They also acquired, and again courtesy of French lessons, a leader of genius who had much the same understanding as Mao had had, as to how technique from the West could be used to subvert the West. The Comintern had its adventurers, men and women who went from language to language and country to country stirring up trouble. Ho Chi Minh was the strangest. He started out with the usual twixt-and-between origins of so many Comintern stalwarts: his father, son of a concubine, nevertheless a mandarin; his schooling, from a French Foreign Legionary with a foul temper; an escape, as stoker, to France, where there was a spell of market-gardening, and then London, where he assisted the great Escoffier in making pastry for the Savoy. In the First World War the French shifted 100,000 Annamites to dig trenches, and Ho picked up Marxism from two Hungarian-Jewish brothers who ran a hostel. The French socialists split in 1920 as to whether they should link up with the victorious Communists in Russia. Ho attended the conference that decided in favour, and signed the document. Then it was the Oriental Workers University in Moscow, where the Comintern taught its people how to take over countries, what were the levers of real power. Ho then moved east — Bangkok as a Buddhist monk, Hong Kong as a cigarette-seller. There, the police picked him up, and he had to be released when appeal was made on his behalf by a prominent British left-wing figure, Sir Stafford Cripps. In 1941, when the Japanese invaded Vietnam, he walked back in. This extremely thin, ascetic, chain-smoking figure with his TB and malaria, his multiple pseudonyms (of which Ho Chi Minh was one, and meant ‘bringer of light’) soon met another clever product of French Marxism, Vo Nguyen Giap, who turned out to have a superb talent for underground warfare. In May 1941, in a small hut, with bamboo tables, they staged the ‘eighth plenum’ of the Vietnamese Communist Party. Ho, chairman, sat on a wooden box and drafted the introductory statements, which are not inflammatory reading. The new organization, essentially popular-front Communist, had the name Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh, or Vietnamese Independence League. It was shortened to ‘Vietminh’ and was then known as ‘Vietcong’.
In 1945, when the Japanese collapsed, Ho Chi Minh could claim quite simply to be the leader of a nationalist resistance. Giap had organized resistance cells among the peasantry, five to a cell, and, in accordance with the usual practice, did not reveal cells’ existence to other cells. They just took their orders from an unknown source — that committee meeting in a bamboo hut. Having used non-Communists in the resistance, Ho and Giap set about eliminating them when the Japanese surrendered (including all Trotskyists, who had illusions that there might be a ‘native’ revolution independent of Moscow). Ho knew very well that help from Moscow would be decisive, but here, as a pawn in Moscow’s game, he needed to be careful. After all, the French were far more important, as potential allies, than any Vietnamese Communists and until 1947, when the Communists were expelled from the Paris government, Ho was required to co-operate with the French. They were very clumsy, not appreciating that their end of empire was upon them, and Ho gained allies. In 1949 China became Communist, and help was forthcoming from that quarter. It gave the Vietminh a commanding lead. By 1952 the French were facing an extremely difficult war, with brittle allies and uncertain American support; in May 1954 they lost a final battle at Dien Bien Phu, in the north. No doubt if Ho had been left to his own devices, he would have gone on to conquer the south. However, in 1954 the Soviets, anxious to spare France in case she signed up to the European Defence Union, pushed for negotiations at Geneva, and a South Vietnamese state came into existence. Ho’s North Vietnam established itself in the usual way, with a million refugees, mainly Catholic, fleeing from collectivized agriculture and the one-party militarized state. There were 100,000 executions.
Saigon, the Southern capital, was then a backwater of French colonial architecture, with its Hôtel Caravelle on the rue Catinat, where Graham Greene talked Pascal to despairing French officers in the stink of rotting vegetation in the marsh heat. It was not at all well organized, and there were battles of some depth between Buddhists and Catholics, while protection rackets pretended to be religions, and the drugs trade flourished. The picture was further confused because there were still French influences, and the refugees from the North made everything difficult. Some wished to take land, and that opened up a dimension of the Vietnam imbroglio which made it, for some academics, romantic: like Cuba, Vietnam was supposed to be having a ‘peasant war’. This was a situation well understood by Ho, perhaps via Mao, but certainly through his Comintern background. It was not so much a matter of class confict between poor peasant and rich peasant, but between poor peasants and their creditors; besides, within and between villages there were generally deeply felt and sometimes hereditary grievances that could be exploited by Communist guerrillas who knew the ground. By the later fifties, guerrillas from the North were infiltrating the South, carrying out attacks on landowners and government servants. As ever, the Communists presented at least an organization, whereas the Saigon regime, preoccupied with internal fighting, was helpless; it appealed to the Americans.
Kennedy’s advisers, in 1960, were unanimously in favour of giving help and in 1961 7,000 Americans appeared, giving instruction in ‘statebuilding’, i.e. teaching the Vietnamese to be democratic in the American manner. Beefy, gold-braided Americans now had to deal with the South Vietnamese ruler, Ngo Dinh Diem, and found him very difficult: an austere, chaste figure, given to lecturing them about a fashionable French Catholic substitute ideology, ‘personalism’. He had taken over the insufferable loftiness of the French higher administrative style, and he had worked out that the way to avoid awkward questions was to talk and talk. He talked and talked, and the power at court was his sister-in-law, who banned divorce. Still, the Americans had had to deal with tiresome Asiatics in the past; these were not to get in the way. Strangely enough, it was only Johnson who had his doubts: ‘I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out.’ De Gaulle (‘a rotten country’) also advised him against going in, but the academic advisers were all adamant.