Hồ Chí Minh (, Chữ Nôm: 胡志明), born Nguyễn Sinh Cung and also known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc (19 May 1890 – 2 September 1969) was a Vietnamese Marxist revolutionary leader who was prime minister (1945–1955) and president (1945–1969) of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam). He was a key figure in the formation the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945, as well as the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) and the National Liberation Front (NLF) during the Indochina Wars until his death in 1969.
Hồ led the Việt Minh independence movement from 1941 onward, establishing the communist-governed Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1945 and defeating the French Union in 1954 at Điện Biên Phủ. He lost political power in 1955—when he was replaced as Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam—but remained the highly visible figurehead of North Vietnam—through the Presidency—until his death. The capital of South Vietnam, Saigon, after the Fall of Saigon, was renamed Hồ Chí Minh City in honor of the nationalist leader.
Early life
Nguyễn Sinh Cung (阮生恭) was born in 1890 in Hoàng Trù Village, Vietnam, his mother’s hometown. From 1895, he grew up in his paternal hometown of Kim Liên Village, Nam Đàn District,
Nghệ An Province, Vietnam. He had three
siblings: his sister Bạch Liên (or Nguyễn Thị Thanh), a clerk in the
French Army; his brother
Nguyễn Sinh Khiêm (or Nguyễn Tất Đạt), a
geomancer and
traditional herbalist; and another brother (Nguyễn Sinh Nhuận) who died in his infancy. As a young child, Cung studied with his father before more formal classes with a scholar named Vuong Thuc Do. Cung quickly mastered
Chinese writing, a requisite for any serious study of
Confucianism, while honing his colloquial Vietnamese writing. In addition to his studious endeavors, he was fond of adventure, loved to fly
kites and go
fishing. In deference to his father, Cung received a French education, attended lycée in Huế, the
alma mater of his later disciples,
Phạm Văn Đồng and
Võ Nguyên Giáp. He later left his studies and chose to teach at Dục Thanh school in
Phan Thiết.
In the USA
In 1912, working as the cook’s helper on a ship, Cung traveled to the
United States. From 1912 to 1913, he lived in
New York (
Harlem) and
Boston, where he worked as a
baker at the
Parker House Hotel. Among a series of menial jobs, he also has claimed to have worked for a wealthy family in
Brooklyn between 1917 and 1918; during this time, he was influenced by
Marcus Garvey in
Harlem. It is believed that, while in the United States, he made contact with
Korean nationalists, an experience that developed his political outlook.
In England
At various points between 1913 and 1919, Cung lived in
West Ealing, west London, and later in
Crouch End,
Hornsey, north London. He is reported to have worked as a chef at the Drayton Court Hotel, on The Avenue, West Ealing. It is claimed that Ho trained as a
pastry chef under the legendary French master,
Escoffier, at the
Carlton Hotel in the
Haymarket,
Westminster, but there is no evidence to support this. The article implores Prime Minister
Raymond Poincaré to outlaw such
Franglais as
le manager,
le round and
le knock-out. Hồ later claimed that he did this because he expected Chau’s trial to stir up anti-French resentment and because he needed the money to establish a communist organization. When his comrades objected to the match, he told them, “I will get married despite your disapproval because I need a woman to teach me the language and keep house.” until late 1929 when he moved on to
Hong Kong, and
Shanghai. In June 1931, he was arrested in Hong Kong. To reduce French pressure for extradition, it was announced in 1932 that Quốc had died. The British quietly released him in January 1933. He then made his way back to
Milan,
Italy, where he served in a restaurant. The restaurant is now a traditional Lombard-cuisine temple and harbors a portrait of Ho Chi Minh on the wall of its main dining hall. He then moved to the Soviet Union, where he spent several more years recovering from
tuberculosis. In 1938, he returned to
China and served as an adviser with
Chinese Communist armed forces, which later forced
China’s government to the island of Taiwan. He oversaw many successful military actions against the
Vichy French and Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II, supported closely but clandestinely by the United States
Office of Strategic Services, and also later against the French bid to reoccupy the country (1946–1954). He was also jailed in China for many months by
Chiang Kai-shek’s local authorities. After his release in 1943, he again returned to Vietnam. He was treated for malaria and dysentery by American
OSS doctors. In the highlands in 1944, he lived with Do Thi Lac, a woman of
Tay ethnicity. Lac had a son in 1956. Though he convinced Emperor
Bảo Đại to abdicate, his government was not recognized by any country. He repeatedly petitioned American President
Harry Truman for support for Vietnamese independence, citing the
Atlantic Charter, but Truman never responded.
In 1945, in a power struggle, the Việt Minh killed members of rival groups, such as the leader of the Constitutional Party, the head of the Party for Independence, and Ngô Đình Diệm’s brother, Ngô Ðình Khôi. Purges and killings of Trotskyists, the rival anti-Stalinist communists, have also been documented. In 1946, when Hồ traveled outside of the country, his subordinates imprisoned 25,000 non-communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee. Hundreds of political opponents were also killed in July that same year, notably members of the Viet Nam Quoc Dan Dang and the Dai Viet Quoc Dan Dang. All rival political parties were banned and local governments purged to minimise opposition later on.
Birth of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
On 2 September 1945, after Emperor
Bảo Đại’s abdication, Hồ Chí Minh read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam, under the name of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. With violence between rival Vietnamese factions and French forces increasing, the British commander,
General Sir Douglas Gracey, declared martial law. On 24 September, the Việt Minh leaders responded with a call for a general strike.
In September 1945, a force of 200,000 Chinese Nationalists arrived in Hanoi. Hồ Chí Minh made arrangement with their general, Lu Han, to dissolve the Communist Party and to hold an election which would yield a coalition government. When Chiang Kai-Shek later traded Chinese influence in Vietnam for French concessions in Shanghai, Hồ Chí Minh had no choice but to sign an agreement with France on 6 March 1946, in which Vietnam would be recognized as an autonomous state in the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. The agreement soon broke down. The purpose of the agreement was to drive out Chiang’s army from North Vietnam. Fighting broke out with the French soon after the Chinese left. Hồ Chí Minh was almost captured by a group of French soldiers led by Jean-Etienne Valluy at Việt Bắc but was able to escape.
“The last time the Chinese came, they stayed a thousand years. The French are foreigners. They are weak. Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia. But if the Chinese stay now, they will never go. As for me, I prefer to sniff French shit for five years than to eat Chinese shit for the rest of my life.”—Hồ Chí Minh, 1946
In February 1950, Hồ met with Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in Moscow after the Soviet Union recognized his government. They all agreed that China would be responsible for backing the Việt Minh. Mao’s emissary to Moscow stated in August that China planned to train 60-70,000 Việt Minh in the near future. China’s support enabled Hồ to escalate the fight against France.
According to a story told by journalist Bernard Fall, after fighting the French for several years, Hồ decided to negotiate a truce. The French negotiators arrived at the meeting site: a mud hut with a thatched roof. Inside they found a long table with chairs and were surprised to discover in one corner of the room a silver ice bucket containing ice and a bottle of good Champagne which should have indicated that Hồ expected the negotiations to succeed. One demand by the French was the return to French custody of a number of Japanese military officers (who had been helping the Vietnamese armed forces by training them in the use of weapons of Japanese origin), in order for them to stand trial for war crimes committed during World War II. Hồ replied that the Japanese officers were allies and friends whom he could not betray. Then he walked out, to seven more years of war.
In 1954, after the important defeat of French Union forces at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, France was forced to give up its empire in Indochina.
Becoming president
(left) in Hanoi, 1945]]
harbour, 1957]]
The 1954 Geneva Accords, concluded between France and the Việt Minh, provided that communist forces regroup in the North and non-communist forces regroup in the South. Hồ’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated to Hanoi and became the government of North Vietnam, a communist-led single party state. The Geneva accords also provided for a national election to reunify the country in 1956, but this provision was rejected by South Vietnam’s government and the United States. The U.S. committed itself to oppose communism in Asia beginning in 1950, when it funded 80 percent of the French effort. After Geneva, the U.S. replaced France as South Vietnam’s chief sponsor and financial backer, but there never was a treaty between the U.S. and South Vietnam.
Following the Geneva Accords, there was to be a 300-day period in which people could freely move between the zones of the two Vietnams. Some 900,000 to 1 million Vietnamese, mostly Roman Catholic, as well as many anti-communists, intellectuals, former French colonial civil servants and wealthy Vietnamese, left for South Vietnam, while a much smaller number, mostly communists, went from South to North. This was partly due to propaganda claims by a CIA mission led by Colonel Edward Lansdale that the Virgin Mary had moved South out of distaste for life under communism. Some Canadian observers claimed that some were forced by North Vietnamese authorities to remain against their will. During this era, Hồ, following the communist doctrine initiated by Stalin and Mao, started a land reform in which thousands of people accused of being landlords were summarily executed or tortured and starved in prison. With the backing of the U.S., the 1956 elections were canceled by Diem. Hồ Chí Minh's regime oversaw clumsy land reform in the North, causing thousands of deaths and starvation.
At the end of 1959, Lê Duẩn was appointed acting party leader and began sending aid to the Vietcong insurgency in South Vietnam. This represented a loss of power by Hồ, who is said to have preferred the more moderate Giáp for the position. The so called Ho Chi Minh Trail was built in 1959 to allow aid to be sent to the Vietcong through Laos and Cambodia, thus escalating the war. Duẩn was officially named party leader in 1960, leaving Hồ a figurehead president and symbol of Vietnamese Communism.
In 1963, Hồ corresponded with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in the hope of achieving a negotiated peace. This correspondence was a factor in the U.S. decision to tacitly support a coup against Diem later that year. During the mid to late 1960s, Lê Duẩn permitted 320,000 Chinese volunteers into northern North Vietnam to help build infrastructure for the country, thereby freeing a similar number of North Vietnamese forces to go south.
By early 1965, U.S. combat troops began arriving in South Vietnam to counter the threat imposed by both the local Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese troops in the border areas. As the fighting escalated, widespread bombing of North Vietnam by the U.S. Air Force and Navy escalated as Operation Rolling Thunder. Hồ remained in Hanoi for most of the duration of his final years, insisting on demanding nothing but an unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops in South Vietnam. By July, 1967, Hồ and most of the Politburo of North Vietnam met in a high-level conference where they concluded that the war was not going well for them since the American military blunted every attempt by the Peoples Army of Vietnam to make gains, and inflicted heavy casualties. But Hồ and the rest his government knew that there was one weakness, that American public opinion was not wholeheartedly in favor of the war. With Hồ's permission, the North Vietnamese army and politicians planned to execute the Tet Offensive as a gamble to take the South by force and defeat the U.S. military.
Although the offensive was a huge tactical failure which resulted in the decimation of whole units of Viet Cong, the end result was a moral victory. It broke the U.S. will to fight the war and public opinion in the U.S. turned against the government. The bombing of North Vietnam was halted, and negotiations with U.S. officials opened to discuss how to end the war.
By 1969, with negotiations still dragging on, Hồ's health began to deteriorate from multiple health problems, including diabetes among other ailments, which prevented him from participating in further active politics. However, he insisted that his forces in South Vietnam continue fighting until all of Vietnam was reunited under his government, regardless of the length of time that it might take, believing that time and politics were on his side.
Death
, Hanoi]]
With the outcome of the Vietnam War still in question, Hồ Chí Minh died at 9:47 a.m. on the morning of 2 September 1969, at his home in Hanoi at age 79 from heart failure. His embalmed body is currently on display in a mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi.
News of his death was withheld from the North Vietnamese public for nearly 48 hours due to not wanting to announce his death on the anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He was not initially replaced as president, but a "collective leadership" composed of several ministers and military leaders took over. They took control of North Vietnam to continue Hồ's goal of finishing the war with South Vietnam and uniting it under his founding government.
Six years after his death, after the communists were successful in the war against South Vietnam, several North Vietnamese tanks in Saigon displayed a poster with the following quote; "You are always marching with us, Uncle Hồ".
Legacy
The former capital of
South Vietnam, Saigon, was officially renamed
Hồ Chí Minh City on 1 May 1975 shortly after its capture which officially ended the war.
Hồ Chí Minh's embalmed body is on display in Hanoi in a granite mausoleum modeled after Lenin's Tomb in Moscow. Streams of people queue each day, sometimes for hours, to pass his body in silence. This is similar to other Communist leaders.
The Hồ Chí Minh Museum in Hanoi is dedicated to his life and work.
Chilean musician Victor Jara references Ho Chi Minh in his song "El Derecho de Vivir en Paz" (The Right to Live in Peace).
Cult of personality
In Vietnam today, he is regarded by the Communist government with god-like status in a nationwide
cult of personality, even though the government has abandoned most of his economic policies since the mid-1980s. He is still referred to as "Uncle Hồ" or just "Uncle" (
Bác) in Vietnam. Hồ's image appears on the front of every
Vietnamese currency note, and Hồ's portrait and bust is featured prominently in many of Vietnam's public buildings, classrooms and even temples, many of which are devoted to him. In 1987,
UNESCO officially recommended to member states that they "join in the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of President Hồ Chí Minh by organizing various events as a tribute to his memory", considering "the important and many-sided contribution of President Ho Chi Minh in the fields of culture, education and the arts" and that Hồ Chí Minh "devoted his whole life to the national liberation of the Vietnamese people, contributing to the common struggle of peoples for peace, national independence, democracy and social progress."
Publications about Ho's non-celibacy are banned in Vietnam. A newspaper editor in Vietnam was dismissed from her post in 1991 for publishing a story about Tang Tuyet Minh. William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000) presents much information on Ho's relationships. The government requested substantial cuts in the official Vietnamese translation of Duiker's book, which was refused. In 2002, the Vietnamese government suppressed a review of Duiker's book in the Far Eastern Economic Review.
References
Further reading
Essays
Bernard B. Fall, ed., 1967. Ho Chi Minh on Revolution and War, Selected Writings 1920-1966. New American Library.
Biography
William J. Duiker. 2000. Ho Chi Minh: A Life. Theia.
Jean Lacouture. 1968. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. Random House.
N. Khac Huyen. 1971. Vision Accomplished? The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh. The Macmillan Company.
David Halberstam. 1971. Ho. Rowman & Littlefield.
Hồ chí Minh toàn tập. NXB chính trị quốc gia
Sophie Quinn-Judge. 2003. Ho Chi Minh: The missing years. C. Hurst & Co. ISBN 1-85065-658-4
Ton That Thien, Was Ho Chi Minh a Nationalist? Ho Chi Minh and the Comintern Information and Resource Centre, Singapore, 1990
The Việt Minh, NLF and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam
William J. Duiker. 1981. The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam. Westview Press.
Hoang Van Chi. 1964. From colonialism to communism. Praeger.
Truong Nhu Tang. 1986. A Viet Cong Memoir. Vintage.
The War in Vietnam
Frances FitzGerald. 1972. . Little, Brown and Company.
American foreign policy
Christopher Hitchens. 2001. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. Verso.
Henry A. Kissinger. 1979. White House Years. Little, Brown.
Richard Nixon. 1987. No More Vietnams. Arbor House Pub Co.
External links
The Drayton Court Hotel
Obituary in The New York Times, 4 September 1969
TIME 100: Hồ Chí Minh
Hồ Chí Minh's biography
Hồ Chí Minh pictures as slides
Satellite photo of the mausoleum on Google Maps
Final Tribute to Ho Chi Minh from the Central Committee of the Vietnam Workers' Party
Bibliography: Writings of Ho Chi Minh, and Books about Him
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Category:1890 births
Category:1969 deaths
Category:People from Nghe An Province
Category:Cold War leaders
Category:Communist rulers
Category:People of the First Indochina War
Category:People of the Vietnam War
Category:Presidents of Vietnam
Category:Prime Ministers of Vietnam
Category:Vietnamese revolutionaries
Category:Vietminh members
Category:World War II resistance members
Category:Communist Party of Vietnam politicians
Category:Bandung Conference attendees
![Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Similar to Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi enjoys a rapidly-developing real estate market. [14] The metropolis's economy growth does not seem correlative to its infrastructure.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110815094917im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/41/64/e9d646bef12884488893f472924e_grande.jpg "Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Similar to Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi enjoys a rapidly-developing real estate market. [14] The metropolis's economy growth does not seem correlative to its infrastructure.")
![Binh Tay Market in Cholon Cholon (Vietnamese: Chợ Lớn, pronounced [cə̂ˀːlə̌ːn]) is the name of the Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), the largest such Chinatown district in Vietnam.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110815094917im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/78/1f/97c463435ef107a19701eb8aca16_grande.jpg "Binh Tay Market in Cholon Cholon (Vietnamese: Chợ Lớn, pronounced [cə̂ˀːlə̌ːn]) is the name of the Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), the largest such Chinatown district in Vietnam.")
![Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Similar to Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi enjoys a rapidly-developing real estate market. [14] The metropolis's economy growth does not seem correlative to its infrastructure.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110815094917im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/41/64/e9d646bef12884488893f472924e_thumb.jpg "Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Similar to Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi enjoys a rapidly-developing real estate market. [14] The metropolis's economy growth does not seem correlative to its infrastructure.")
![Binh Tay Market in Cholon Cholon (Vietnamese: Chợ Lớn, pronounced [cə̂ˀːlə̌ːn]) is the name of the Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), the largest such Chinatown district in Vietnam.](http://web.archive.org./web/20110815094917im_/http://cdn.wn.com/pd/78/1f/97c463435ef107a19701eb8aca16_thumb.jpg "Binh Tay Market in Cholon Cholon (Vietnamese: Chợ Lớn, pronounced [cə̂ˀːlə̌ːn]) is the name of the Chinese district of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon), the largest such Chinatown district in Vietnam.")
