Word: minh
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Eventually, a single leader is likely to emerge. As U.S. Analyst Douglas Pike puts it: "They'll agree not to get grabby. But I have no faith in collective leadership. They will all claim the mantle of Ho Chi Minh, and they will start to get grabby...
...MINH held on to his little mysteries very skillfully indeed, and to much larger ones as well. The face that he presented to the world was that of an avuncular, slightly shabby poet, yet he was a dedicated, often ruthless Communist for half a century. He impressed most visitors with his gentleness, but no man can hold together a Communist Party for nearly 40 years, as he did, without an iron hand. He seemed fragile as a dried leaf, but he endured privation, prison and grueling pressures, and still survived for nearly eight decades...
...Minh's life was dedicated to the creation of a unified Viet Nam, free from foreign control, and the 19 million people of his tortured land suffered mightily from his total devotion to that vision. Even so, they affectionately knew him as "Bac Ho" (Uncle Ho). So did many in the South. No national leader alive today has stood so stubbornly for so long before the enemy's guns. His death will have inevitable and far-reaching repercussions in North Viet Nam, in Asia and beyond...
There were few dramatic successes for the Viet Minh during the war years, and Ho, on a journey back into China, was jailed by a Nationalist warlord. He spent a year in prison, finally won his freedom and promptly began seeking support from American elements then in South China. He got in touch with an extraordinary number of U.S. officers, skillfully promoting his cause. His growing reputation led the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (forerunner of the CIA) to make contact with Ho in 1945 in the jungles along the China-Viet Nam border. Under the code name "Lucius...
...returned to Viet Nam, then occupied by the Japanese, for the first time in 30 years. He was accompanied by Dong and a young ex-teacher named Vo Nguyen Giap, now the North's military leader. A few months later, Ho founded an independence league called the Viet Minh, and established a base area conveniently near the Chinese border. Ostensibly, the front was intended to lead the anti-Japanese resistance; in fact, it was a sword at the throats of the French...