Page:Pentagon-Papers-Part I.djvu/201

Declassified per Executive Order 13526, Section 3.3 NND Project Number: NND 63316. By: NWD Date: 2011 TOP SECRET – Sensitive I. C. 2.

There have been two periods in the life of Ho Chi Minh, President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), in which he ostensibly devoted himself wholly to Vietnamese Nationalism. The first period was in the early years before 1920 when Ho Chi Minh was an avid anti-colonialist, but not yet caught up in the communist revolution. The second period of seeming nationalist preoccupation was from 1945 to 1950, when Ho tried to negotiate with the French, appealed to the U.S., UK and China for intervention in Vietnam, denied being a communist, and avoided any ostensible link between the DRV and the Kremlin. The remainder of Ho Chi Minh's political life has been that of a classic communist, anti-colonial, nationalist revolutionary — exile, Moscow schools, prison, covert operations, guerrilla warfare, party politics. A chronology of his career through 1950 is attached, (pp. C-48 ff).


 * 1.

Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Van Thanh, 19 May 1890, in Kim-Lien in the northern Annam province of Nghe-An (in what is now North Vietnam). Ho was exposed early in life to bitter resentment of the French presence in Vietnam; his father was jailed at Poulo Condore for participation in nationalist activities. Ho's secondary education took place in a hotbed of nationalism, Hue's Lycee Quoc-Hoc. His schooling terminated around 1910 before he received a diploma, but still he acquired more education than most of his compatriots. His decision to work as a mess boy on a French liner in 1912 has been regarded by Bernard Fall as a key political decision — that is, Fall held that Ho, unlike most conservative fellow Nationalists, thereby opted for the West (republicanism, democracy, popular sovereignty, etc.), against the East (militarism, mandarinal society, etc.). If the going to sea were a significant decision at all, it probably showed only that Ho was not inclined to follow the normal path of Vietnamese nationalism. This fact was borne out by Ho's break with his father, Nguyen Tat Sac, who had given him a letter for Phan Chu Trinh, a veteran Viet nationalist, in Paris. Sac had hoped Phan would tutor Ho in Vietnamese nationalisnationalism [sic], but Ho could not accept Phan's "peaceful cooperation with the French," and left Paris; thereafter he severed his ties with his father.

As a young Asian struggling to earn a living in pre-World War I Europe and America, Ho had been exposed to the racial inequalities of the Western civilization and perhaps sought security when he joined the Chinese-dominated Overseas Workers Association, a clandestine, anti-colonialist organization concerned with improving the working conditions of foreign laborers but increasingly a political force. Ho went to France from London in 1917 with the war in the forefront, and the Russian Leninist revolution in the background. Looking on himself as a political organizer and writer of sorts, Ho signed his articles Nguyen Ai Quoc (which means "Nguyen-the-Patriot") — an alias by which all Vietnam came to know him until be became Rh