THE LEGACY OF HO CHI MINH
You know, I am an old man, a very old man. An old man likes to have a little air of mystery about himself. I like to hold on to my little mysteries. --HoChiMinh, 1962
Ho CHI MINH held on to his little mysteries very skillfully indeed, and to much larger ones as well. The face that he presented to the world was that of an avuncular, slightly shabby poet, yet he was a dedicated, often ruthless Communist for half a century. He impressed most visitors with his gentleness, but no man can hold together a Communist Party for nearly 40 years, as he did, without an iron hand. He seemed fragile as a dried leaf, but he endured privation, prison and grueling pressures, and still survived for nearly eight decades.
When North Viet Nam's President died of a heart attack in Hanoi last week at the age of 79, he left an impressive legacy of accomplishment. He had restored a sense of nationhood to Viet Nam. He had come to represent a form of "national Communism" that left him out of both the Chinese and the Soviet orbits, but prompted both powers to court him. With the limited resources of a tiny impoverished Asian nation--and with vast help from Peking and Moscow--he had withstood the enormous firepower of the mightiest industrial nation on earth. In so doing, he had forced one U.S. President out of office and tarnished the bright memory of another. He had reached deep into American society through a war that affects the disaffected young, the restless blacks, the threatened guardians of old values--the country's very image of itself.
Ho Chi Minh's life was dedicated to the creation of a unified Viet Nam, free from foreign control, and the 19 million people of his tortured land suffered mightily from his total devotion to that vision. Even so, they affectionately knew him as "Bac Ho" (Uncle Ho). So did many in the South. No national leader alive today has stood so stubbornly for so long before the enemy's guns. His death will have inevitable and far-reaching repercussions in North Viet Nam, in Asia and beyond.
Change will not come tomorrow, for Ho and other leaders had tried to lay the groundwork for a tranquil succession. Over the past several years, Ho had gradually moved away from the day-to-day exercise of power, turning over routine responsibilities to a triumvirate consisting of Premier Pham Van Dong, Party First Secretary Le Duan and high-ranking Politburo Member Truong Chinh, all in their early 60s (see box, page 28). For the immediate future, Ho's title will probably be taken by Vice President Ton Due Thang, an 81-year-old nonentity. Actual power will probably be wielded by the triumvirate--plus Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap, 57.*
Eventually, a single leader is likely to emerge. As U.S. Analyst Douglas Pike puts it: "They'll agree not to get grabby. But I have no faith in collective leadership. They will all claim the mantle of Ho Chi Minh, and they will start to get grabby."
Hanoi's leadership has been remarkably stable. No other Communist Party in the world has endured so long without a major purge. When it was formed in 1945, the Party's Politburo had eleven full members. Today nine of the eleven remain in power; the missing members are Ho and Nguyen Chi Thanh, the North's second-ranking military man, who died in 1967. There were always divisions and differences, but Ho helped keep them submerged by the force of his personality and, in his declining years, by his mere presence. "He was the hoop that held the staves of the barrel in round," says Pike. "Now that hoop is gone." As a result, fissures are likely to appear more frequently. The aim will remain the same--unifying Viet Nam under Hanoi's control--but the five contenders are likely to differ on the means. Pike believes, for example, that they disagree on the major policy issue confronting Hanoi--how best to win the war in the South. Giap, Dong and Le Duan support the current policy: intensive guerrilla activity interspersed with conventional, regular-force battles or "high points," all aimed at inflicting a decisive victory in the tradition of Dienbienphu. Truong Chinh, clearly influenced by the theories of Mao Tse-tung, favors dropping to a lower level of warfare. He argues that such protracted conflict would eventually exhaust the foe.
Ho himself probably advocated the regular-force theory, and some analysts believe that his firmness on this point was largely responsible for freezing the Paris negotiations. According to this theory, as long as Ho was on the scene --healthy or ill--it was impossible for other leaders to make a move toward breaking the deadlock. There has been a lack of progress, in fact, ever since Chief North Vietnamese Strategist Le Due Tho abruptly left Paris last July. Several Washington officials now believe that he may have been called home because Ho had suddenly begun to fail. These officials also believe it was more than coincidental that last week, only hours before Hanoi announced Ho's approaching death, North Vietnamese Negotiator Xuan Thuy hinted at a possible speedup of negotiations should the U.S. accept the principle of total withdrawal from South Viet Nam.
Undisguised Anxiety
Little real movement is expected in Paris, however, until Tho or another senior official returns with new instructions from Hanoi. Even then, it may be a while before the interim leaders can agree on the wording of those instructions. Nor is a quick shift expected on the battlefields of the South, where last week Communist forces staged their heaviest attacks in almost a month. The Viet Cong and North Viet Nam, however, announced that there would be a three-day ceasefire, perhaps this week, to mark Ho's death. There were indications that the allied forces would tacitly follow suit.
While any struggle for power in Hanoi was being kept wholly under wraps, there was no disguising anxieties in Peking and Moscow. Chinese Communist Premier Chou Enlai, accompanied by a brace of high-ranking aides, arrived in Hanoi less than 48 hours after the announcement of Ho's death and almost immediately went into lengthy conferences with the North Vietnamese Politburo. Next day he flew back to Peking, probably to avoid a confrontation with incoming Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin. The semicomic scramble to avoid a meeting brought into the spotlight once more the Sino-Soviet rivalry for favor in North Viet Nam.
In this struggle, Ho's role was all-important. He succeeded not only in avoiding a rupture in relations with either nation but also in keeping aid flowing in. "He was the man who kept Moscow and Peking in balance," said Jean
Lacouture, a French biographer of Ho, "with an inevitable tendency for the Soviets. His death is a loss to Moscow." Privately, Soviet sources conceded as much. They noted that Ho's great prestige had enabled him to tread a neutral course between Peking and Moscow, and that his successors may find it more difficult to do so.
Altering the Equations
There is little question that a basic power equation was unbalanced by Ho's death. That was altogether fitting, for during his lifetime he had altered many an equation.
Ho was born in 1890 in Nghe An province, in what is today North Viet Nam. According to a local maxim, "a man born in Nghe An province will oppose anything," and both his parents were cast in that rebellious mold. His father lost his post as a magistrate for associating with the anti-French movement; his mother, who died when Ho was ten, was charged with stealing weapons from French barracks for the rebels. At the time, nationalism was beginning to be a potent force in Southeast Asia, spurred by the generally oppressive colonial rule of the French, British and Dutch. Ironically, nationalism was less a local product than a European import. As Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in Asian Drama: "It was with the intellectual weapons forged in Europe, where liberalism had become the middle-class ideology, that the liberation movements rose in South Asia and fought their way to a vision, and later the realization, of full independence."
The first generation of Asian nationalists, of which Ho was a charter member, seized on these borrowed ideas. Ho's emphasis on nationalism made him stand out in the memories of his fellow Communists. Ruth Fischer, a leading German party member who knew Ho in the 1920s, wrote: "It was Ho's nationalism which impressed us European Communists, born and bred in a rather gray kind of abstract internationalism." To classic nationalistic sentiments, Asians added an indigenous ingredient --barely contained outrage at the fact that the European colonizers almost inevitably humiliated the peoples they sought to rule. "Natives" were not allowed in European parks or clubs; they were either treated like children or abused like slaves. Before Ho was ten, a Hanoi biography says, his countrymen were press-ganged into road-building crews while Francophile mandarins "sipped champagne in the evening and milk in the morning." Ho once noted that until he arrived in France in his 20s, he had never been addressed as "Mr."
Imbued with the nationalist ideals of his father, Ho finished his schooling, taught briefly in the South and finally, about 1914, shipped out to Europe. For several years, he held a series of odd jobs, including a spell as a pastry cook under the famed French Chef Escoffier at London's Carlton Hotel. In Paris, Ho worked as a gardener and photo retoucher. In 1917, so one account goes, he worked his way across the Atlantic as a merchant seaman, visiting New York, Boston and perhaps San Francisco. One source says that Ho worked briefly as a waiter in a Harlem restaurant. Back in Paris, he resumed contacts with other nationalist-minded Asians, and found himself increasingly attracted by the rosy ideals of international Socialism. In 1919, Ho rented a striped suit and derby and sought out Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles Peace Conference. Ho hoped to interest the peacemakers in his dreams of autonomy for Viet Nam, but his efforts were ignored. In 1922, after discovering that French Socialists were similarly indifferent to the problems of the colonies, he joined the newly founded French Communist Party. His path was set.
Over the next decade, Ho the Asian nationalist became Ho the Westernized Asian Communist. He absorbed the teachings of Marx and Lenin during two years of study at Moscow's Toilers of the East University, wrote a host of articles on colonial problems for Communist-front magazines. In 1925, he was assigned by the Comintern to go to Canton as an adviser to Soviet Agent Mikhail Borodin, then an adviser to the Chinese Nationalists.
The Foundation of Nationalism
In Canton, he began preparing for his eventual return to Viet Nam. Nationalism, Ho saw, was the foundation on which an independent Viet Nam could be built. To this end, he began organizing young Vietnamese nationalists exiled in China, slowly building the organization that was to become his apparatus of power. In the process, he proved that he could be utterly cruel.
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.
Very Small Share
Another American, former Marine Lieutenant Charles Fenn (now a novelist writing in Ireland), had helped Ho set up the intelligence operation and occasionally corresponded with him. In one letter, previously unpublished, Ho wrote to Fenn: "The war is won. But we small and subject countries have no share, or very very small share, in the victory of freedom and democracy. Probably if we want to get a sufficient share, we have still to fight." He was right, of course. Ho and his Viet Minh colleagues approached the French as the Pacific war was ending and asked for a measure of autonomy and at least a pledge of eventual independence for Viet Nam. France dithered. In August 1945, the Viet Minh launched their revolution, and on Sept. 2, 1945, Ho proclaimed the Vietnamese republic. Its declaration of independence, modeled on that of the U.S., included a preamble beginning "All men are created equal."
The republic was baptized in blood. Initially, Ho and French civilian leaders in Hanoi sought to work out a compromise. Their efforts were undermined by colonialists in Paris, and for the next nine years the revolution ground on. In the spring of 1954, after a series of disasters on the battlefield and war exhaustion back home, the French were forced to leave Viet Nam. But Ho failed to secure at the conference table what his troops had won in combat. Under severe pressure from the Soviet Union, he was forced to accept control of only half of Viet Nam. In the South, a pro-Western government was set up--with heavy American assistance.
Executing the Exploiters
Ho's spoils seemed paltry at best. The French had concentrated their agricultural production in the South; crops in the North were insufficient to feed its population. Industry, indeed, had been established in the North--but the plant was minuscule: a cement factory, a brewery, a few railway-repair shops and an assortment of small machine and textile producers. Ho's major asset was coal, and its continuing abundance has provided North Viet Nam with badly needed foreign exchange. Clearly, intensive efforts were needed in the agricultural sector. Ho's first major program, accordingly, was agrarian reform, and his first mass target was the "exploiting landlords." There were, in fact, few landlords of any size. Nevertheless, the order rumbled down from Hanoi: find the exploiters and execute them. Anywhere from 50,000 to 200,000 Vietnamese were executed--mostly village leaders who were replaced by heretofore landless peasants. As Honey points out: "By forcing the villagers to participate in the deaths of people they knew to be guiltless, Ho involved them in collective guilt. By giving authority to villagers who never expected it, he secured their cooperation."
It was a clever gambit, characteristic of Ho, and it worked for a time. But in 1956, when the government tried to force every farmer into a collective, a peasant revolt erupted in his native Nghe An province. Though the policy was almost certainly Ho's, Truong Chinh was made the scapegoat. He lost his post as party leader. Giap denounced him for having "executed too many people" and having "resorted to terror." The agrarian purge was not the only instance of the regime's bloody-mindedness. Immediately after independence was declared in 1945, Ho's officials, bent on eliminating all real or potential opposition, wiped out thousands of non-Communist nationalists, members of the middle class, and members of religious sects.
In 1960, Ho re-embarked upon collectivization, this time calling the units "cooperatives." Today 93% of North Vietnamese peasants are enrolled in them. Productivity has not been helped. Last year North Viet Nam was forced to import 750,000 tons of wheat from Russia to make up for rice shortages.
In 1954, just before partition, the shortfall was 250,000 tons of rice, and this year's may be four times as much. Ho moved almost as drastically in the industrial sector, only to see most of the results of his nation's efforts in capital investment wiped out by U.S. bombs. Consumer goods are in short supply, and quality has slipped. A thirsty Northerner, for instance, often must queue for two hours simply to quaff a glass of weak beer. Each adult is allowed a scant four yards of cloth annually. At an angry meeting of the United Women's Organization in Hanoi last spring, representatives criticized pointed or padded brassieres because it took too much time and, more important, too much fabric, to make them. The nation is barely self-sufficient in simple tools and basic agricultural machinery, and it is completely dependent on its allies for major industrial needs. North Viet Nam today is not a going economic concern.
Compounding the economic problem is the fact that morale has fallen off sharply since the halt in American bombing. As long as U.S. warplanes filled the skies over the North, workers and peasants were inspired to grim extra effort. Now, according to non-Communist foreign visitors recently in Hanoi, many seem to have relaxed their drive. Last June the newspaper Hanoi Moi reported that of 538 specific construction-industry quotas only 328 had been achieved or surpassed. Other papers maintain a steady barrage of complaint against pilferage, slackness and absenteeism, and at the beginning of 1969 the government found itself forced to open a massive campaign against factory corruption. Further complicating the economic dilemma, an estimated 500,000 workers and farmers have been drafted into the army since 1965, cutting heavily into potential productivity.
Cultural Repression
Ho's legacy, however impressive in many respects, plainly has its shortcomings. North Viet Nam is a much more egalitarian society today than it was when the "republic" was proclaimed 24 years ago, but politically as well as economically, progress has been scant. Writers and artists are limited by political requirements; a brief attempt at liberalization in the late '50s, patterned after Mao's short-lived campaign to "let 100 flowers bloom," uncovered so much resentment that repression was reinstituted almost immediately. Ho, however, was never blamed for repression: skillfully, he divorced himself in the public mind from that harsh entity known as government. As British Journalist James Cameron put it, the people seemed to say: "This or that is a damn nuisance, the government is pushing us around again. But Uncle Ho says it is all right, so we suppose it must be."
That time is now past, and there is no doubt that its passing will adversely affect Communist morale. Ho was an impressive figure--the only truly national leader that Viet Nam has produced in modern times--and he will be missed.' In Hanoi, faces were somber and black bands of mourning appeared on thousands of sleeves. A crowd formed before Ba Dinh Congress Hall, where his body lies in state. The clandestine Viet Cong Radio, echoing Hanoi broadcasts, reported that the new wave of attacks in the South last week had been launched "to change sorrow into a revolutionary act after receiving the news of Chairman Ho's death."
In Saigon, the reaction was ambivalent. There was "nothing important" in Ho's death, said President Nguyen Van Thieu. "What is important is whether the North Vietnamese will end their aggressive policies or will end the war." Communist defectors felt that Ho's death would cause deep morale problems among the Viet Cong, who admired Ho hugely. One defector noted that the guerrillas have long dreamed of seeing Ho riding triumphantly into Saigon, which then would be renamed Ho Chi Minh City. Nobody expects the V.C. to lay down their weapons because that dream has dissolved, but their righting spirit could be affected.
That would be a significant development indeed, for one of the remarkable things about the Communsi forces in Viet Nam--whether guerrillas or regulars from the North--has been their spirit. The young men sent to the South, as U.S. fighting men have painfully discovered, made excellent soldiers. Tough and well-disciplined, they stood their ground under massive American firepower, then rose to charge. And the battlefield was only one test: the struggle southward along the tangle of jungle paths called the Ho Chi Minh Trail often lasted four to six months, during which many perished of disease, malnutrition and exhaustion. If a trooper survived that trek, he had proved himself strong indeed--and there seems little question that the spirit imparted by Uncle Ho deserved a share of the credit. Ho's successors may be able to keep that spirit alive for a time, but not forever. It remains to be seen whether, once the memory of Ho fades, the soldier from the North will prove as inadequately motivated as the one from the South. Certainly, the possibility is of concern to Uncle's heirs.
What most interests U.S. officials is how Ho's successors will prosecute the war. "Premise No. 1," says a member of the Administration in Washington, "is that nobody knows anything about what will happen now--and if they say they do, they are lying." There is little doubt that Ho's departure will have a profound effect. Accordingly, the sentiment among many responsible officials in Washington is to "let the dust settle," in Dean Acheson's unforgettable words on China in 1949, rather than to seize the initiative. There are, however, other alternatives. At the extremes, the U.S. could either step up the war and resume the bombing of the North in an attempt to stampede the new leadership--or pull out completely, trusting in the South Vietnamese to cope with a Ho-less foe. No one in the Government seriously advocates either course.
Inaction, however, seems unwise to many experts outside the Administration. In Saigon, Professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, an adviser to former President Johnson, said that Ho's death had provided a "timely moment" for the U.S. and South Viet Nam to propose negotiations on a ceasefire. Brzezinski argued that the death of a Communist leader creates a period of "intense political conflict" during which there is an opportunity to focus attention of the successors on "initiatives from abroad." At the very least, he said, "it is always possible that some faction will argue that a positive response ought to be made." In Paris, Professor Philippe Devillers, a longtime specialist on Viet Nam, warned that the Paris negotiations would not progress "until the U.S. has accepted the principle of the total withdrawal of troops." Once this word is given, Devillers reasoned, "you unjam the negotiations and everything can be negotiated." He added, however, that the U.S. should act soon: "Now is the crucial moment. If they [the Americans] make no gesture within the next 15 days, the conclusion which will be drawn at Hanoi is that decidedly the only course is to fight, that they can only continue the war to the bitter end."
Please Acknowledge
In private Paris talks with their North Vietnamese counterparts, U.S. officials have said flatly for weeks that they want to withdraw all American troops from Viet Nam as soon as possible. In return, the U.S. has asked only that Hanoi acknowledge this declaration of intent and get the negotiations moving--so far without any result.
The fact is that the North Vietnamese were reluctant either to suggest or to respond to new initiatives while Ho lay dying. As Historian Lacouture pointed out last week, the key men in Hanoi today are "the executors of Ho Chi Minh's political testament, which really is an appeal to resist to the end." If they are faithful lieutenants, they will not be quick to abandon his policies--or his dreams.
Once, Ho told a French acquaintance: "I am a professional revolutionary. I am always on strict orders. My itinerary is always carefully prescribed--and you can't deviate from the route, can you?" Ho never did. His successors are likely to follow the route as un-deviatingly as he did--for a while. But his very absence is bound to change the political map so completely that the men who follow him will be compelled to seek new, still unpredictable routes. The result will not necessarily bring comfort to the U.S., but North Viet Nam without Ho will be a different force in the world.
* There is something like a generation gap between the new leaders of the North and those below the 17th parallel. South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu is 46, Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky turns 39 this week and Prime Minister Tran Thien Khiem is 44. Advanced age is no handicap in Viet Nam,, however; it is considered a badge of merit.
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