Ho Chi Minh: A Life
by William Duiker
Hyperion

All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

This immortal statement appeared in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, it means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live and to be happy and free.

With these words, Ho Chi Minh began a 1945 speech to a massive crowd of citizens and revolutionaries in Saigon. By the end of the speech, Vietnam had declared its independence from France, and a new era of struggle had begun.

Most Americans have a desperately foggy concept of the Vietnam war, a swampy brew distilled from chunks of pop culture like Rambo, Apocalypse Now and Forrest Gump. Small Asian men, driven by some unknown, insane hatred, lob grenades into American tents. Female suicide bombers blow up American choppers on the ground. Waves of poorly armed peasant soldiers throw themselves against superior American defenses and die by the dozen. 'Nam was hell.

In the haze of general amnesia about the war's actual events, many Americans forget that there was a single man largely responsible for the incredibly defiant Vietnamese resistance to American forces. When he was born as the son of rural scholar of the Confucian tradition, he was named Nguyen Sinh Cung. When he grew older, he took the name Nguyen Tat Thanh. His first revolutionary name was Nguyen Ai Quoc (Nguyen the Patriot), and his second — the one that stuck — was Ho Chi Minh, a name adopted while he posed as an itinerant Chinese journalist.

Author William J. Duiker, a recent emeritus of Penn State's history department, spent 30 years researching his book, "Ho Chi Minh: A Life." The effort shows. "Ho Chi Minh" is exhaustively sourced, and it painstakingly charts Ho's subtle navigation through the Byzantine passageways of international revolutionary politics.

And although his book makes an extremely convincing case that Ho Chi Minh should be remembered among history's greatest revolutionaries, the text constantly mulls a single pivotal question: Was Ho Chi Minh a patriot bent on liberating and uniting Vietnam, who simply saw communism as a brilliant means to a complicated end? Or was he a true part of the Communist International, striving to bring Vietnam into a family of people's socialist republics, in happy harmony with giants like China and the Soviet Union?

Duiker makes a strong argument for the former, painting Ho Chi Minh as a supreme compromiser, negotiator and political strategist, playing enemies off of enemies while amassing broad coalitions of allies to use as tools toward the greater goal of a free and united Vietnam.

From his early days in the 1920s as a leading Vietnamese dissident in Paris, fighting the French colonialists in their own territory with words and political organizing, to his final days in the midst of the raging Vietnam war, Ho Chi Minh understood people, and he understood the currents of international politics well enough to lead his country from under the gun of two different world powers: France, and, later, the United States. And more miraculously still, he did it with the assistance of the Chinese and Soviets — and without allowing his new Vietnam to become a puppet state of either.

Duiker concentrates his text on the early part of Ho Chi Minh's career, looking at how his revolutionary ideals were formed, and how he rose to his pivotal position in the independence movement he would eventually lead. Along the way, he documents a man who, at 60, was still capable of marching 30 miles in a day, and liked to wind up a day's work with a rousing game of volleyball. Ho Chi Minh's amazing spark for life — and genuinely generous, and even tenderhearted, nature — is clearly portrayed, and Duiker paints a clear picture of how Ho Chi Minh was able to become such a beloved figurehead of the revolutionary movement.

"Ho Chi Minh: A Life" is not always easy reading. The revolutionary politics — often fought out at a lofty level of ideology hard to grasp by those arguing it, let alone those reading about it 30 years later — would be daunting to any author. Duiker gamely summarizes and draws out the threads of politics and idealogy, but the exhaustive drumming of revolutionary intrigue sometimes drowns out Duiker's central story of a man pivotal to world history, rising up to lead his people from captivity to freedom.

In the end, however, it is exactly this central story that shines through. Duiker's clean, engaging text draws the reader through 70 years of revolutionary struggle, and lets us see the whole person behind Ho Chi Minh's lovable but enigmatic facade. "Ho Chi Minh" is more than a political biography; it is the relentless narrative of a nation struggling for freedom. With his even-handed and well-supported book, Duiker has told the other side of a struggle that once divided America and plunged Southeast Asia into the flames of a brutal war.

— James Norton (jrnorton@flakmag.com)