Who Is Ho?

Participants in a furious jungle war were finding peace a reluctant prize. Last year the "Republic" of Viet Nam (almost half the size of France), formerly part of French Indo-China, waged a fierce minor struggle for independence from France. At Fontainebleau last week, the French-Viet Nam peace conference broke wide open, seriously endangering France's already tottering colonial policy. Chiefly responsible was Viet Nam's self-styled "President" Ho Chin Minh.

Before he would join France's projected Indo-Chinese Federation, Ho demanded: 1) Viet Nam's right to manage its own foreign affairs without interference by the Federation; 2) annexation of Cochin-China, an adjoining province (almost one-third the size of Viet Nam), which wants to be a separate member of the Federation. The French, who had agreed to all other Viet Nam demands, said no. Ho walked out of the conference, and while his guerrillas continued to kill French soldiers almost daily, holed up in his flower-littered suite at Paris' swank Royal Monceau Hotel.

Who, asked troubled Frenchmen, was Ho?

The facts were few, but exotic. At Fountainebleau, Ho appeared as a saintly-looking little man who liked to present roses to lady reporters. He had started his underground political career 35 years ago at 19, when his radical father was imprisoned by an unsympathetic Viet Nam emperor. He ran off to sea, went to France at the end of World War I and under the alias of Nguyen-Ai-Quoc ( One Who Loves His Country"), became a Socialist, and later a Communist. Then he went to Moscow, where, under the alias of Song Man-tcho ("Mr. Song of Boundless Generosity") he became a Soviet citizen, and attended a training school for Communist agitators. Seven years later, he went to China and Siam to practice what he had learned.

From Hong Kong, in 1930, Ho tried to organize a Viet Nam revolt, but failed, and hid under several new aliases while the affair blew over. During World War II, he turned up in Viet Nam as Ho Chin Minh ("Mr. Ho the Bright Spirit"), turned out the Japanese puppet ruler and organized an anti-French rebellion. Once in power, he decided that Communism could wait. Says Ho: "Almost 2,000 years ago, Jesus Christ said we should love our enemies. We are still far from that ideal. I do not know when Marx's ideal will be achieved. . . . Maybe Viet Nam will be Communist in 50 years, but not now."

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