Ho Chi Minh

Ho Chi Minh (1890?–1969), international Communist and president of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV).The son of a scholar‐official, Ho was born in Nghe An, central Vietnam, and went to a Franco‐Vietnamese school. He moved to France in 1911 and thereafter used over 100 aliases.

A sailor for two years, Ho worked between Le Havre, London, and New York. During World War I, he lived in London, working as a domestic. Back in France, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party in 1920, and, in Moscow from 1923, a Comintern (Communist International) expert on colonial and Asian questions. During long periods in China Ho was instrumental in forming the proto‐Communist Vietnamese Youth League in Canton (1925) and the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong (1930).

Ho returned to Vietnam in 1941 and emerged at the head of the Vietnamese Independence League (Viet Minh). Using the code name “Lucius,” he supplied anti‐Japanese intelligence to American authorities in Kunming, China, in 1944–45. As he led the Viet Minh to power in Vietnam in the August 1945 revolution, Ho's attempts to gain American support against a resumption of French rule continued, but failed. During the thirty‐year war for independence against French rule and American intervention, he remained president of the DRV until his death. Although he wanted to be cremated, the myth of the “Uncle‐President” became so central to Vietnamese political culture that Ho's body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum.
[See also Vietnam War: Causes; Vietnam War: Military and Diplomatic Course.]

Bibliography

Jean Lacouture , Ho Chi Minh, A Political Biography, 1968.
Charles Fenn , Ho Chi Minh: A Biographical Introduction, 1973.

Greg Lockhart