A Vietnam Vet Researches The History of Ho Chi Minh

Author: 
SNS
Locality: 

"We were wrong, terribly wrong." wrote Robert McNamara about the US war against Vietnam. McNamara had been the Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Altogether 7 presidents, Wilson, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johson, Nixon
and Ford would be involved in the bloody fiasco which claimed so many Vietnamese and American lives.

Ho Chi Minh was born in 1880. In 1913 Ho Chi Minh, father of Vietnam, worked in a Boston's Parker house Hotel as a baker. From later in 1913 til 1919 Ho lived in the UK, and in France from 1919 til 1923. During the Versailles peace talksafter World War I, Ho who had been publishing a newspaper, led an Indochina delegation petitioning for recognition of the right of
Vietnam to independence. The Vietnamese were ignored. Indochina (indo means south) was a name assigned by colonizers. Ho wrote to President Woodrow Wilson asking help for the
Vietnamese people. Wilson in the US had been a notorious racist, ending President Theodore Roosevelt's beginning reforms re African Americans. He would not even give Ho a meeting at Versailles.

Ho published that he did not like the use of English words
in French and opposed what he called Franglais (a combination of
French and English. That brought him to the attention of a Soviet
Communist who invited him to Russia. in 1925 and 1926 Ho lived in
Canton, China. Ho could not return to Vietnam because he was known
as a leader of the resistance and would have been arrested. Throughout the 1930's he worked for
Vietnamese independence in different countries, and was finally able to return to Vietnam in 1941 because the French had been invaded in their country by Nazis.

He had an agreement with President Roosevelt during
World War II that if the Vietnamese fought to rid that country of
the Japanese, the US in turn would sponsor an end to colonial domination. But
Roosevelt died, and subsequent presidents Truman and Eisenhower did
not honor the contract.

France expanded its presence in Vietnam in 1945 and again controlled the country. The abdication of Emperor Bảo Đại happened on 2 September 1945. Hồ Chí Minh then read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam. There was much resistance by the Vietnamese to continued French presence which would continue to build until 1954. One technique the Vietnamese used was 'to smoke out French positions, using straw bundled with chili pepper.' (Source: Wikipedia)

In 1954 both sides had increased their military. The French had 15,000 in the North near Laos while there were 50,000 Viet Minh troops led by the brilliant strategist General Vo Nguyen Gap.
In May of 1954 the battle of Dien Bien Phu was decided in favor
of the Vietnamese. As a result Vietnam was divided into North
and South. (Even today a similar division in Korea exists.)

Meanwhile Truman had until 1952 funded 80% of the French military
expenses as they fought to reestablish their colonial domination
of Vietnam.(Source: a paper by the University of Virginia Miller
Center.) Next came Eisenhower. The Buffalo News wrote "Ike took a fatal turn, setting America on course for disaster. His administration forged the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO), committing the United States to protect a South Vietnam that was not even supposed to exist. Ike boosted Ngo Dinh Diem into power, backed his refusal to hold the 1956 elections and then pumped massive aid into building a new nation around him." The News also reported that a Geneva recommendation that Vietnam hold elections was supported publicly by Eisenhower but privately he sabotaged them, knowing the popular Ho would win them.

Historically Vietnam was abused by China but accepted aid from
China after 1949. The Vietnamese were much organized militarily
than the nonviolent Buddhist monks of Tibet who were overrun by
China in the 50's.

Kennedy followed Eisenhower. "Kennedy expanded military aid to the government of President Ngô Đình Diệm, increased the number of U.S. military advisors in South Vietnam, and reduced the pressure that had been exerted on Diệm during the Eisenhower Administration to reform his government and broaden his political base" Wikipedia
Lyndon Johnson was the first to send combat troops, on March 8 of 1965 dispatching 3500 Marines to Vietnam. Johnson continued his
escalation, and Nixon reached a peak of 543,000 in April of 1969.
After Nixon resigned, Ford too prosecuted the war which the US lost
in 1975.

A 1965 NY Times Sunday magazine article on
Ho Chi Minh convinced many Americans to join the peace movement's
opposition to the Vietnam War.

Ho died after a heart attack in 1969, at the age of 79. He would not
live to see the Vietnamese victory of 1975, but Vietnamese vehicles
announced his presence with the soldiers.

When the Vietnam veteran returned home, he began writing a defense of the US in Vietnam, but the more he read of the history of Vietnam the more he agreed with Secretary McNamara. In defense of Kennedy, the president had told his inner circle that upon his reelection in 1964 he would withdrawn the US from Vietnam. It was one of several reasons he was assassinated.

Palm trees grow up through tank roofs. Time passes. Vietnamese
and American soldiers forgive each other. Some do something more
dicciult. They forgive themselves.

https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/educational-resources/kennedy-commitment
https://buffalonews.com/news/want-to-place-blame-for-vietnam-start-with-eisenhower/article_1e6bfcab-2fe1-5482-b79b-cdde83261032.html
https://nytimes.com The Times Machine is a paid service
which includes a 1965 article in its Sunday magazine, a biography
of Ho Chi Minh.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?160224-1/ho-chi-minh-life
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ho-Chi-Minh
https://www.history.com/topics/france/battle-of-dien-bien-phu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Minh#In_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1961_in_the_Vietnam_War

Add new comment

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
To prevent automated spam submissions leave this field empty.
CAPTCHA
This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.
Image CAPTCHA
Enter the characters shown in the image.