Word: ho
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Favorable Moment. How much has Ho been an international Communist revolutionary? How much has he been a patriot using the revolution as a handy tool? Obviously he has been both. Lacouture examines both sides of the case and settles for calling him an "ingenious empiricist," a "highly unusual practitioner of Marxism," a master strategist of the "favorable moment." But there is not much doubt that the autonomy of Viet Nam has been the one uncompromising goal of Ho's long, tenacious career...
Lacouture portrays Ho in the years after his release as a tough moderate. World War IFs end had brought 200,000 Nationalist Chinese troops into Indo-China as an occupation force. Ho, "resisting the temptation to play the romantic revolutionary," in Lacouture's words, cagily started negotiating with the French to lever the Chinese...
...better to sniff the French dung for a while than eat China's all our lives," he is said to have remarked at the time. But even before Dienbienphu, Ho had spotted "American imperialism," in Lenin's classically Communist thinking, as the "main adversary...
...first direct encounter with U.S. power in an anteroom at the Versailles peace conference is now, 50 years later, fighting a mighty U.S. army to a stalemate in Viet Nam. Just what gave him his enduring tenacity, this book cannot completely explain. To his followers, he is "Uncle Ho" when he writes burbling public letters to children: "You are rejoicing, and your Uncle Ho rejoices with you. Guess why? First, because I love you . . . '" To his political enemies, many of them dead, thanks to his ruthless purges, he has been a southern Maoist whose authority "issued from the muzzle...
...After Ho, what? Lacouture is not encouraging to those who think that Ho's lifelong dream of a united, independent Viet Nam will die with him. Once, when temporarily out of the country, Ho was asked if he worried about what his subordinates might be up to. "What could they possibly do without me?" he answered serenely. "It was I who made them." Being so fashioned in his image, Lacouture thinks, Ho's heirs can dream no other dream...