Covering North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh over the past 25 years has never been an easy journalistic assignment. Even the name is an alias. It translates as "he who enlightens," yet few Western news men have seen him, much less sat down for an interview. Nevertheless, for this week's cover story on the death of Ho and the new era that begins in North Viet Nam, our Hanoi watchers around the world were able to piece together a detailed picture of the complex Communist leader and Vietnamese nationalist.

Here in New York, the cover story was edited by Ron Kriss and written by Bob McCabe and John Shaw. They were able to draw on the reminiscences of Frank White, a former TIME Correspondent and now a Time Inc. executive. As a major in Hanoi at the end of World War II, White met Ho for a chat and a whisky three or four times a week, and gained many insights into the man's mystique. "When you interviewed him, he was always interviewing you," recalls White. "You got the impression that he had been isolated for a long time. He would ask questions about what San Francisco looked like. What were the buildings like? How many people had cars, refrigerators? He didn't seem to be interested in Communism as an international conspiracy. He talked in terms of what the country would do."

The reportage for our fourth Ho cover turned up another bit of intelligence that holds particular interest for us. Whenever Ho was in Kunming during World War II, he visited the U.S. Office of War Information. His request: TIME, the Weekly News magazine. Later from Communist sources, we heard that he was especially pleased by our first cover portrait, by Boris Chaliapin, which depicted him as a lean and hot-eyed fanatic -- quite unlike the benevolent fatherly image projected by Hanoi.

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