'Half Lenin, Half Gandhi'
                                      Date: October 15, 2000
                                     Byline: By Frances FitzGerald
                                  HO CHI MINH, by William J. Duiker.

 Confucian humanist and Communist revolutionary, the architect of 
 Vietnamese independence and of the successful struggle against the
 French, the United States and the Saigon government, Ho Chi Minh
 was one of the most influential political leaders of the 20th century. 
 Yet even after his death in 1969 -- and for all the years the American
 troops fought in Vietnam -- he remained a shadowy figure, his life 
 and career shrouded in myth and in the myriad guises he assumed 
 during his many years in exile and in the maquis of Vietnam. As the
 French journalist Jean Lacouture wrote in his 1967 biography, 
 ''Everything known about Ho's life prior to 1941 is fragmentary, 
 controversial and approximate.'' Thanks to William J. Duiker's
 magnificent new biography, this is no longer the case.

 A retired professor of history who served as a United States foreign 
 service officer in Saigon in the mid-1960's, Duiker spent over 20 
 years gleaning new information from interviews and from archives
 in Vietnam, China, Russia and the United States. Other Western
 historians have come closer to Ho as a person and to the cultural
 context of his revolution, but Duiker has managed not only to fill
 in the missing pieces of Ho's life but to provide the best account 
 of Ho as a diplomat and a strategist.

 The Vietnam War -- as we call it -- was a watershed in 20th-century 
 American history, and we assume it was one in the history of Vietnam.
 But as Duiker's biography reminds us, the major problem for the
 Vietnamese, as for many others on this planet, was how to respond to
 the colonial power and the destruction of traditional society. Ho Chi
 Minh dedicated his life to this task.

 Ho's childhood lay in a world lost in time. Born in 1890, just five years 
 after the French consolidated their control over all of Vietnam, Ho -- 
 whose given name was Nguyen Tat Thanh -- grew up in Nghe An
 province, on the narrow and mountainous coast of north-central
 Vietnam. One of the most beautiful regions of the country, it was
 also one of the poorest and most rebellious. Ho's father, Nguyen Sinh
 Sac, was a scholar from a peasant family who managed to work his way
 up through the imperial examination system. Under his tutelage, Ho
 studied the classical Chinese texts that taught governance as the Dao 
 of Confucius. According to Duiker, Sac was well acquainted with the
 scholars Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh, the most important 
 Vietnamese nationalists in the first two decades of the century. Like 
 many of the patriotic  scholar-gentry, Sac refused to serve at court 
 during a time of national humiliation, and by 1905 it had become
 clear to him that the imperial system, preserved by the French, was
 inadequate to cope with the new realities. That year he sent Ho off to
 a Franco-Vietnamese school with the admonition of the 15th-century
 scholar Nguyen Trai that one must understand the enemy in order
 to defeat him.

 When Ho entered the prestigious National Academy in Hue in 1907,
 he was already a rebel. The following year he was thrown out of school
 for lending support to peasants demonstrating against high agricultural
 taxes and corvee labor. Pursued by the police, he traveled south, taking
 jobs where he could. In 1911 he signed on as an assistant cook on a 
 steamer bound for France, under the name of Ba -- the first of his 50
 or more aliases. ''I wanted to become acquainted with French civilization
 to see what meaning lay in those words,'' he later told a Soviet journalist.

 Ho's travels took him to ports in Asia and Africa, to New York and London.
 He stayed for some time in New York, working as a laborer and going to 
 meetings of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Trust in Harlem.
 In London he landed a job as a pastry cook under Auguste Escoffier at the 
 Carlton Hotel. Toward the end of World War I he settled in Paris, the heart
 of the French empire. While earning his living as a photo retoucher, he
 formed an association of Vietnamese emigres and denounced France's
 treatment of its colonies at gatherings of the French Socialist Party. In 
 1919 he presented a petition to the Allied governments at the Versailles 
 conference, asking them to apply President Woodrow Wilson's principle 
 of self-determination to Vietnam. Only the French police paid attention
 to the petition and its author, ''Nguyen Ai Quoc'' (''Nguyen the Patriot''). 
 They followed Ho everywhere, though ''Nguyen the Patriot'' was a
 penniless scribe, a frail young man in ill-fitting suits who cut a 
 Chaplinesque figure.

 Ho came to Marxism in the summer of 1920, via Lenin's ''Theses on the 
 National and Colonial Questions.'' He had read Marxist works before, but, as 
 Duiker explains, Lenin's arguments about the connection between
 capitalism and imperialism and about the importance of nationalist 
 movements in Asia and Africa to world revolution struck him forcefully, 
 setting him ''on a course that transformed him from a simple patriot 
 with socialist leanings into a Marxist revolutionary.'' When the French 
 Socialist Party split over the issue of joining Lenin's Third International 
 at its 1921 congress, he became a founding member of the French 
 Communist Party. Still writing as Nguyen the Patriot, he argued not 
 only that Communism could be applied to Asia but that it was in 
 keeping with Asian traditions based on ideas of community and 
 social equality.

 For three years Ho pressed the new party for action on the colonial 
 question, but the French Communists proved to be ''Eurocentric,'' 
 as Duiker delicately puts it, so in 1924 he went to Moscow at the
 invitation of the Comintern. The Soviet leadership was, however, 
 preoccupied by its own internal struggles, and it took Ho almost a 
 year to persuade officials to send him to southern China, where an 
 uneasy alliance between the Chinese Nationalists and the Communists 
 would permit him to begin organizing the Vietnamese.

 Ho Chi Minh spent the next 15 years working for revolution in Vietnam
 as an agent of the Comintern. According to Duiker's original and highly
 detailed account of this period, Ho's emphasis on nationalism and his
 patient, pragmatic approach to organizing often put him at odds with
 Moscow. Yet he singlemindedly pursued his own agenda, waiting out
 periods of adversity and seizing opportunities as they arose. In
 Canton, Ho published a journal, created the Vietnamese Revolutionary
 Youth League and set up a training institute that attracted students
 from all over Vietnam. Along with Marxism-Leninism he taught his own
 brand of revolutionary ethics: thrift, prudence, respect for learning, 
 modesty and generosity -- virtues that, as Duiker notes, had far more
 to do with Confucian morality than with Leninism. To his students Ho 
 seemed to embody these qualities, and the teaching of his precepts
 later became a distinguishing feature of the Vietnamese revolution.

 In 1927, when Chiang Kai-shek began to crack down on the Chinese left,
 the institute was disbanded and Ho, pursued by the police, fled to Hong
 Kong and from there to Moscow. He was sent by the Comintern to 
 France and then, at his request, to Thailand, where he spent two years
 organizing Vietnamese expatriates. In 1930 he returned to China and 
 worked as he could while hiding out from the Chinese police and the 
 French Srete. Arrested in Hong Kong by the British, he spent a year
 in jail, and had once more to escape to Moscow. But there was little help 
 to be found there. In the midst of Stalin's purges the Comintern
 repudiated Lenin's theses, insisted that the Asian Communist parties
 pursue the wholly unrealistic goal of a international proletarian revolution
 and ordered the Vietnamese to form an ''Indochinese'' Communist Party
 -- though the word signified nothing more nor less than the French
 colonial project in the region. Ho was personally criticized, investigated
 and sidelined.

 In 1938 Ho's fortunes changed. With the rise of Nazi Germany the Soviets 
 changed their line on nationalism and called for an alliance of ''progressive
 forces'' to oppose fascism. At the same time, Chiang Kai-shek created a 
 united front with the Communist Party to resist Japanese aggression. 
 His strategy vindicated, Ho returned to head the Vietnamese movement, 
 and with the Japanese invasion of Indochina, he created a nationalis
 front of workers and peasants for the independence of Vietnam, the 
 Vietminh. In 1941 he re-entered the country he had not seen in 30 years
 to set up a guerrilla base in  the mountains.

 In August 1945, three months after the Japanese deposed the Vichy
 French administration and just  two days after the Japanese surrender
 to the Allies, the Vietminh moved into Hanoi, and amid cheering 
 crowds Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent country.
 But that was just the beginning.

 Ho Chi Minh did not want war with the French. He did everything he could
 to prevent it. He courted United States support through the O.S.S. officers
 he had cultivated during the war -- going so far as to offer the United 
 States a naval base at Cam Ranh Bay. He created a coalition government,
 reined in the hotheads and agreed to accept a French military presence
 and membership in the French Union so long as the French agreed to
 the eventual goal of Vietnamese independence. But after the French
 humiliations in World War II even the French Socialists could not accept 
 the idea of giving up the colonies. So at the beginning of 1947 Ho 
 went back to the maquis. He had told his friend Jean Sainteny, ''You will
 kill ten of my men while we will kill one of yours, but you will be the
 ones to end up exhausted.'' And so it was.

 During the French war, as during World War II, Ho and his companions
 lived in caves or thatched shelters in the mountains, moving frequently
 to avoid French patrols, often hungry, often suffering from malaria
 or dysentery. In 1954 the Vietminh won a decisive victory at Dien Bien
 Phu, but still the war dragged on. Mao Zedong had begun to provide
 the poorly equipped Vietminh with training and war materiel, and the 
 United States had begun to finance the French war effort. The great
 powers were now heavily involved in Vietnam, and in 1954 they met
 in Geneva to negotiate a settlement.

 Under pressure from Beijing and Moscow, the Vietminh agreed to a 
 cease-fire and to the division of the country into two regroupment
 zones at the 17th parallel. By the terms of the accord an election was
 to be held in two years to unify the country. However, Beijing and
 Moscow did not guarantee the election, the United States did not
 sign the agreement and, soon after the conference ended, Secretary
 of State John Foster Dulles announced that the United States would 
 begin to foster a non-Communist state in the South. In the view of 
 Vietnam's revolutionaries, the Geneva Conference was the first step
 on the road to the second Indochina war.

 In Hanoi, Ho lived almost as simply as he had in the maquis. Refusing to 
 install himself in the governor general's residence, he inhabited the 
 gardener's cottage and then a house on stilts beside a pond. He was
 President of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, but the title he preferred
 was Uncle Ho. Often he could be seen in his worn khaki uniform and 
 sandals talking with peasants or groups of delighted children. To many 
 foreign observers there seemed to be more than a touch of artifice in 
 his self-presentation. After all, he was a sophisticate who charmed his
 interlocutors in many languages and a man not immune to praise or
 the love of women. (While in China he had, Duiker tells us, been married
 twice, and in Hanoi he fathered a child.) Duiker does not explain Ho's
 play-acting, but then there is much about Confucianism that eludes
 him. In the Confucian tradition, the emperor must provide a model
 of correct behavior. By rejecting imperial extravagance, Ho was 
 demonstrating the Dao of his revolution to his countrymen, its break
 with the past.

 In the late 1950's and early 60's Ho spent much of his time abroad engaged 
 in the delicate negotiations required to bring the Soviet Union as well as 
 China to the aid of his government as the Sino-Soviet split deepened. Bu
 his role was increasingly a ceremonial one. Le Duan, a southerner who
 had spent many years in French prisons, had seized the reins of power 
 and proceeded to marginalize Ho and his long-term companions -- 
 among them Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap. Duiker suggests that Ho's decline
 in authority began during the brutal land reform campaign of 1955-56, 
 at a time of rising Chinese influence over the revolution. According to 
 Duiker, Ho was not directly involved in the campaign, but ''his prestige 
 as an all-knowing and all-caring leader had been severely damaged.''

 During the early 1960's Ho warned his colleagues against launching a 
 premature uprising in South Vietnam and against overemphasizing the
 military struggle. He wanted to avoid bringing the United States into
 the war, and until the Johnson administration began bombing the North,
 he remained hopeful that Washington would withdraw its support for
 the regime in Saigon. But it was not to be. When American troops
 began to arrive in Vietnam in 1965, Ho was a 75-year-old man and
 no longer in charge of his government.

 ''Ho Chi Minh was half Lenin and half Gandhi,'' Duiker writes. Ho always
 sought to achieve his objectives without resort to military force and,
 unlike some of his colleagues, he had a clear-eyed view of international
 and domestic realities, a flexible, pragmatic approach and the patience
 and  subtlety to seek diplomatic solutions. Unfortunately, as Duiker 
 might have added, neither the French nor the American leadership 
 had the sense to respond in kind.

Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company.