Booknotes

Professor WILLIAM DUIKER, AUTHOR, "HO CHI MINH: A LIFE": Ho Chi Minh, of course, to most Americans was the leader of the Vietnamese revolutionary movement, a movement, of course, that caused us enormous difficulty for 15, 20 years. I think most Americans see him that way. I think to the rest of the world, he's also--for many people living in Asia, Africa, Latin America, he's a symbol of the national liberation movement. And, of course, within the--what used to be known as the Communist world, he was one of the international figures of that movement, along with Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

Prof. DUIKER: He was both. He started out, certainly, with strong patriotic leanings, but in the course of his early maturity, he became convinced that capitalism was a system that was very oppressive to--not only to peoples like the Vietnamese, but to the working class around the world. And he became--while in France, he became a convinced Marxist and stayed that till the end of his days.

Prof. DUIKER: 1969.

Prof. DUIKER: Seventy-nine years old.

Prof. DUIKER: I think he died probably, like many people, of a combination of things. But, bas--basically, a form of congestive heart failure.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes, I have.

Prof. DUIKER: In fact, the--the origin of it has to go back to Ho Chi Minh's testament, which he drafted over a period of years in the last few years of his life. And he indicated in his testament that he wanted to be cremated, and he wanted to have his ashes distributed both north, center and south, so that the people of all Vietnam would have a chance to venerate him.

But after his death, the Vietnamese leadership decided that they needed some physical symbol, and they undertook a fairly comprehensive study of the kind of symbol they wanted. They looked at Lenin's mausoleum, they looked at the Lincoln Memorial and a number of other memorial buildings around the world, and they settled on this one, which I would have to say many people, including myself, feel is singularly inappropriate for his memory because it's very heavy and Leninesque. It's very moving, I would say, when you go through it. Did you go through the...

Prof. DUIKER: And you--and you see his--his remains there. But it--it doesn't seem to fit his personality, and I think a lot of people have been a little disappointed in that.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes, mm-hmm.

Prof. DUIKER: Ba--Ba Dinh Square, correct.

Prof. DUIKER: I wonder if the clean-up is meant as a--more or less, a kind of political statement, or do you think it's just generally cleaning up...

Prof. DUIKER: You mean to the Vietnamese?

Prof. DUIKER: Oh, to us?

Prof. DUIKER: It would obviously be a controversial statement. There are many Americans and certainly many Vietnamese emigres living in the United States who see Ho Chi Minh as a symbol of oppression and brutality. And I think if he does go there, and it's--it's televised and--and shown back in the United States, it will arouse a good deal of debate. From his standpoint--I certainly couldn't try to anticipate how he feels about it--he may feel this is sort of symbolic statement embracing the idea of a reconciliation of the two peoples.

Prof. DUIKER: It could be a divisive issue, but my experience in traveling there on many occasions is that the--certainly the vast majority of people living in the north still venerate him. His reputation is a lot more controversial in the south, where some people feel that he's a representative of a--of a repressive system. Interestingly enough, for many young Vietnamese, he has no more particular meaning than, say, Abraham Lincoln to the average American. He's some old guy, you know, that they look back on and say, `This is one of the founders of our country.' But many Vietnamese I talk to who--who are, of course, much too young to remember the war will say, `We--we don't really remember the war. We're ready to get on with our lives.'

Prof. DUIKER: Oh, the one with the top hat.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes. I--some of these pictures are hard to--to locate precisely because there are pictures that were in the French archives, and they're not really identified. But in the course of--of analyzing some of his activities in Paris, this was a picture that, I believe, was taken by the French security services simply to be able to identify him. And as you can see there, he's very dapper in a top hat and so forth. And it's an interesting picture in some ways because it's so out of character for the image that he projected in the last years of his life, the simple Uncle Ho who--who wore a kind of bush jacket and that sort of thing. So...

Prof. DUIKER: He went to Paris originally in the years before World War II, probably to contact some friends of his father's who were engaged in the--what we might call the Vietnamese independence movement. And he was already at that time very much dedicated to doing whatever he could to liberate his country, and I think he hoped to link up with these people and perhaps get in--get involved in the national liberation struggle.

Later on, he--he left France before the war and then came back at the end of World War I and immediately came to the attention of the entire nation of France because he submitted the famous petition to the victorious allies meeting in Versailles, at the Versailles Peace Conference, in which he in effect demanded that Woodrow Wilson live up to the promise of the 14 points involving self-determination of peoples. And that brought him to the attention of the entire country, and, of course, word eventually seeped back to Vietnam.

Prof. DUIKER: I see it. Yes, that was probably taken in the Soviet Union, but, there again, it's not quite clear exactly when. Of course, very clean-shaven at that time. Two of the things that show up there that are interesting--actually three: One, I think you can tell in this picture how singular are his eyes. It's the thing that so many of his acquaintances would say back in those days; that he was a very unprepossessing young man, very unassuming, modest in demoner--in demeanor. Of course, he didn't dress in a--in--certainly in any imposing way. But the eyes were the type of eyes that would penetrate into your soul.

Second thing I notice here is that he's wearing a tie, and he claimed in his later years that he'd never worn a necktie in his life. So this is one of the many instances where he--he, in effect, used his image as that kindly old Uncle Ho to sort of make a point, which, of course, his life will often show is not the case.

Th--the third point, interestingly, ar--there is a shape of his ear. The French security services for many, many years were trying to identify Ho Chi Minh, and--because he was living and working under an assumed name when he joined the French Communist Party, and they were very concerned to find out where he came from and what his background was. And they--they suspected that he was a young man who had been evicted from high school back in 1908--this was before his foreign travels--who had gotten involved in an anti-French demonstration, and they'd evicted him from school, and he disappeared from view and then eventually went to France. And what they determined was that the information they'd had on him, that he had a certain type of deformity in his ear, and they--from pictures like this, they were able to say, indeed, that's the same young man.

Prof. DUIKER: That's correct. There's some debate over when he was born, but based on what I've been able to determine and his movements, he was probably born in 1890. So he--he would have been about 34 at that time.

Prof. DUIKER: Physically, you mean?

Prof. DUIKER: The total population perhaps at that time may have been about 15 million--14 million, 15 million. In terms of the size of the country, at that time it wasn't even a country. It was divided up into three separate sections by the French. Two sections were technically under the authority of the Vietnamese imperial court, although under French protection. And the southern part of the country was actually a French colony. So there literally was no Vietnam at that time.

Prof. DUIKER: How did they manage to take it over? It was part of the--it was part of that thrust outward of European capitalist countries in the 19th century, when they were looking for cheap raw materials and markets. And the French had been involved in Indo-China for 200 years, primarily Christian missionary work, so when the British began to penetrate into Burma to the west--and, of course, there was a great interest in the China market at that time--the French felt, in a competitive manner, that they needed to build their own colony in the area. And they looked upon Vietnam and neighboring Laos and then Cambodia as their best opportunity.

Prof. DUIKER: He does, doesn't he? He looks very serious and somber and almo--loo--looks like a different hairdo. He--he had gone to--to Moscow in 1923 at--at the invitation of the Soviet leadership, and they--they wanted him to--to perform in Moscow, basically, as a kind of token Asian. They're not treating him entirely seriously, but just having him there as a kind of symbol of the fact that the international Communist movement had its objective to help liberate the colonial peoples.

And he stayed there in training and working at the Communist international headquarters for a while. And then he became very impatient, and he said, `I need to go back and help organize my people and build a Communist Party in--in Indo-China,' as the French called their territory there. And he had to--he literally had to plead for permission to go back, not to Vietnam, where he would have, of course, been--at that time he would have been under arrest. So he went back to South China and created the first revolutionary movement out of the emigre community living there. So that's one of the pictures that--that was probably taken around that time.

Prof. DUIKER: Interesting question. I--it's not certain that he was ever married in the Western sense; in other words, th--th--what we think of, of course, as the wedding ceremony. There's adequate evidence that he had serious liaisons on a number of occasions and that he had at least a Chinese marriage to a young Chinese woman while he was in Guangzhou, Canton, as we used to know it. And he establish a relationship with a young woman there and lived with her for about two years. And then when he was forced to leave the area, after Chiang Kai-Shek began to crack down on the Communists, he and his then-Chinese wife lost track of each other.

Prof. DUIKER: That is a young man--a young woman we know as Winte Min Kai, who's probably the most famous female revolutionary in Vietnam. She was a--a young woman who joined the party in the very late--let's say around 1930 and was sent to Hong Kong because he had his headquarters there very briefly, just at the time the Communist Party was first created. And based on internal documentary evidence, letters that were written to Moscow and that sort of thing, it appears that the two developed a--a--I say sexual relationship, certainly an intimate relationship. And there are scattered letters that indicate that, at that time, he actually requested permission from Moscow to get married. He didn't formally identify who the wife was, but it's quite clear that this is the young woman.

And either they were formally married, or at least th--they were, you know, at the point where they were about to be married, and then both of them were arrested and were separated for several years. The irony of all of this is that when they next meet each other again, it was in Moscow at a major meeting of international Communist parties, and at that time, she is listed as coming to Moscow as his wife. And yet after she arrives there, she becomes engaged to and marries one of Ho Chi Minh's chief lieutenants.

Prof. DUIKER: She went back to Vietnam with her new husband, who was also, of course, a leading figure in the movement. They were both arrested in the late 1930s, and both were executed. So she died in 1940. And it's--it's, frankly, one of the great mysteries of the life of Ho Chi Minh--is a puzzle, in other words, what--what--was there a relationship, and how did--how did the relationship come to an end?

Prof. DUIKER: Mm-hmm. I can go, I guess, in two or three different directions on this. I first became interested in the book before the end of the war, and I think at that time, insofar as I thought of it in marketable terms, I thought Ho Chi Minh would be a fascinating subject because he was the public image of our adversary. I found out after the war was over that, for many years, Americans lost interest in Vietnam. Obviously, it was a humiliation for us, and there really wasn't much of a market for the subject, and I dropped it for that reason and some others.

And then I came back to it in the last decade or so because more and more information was coming out about him, particularly from Russia and from China and from Vietnam itself. And I have to say, honestly, I wrote it out of a strong impulse in myself that I wanted to understand this man, and the fact that it came out as a book is almost secondary. And I was delighted that Hyperion was interested in it. I--I think, based on my conversations with the people there, that--that I think they hope that it will sell, but I think they felt also that it was a topic that needed discussing. And I think most of my friends in the Vietnam field would agree, we neally--we really need to understand Ho Chi Minh to understand the Vietnam War.

Prof. DUIKER: Well, if--any author, I guess, would like to feel that he's answered every question, and I do feel that I have--I've certainly penetrated some of the mysteries around his life. I think I picked out his movements and pinned them down. I personally feel that I have a fairly good idea of what made him tick. If you work with someone long enough, you know, you feel like you've penetrated into that person's skin, and--and I feel I understand him.

But I do see him as a very complex individual. He's a man of enormous simplicity, but enormous complexity. He's a man who is very affable, very friendly, very unassuming. He was very easy to like. Almost everyone who met him enjoyed him and--and found themselves drawn to his personality. And yet there was this fierce, steely determination inside him that was driving this man. And in those cases where--where he found--you know, where he found it necessary either to utilize his image or to eliminate his rivals, he was perfectly capable of doing that. So I--I think that's the--that's the hard thing to penetrate, is--is just how these various factors in his personality tied in together and how he--perhaps how he saw himself.

Prof. DUIKER: Mm-hmm. He was in prison there in the--the summer of 1931. He was captured by the British police as part of a general round-up of Communist operatives all over East and Southeast Asia. And they did not have anything concrete against him, except a scattering of materials in his office that--that suggested that he was engaged in revolutionary activities. The problem was--for the authorities was that his activities had nothing to do with colony of Hong Kong; they had to do with Indo-China.

So what they--the British had to do was decide whether to extradite him and send him back to Indo-China for the French to try and convict for treasonous activities, and it became a--a very serious debate within the government in Hong Kong and in London over whether that was the proper thing to do. And as it finally turned out, various groups in Great Britain were able to persade--persuade the government that he should be released because there was nothing concrete to charge him with, and he should be allowed to go to the destination of his own choosing.

So he was finally spirited out of Hong Kong on a Sanpan out to a waiting Chinese steamship, and the steamship took him up the coast and eventually dropped him off in--around Shanghai. And the French, from that point on until World War II, weren't sure where he was. In fact, sometimes they thought he died in prison.

Prof. DUIKER: Off and on probably for 25 years, but I'd mentioned before that I had taken it up briefly at the end of the war, and at that time I realized that it was not sufficient material to write the kind of biography I wanted. So I dropped it and finally got to the point about 10 years ago when I could see more and more information coming out, and I still had that fascination with him. To me, it's--it's almost like a detective story. It's almost like writing an Agatha Christie novel, but you don't know the end of it when you started.

Prof. DUIKER: I think perhaps it's more sort of the overall picture. I--I find, as I go through this, that I'm confirming a lot of things that I think certainly those of us who are acquainted with him know. I think there's some things I've--I've discovered that add nuances to our--to our knowledge about him. For example, his very delicate relationship with the Soviet Union and with China and with the leaders of those two countries, Stalin and Khrushchev and Mao Tse-Tung and Chou En-lai and that sort of thing, and I can flesh out that relationship.

And--and it's--I--I think it's very clear that he was a very central figure in the international Communist movement. He tried to resolve the Sino-Soviet dispute. I think--I think I've clarified the issue of his attitude toward nationalism and revolution. To--certainly to my own feeling, I have clarified the fact that he was a genuine revolutionist. He--I wouldn't say he was that interested in Marxism, but he was very much a believer in revolution. And those people who say he was just a patriot, who was driven to the Soviet Union by the fact that America brushed him off is not entirely active--I--accurate. I think he would have certainly tried to make a relationship with the United States, but his commitment to--to socialism and perhaps even, in a very general sense, the--the concept of a Communist utopia was genuine.

Prof. DUIKER: There's--that's the gap that's the hardest to fill because we know, primarily by his own statements, that he arrived in the United States about 1912 or so while he was sailing on a steam--French shen--steamship liner. And he left the ship either in Baltimore or in New York, and he spent, by his own account, several months in New York City living in Manhattan and perhaps Harlem and Queens, Brooklyn maybe and then went up to Boston and worked there very briefly, and then left at an unknown time and went back to Europe.

And with the help of some other people who are interested in him, we've tried to locate something in the immigration records, and there's absolutely nothing. He must have just gotten off the ship, you know, sort of disappeared into the throng of--of immigrants living in the big cities and the East Coast; spent some time here, learned some English and then went back to England. And it's not--England and France--and it's not entirely clear, even by his own account, exactly why he did this.

Prof. DUIKER: I have--I have heard his voice on tape. His voice, when he gave the famous Declaration of Independence at Ba Dinh Square in September of 1945.

Prof. DUIKER: Fairly high-pitched; I'm tempted to say squeaky, but it may be the quality of the tape. It's a--it's a very high, sharp voice. It reminded me a little bit of the voice of Chiang Kai-Shek or even Mao Tse-tung when they speak. And as I said, that may have something to do with the--the quality of--of--you know, of radio transcription and that sort of thing. He had a very strong central Vietnamese accent.

Prof. DUIKER: At a minimum, it wouldn't have been at all the same kind of--of revolution, and--and I would say it for this--for--this way. It was Ho Chi Minh who--who devised the idea that the best way to approach the Vietnamese people and appeal to their instincts was not to talk about Communism and the classless utopia and collective farms and that sort of thing, but to talk about the two dramatic forces which were shaping Vietnamese society in the 20th century. And one would be the issue of national independence, of course, based on the French conquests; Vietnam in the 19th century. And the other is a somewhat broader populist appeal that I tend to call social justice, which means land of the tiller; it means decent working conditions and opportunity for education.

He knew at that time that you couldn't appeal to the Vietnamese people, 95 percent of whom were farmers, with Communist slogans. You had to talk to them in the language that they understood. And there was no one else in Vietnam at that time or, I think, even among his colleagues later on who could quite understand that gift that he had.

Secondly, I think his strategical instincts were very important. I think, to a degree, he followed the--what I think many people know as the Maoist idea of people's war: guerrilla struggle and that sort of thing. But he was good at applying them in a Vietnamese context. And he--he discovered very early on, because he'd already become a sophisticated observer of the international scene, that for Vietnam to be liberated, however he might define that, it could not be done, for example, the way the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place or even the Chinese Civil War. It couldn't be done entirely on a domestic basis because Vietnam was a small country controlled by a large, powerful European country. He had to have support on the international scene. So he very early learned to sort of tie the liberation struggle in Indo-China with international events and with trying to manipulate what we might call the great power balance.

Prof. DUIKER: I was first in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965. At that time, I was a Foreign Service officer. And I was stationed with the US Embassy in Saigon, and that's where I first got interested in Ho Chi Minh.

Prof. DUIKER: I was the--an economic reporting officer. I had--prior to my assignment there, I had been assigned to Chinese language training in Taiwan. And when I was assigned to Saigon, after my Chinese language training was over, I was a bit puzzled. And then I discovered that in the economic reporting office, they always wanted one Chinese speaker to deal with the large overseas Chinese business community in Saigon. So in a s--light moment, I will sometimes say that I was sent to Vietnam to win the support of the Chinese community to the South Vietnamese cause in the war.

Prof. DUIKER: That's right.

Prof. DUIKER: I don't know much about it from that because I've never followed it up at that time, but during that period from 1964 to 1965, there were innumerable coups, and some of them were ac--actually involved: tanks going up into the presidential palace lawn; in other case--cases, they were just--you know, reshufflings of the Cabinet and that sort of thing. And this was at a time when there was a--a kind of token civilian government in power in Saigon, but the military was sitting in the background sort of moving their musical chairs around.

And I'd gone off to Bangkok just for a couple of days to see some friends, and over the weekend, there was some reshuffling of the Cabinet in--in such a way that it was almost like a coup d'etat. In other words, it wasn't just an appointment. And then I guess I came back on a Monday, and by that time, that particular group had been replaced by another group. And that process, which I always describe as a kind of musical chairs game, lasted for about a year and a half, until the--the rise of Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu about two months later. They came in power in June of '65.

Prof. DUIKER: I arrived just after Maxwell Taylor arrived. General Taylor was there for about a year, little bit over a year, and then he left in the early summer or mid-summer of '65 and Henry Cabot Lodge came back for a second tour of duty. So I was there briefly when--when Henry Cabot Lodge had some back for a second term.

Prof. DUIKER: Now he...

Prof. DUIKER: Le Duan was a young Communist Party functionary from central Vietnam who had emerged during his early- to mid-30s, around the time of the Second World War, into a position of leadership. This was a time when there was enormous shake-up in the party because a number were captured and put to death. And Le Duan began to emerge during the Second World War as a very effective party member. And after the war was over, because of his background in central and south Vietnamese affairs, he was assigned to the south to--to command the party's political and military activities in South Vietnam. And he--he essentially stayed in the south right up through the mid-1950s. In other words, at a time when the United States had come in to support the new government in South Vietnam. And in 19--1956 or early 1957, he was ordered north to Hanoi where the government had established its power base after the Geneva Conference and became acting--acting general secretary, which meant he was primarily the most powerful person in the--in the--in the Communist Party.

And the general feeling is--and I certainly share it--that he was given that position primarily because of his enormous commitment to unification and liberation of the south. And it was more or less a symbolic statement that unification is going to be one of our top priorities for the next few years.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes. The Maddox and I guess C. Turner Joy, right.

Prof. DUIKER: Right.

Prof. DUIKER: I don't believe so. I think some other scholars have--there--there are one or two major studies on the whole Tonkin Gulf incident and, of course, the consequences of it. And I think that's--I think that's something that is becoming clearer. Some of the conversations that I report between the Vietnamese and the Chinese may be fairly new, although these are--this is information available to other people as well.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes. I think by my reading, it was a local decision based on--perhaps on the assumption that the US actions there, the--the--the two American warships were related to some South Vietnamese guerrilla operations taking place in the vicinity. And the local authorities then reported it to the north, and if I recall--I'm not too precise on my knowledge on this--that the Northerners approved it. The North Vietnamese insist--and I think correctly--that they had not--that there had been no second attack, that that may have been just electronic emissions or something.

Prof. DUIKER: I would say the bulk of my information came from Vietnam. I was able to go back to Hanoi on several occasions to engage in research. I had a little access to the archives. I talked to a number of scholars. I was able to interview some people who had known Ho Chi Minh. And I think a lot of the information came from there. I was able to find a good deal of information in the last few years from memoirs and collections of documents that have been published in China. The Chinese are--they don't open their archives to foreigners as a general rule, certainly not in a matter as sensitive as Sino-Vietnamese relations. But they have taken to publishing the reminiscences of some of their ambassadors and some of their military commanders. And a lot of that is very useful. The Russian archives have been opened just a peek. And now it's possible to see some of that information. And then finally, certainly an enormous amount of information came from the French archives. They--during the Colonial period, they kept a very close watch on Ho Chi Minh.

Prof. DUIKER: 19...

Prof. DUIKER: Yeah, 1954. At the close of the Geneva Conference, which divided Vietnam temporarily in two separate zones with the Vietminh, as they were called, and the Communist Party in control in the north and pro-French or at least anti-Communist Vietnamese settling in the south. And the United States immediately decided to back the South Vietnamese government to stop the further spread of communism.

Prof. DUIKER: 1908, I think, when he engaged in that anti-French demonstration in the imperial capital of Hue. That's what--that was his first open political act. And it--it--it, basically, you might say, it started him on a revolutionary career.

Prof. DUIKER: That was--he was about 17 or 18 at the time. Three years later, he sailed from Saigon to Europe. I say Europe, because he stopped in France, but he went elsewhere as well. Spent three or four years working on an ocean liner, or as I said, settling briefly in--in the United States. Most of World War I, he was apparently in Great Britain, although it's hard to pin down his activities. 1917, 1918, he arrived in Paris. And that's where he joined the Socialist movement and a founding member of the Communist Party. 1923, ordered to Moscow for training. Late 1924, on to China.

I--I have a joke with my wife that we really ought to have--we should have put a pedometer on him so that we should of kept track of his activities, because he must have been the most peripatetic man you could see. Late '24 to China. 1927, he was evicted or forced to leave China because of Chiang Kai-shek's crackdown on Communists. He went back to Moscow and traveled in Europe. The late '20s, he went back to Southeast Asia, lived in Thailand for a few months, went to Hong Kong to found the Communist Party, arrested, two years in prison in Hong Kong. After release, he went back to the Soviet Union, where he spent five years. Do I go on?

Prof. DUIKER: Came back in ni...

Prof. DUIKER: Came back--uh-huh.

Prof. DUIKER: Right. In 19-in 19--1938, he was permitted to go back to China to re-establish contact with his party. And finally, he was able to do so in 19--some time in the spring of 1940. And that--from that point on, literally until his final days, he was in direct contact with his close followers and--and if not the leader of the Communist Party, certainly its most influential public figure. And from '41 to '45, he was primarily in--either in South China or Northern Vietnam organizing his revolutionary movement. The fall of--or late summer of 1945, when the war was over, he and a ragtag group of 5,000 troops marched into Hanoi, raised the flag of the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam. That's where he made his famous speech in Ba Dinh--Dinh Square.

For the next 18 months, he was engaged in negotiations with the French in order to gain some form of autonomy or independence, trying to appeal to the United States for some measure of recognition or legitimacy. Those negotiations broke down in late '46. And from December '46 until 1954, he was back in the bush, leading his movement against the French. After Geneva, his party came back to Hanoi, and he spent his last--well, the last 15 years of his life as president of the country.

Prof. DUIKER: That--that was a photograph taken in late 1945, perhaps early 1946, when he had been named president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. And that's a--a--a more formal photo--photograph of him, obviously a fairly posed one.

Prof. DUIKER: Mm-hmm.

Prof. DUIKER: It is one of--it is one of several communications that he sent either to President Roosevelt or President Truman or one of our secretaries of State. It was part of a long process that began in late 1944, early 1945 when he--he--he realized at the end of the war that this was a--a marvelous opportunity to liberate his country because Japanese surrender would create a--a vacuum in Indochina. And the French had been--French authorities had been imprisoned by the Japanese. So there would be this short window when the Ja--when the Vietminh might be able to seize control.

But he recognized that for that--for that process to succeed, he needed to gain international recognition of his new government. And he was well aware of the fact that the Soviet Union had relatively little interest. Stalin never did care much about Indochina. And what he deduced from the situation was that given the circumstances at the end of the war with the United States allied with the Soviet Union and Great Britain in the grand alliance and with, of course, Roosevelt's reputation as being anti-French and an anti-colonialist, he hoped somehow that he would be able to induce the United States to support the le--legitimacy of his government, rather than support a return of the French. And this is one of the later messages that he sent off to Washington in the hope that somehow the Americans would see some benefit in--in supporting his movement.

Prof. DUIKER: Generally, in the--in the political scene? It's probably hard to be overly specific because in his last few years, he--he suffered from a number of physical ailments, and also, I think, I couldn't give any kind of a medical diagnosis on it, but it--from people I've known who--who saw him in operation at that time, occasionally, mentally, he would sort of drift out of the picture. They would see him, for example, in--in important international conferences and he'd be sort of staring off into space. And that process was sort of an ongoing process.

I've had interviews with Vietnamese in particular who insist that up to about 1964, 1965, he was very active in helping to direct the Vietnamese political activities. But from 1965 on, apparently he went downhill quite rapidly. And I--I think one of the--one of the--one--one of the things I'm able to bring out in this book fairly clearly is the degree to which he began to lose control or influence over his movement, not only after 1965, but to a certain degree beginning in the early- to mid-1950s.

Prof. DUIKER: It--it's a very moving story. This would have been about 1967, 1968, when--this was around the time of the Tet offensive. And he had--he had been in Beijing for medical treatment. He was quite weak at the time. And as I said, I think perhaps some of his mental acuity had begun to drain away at this point. And he'd always wanted to visit the south. I mean, he felt very strongly about his symbolic importance to the people in the south and the fact that they had struggled so long for their own liberation. And I think he was very sensitive to the fact that many Southerners complained that he had sold them out at the Geneva Conference because he'd allowed the division of the country.

And he wanted to go south, but--obviously to travel through NLF-held areas and raise the spirits of the people. But his--his physical condition, my sense is, simply didn't permit it. So that he was, you know, being very unrealistic at this time. So that what his colleagues had to do, many of--many of your viewers, of course, will remember Le Duc Tho, who was Henry Kissinger's opposite number during the Paris Treaty--he went to Beijing, I think, after the Tet offensive to report to Ho Chi Minh on what had happened at Tet and to tell Ho Chi Minh that negotiations were beginning. Ho--Ho hadn't been involved in these decisions. And it may have been about that time when Ho said, `I want to go south now because things are looking better.' And Le Duc Tho more or less palmed him off and said, `Well, we can't take you there. You'd be recognized and you might be--you know, and you might be arrested,' and--and Ho Chi Minh said, `Well, maybe you could take me secretly by sea down around to southern Cambodia and sneak me in that way.'

Prof. DUIKER: He'd be willing to shave his beard so he wouldn't be recognized. It--it's a really--it's quite a moving story. And if you--if you--if you become, you know, in a sense, sort of attached to Ho Chi Minh as an individual, whatever--you know, whatever one thinks of his--his political ideology, it--it's--it's almost pathetic to see this man desperately wanting, you know, to get a sort of hands-on relationship with the people in the south.

Prof. DUIKER: That's right.

Prof. DUIKER: It came from--it came from two or three different reminiscences that have been published in the last few years, reminiscences by Vietnamese and I think, to a certain degree, maybe comments made by Le Duc Tho himself. But not, I might say, for--for broad public dissemination in Vietnam. Because it--you know, it obviously, undercuts the image of Uncle Ho as firmly in charge of the country right to his--the end of his days.

Prof. DUIKER: Probably somewhere between five and 10 times. First trip, 1985 for research visit.

Prof. DUIKER: Nice trip?

Prof. DUIKER: Last trip, the--must have been about 1996 or '97.

Prof. DUIKER: Somewhere in that range. I--I'm always a little imprecise about it, not--not by any means trying to say I've written so many, I don't think even about it. But some of the things that--that I might think of as a book are relatively short and they might be considered, you know, research papers or something of that type. So it's somewhere around that range.

Prof. DUIKER: A lot of dollars.

Prof. DUIKER: If the--if my editor isn't worried about it, I guess I'm not worried about it.

Prof. DUIKER: That's a picture that was taken a--about 19--early 19--or mid-1954, just at the end of what we call the Franco-Vietnam War when the French were fighting against the revolutionary forces. And from what I've gathered from the context, this was a moment of general repose when the war was just about won. And he's in his--again, his bush jacket waiting to go back to Hanoi.

Prof. DUIKER: Somewhere between 50 and 100. And indeed, there are undoubtedly more that we don't know about.

Prof. DUIKER: His name? His first name was what the Vietnamese call a milk name, which is just the name that infant is given to begin with. And his name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. At age 11 or 12, it's at that point where adolescence begins and then the parents will give a--a young man or a young woman a name representing their aspirations for their child. And at that point, he was called Nguyen That Thanh, which means--Nguyen, which is one of the familiar family names in--in Vietnam. That Thanh meaning `He who will succeed or he who will become.' He kept that name until he left Vietnam. And it was when he left Vietnam that he began using various aliases.

Prof. DUIKER: I have a position, but it's a--it's a--somewhat of a conflicted one. And I've always been very honest about it. It may have to do in part with my age and my background. I grew up at a time when Americans still believed very strongly in the correctness of our foreign policy objectives. I believed in US containment policy. I believed that it was necessary, although I--I might say I thought I'd been much to militarized. I went into the State Department almost literally at the time John Kennedy entered the White House and felt many of the same feelings of enthusiasm that that generation felt.

So when I was sent to Vietnam, when I--when I was in the foreign service, I sort of carried as a badge of honor the idea that I was doing a noble service. And then by the time I--by the time I got to Vietnam, I--for whatever reason, I was already--already quite skeptical that we could win. I had no particular pleasure in seeing America lose. I certainly didn't glorify the revolutionary movement in any particular way. I--I had no particular liking for Communism. But I just thought it was a mistake. I thought we were, in effect, throwing money into a--a lost situation. And it's almost like a military campaign. If you're very exposed in a military campaign, you don't throw all of your--your troops into that point. You back up and you establish a--you establish a more defensible security perimeter. And I just felt, based on my experience there and perhaps my study of Chinese history, because there were so--some similarities there, I just felt that we were unlikely to be successful in Vietnam. And from that point on, I--I--I--in--in whatever way I could, I was hoping that we would find some way of extricating ourselves from Vietnam with honor and as much as possible a minimum of bloodshed for the Vietnamese people.

Prof. DUIKER: After the Vietnam assignment in the fall of 1965.

Prof. DUIKER: Thirty-three.

Prof. DUIKER: I finished my doctoral studies at Georgetown University. I had started them before I went overseas. And after I finished my doctorate, hung my name out for a job and was accepted for a position in the History Department at Penn State.

Prof. DUIKER: Thirty years, full--full career.

Prof. DUIKER: I retired a couple of years ago and just decided last year to move down to the Outer Banks of Hurricane Alley, as we call it in North Carolina and love it down there.

Prof. DUIKER: I bounced around a--a lot. I was born in Chicago, spent many years in Washington, DC. Every time I come to Washington, I see a house I lived in or a friend's house. Spent some time during my adolescence in Philadelphia, lived in Miami, Indiana. Went to school at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Prof. DUIKER: Correct.

Prof. DUIKER: Which is right next door to the Presidential Palace.

Prof. DUIKER: The Presidential Palace on top was a--a very impressive, late 19th century building built by the French to represent the grandeur of the French Colonial empire. He moved there very, very briefly after the war. I think that is 1945, 1946, for symbolic reasons. It was very important for the Vietnamese that they control the Presidential Palace, rather than the French, during that period after 1945 when they were negotiating with each other. But from the start, he was very uncomfortable with living there, because it was much too ostentatious. So he did not live there personally during that particular period. He lived in an administrative office over toward the center of town.

Then when the--the--the Vietminh movement, that is the party leaders came back to Hanoi in October of 1954, he refused to occupy that residence and he moved into the gardener's quarters on the grounds of the Presidential Palace. And this would have been the mid- to late-50s. That's correct. That's the fish pond that he often was seen sitting there feeding the fish right beside it. And it was while he was living in the gardener's quarters that the party arranged to have this house built in the style of the mountain minorities. And he lived there for most of the remainder of his life. During the--during the bombing campaign of '65 to '68, he often lived in a bomb shelter also adjacent to these quarters.

Prof. DUIKER: The one from the Vietnamese?

Prof. DUIKER: Yes.

Prof. DUIKER: I think in fairness to him, I probably would like to talk with him and see whether he has information that wasn't available to me because there's an enormous amount of information and misinformation about Ho Chi Minh out around the world and certainly in the Internet. And what I have tried to do is to corroborate everything that I have seen; certainly anything that's controversial, so that I didn't find myself simply repeating stories that--for--for which there wasn't any proper evidence or maybe it was something put out as a false scent.

I--I think what pub--puzzled me a little bit about that--about that letter was that one of the things he quoted is the case of a young woman who apparently became Ho Chi Minh's concubine toward the end of his life. And there was a very messy story about the fact that she was raped by Ho Chi Minh's Minister of the Interior, and later, her body was found in the suburbs of Hanoi with the assumption that she had been assassinated, perhaps because she'd given birth to Ho Chi Minh's child and wanted--and--and wanted to marry him. And, of course, this would have been unacceptable, given the image of Ho as a celibate.

The fact is, I do report that story. I don't dwell on it unnecessarily because it's a little hard to corroborate and I--I don't want to accentuate things where there may be more that I don't know about. But I do report it. And I--certainly, I--I gather from the kind of things that he's saying that I downplay the degree of cruelty and the degree of bloodshed that occurred in Vietnam. Maybe the difference there is that I don't--I don't deny the brutality and the bloodshed that took place, as I see it somewhat on both sides. But I certainly can see the Leninist character of his government and I can see, as I think I mentioned to you before, that there were times when he was quite willing to commit actions or order actions that could involve very high degree of casualties among his supporters as well as among his enemies. And there were times when some of his colleagues committed what, to me, are quite brutal acts in the suppression of their enemies. And I--I find myself very aware that in some cases, Ho Chi Minh appeared to lack the pol--political courage to stop it.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes.

Prof. DUIKER: Yeah, I'm having trouble following it.

Prof. DUIKER: Well, I think that's part of Ho Chi Minh's image making. He certainly began to see himself at some point as a symbol of his cause. And I think he realized his talent. And--in--in effect, making himself the public image of the movement. And he saw, in effect, that it was the appeal to his personality and his character, that it was a large part of the success of his movement.

Prof. DUIKER: I--I read it reasonably well. I do keep a dictionary handy.

Prof. DUIKER: Not one of this length and not one that I think delves as much as--as I have into his movements. There may be some people who say, `You're talking a lot--awful lot about where he went and when.' And I do that in part because that's been part of the mystery of Ho Chi Minh is that he's seen everywhere, and wha--it's important, I think, to tie down his--you know, hi--where he went and why he did he what he did. And I've tried to let the story speak for itself.

Prof. DUIKER: Thank you, Brian.