The Historical Ho

HO CHI MINH: A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY by Jean Lacouture. 313 pages. Random House. $5.95.

For most of his career, Ho Chi Minh has been playing a kind of political character part: power disguised as innocence. A harmless-looking old party with a ridiculous beard and a peasant's jacket, the leader of North Viet Nam conjures up for many people the image of "a Franciscan Gandhi" or "Chaplin at his most affecting." So says Le Monde Journalist Jean Lacouture, who adds: "This is a man so fragile that he seems to survive only by the sheer force of his imagination."

The U.S. knows better. Not since Mao Tse-tung managed to pass himself off as an agrarian reformer has power masqueraded in such an artful impostor. A Viet Nam-watcher for two decades (Vietnam: Between Two Truces) and a student of other power styles (De Gaulle), Biographer Lacouture has the difficult job of estimating a man who has made a career out of being underestimated and who wears ambiguity as practically his uniform. No wonder Ho and the book occasionally seem to dissolve into mist. But the tracking is never dull as Lacouture chases down his Asian escape artist.

Wandering Wraith. Ho was born in French Indo-China, not far from the Gulf of Tonkin, 78 years ago. His father was a celebrated scholar and minor official--following the mandarin tradition--in the imperial puppet government. He was fired because the French suspected him of "patriotic" sympathies. Embittered, he used to declare that "being a mandarin is the ultimate form of slavery." He went on to eke out an existence as a nomadic marketplace storyteller, scribe and sometime bonesetter, but he somehow had contrived to send his son to schools in Hue and Saigon. At the age of 21, Ho signed on as a mess boy on a France-bound liner. He was not to set foot in his homeland again for 30 years.

For two years, he barnstormed among the world's ports, then came ashore in London. There he washed dishes, cooked under Escoffier, and met Fabian socialists; he moved on to Paris in 1917. "The French left," says Lacouture, turned "an angry patriot into a modern revolutionary." Setting himself up as a retoucher of photographs and a painter of "Chinese antiquities" manufactured in France, Ho changed his name from Nguyen Tat Thanh to Nguyen Ai Quoc--"Nguyen the patriot." A wraithlike figure "always armed with a book" (Zola, Shakespeare, Dickens, as well as Marx), he was nicknamed, unaccountably, "little M. Ferdinand."

Withdrawal & Retreat. Ho began to build his legend by demanding an audience with Woodrow Wilson himself at the Versailles peace conference. He was, says Lacouture, "unceremoniously shown the door." Not long after, he joined the French Communist Party and began to fire journalistic broadsides at French colonials. "The disreputable old fogy," he is said to have written of one officer, "is leaving Morocco so that he can nurse his 'syph' in France."

Apprenticeship served, Ho commenced his indefatigable career as "traveling salesman of revolution." In 1925 he was in Canton, setting up the Association of Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth. Three years later, wearing the robes of a Buddhist monk, he turned up in Bangkok, organizing cells in the pagodas. Everywhere he went, he left behind a network of indoctrination schools and newspapers.

Every prophet-leader has his period of withdrawal and retreat. Ho's came when he got out of a Hong Kong prison with an aggravated case of TB. He spent the next four years (1934-38) in Russia, savoring recuperation as a "scholar recluse." In 1941, he slipped back into his homeland. For him, the return marked a kind of reincarnation, and after setting up the League for Vietnamese Independence (nicknamed the Viet Minh), he renamed himself Ho Chi Minh ("Ho who enlightens").

His drive for enlightenment was momentarily interrupted when he incautiously crossed back into China and was promptly clapped into jail by the local warlord. Often chained and sometimes yoked, he languished there for 15 months until his colleagues wangled his release. He seized the chance to write 100 poems in classical Chinese, including one verse that compared man to a kernel of rice polished white and hard by the pestle.

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 out.

"It is 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."

Actor as Director. It is stunning to think that a man who had his 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 of a rifle." Lacouture's final summation, which is something of a copout: in political role playing, an actor finally becomes the sum of all his favorite parts.

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.

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