'You Are Always With Us, Uncle Ho'

In the patriotic struggle against U.S. aggression, we shall have indeed to undergo more difficulties and sacrifices, but we are sure to win total victory. This is an absolute certainty.

--The Last Testament of Ho Chi Minh, 1969

As the chilling wail of sirens sounded over Hanoi last week, a radio announcer quickly reassured his listeners that U.S. bombers were not on their way. "Don't run for the air-raid shelters," he said. "Let us celebrate the great victory." The citizens of Hanoi needed no encouragement. Normally the most staid and restrained of people, they exploded in an all-day celebration that rivaled Rio's carnival in exuberance.

The timing was almost perfect.

News of Saigon's fall reached Hanoi at 9:30 on the morning before May Day. Within minutes, traffic snarled to a halt as drivers hopped out of trucks and autos to join in street dances. Firecrackers exploded everywhere, and bells rang joyously. Jubilant factory workers and office employees, teachers and pupils poured into the center of town. From a huge poster high on the fac,ade of the Central Information Hall, overlooking the confluence of the city's main thoroughfares, Ho Chi Minn, clad in the green fatigues of the Viet Nam People's Army, smiled benignly on the joyful crowds. The big letters on the poster read: YOU ARE ALWAYS MARCHING WITH US, UNCLE HO.

Indeed he was. The final assault on Saigon was code-named the Ho Chi Minh Campaign. When Saigon collapsed, it was promptly rechristened Ho Chi Minh city. In the streets of rejoicing Hanoi, the most frequently exchanged greeting was "Ho Chi Minh muon nam" (Long live Ho Chi Minh).

Propaganda bombast aside, Ho Chi Minh, dead or alive, provided the crucial element in North Viet Nam's astonishing victory. No statesman now alive, except Yugoslavia's Tito and China's Mao, has so shaped his country's destiny. With his skill, cunning, sense of history and unshakable will, he turned a peasant and impoverished country into a force that exhibited fervor and zeal rarely matched in this century.

To a remarkable degree, Ho's life prepared him for his mission. He was born in 1890 in the province of Nghe An in what then was part of France's sprawling Far Eastern empire, and today is North Viet Nam. According to local myth, "a man born in Nghe An will oppose anything." His father, a magistrate, lost his post because of his links to the anti-French movement. His mother, who died when Ho was ten, once was arrested for stealing French arms for the rebels.

After studies in Hue and Saigon, Ho worked his way as a cabin boy aboard a ship to Europe. There, supporting himself with odd jobs (pastry cook at London's Carlton Hotel, photo retoucher in Paris), he became enamored of Communism as the means of overthrowing his country's imperialist burden.

By 1923 Ho was a student at the Toilers of the East University in Moscow. Next he went to China. After Chiang Kai-shek turned on the Communists and drove them underground in 1927, Ho spent the next 13 years shuttling between Moscow and China--with stopovers in Chiang's prisons. Behind bars, Ho honed his talent for writing poetry and began developing an avuncular manner that carefully masked his guile and ruthlessness. On occasion he would betray rival nationalist leaders to the French police and then donate the reward to the party.

At the outbreak of World War II, Ho returned to Indochina to organize a resistance movement against the invading Japanese. Toward the end of the war, he courted American intelligence officers in the hope that the U.S. would plead his cause. As Japan collapsed, he proclaimed an independent republic of Viet Nam, but the French, determined to regain the empire, refused to deal with him. After nine years of war, Ho's Viet Minh guerrillas bled France into exhaustion. But at the 1954 Geneva Conference, he was rewarded with only the northern half of the country.

The U.S., which Ho long thought of as a potential friend, backed the South Vietnamese regime and automatically became his new enemy. He completely outperformed Washington in the manipulation of world opinion, making the U.S. appear as a brutal oppressor while never admitting the aggressions of his own army against the South. In the end, the U.S. did what he always said it should do--go home.

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