Ho Chi Minh

Rating:
Summary: The Mystery of Ho
Review: I hesitate to launch into too scathing a critique of William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, because a tome of five hundred and seventy-seven pages can hardly fail to contain something of interest. And indeed, Duiker's biography is a fair read: the prose flows, the scope of inquiry is vast, and the research is replete the annals of Ho Chi Minh's life. It is, in part, a meticulous and well-crafted work. Unfortunately, Duiker still falls far short of achieving "a more definitive understanding of Ho's life" (HCM, 5). As the biography progresses, Duiker's focus shifts incrementally from Ho Chi Minh, the man, to a broader examination of the historical conditions surrounding his life. After the formation of the DRV in 1945, it is characteristic of Duiker to spend tens of pages describing political events without a single mention of Ho Chi Minh, and by his death in 1969, Ho is discussed only in passing. Since this trajectory forms most glaring failure in the "biography," the author anticipates and tries to deflect criticism in his introduction:
Some readers will undoubtedly be disappointed that there is not a greater focus on the final years of [Ho Chi Minh's] life at the height of the Vietnam War. In fact, Ho Chi Minh's role in the creating the conditions for that conflict are vastly more important that his influence in Hanoi during the course of the war itself, when he was frequently ill or in China for medical treatment. Many readers will find, therefore, that substantial parts of this book refer to individuals and events with which they are not familiar. I hope that they will feel compensated by a greater awareness of the underlying causes of the war and its consequences. (7)

This style of narrative leads to several disappointing results. First, Duiker assumes that the reader requires a primer in Vietnamese history before he or she can make sense of the role that Ho Chi Minh played in it. Hence, much of the book tarries on the famous events of 20th century Vietnamese history: the French occupation, the First Indochinese War (particularly Dien Bien Phu), the Geneva accords dividing the country, and the American war. Unfortunately, Duiker's accounts have little to add in the way of historical perspective to the academic reader; in fact, Duiker marginalizes or distorts some of these historical events, often citing statistics that are at odds with other historical accounts. For example, Duiker states that over 1 million Vietnamese died from starvation in the autumn of 1944 (308), whereas he might have cited the statistic that during the entire course of the famine, over 2 million died. A more glaring discrepancy is his figure of 1 million Vietnamese deaths during the entire American-Vietnamese war (554); most sources quote 3 million. Duiker also fails to mention post-war casualties from American munitions and chemicals. This second-rate recapitulation of Vietnamese history serves no better as an overview than it does as a ground-breaking analysis-I was able to grasp a much more accurate sense of history in the readings for "Nothing So Precious," and with considerable less historical minutiae, than with Duiker's version. An additional disappointment, and one which indicates his intended audience, is that Duiker omits all Vietnamese diacritics, except for an occasional circumflex. In a work that involves so many names and places, and that expects to serve as a definitive resource, such negligence is unfortunate. Finally, my greatest disappointment was that Duiker fails to give us a complex, multi-dimensional, and reflective sketch of Ho Chi Minh as a person (I judge this book a failure in comparison to the last eight hundred-page biography I read last semester, on James Joyce, the author of which was quite successful in inducting personality from facts). Instead, Duiker skims along the ink surface of Ho's recorded life, and what results is little more than an itinerary of his travels and efforts. In fact, wherever Duiker attempts to get inside Ho Chi Minh's mind, he only does so briefly in the conditional tense, e.g. "Ho Chi Minh's role in the policy debate is not clear, but it is probable that ...(535)." Additionally, Duiker rarely quotes Ho's own words; aside from four pages of excerpted poems from his prison diary (265-8), the book contains little of what Ho wrote or spoke. Finally, nowhere in the biography does Duiker spend significant time responding to the research of his colleagues (notably, he fails to address the important theories addressed by Hue-Tam Ho Tai in her essay "Monumental Ambiguity: The State Commemoration of Ho Chi Minh" (1995), merely devoting one sentence to remark that his mausoleum indeed is built in a Soviet style that disassociates Ho from his humble and nationalistic aspects). The lack of a critical thesis and a dynamic method of research result in Duiker's disappointingly vague and debatable conclusion:
...The tragedy of Ho Chi Minh is that such a wondrous talent for exercising the art of leadership should have been applied to the benefit of a flawed ideology-indeed, one that has now been abandoned even by many of its most sincere adherents around the world... (576)
Why did Ho Chi Minh, with his lifelong appreciation for the humanistic aspects of the Confucian and Western traditions, continue to embrace Marxism-Leninism even after its severe limitations in protecting such values had become clear? Some critics contend that Ho's alleged humanism was simply a pose to delude the gullible. But perhaps a more persuasive explanation is that he felt confident that he could avoid the pitfalls of Stalinism and synthesize the positive aspects of classical Marxism and humanist values in a future socialist Vietnam. By the time it had become clear that Vietnamese socialism was subject to many of the same flaws of its Soviet counterpart, Ho apparently lacked the clarity of vision or the political courage to speak out firmly in opposition. (577)

The fruit of Duiker's labor comes not in the form of revelation about Ho's character, but in a broadside to the "flawed ideology" of Communism. While I would be willing to accept this conclusion if Duiker had documented the shortcomings of the DRV, his book is an unbiased historical narrative that never addresses the issue of Marxism-Leninism being a "flawed ideology." I am forced to conclude that Duiker extrapolates the ideology's defects from its post-1975 implementation (which is beyond the chronological scope of his book), and not from the events between French and American wars. If indeed Duiker expects the handful of political executions and the missteps taken during land-redistribution of the 1950s to serve as grounds of evidence for the failure of Marxism-Leninism, then he does poorly to sandwich these failures between his accounts of the French colonial repression and the brutal My-Diem government. Since Duiker has not presented an adequate argument to back up his conclusion, his dismissal of the ideology to which Ho Chi Minh and millions of his followers committed themselves thus appears as intellectually weak to the academic, and as conventional wisdom towards his intended audience of lay people.
Despite the larger problems, smaller scholarly gems abound in Ho Chi Minh: A Life; many of them in their own right challenge or append previous scholarship. One major historical revision is the alleged betrayal of the nationalist Phan Boi Chau by Nguyen Ai Quoc. According to Duiker,
From the beginning, many members of the Revolutionary Youth League suspected that the man who had betrayed Phan Boi Chau to the French was his personal secretary, Nguyen Thuong Huyen. Chau himself made a similar claim in his memoirs. But some non-Communist nationalist sources have argued that the culprit was Nguyen Ai Quoc's close associate Lam Duc Thu, or even that Nguyen Ai Quoc himself had connived with Thu in deliberately betraying Chau in order to obtain the reward money an create a martyr for the nationalist cause. This charge has been repeated by a number of Western writers, although no concrete evidence is available to confirm it. (127)
It is notable that in statements made in exile to the end of his life, Chau continued to hold Nguyen Ai Quoc in high esteem and never suggested publicly that he might have held [him] responsible for his seizure in Shanghai. (128)

Later, Duiker exposes a possible attempt by Ho Chi Minh to fabricate his own history, by stating in his memoir "in Hong Kong he was housed in a virtual dungeon, where he was regularly maltreated and fed meals of bad rice, rotten fish, and a little beef" (205). Duiker states that "according to some sources, however, in the Bowen Road Hospital [Ho Chi Minh] was lodged in relative comfort" and "spent his idle hours reading and reportedly writing a book in English on his personal philosophy" (205). In an interesting note, Duiker documents that, while waging guerrilla war Cao Bang province in 1941, Nguyen Ai Quoc predicted 1945 as the year of Vietnamese independence. "When colleagues asked him how he knew precisely when liberation would take place, he replied enigmatically, "We'll see." "(260). Ho's stamina was also remarkable: "Although he was now over sixty, Ho was still capable of walking thirty miles a day, a pack on his back, over twisting mountain trails" (443). In another scholarly coup, Duiker shows that Diem was not handpicked by the Americans to serve as their lackey:
By his own account, Bao Dai had been motivated to appoint Ngo Dinh Diem because of his belief that Diem's staunch anticommunism might appeal to cold warriors in Washington. Although it has often been assumed that the Eisenhower administration played a role in the decision, the news was apparently greeted in Washington with dismay as well as some reservations. (468)

Some of Duiker's observations on the land reform programs of 1954 are similarly eye-opening. He notes that by inverting the social order, the Party was able spontaneously generate "a new rural leadership composed of former peasants, who would then be grateful to the Party and loyally carry out its policies" (475). Also, Duiker offers a cogent explanation for the abuses of power in the kangaroo court "speak bitterness" sessions: "Following the Chinese example, [Party cadres] calculated that 4 to 5 percent of the local population must be declared class enemies, despite the fact that in many poor villages even the most well-off farmers did little better than survive" (477). Another side of Ho's personality is shown when Ho, at the age of seventy-five, "suddenly requested that his old friend [a PRC leader named Tao] provide him with a young women from the Chinese province of Guangdong to serve as his companion. When Tao asked why Ho did not seek someone to serve his needs in the DRV, his host said simply, "Everyone calls me Uncle Ho." " (555).
These and other scholarly hors d'oeuvres in Ho Chi Minh: A Life saves Duiker's book from having virtually no value to the field of Vietnamese studies. Yet despite the careful, erudite documentation that Duiker provides, he nevertheless does not attempt to fathom the deeper motives and personalities in the life of Ho Chi Minh. In his introduction, Duiker quotes Ho, "An old man likes to have a little air of mystery about himself. I like to hold on to my little mysteries. I'm sure you will understand that" (7). To the dismay of his readers, although perhaps to the approval of Ho, Duiker leaves that mantle of mystery thoroughly intact.

Rating:
Summary: did not reveal the whole truth
Review: I was eagerly awaiting this book, believing that it contains information from the Russian, French and Vietnamese archives that I have not studied. I was thoroughly disappointed.

What bother about this book was not so much the information that the author convey, but the information that he either through coincident or on purpose deliberately hide from his reader. For example, the author shows us Ho's letter applying for admission to the Colonial School on Sept. 15, 1911 to the Minister of Colonies and the President of France. In the letter Ho said that he wanted to be educated to that he could be a useful instrument to France and his people. This letter is stored at the French Archives Nationales, Section d'Outre-Mer, Ecole Coloniale. What the author did not tell his reader is that there this letter was discovered in 1983 by 2 Vietnamese historians. Also, the author did not mentioned to his readers that there was another letter written by Ho(also at the Archives Nationales), in which Ho begged the French government to re-instate his father (who was a mandarin and was dismiss from his post for killing a suspect during court). Ho claimed that his father and himself should be given a chance to prove how they can be "useful servants" to France. Why did the author not mention this to his readers ?

The author also makes use of the information from Vu Thu Hien's biography "Dem Giua Ban Ngay"[Darkness at mid-day]. Vu Thu Hien is the son of Ho's personal secretary, he and his father are among the handful of people who have access to the Communist party secret documents stored at Bo Chinh Tri[Political Department]. Vu Thu Hien 800 plus biography included information about Ho Chi Minh wives. One of Ho's wife was Ms. Nguyen Thi Xuan (nickname Sang), born at Ha Ma hamlet, Hong Viet village, Hoa An district, Cao Bang province. Ms Nguyen was "encourage" to become Ho's concubine and when she was pregnant with Ho's son and demanded that Ho marry her, Ho placed her under house arrest at 66 Hang Bong Nhuom in Hanoi. She was later raped and murdered along with her sister by Ho's chief security officer. Ms. Nguyen Thi Xuan's family and her sister fiancée later file a complaint with the Vietnamese Communist party and demanded that her case be open and investigated in the late 1980's during Vietnam "peretroitka" period. This has been documented in Vu Thu Hien book. It also been confirm by Nguyen Minh Can( A high ranking former member of the Vietnamese Communist party since 1945, and a former member of Hanoi City Party Standing Committee from 1954 to 1964). Bui Tin, a former editorof the Vietnamese Communist party official newspaper Nhan Dan, also confirmed it. Why did the author hide this fact from his reader if the author did indeed read Vu Thu Hien biography like he claimed in his book?

This author also make extensive use of Ho personal biography written by himself under the pseudonym Tran Dan Tien. What this author did not tell his readers is that Ho written his own biography as a third person "journalist". For instance, in the book, Tran Dan Tien (alias Ho Chi Minh) comments: "Many Viet and foreign writers and journalists have tried to write biographies of the President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but so far they have had little success. The reason is simple : "The modest President Ho doesn't like to be talked about too much". Later on in the book, when the question of biography is mentioned, Ho replies: "Biography, that is a good thing. But at present our people still live in poverty. After eighty years of slavery, our country is in ruin and we have a big task of reconstruction. Let's do what is most urgent first. As for my biography, it can wait". The author seemed to take Ho's method of fictitious dialogue as merely a convenient literary device without understanding Ho's real intention and, because of his naiveté, unwittingly exposed his hero's deceitfulness. Ho set out to write his autobiography, but with the idea of making the readers believe that the work was not his, this is why he wrote his own biography as a third person and using a fictitious journalist by the name of Tran Dan Tien. It is strange that, Ho said at least twice in the book, he felt he should rebuild the country first, before talking about himself. But that is not his only lie. Practically everything in his book is full of half-truth.

Rating:
Summary: well reserched
Review: I would recomend this book to anyone who wants to learn about Ho. This book was not biased as many other books written by american war veterans. This author was unbiased which I belive is important in writing a biography. The only thing I disagreed with the author on is at the end he equates capitalisum with progress which is not always true, some of the poorist countries on earth have been capitalist for generations. This books demonstrates why Ho is one of the great revolutionaries of the 20th century, along with Che Gruvara and Nelson Mandella. Like these great men, Ho's family life suffered bc he was so deticated to his cause. He traveled around the world like these men and his country became a great military power, shatering the inviciblity of the so called honest, heroic american fighting man. Many american GI's still are unable to come to terms with this fact. This book also shows how truely moderate Ho was, unlike those leaders who came after him. If he was still alive the war with communist China may not have taken place. And he cared for the people who had nothing and always lead a modest, meager life, unlike these so called great american presidents like Bush and the Bush clone, John Kerry

Rating:
Summary: DETAILED AND WELL DOCUMENTED
Review: If this book had been around in the early 1960s maybe wiser heads would have prevailed in Washington and all those useless deaths would have been avoided.

Rating:
Summary: A Balanced Book
Review: If VietNam was the first war we lost, Ho was the man on the other side. Since the War is still unresolved, this can be a hard book to read and absorb. You start out with the fact the French were rather miserable colonials. So Ho, as nationalist, seems basically 'good'. But, then, the path of least resistance was through Communist Russia. They were the only nation of some substance that wanted to hear the refrain of oppressed people in undeveloped Asia. Unfortunately, the Russians kept changing their position. Marxism didn't provide much of a path for Ho, and there were constant attempts to adapt it to Russia and the non-industrialized world. Some of it gets slightly ludicrous.

Of course, at various times the Russians wanted to kill Ho, the French wanted to kill Ho, the Japanese wanted to kill Ho... Ho was a survivor, a canny man who knew how to use his charms. Communism has essentially failed. Vietnam was a desperately poor nation, anyway. One can only hope that poor nations will find a path to prosperity in an age when they cannot play one great power off against another.

If you read this book along with Kaiser's 'American Tragedy', you get a sense that history could have gone another way, but the forces that existed were very powerful. Once Vietnam and Asia were defined in terms of Communism and containment, the options were quite limited. If we had simply ignored Vietnam in 1960-63, said it was irrelevant, it's hard to imagine any change in the sweep of history.

This book suggests to me that Ho could never have been on good terms with the US, in that period. The US was somewhat removed from European colonialism, but probably not far enough to really encourage strong local leaders. But reading this book tends to show just how far we are from a Cold War World, and may beg the question whether our thinking is changing fast enough.

If you want to take one final dip in the acid pool of Vietnam, consider this book and "American Tragedy". Ask what one skeptical (US) leader might have done, but then move on.

Rating:
Summary: History as it should be written
Review: Students and friends of East Asian studies will admire and respect the amount of work William Duiker put behind this great biography. Duiker's expertise in the field of Vietnamese History was showcased and pushed to the forefront after the release of this book. This is a must have reference material for anyone studying East Asian History or Modern American History. Duiker's pages went fast but I can see periods of dry times for the average reader less familiar with Vietnam.

I found the early years of Ho and his pleas for nationalistic assistance equally interesting to that of the more popular French and American conflicts. Like many reviewer opinions, this is not a book about Vietnam but rather the evolution of a legend, one who has defined a country, and a man of either self-serving ideals or nationalistic pride. Duiker's prose are smooth; however information and citations do come in a little choppy thus making transitions a little difficult to follow. In addition, it seems that the connectivity between Ho and the much larger key events surrounding Vietnamese history with the French and Americans are missing. This is especially true in the later pages. Ignoring this minor flaw the book still deserves 5 stars. I would also recommend his book, "Sacred War". Though it reads more like a text, it does capture the North's perspective during the war with the U.S. .

Rating:
Summary: History as it should be written
Review: Students and friends of East Asian studies will admire and respect the amount of work William Duiker put behind this great biography. Duiker's expertise in the field of Vietnamese History was showcased and pushed to the forefront after the release of this book. This is a must have reference material for anyone studying East Asian History or Modern American History. Duiker's pages went fast but I can see periods of dry times for the average reader less familiar with Vietnam.

I found the early years of Ho and his pleas for nationalistic assistance equally interesting to that of the more popular French and American conflicts. Like many reviewer opinions, this is not a book about Vietnam but rather the evolution of a legend, one who has defined a country, and a man of either self-serving ideals or nationalistic pride. Duiker's prose are smooth; however information and citations do come in a little choppy thus making transitions a little difficult to follow. In addition, it seems that the connectivity between Ho and the much larger key events surrounding Vietnamese history with the French and Americans are missing. This is especially true in the later pages. Ignoring this minor flaw the book still deserves 5 stars. I would also recommend his book, "Sacred War". Though it reads more like a text, it does capture the North's perspective during the war with the U.S. .

Rating:
Summary: A skewed Portrait.
Review: There was no question that Ho was a complex man, one hiding behind one hundred aliases, and no more than one hundred masks. This complexity was further compounded by the fact that he wrote "two self congratulatory autobiographies under assumed names" (p 572), then turned around and stated that he did not like publicity.

Ho was a smooth talker and a consummate "politician." He could appear to be friendly, outgoing, and simple but behind that mask was a calculated, machiavellian, and even ruthless politician. In front of the world, he over and over reiterated that he would not invade South Vietnam, but we know now that his primary and only goal as far back as 1960 was to conquer South Vietnam.

Duiker reminded us that Ho once wrote that a revolutionary must "...(be) ruthless...lie and cheat in the interest of the revolution." Duiker commented that these norms were "strongly reminiscent of traditional Confucian morality" (p 135). I beg to disagree with the author.

Was Ho a Marxist or a nationalist? Although Duiker tried his best to convey the message that Ho was first and foremost a nationalist, my interpretation from this book was different: Ho was an unabashed Marxist and an internationalist. He never cared about the Vietnamese people, but only about communist expansion. He took a statement from the US Constitution and proclaimed that "All men are created equal...endowed with...unalienable rights" (p 323). So far almost 30 years after the fall of Saigon, the Vietnamese people still are not free. If his revolution was successful in getting rid of colonialism and capitalism (it is coming back), the Vietnamese are now suffering under a new yoke: socialism. They were just exchanging masters, and today they are certainly less free and less well to do than under the Diem or Thieu regimes.

Ho's legacy was thus mostly negative. He had instigated one of the longest and destructive war in history resulting in 2 million deaths, from the North as well as the South. The fall of Saigon led to an exodus of two million people (one of the largest in modern history) who rather died free than lived under his followers' rule. More than a million people were sent to reeducation camps, and the rest of the country was reduced to poverty and destitution. I fully agree with Duiker's statement: "Ho Chi Minh must bear full responsibility of his action" (p 576).

It appears to me that Duiker was so fond of his hero (p XII) that the book he wrote was not about facts but about his interpretation of these facts. And then, who would believe "communist facts" about a communist leader?

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book-Stunning Detail
Review: This book is really very good. It goes into excellent detail on each facet of Ho Chi Minh's life and gives good interpretations of why he did what he did. Beware though, this is not for the faint of heart. It's 700 pages. I used it for a high school biography paper and read it over the summer--it's very interesting to read. It ranks right up there with Lenin by Robert Service. It really is worth the money.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent Book-Stunning Detail
Review: This book is really very good. It goes into excellent detail on each facet of Ho Chi Minh's life and gives good interpretations of why he did what he did. Beware though, this is not for the faint of heart. It's 700 pages. I used it for a high school biography paper and read it over the summer--it's very interesting to read. It ranks right up there with Lenin by Robert Service. It really is worth the money.