Word: south
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
...rule of the French, British and Dutch. Ironically, nationalism was less a local product than a European import. As Gunnar Myrdal pointed out in Asian Drama: "It was with the intellectual weapons forged in Europe, where liberalism had become the middle-class ideology, that the liberation movements rose in South Asia and fought their way to a vision, and later the realization, of full independence...
Imbued with the nationalist ideals of his father, Ho finished his schooling, taught briefly in the South and finally, about 1914, shipped out to Europe. For several years, he held a series of odd jobs, including a spell as a pastry cook under the famed French Chef Escoffier at London's Carlton Hotel. In Paris, Ho worked as a gardener and photo retoucher. In 1917, so one account goes, he worked his way across the Atlantic as a merchant seaman, visiting New York, Boston and perhaps San Francisco. One source says that Ho worked briefly as a waiter...
...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 Nam. In the South, a pro-Western government was set up?with heavy American assistance...
...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...