Word: frenchness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...republic was baptized in blood. Initially, Ho and French civilian leaders in Hanoi sought to work out a compromise. Their efforts were undermined by colonialists in Paris, and for the next nine years the revolution ground on. In the spring of 1954, after a series of disasters on the battlefield and war exhaustion back home, the French were forced to leave Viet Nam. But Ho failed to secure at the conference table what his troops had won in combat. Under severe pressure from the Soviet Union, he was forced to accept control of only half of Viet...
...spoils seemed paltry at best. The French had concentrated their agricultural production in the South; crops in the North were insufficient to feed its population. Industry, indeed, had been established in the North?but the plant was minuscule: a cement factory, a brewery, a few railway-repair shops and an assortment of small machine and textile producers. Ho's major asset was coal, and its continuing abundance has provided North Viet Nam with badly needed foreign exchange. Clearly, intensive efforts were needed in the agricultural sector. Ho's first major program, accordingly, was agrarian reform, and his first mass target...
...mentor. Ho called him "my best pupil" and "my other self." Dong's striking face was once compared to "a mask carved for a museum of the revolution, in order to show just how far the peoples of Asia are capable of carrying stoicism." Dong once told a French visitor: "We Communists are romantics, too. You don't know how exciting it is to make a revolution." Dong began early, organizing student strikes in Hanoi in 1925, then escaping to China, where he first met Ho. While Ho was in a Chinese jail...
...Communist hierarchy, he is little known in the West. Nikita Khrushchev once said Le Duan (pronounced Lay Zwan) "talks, thinks and acts like a Chinese," but he is believed to be neutral, or even mildly inclined toward Moscow, in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Imprisoned for ten years by the French, he began his career late but climbed fast. When the country was divided in 1954, Hanoi withdrew its crack troops from the South but assigned Le Duan there to prepare politically for a second round. He was so effective, as the later success of the Viet Cong proved, that...
...Israel's Moshe Dayan, the most successful soldier since World War II. His chances-of succeeding Ho seem slim, however, though he could be chosen if Hanoi decided that an international reputation were required. Before joining Ho in China in 1940, Giap studied and taught law, politics and French military history. "He could draw every battle plan of Napoleon," a pupil recalled. In his guerrilla textbook, People's War, People's Army, Giap stresses mobility and cautious avoidance of enemy units capable of hitting back. Yet in 1951 he narrowly escaped dismissal after a disastrous campaign against...