace the Japanese and occupy Vietnam north of the sixteenth parallel. Ho persuaded the French, who were attempting to reassert their authority over Vietnam, to force the withdrawal of the Chinese; he then began negotiating with the French to secure Vietnam’s autonomy and unification. After many months, negotiations broke down when a French cruiser opened fire (November 20, 1946) on the town of Haiphong after a clash between French and Vietnamese soldiers. Almost six thousand Vietnamese were killed. On December 20, 1946, Ho declared a national war of resistance and called on his countrymen to drive out the French colonialists and save the fatherland. Ho sought refuge in northern Vietnam while the first Indochinese war was fought. Finally, in May of 1954, the French were thoroughly defeated at Dien Bien Phu and had no choice but to negotiate. The meeting between representatives of eight countries in May-July, 1954, yielded the Geneva Accords , in which it was finally concluded that Vietnam was to be divided at the seventeenth parallel into northern and southern sections. The north was to be led by Ho, the south by Bao Dai (later Ngo Dinh Diem), until elections could be held in 1956 and a unified government be established by the vote of the people.

In September, 1955, Ho, who had been both president and premier of North Vietnam, relinquished the premiership to Pham Van Dong. He continued to be recognized as the real leader of North Vietnam (officially called the Democratic Republic of Vietnam). The 1956 elections that were to guarantee the country’s reunification were postponed by the United States and by South Vietnam, which was created on a de facto basis at that time. In September, 1960, Ho was reelected president of his country, and a new constitution, adopted that year in the north, gave him unlimited power and placed greater emphasis on Communist principles.

Ho never lived to see the fulfillment of his vision a unified, autonomous, peaceful Vietnam. In 1959, there emerged in South Vietnam the Communist-oriented Viet Cong guerrilla force supported by Ho and the North Vietnamese government. They began conducting an armed revolt against the American-sponsored regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. In response, the United States sent military aid to South Vietnam. The conflict escalated to full-fledged war, which lasted until 1975, when the Vietnamese Communists unified their country as a totalitarian state. Ho had died six years before, on September 3, 1969, at the age of seventy-nine.

Significance

Ho, a shrewd calculator, a consummate actor, a patient revolutionary, and a relentless agitator, was also, above all, a successful leader. He did not hesitate to resort to any means to achieve his political objectives, but his popularity seems never to have waned. Throughout the villages of North and South Vietnam he was referred to as Uncle Ho, a name symbolic of the affection he engendered in the public mind. Behind the scenes, he ruled increasingly with an iron fist and, for reasons of state, ultimately silenced forever half a million adversaries during the infamous period of land reform in North Vietnam (1953-1956).

Ho was not the intellectual genius that some of his admirers claimed him to have been. Rather, he worked to improve his knowledge of persons and things as part of the pursuit of his ideal. Being in the company of international revolutionary theorists (in France, Russia, and China) made him keenly aware of his shortcomings. While in France (1917-1923), he suffered from his relative lack of education (because of a wretched childhood) and sought to correct this by reading the works of William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens in English, Lu Xun in Chinese, and Victor Hugo and Émile Zola in French. His favorite author became Leo Tolstoy. Ho’s ability to create and motivate groups and organizations was surpassed only by his ability to continue to influence them, as was demonstrated in 1954 when he persuaded the Viet Minh radicals to accept, for a time, the Geneva Accords. His death in 1969 ruined chances for an earlier settlement of the Vietnam War.

Ho was one of the most important leaders of the twentieth century. His continual battle against foreign control of Vietnam caused grave crises in two of the West’s most powerful countries, France and the United States. As one of the leading Communists internationally, he emphasized the role of the peasantry in the success of revolutionary struggle.

Bibliography

Duiker, William J. Ho Chi Minh. New York: Hyperion, 2000. Duiker, a respected American historian of Vietnam, provides what has been described as a definitive biography. He depicts Ho as an anticolonial nationalist and committed Marxist who nevertheless believed the United States would support his efforts to free Vietnam from French rule.

Fenn, Charles. Ho Chi Minh: A Biographical Introduction. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973. As a correspondent and friend of Ho, the author brings an important perspective to his work. This book attempts synthesis rather than completeness by culling, from previous biographies, scholarly studies, and personal knowledge, essential information on the life of Ho. It presents to the reader extensive quotations from these other sources.

Huyen, N. Khac. Vision Accomplished? The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh. New York: Macmillan, 1971. A native of Indochina, Huyen lived under Ho’s regime for seven years. The book represents a scholarly contribution to the literature on Ho. It is well documented and contains appendixes, a bibliography, and an index that are helpful to the researcher or serious student. Written from the perspective of respect for Ho, it nevertheless attempts a balanced view.

Karnow, Stanley. Vietnam: A History. New York: Viking Press, 1983. Written by a distinguished journalist who reported on Southeast Asia during his own career, this extensive volume covers the first (1946-1954) and second (1959-1975) anticolonial Indochinese wars. Three introductory chapters trace the history of Vietnamese nationalism and help the reader to understand the context of Ho’s nationalistic ideas.

Lacouture, Jean. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. Translated by Peter Wiles. New York: Random House, 1968. One of the best-known biographies of Ho, written by French journalist Lacouture two years before the leader’s death. Its style is popular rather than scholarly and focuses on the political activities of Ho and how they had been viewed up to the time of the book’s publication.

Neumann-Hoditz, Reinhold. Portrait of Ho Chi Minh: An Illustrated Biography. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. This volume presents the essential events of Ho’s life, with special attention given to his early political training in France and his visits to China and Russia. Written in an engaging style, the book contains many informative photographs as well as extensive quotations taken from Ho’s translated writings. It does not say much about Ho’s activities from 1954 through 1969.

Quinn-Judge, Sophie. Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Quinn-Judge focuses on Ho’s career before he came to power in Vietnam, from his participation in the 1919 Paris Peace Conference through his organization of the Viet Minh at the beginning of World War II.

Sainteny, Jean. Ho Chi Minh and His Vietnam. Translated by Herma Briffault. Chicago: Cowles, 1972. This work tells of Ho’s life from the standpoint of a noted French diplomat who engaged in negotiations with the Vietnamese leader and became his close personal friend. It is an easy-to-read translation of a succinctly written study.