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Professor WILLIAM DUIKER (Author, "Ho Chi Minh: A Life"): Ho Chi
Minh, of course, to most Americans was the leader of the Vietnamese
revolutionary movement, a movement, of course, that caused us enormous
difficulty for 15, 20 years. I think most Americans see him that way.
I think to the rest of the world, he's also--for many people living in
Asia, Africa, Latin America, he's a symbol of the national liberation
movement. And, of course, within the--what used to be known as the
Communist world, he was one of the international figures of that
movement, along with Stalin and Mao Tse-tung.

LAMB: Was he a nationalist or Communist or both?

Prof. DUIKER: He was both. He started out, certainly, with strong
patriotic leanings, but in the course of his early maturity, he became
convinced that capitalism was a system that was very oppressive
to--not only to peoples like the Vietnamese, but to the working class
around the world. And he became--while in France, he became a
convinced Marxist and stayed that till the end of his days.

LAMB: What year did he die?

Prof. DUIKER: 1969.

LAMB: How old was he?

Prof. DUIKER: Seventy-nine years old.

LAMB: And what did he die of?

Prof. DUIKER: I think he died probably, like many people, of a
combination of things. But, bas--basically, a form of congestive
heart failure.

LAMB: When we were there in '92, we had some video shot of the
mausoleum, and I want you to talk through why this kind of a
mausoleum. Have you been there?

Prof. DUIKER: Yes, I have.

LAMB: It'll be on the screen in just a second. And what--what's the
origin of this?

Prof. DUIKER: In fact, the--the origin of it has to go back to Ho
Chi Minh's testament, which he drafted over a period of years in the
last few years of his life. And he indicated in his testament that he
wanted to be cremated, and he wanted to have his ashes distributed
both north, center and south, so that the people of all Vietnam would
have a chance to venerate him.

But after his death, the Vietnamese leadership decided that they
needed some physical symbol, and they undertook a fairly comprehensive
study of the kind of symbol they wanted. They looked at Lenin's
mausoleum, they looked at the Lincoln Memorial and a number of other
memorial buildings around the world, and they settled on this one,
which I would have to say many people, including myself, feel is
singularly inappropriate for his memory because it's very heavy and
Leninesque. It's very moving, I would say, when you go through it.
Did you go through the...

LAMB: Yes.

Prof. DUIKER: And you--and you see his--his remains there. But
it--it doesn't seem to fit his personality, and I think a lot of
people have been a little disappointed in that.

LAMB: Are those his remains there?

Prof. DUIKER: Yes, mm-hmm.

LAMB: The--the area--What's it called?--Ba Dinh Square.

Prof. DUIKER: Ba--Ba Dinh Square, correct.

LAMB: Supposedly--and when we taped this, you never know how it's
going to come out by the time it airs, but that area has supposedly
been blocked off for clean-up during the time that President Clinton
is there for this visit coming up this week. What's that all about,
do you think?

Prof. DUIKER: I wonder if the clean-up is meant as a--more or less,
a kind of political statement, or do you think it's just generally
cleaning up...

LAMB: Well, I wondered what--you know, the--the reports, when it
first came out: They didn't want the president going there to pay
homage to Ho Chi Minh. What would it have meant if he did?

Prof. DUIKER: You mean to the Vietnamese?

LAMB: Or to us, to the Americans.

Prof. DUIKER: Oh, to us?

LAMB: Yeah.

Prof. DUIKER: It would obviously be a controversial statement.
There are many Americans and certainly many Vietnamese emigres living
in the United States who see Ho Chi Minh as a symbol of oppression and
brutality. And I think if he does go there, and it's--it's televised
and--and shown back in the United States, it will arouse a good deal
of debate. From his standpoint--I certainly couldn't try to
anticipate how he feels about it--he may feel this is sort of symbolic
statement embracing the idea of a reconciliation of the two peoples.

LAMB: What do the Vietnamese people think of him?

Prof. DUIKER: It could be a divisive issue, but my experience in
traveling there on many occasions is that the--certainly the vast
majority of people living in the north still venerate him. His
reputation is a lot more controversial in the south, where some people
feel that he's a representative of a--of a repressive system.
Interestingly enough, for many young Vietnamese, he has no more
particular meaning than, say, Abraham Lincoln to the average American.
He's some old guy, you know, that they look back on and say, `This is
one of the founders of our country.' But many Vietnamese I talk to
who--who are, of course, much too young to remember the war will say,
`We--we don't really remember the war. We're ready to get on with our
lives.'

LAMB: You've got some photos in your book, and there's--the first one
I want to show is--looks like it's odd. I don't know--you'll see in
just a moment. It's the one where he's very young and--it's on the
screen here now. You can see it over there on that monitor, if you
look.

Prof. DUIKER: Oh, the one with the top hat.

LAMB: Yeah.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes. I--some of these pictures are hard to--to locate
precisely because there are pictures that were in the French archives,
and they're not really identified. But in the course of--of analyzing
some of his activities in Paris, this was a picture that, I believe,
was taken by the French security services simply to be able to
identify him. And as you can see there, he's very dapper in a top hat
and so forth. And it's an interesting picture in some ways because
it's so out of character for the image that he projected in the last
years of his life, the simple Uncle Ho who--who wore a kind of bush
jacket and that sort of thing. So...

LAMB: Why did he go to Paris?

Prof. DUIKER: He went to Paris originally in the years before World
War II, probably to contact some friends of his father's who were
engaged in the--what we might call the Vietnamese independence
movement. And he was already at that time very much dedicated to
doing whatever he could to liberate his country, and I think he hoped
to link up with these people and perhaps get in--get involved in the
national liberation struggle.

Later on, he--he left France before the war and then came back at the
end of World War I and immediately came to the attention of the entire
nation of France because he submitted the famous petition to the
victorious allies meeting in Versailles, at the Versailles Peace
Conference, in which he in effect demanded that Woodrow Wilson live up
to the promise of the 14 points involving self-determination of
peoples. And that brought him to the attention of the entire country,
and, of course, word eventually seeped back to Vietnam.

LAMB: There's a picture in here wh--when he was--had arrived in the
Soviet Union in 1923. What are the circumstances for this picture?
It's--you--you can't see it. It's over there on the...

Prof. DUIKER: I see it. Yes, that was probably taken in the Soviet
Union, but, there again, it's not quite clear exactly when. Of
course, very clean-shaven at that time. Two of the things that show
up there that are interesting--actually three: One, I think you can
tell in this picture how singular are his eyes. It's the thing that
so many of his acquaintances would say back in those days; that he was
a very unprepossessing young man, very unassuming, modest in
demoner--in demeanor. Of course, he didn't dress in a--in--certainly
in any imposing way. But the eyes were the type of eyes that would
penetrate into your soul.

Second thing I notice here is that he's wearing a tie, and he claimed
in his later years that he'd never worn a necktie in his life. So
this is one of the many instances where he--he, in effect, used his
image as that kindly old Uncle Ho to sort of make a point, which, of
course, his life will often show is not the case.

Th--the third point, interestingly, ar--there is a shape of his ear.
The French security services for many, many years were trying to
identify Ho Chi Minh, and--because he was living and working under an
assumed name when he joined the French Communist Party, and they were
very concerned to find out where he came from and what his background
was. And they--they suspected that he was a young man who had been
evicted from high school back in 1908--this was before his foreign
travels--who had gotten involved in an anti-French demonstration, and
they'd evicted him from school, and he disappeared from view and then
eventually went to France. And what they determined was that the
information they'd had on him, that he had a certain type of deformity
in his ear, and they--from pictures like this, they were able to say,
indeed, that's the same young man.

LAMB: He would have been about 34 in 1924.

Prof. DUIKER: That's correct. There's some debate over when he was
born, but based on what I've been able to determine and his movements,
he was probably born in 1890. So he--he would have been about 34 at
that time.

LAMB: How big was Vietnam in the 1890 to 1920 era?

Prof. DUIKER: Physically, you mean?

LAMB: Physically and population.

Prof. DUIKER: The total population perhaps at that time may have
been about 15 million--14 million, 15 million. In terms of the size
of the country, at that time it wasn't even a country. It was divided
up into three separate sections by the French. Two sections were
technically under the authority of the Vietnamese imperial court,
although under French protection. And the southern part of the
country was actually a French colony. So there literally was no
Vietnam at that time.

LAMB: How did the French get control?

Prof. DUIKER: How did they manage to take it over? It was part of
the--it was part of that thrust outward of European capitalist
countries in the 19th century, when they were looking for cheap raw
materials and markets. And the French had been involved in Indo-China
for 200 years, primarily Christian missionary work, so when the
British began to penetrate into Burma to the west--and, of course,
there was a great interest in the China market at that time--the
French felt, in a competitive manner, that they needed to build their
own colony in the area. And they looked upon Vietnam and neighboring
Laos and then Cambodia as their best opportunity.

LAMB: We have another picture from 1924 after leaving Moscow for the
South China. What were--what were the circumstances that--he looks a
lot different here than he did in that other picture.

Prof. DUIKER: He does, doesn't he? He looks very serious and somber
and almo--loo--looks like a different hairdo. He--he had gone to--to
Moscow in 1923 at--at the invitation of the Soviet leadership, and
they--they wanted him to--to perform in Moscow, basically, as a kind
of token Asian. They're not treating him entirely seriously, but just
having him there as a kind of symbol of the fact that the
international Communist movement had its objective to help liberate
the colonial peoples.

And he stayed there in training and working at the Communist
international headquarters for a while. And then he became very
impatient, and he said, `I need to go back and help organize my people
and build a Communist Party in--in Indo-China,' as the French called
their territory there. And he had to--he literally had to plead for
permission to go back, not to Vietnam, where he would have, of course,
been--at that time he would have been under arrest. So he went back
to South China and created the first revolutionary movement out of the
emigre community living there. So that's one of the pictures
that--that was probably taken around that time.

LAMB: How often was he married?

Prof. DUIKER: Interesting question. I--it's not certain that he was
ever married in the Western sense; in other words, th--th--what we
think of, of course, as the wedding ceremony. There's adequate
evidence that he had serious liaisons on a number of occasions and
that he had at least a Chinese marriage to a young Chinese woman while
he was in Guangzhou, Canton, as we used to know it. And he establish
a relationship with a young woman there and lived with her for about
two years. And then when he was forced to leave the area, after
Chiang Kai-Shek began to crack down on the Communists, he and his
then-Chinese wife lost track of each other.

LAMB: Who is this lady in this picture?

Prof. DUIKER: That is a young man--a young woman we know as Winte
Min Kai, who's probably the most famous female revolutionary in
Vietnam. She was a--a young woman who joined the party in the very
late--let's say around 1930 and was sent to Hong Kong because he had
his headquarters there very briefly, just at the time the Communist
Party was first created. And based on internal documentary evidence,
letters that were written to Moscow and that sort of thing, it appears
that the two developed a--a--I say sexual relationship, certainly an
intimate relationship. And there are scattered letters that indicate
that, at that time, he actually requested permission from Moscow to
get married. He didn't formally identify who the wife was, but it's
quite clear that this is the young woman.

And either they were formally married, or at least th--they were, you
know, at the point where they were about to be married, and then both
of them were arrested and were separated for several years. The irony
of all of this is that when they next meet each other again, it was in
Moscow at a major meeting of international Communist parties, and at
that time, she is listed as coming to Moscow as his wife. And yet
after she arrives there, she becomes engaged to and marries one of Ho
Chi Minh's chief lieutenants.

LAMB: What happened to her eventually?

Prof. DUIKER: She went back to Vietnam with her new husband, who was
also, of course, a leading figure in the movement. They were both
arrested in the late 1930s, and both were executed. So she died in
1940. And it's--it's, frankly, one of the great mysteries of the life
of Ho Chi Minh--is a puzzle, in other words, what--what--was there a
relationship, and how did--how did the relationship come to an end?

LAMB: Why did you think that a book on Ho Chi Minh would sell?
I--I'm not sure you think of it that way, but what were your--and--and
why did the Hyperion people think it would sell?

Prof. DUIKER: Mm-hmm. I can go, I guess, in two or three different
directions on this. I first became interested in the book before the
end of the war, and I think at that time, insofar as I thought of it
in marketable terms, I thought Ho Chi Minh would be a fascinating
subject because he was the public image of our adversary. I found out
after the war was over that, for many years, Americans lost interest
in Vietnam. Obviously, it was a humiliation for us, and there really
wasn't much of a market for the subject, and I dropped it for that
reason and some others.

And then I came back to it in the last decade or so because more and
more information was coming out about him, particularly from Russia
and from China and from Vietnam itself. And I have to say, honestly,
I wrote it out of a strong impulse in myself that I wanted to
understand this man, and the fact that it came out as a book is almost
secondary. And I was delighted that Hyperion was interested in it.
I--I think, based on my conversations with the people there,
that--that I think they hope that it will sell, but I think they felt
also that it was a topic that needed discussing. And I think most of
my friends in the Vietnam field would agree, we neally--we really need
to understand Ho Chi Minh to understand the Vietnam War.

LAMB: You write that the air of mystery around this man still remains
intact after all the research and the stuff that you've written.

Prof. DUIKER: Well, if--any author, I guess, would like to feel that
he's answered every question, and I do feel that I have--I've
certainly penetrated some of the mysteries around his life. I think I
picked out his movements and pinned them down. I personally feel that
I have a fairly good idea of what made him tick. If you work with
someone long enough, you know, you feel like you've penetrated into
that person's skin, and--and I feel I understand him.

But I do see him as a very complex individual. He's a man of enormous
simplicity, but enormous complexity. He's a man who is very affable,
very friendly, very unassuming. He was very easy to like. Almost
everyone who met him enjoyed him and--and found themselves drawn to
his personality. And yet there was this fierce, steely determination
inside him that was driving this man. And in those cases where--where
he found--you know, where he found it necessary either to utilize his
image or to eliminate his rivals, he was perfectly capable of doing
that. So I--I think that's the--that's the hard thing to penetrate,
is--is just how these various factors in his personality tied in
together and how he--perhaps how he saw himself.

LAMB: You said he was in prison in Hong Kong, and here's a picture of
him right after he was released from the Hong Kong prison.

Prof. DUIKER: Mm-hmm. He was in prison there in the--the summer of
1931. He was captured by the British police as part of a general
round-up of Communist operatives all over East and Southeast Asia.
And they did not have anything concrete against him, except a
scattering of materials in his office that--that suggested that he was
engaged in revolutionary activities. The problem was--for the
authorities was that his activities had nothing to do with colony of
Hong Kong; they had to do with Indo-China.

So what they--the British had to do was decide whether to extradite
him and send him back to Indo-China for the French to try and convict
for treasonous activities, and it became a--a very serious debate
within the government in Hong Kong and in London over whether that was
the proper thing to do. And as it finally turned out, various groups
in Great Britain were able to persade--persuade the government that he
should be released because there was nothing concrete to charge him
with, and he should be allowed to go to the destination of his own
choosing.

So he was finally spirited out of Hong Kong on a Sanpan out to a
waiting Chinese steamship, and the steamship took him up the coast and
eventually dropped him off in--around Shanghai. And the French, from
that point on until World War II, weren't sure where he was. In fact,
sometimes they thought he died in prison.

LAMB: How long did you work on this book?

Prof. DUIKER: Off and on probably for 25 years, but I'd mentioned
before that I had taken it up briefly at the end of the war, and at
that time I realized that it was not sufficient material to write the
kind of biography I wanted. So I dropped it and finally got to the
point about 10 years ago when I could see more and more information
coming out, and I still had that fascination with him. To me,
it's--it's almost like a detective story. It's almost like writing an
Agatha Christie novel, but you don't know the end of it when you
started.

LAMB: What is new in here that no one's ever gotten before?

Prof. DUIKER: I think perhaps it's more sort of the overall picture.
I--I find, as I go through this, that I'm confirming a lot of things
that I think certainly those of us who are acquainted with him know.
I think there's some things I've--I've discovered that add nuances to
our--to our knowledge about him. For example, his very delicate
relationship with the Soviet Union and with China and with the leaders
of those two countries, Stalin and Khrushchev and Mao Tse-Tung and
Chou En-lai and that sort of thing, and I can flesh out that
relationship.

And--and it's--I--I think it's very clear that he was a very central
figure in the international Communist movement. He tried to resolve
the Sino-Soviet dispute. I think--I think I've clarified the issue of
his attitude toward nationalism and revolution. To--certainly to my
own feeling, I have clarified the fact that he was a genuine
revolutionist. He--I wouldn't say he was that interested in Marxism,
but he was very much a believer in revolution. And those people who
say he was just a patriot, who was driven to the Soviet Union by the
fact that America brushed him off is not entirely active--I--accurate.
I think he would have certainly tried to make a relationship with the
United States, but his commitment to--to socialism and perhaps even,
in a very general sense, the--the concept of a Communist utopia was
genuine.

LAMB: How long did he spend in the United States?

Prof. DUIKER: There's--that's the gap that's the hardest to fill
because we know, primarily by his own statements, that he arrived in
the United States about 1912 or so while he was sailing on a
steam--French shen--steamship liner. And he left the ship either in
Baltimore or in New York, and he spent, by his own account, several
months in New York City living in Manhattan and perhaps Harlem and
Queens, Brooklyn maybe and then went up to Boston and worked there
very briefly, and then left at an unknown time and went back to
Europe.

And with the help of some other people who are interested in him,
we've tried to locate something in the immigration records, and
there's absolutely nothing. He must have just gotten off the ship,
you know, sort of disappeared into the throng of--of immigrants living
in the big cities and the East Coast; spent some time here, learned
some English and then went back to England. And it's not--England and
France--and it's not entirely clear, even by his own account, exactly
why he did this.

LAMB: Have you ever heard his voice?

Prof. DUIKER: I have--I have heard his voice on tape. His voice,
when he gave the famous Declaration of Independence at Ba Dinh Square
in September of 1945.

LAMB: What's it sound like?

Prof. DUIKER: Fairly high-pitched; I'm tempted to say squeaky, but
it may be the quality of the tape. It's a--it's a very high, sharp
voice. It reminded me a little bit of the voice of Chiang Kai-Shek or
even Mao Tse-tung when they speak. And as I said, that may have
something to do with the--the quality of--of--you know, of radio
transcription and that sort of thing. He had a very strong central
Vietnamese accent.

LAMB: What would have happened, in your opinion, in the Vietnam
country and, also, American war in Vietnam had Ho Chi Minh not been
there?

Prof. DUIKER: At a minimum, it wouldn't have been at all the same
kind of--of revolution, and--and I would say it for this--for--this
way. It was Ho Chi Minh who--who devised the idea that the best way
to approach the Vietnamese people and appeal to their instincts was
not to talk about Communism and the classless utopia and collective
farms and that sort of thing, but to talk about the two dramatic
forces which were shaping Vietnamese society in the 20th century. And
one would be the issue of national independence, of course, based on
the French conquests; Vietnam in the 19th century. And the other is a
somewhat broader populist appeal that I tend to call social justice,
which means land of the tiller; it means decent working conditions and
opportunity for education.

He knew at that time that you couldn't appeal to the Vietnamese
people, 95 percent of whom were farmers, with Communist slogans. You
had to talk to them in the language that they understood. And there
was no one else in Vietnam at that time or, I think, even among his
colleagues later on who could quite understand that gift that he had.

Secondly, I think his strategical instincts were very important. I
think, to a degree, he followed the--what I think many people know as
the Maoist idea of people's war: guerrilla struggle and that sort of
thing. But he was good at applying them in a Vietnamese context. And
he--he discovered very early on, because he'd already become a
sophisticated observer of the international scene, that for Vietnam to
be liberated, however he might define that, it could not be done, for
example, the way the Bolshevik Revolution had taken place or even the
Chinese Civil War. It couldn't be done entirely on a domestic basis
because Vietnam was a small country controlled by a large, powerful
European country. He had to have support on the international scene.
So he very early learned to sort of tie the liberation struggle in
Indo-China with international events and with trying to manipulate
what we might call the great power balance.

LAMB: When was the first time you went to Vietnam?

Prof. DUIKER: I was first in Vietnam in 1964 and 1965. At that
time, I was a Foreign Service officer. And I was stationed with the
US Embassy in Saigon, and that's where I first got interested in Ho
Chi Minh.

LAMB: When did do you at the embassy?

Prof. DUIKER: I was the--an economic reporting officer. I
had--prior to my assignment there, I had been assigned to Chinese
language training in Taiwan. And when I was assigned to Saigon, after
my Chinese language training was over, I was a bit puzzled. And then
I discovered that in the economic reporting office, they always wanted
one Chinese speaker to deal with the large overseas Chinese business
community in Saigon. So in a s--light moment, I will sometimes say
that I was sent to Vietnam to win the support of the Chinese community
to the South Vietnamese cause in the war.

LAMB: And in a footnote in the back, you say that one weekend you
went to Bangkok for the weekend, and by the time you came back, the
government that was in control when you left was out, the government
that took over was out and there was a third government in charge.
What was...

Prof. DUIKER: That's right.

LAMB: What's that story?

Prof. DUIKER: I don't know much about it from that because I've
never followed it up at that time, but during that period from 1964 to
1965, there were innumerable coups, and some of them were ac--actually
involved: tanks going up into the presidential palace lawn; in other
case--cases, they were just--you know, reshufflings of the Cabinet and
that sort of thing. And this was at a time when there was a--a kind
of token civilian government in power in Saigon, but the military was
sitting in the background sort of moving their musical chairs around.

And I'd gone off to Bangkok just for a couple of days to see some
friends, and over the weekend, there was some reshuffling of the
Cabinet in--in such a way that it was almost like a coup d'etat. In
other words, it wasn't just an appointment. And then I guess I came
back on a Monday, and by that time, that particular group had been
replaced by another group. And that process, which I always describe
as a kind of musical chairs game, lasted for about a year and a half,
until the--the rise of Nguyen Cao Ky and Nguyen Van Thieu about two
months later. They came in power in June of '65.

LAMB: Who was the American ambassador when you were in the embassy?

Prof. DUIKER: I arrived just after Maxwell Taylor arrived. General
Taylor was there for about a year, little bit over a year, and then he
left in the early summer or mid-summer of '65 and Henry Cabot Lodge
came back for a second tour of duty. So I was there briefly
when--when Henry Cabot Lodge had some back for a second term.

LAMB: Buried in your book is a reference to Le Duan. Who is he?

Prof. DUIKER: Now he...

LAMB: Now they--there are a lot of them, but there's one particular
reference I want to ask you about.

Prof. DUIKER: Le Duan was a young Communist Party functionary from
central Vietnam who had emerged during his early- to mid-30s, around
the time of the Second World War, into a position of leadership. This
was a time when there was enormous shake-up in the party because a
number were captured and put to death. And Le Duan began to emerge
during the Second World War as a very effective party member. And
after the war was over, because of his background in central and south
Vietnamese affairs, he was assigned to the south to--to command the
party's political and military activities in South Vietnam. And
he--he essentially stayed in the south right up through the mid-1950s.
In other words, at a time when the United States had come in to
support the new government in South Vietnam. And in 19--1956 or early
1957, he was ordered north to Hanoi where the government had
established its power base after the Geneva Conference and became
acting--acting general secretary, which meant he was primarily the
most powerful person in the--in the--in the Communist Party.

And the general feeling is--and I certainly share it--that he was
given that position primarily because of his enormous commitment to
unification and liberation of the south. And it was more or less a
symbolic statement that unification is going to be one of our top
priorities for the next few years.

LAMB: The reason I bring up--him up is that, you know, there are a
number of issues that we still can get a good argument started about
in the United States. One of them is: Did the Vietnamese attack our
destroyers there in the Tonkin Gulf or vice versa? And who did what
to whom? You say that Le Duan told Mao, I believe, that it was a
local decision to attack, the--which I don't know--was it C. Turner
Joy or one of those...

Prof. DUIKER: Yes. The Maddox and I guess C. Turner Joy, right.

LAMB: The Maddox, yeah.

Prof. DUIKER: Right.

LAMB: Is that new?

Prof. DUIKER: I don't believe so. I think some other scholars
have--there--there are one or two major studies on the whole Tonkin
Gulf incident and, of course, the consequences of it. And I think
that's--I think that's something that is becoming clearer. Some of
the conversations that I report between the Vietnamese and the Chinese
may be fairly new, although these are--this is information available
to other people as well.

LAMB: Do you agree with that, that it was a local decision?

Prof. DUIKER: Yes. I think by my reading, it was a local decision
based on--perhaps on the assumption that the US actions there,
the--the--the two American warships were related to some South
Vietnamese guerrilla operations taking place in the vicinity. And the
local authorities then reported it to the north, and if I recall--I'm
not too precise on my knowledge on this--that the Northerners approved
it. The North Vietnamese insist--and I think correctly--that they had
not--that there had been no second attack, that that may have been
just electronic emissions or something.

LAMB: Where did you go for the new information on Ho Chi Minh?

Prof. DUIKER: I would say the bulk of my information came from
Vietnam. I was able to go back to Hanoi on several occasions to
engage in research. I had a little access to the archives. I talked
to a number of scholars. I was able to interview some people who had
known Ho Chi Minh. And I think a lot of the information came from
there. I was able to find a good deal of information in the last few
years from memoirs and collections of documents that have been
published in China. The Chinese are--they don't open their archives
to foreigners as a general rule, certainly not in a matter as
sensitive as Sino-Vietnamese relations. But they have taken to
publishing the reminiscences of some of their ambassadors and some of
their military commanders. And a lot of that is very useful. The
Russian archives have been opened just a peek. And now it's possible
to see some of that information. And then finally, certainly an
enormous amount of information came from the French archives.
They--during the Colonial period, they kept a very close watch on Ho
Chi Minh.

LAMB: When did the French get kicked out of Indochina?

Prof. DUIKER: 19...

LAMB: Our out of--out of--out of Vietnam?

Prof. DUIKER: Yeah, 1954. At the close of the Geneva Conference,
which divided Vietnam temporarily in two separate zones with the
Vietminh, as they were called, and the Communist Party in control in
the north and pro-French or at least anti-Communist Vietnamese
settling in the south. And the United States immediately decided to
back the South Vietnamese government to stop the further spread of
communism.

LAMB: If you don't mind--from 1890 until 1969, block off--out Ho Chi
Minh's life. I know 30 years he spent outside of Vietnam. Where were
the major points?

Prof. DUIKER: 1908, I think, when he engaged in that anti-French
demonstration in the imperial capital of Hue. That's what--that was
his first open political act. And it--it--it, basically, you might
say, it started him on a revolutionary career.

LAMB: Eighteen years old.

Prof. DUIKER: That was--he was about 17 or 18 at the time. Three
years later, he sailed from Saigon to Europe. I say Europe, because
he stopped in France, but he went elsewhere as well. Spent three or
four years working on an ocean liner, or as I said, settling briefly
in--in the United States. Most of World War I, he was apparently in
Great Britain, although it's hard to pin down his activities. 1917,
1918, he arrived in Paris. And that's where he joined the Socialist
movement and a founding member of the Communist Party. 1923, ordered
to Moscow for training. Late 1924, on to China.

I--I have a joke with my wife that we really ought to have--we should
have put a pedometer on him so that we should of kept track of his
activities, because he must have been the most peripatetic man you
could see. Late '24 to China. 1927, he was evicted or forced to
leave China because of Chiang Kai-shek's crackdown on Communists. He
went back to Moscow and traveled in Europe. The late '20s, he went
back to Southeast Asia, lived in Thailand for a few months, went to
Hong Kong to found the Communist Party, arrested, two years in prison
in Hong Kong. After release, he went back to the Soviet Union, where
he spent five years. Do I go on?

LAMB: Sure.

Prof. DUIKER: Came back in ni...

LAMB: I want to get to the point...

Prof. DUIKER: Came back--uh-huh.

LAMB: ...where he was in charge.

Prof. DUIKER: Right. In 19-in 19--1938, he was permitted to go back
to China to re-establish contact with his party. And finally, he was
able to do so in 19--some time in the spring of 1940. And that--from
that point on, literally until his final days, he was in direct
contact with his close followers and--and if not the leader of the
Communist Party, certainly its most influential public figure. And
from '41 to '45, he was primarily in--either in South China or
Northern Vietnam organizing his revolutionary movement. The fall
of--or late summer of 1945, when the war was over, he and a ragtag
group of 5,000 troops marched into Hanoi, raised the flag of the new
Democratic Republic of Vietnam. That's where he made his famous
speech in Ba Dinh--Dinh Square.

For the next 18 months, he was engaged in negotiations with the French
in order to gain some form of autonomy or independence, trying to
appeal to the United States for some measure of recognition or
legitimacy. Those negotiations broke down in late '46. And from
December '46 until 1954, he was back in the bush, leading his movement
against the French. After Geneva, his party came back to Hanoi, and
he spent his last--well, the last 15 years of his life as president of
the country.

LAMB: Where is this photograph from? He's there with the--some type
of beard.

Prof. DUIKER: That--that was a photograph taken in late 1945,
perhaps early 1946, when he had been named president of the Democratic
Republic of Vietnam. And that's a--a--a more formal photo--photograph
of him, obviously a fairly posed one.

LAMB: I have here in--in--in your book the document that you
reprinted. It says, `Via the War Department, Ho Chi Minh, president,
Provincial Government of Vietnam, transmitted to Harry S. Truman.'

Prof. DUIKER: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: And it reads, `Mr. President, on behalf of Vietnam people and
government, I wish to express to you our sincere gratitude for the
declarations in 12 points you've made on the US foreign policy. That
declaration is enthusiastically welcomed by our people as the opening
of--of a new era for the opposed nations all over the world.' What's
this and why is it important?

Prof. DUIKER: It is one of--it is one of several communications that
he sent either to President Roosevelt or President Truman or one of
our secretaries of State. It was part of a long process that began in
late 1944, early 1945 when he--he--he realized at the end of the war
that this was a--a marvelous opportunity to liberate his country
because Japanese surrender would create a--a vacuum in Indochina. And
the French had been--French authorities had been imprisoned by the
Japanese. So there would be this short window when the Ja--when the
Vietminh might be able to seize control.

But he recognized that for that--for that process to succeed, he
needed to gain international recognition of his new government. And
he was well aware of the fact that the Soviet Union had relatively
little interest. Stalin never did care much about Indochina. And
what he deduced from the situation was that given the circumstances at
the end of the war with the United States allied with the Soviet Union
and Great Britain in the grand alliance and with, of course,
Roosevelt's reputation as being anti-French and an anti-colonialist,
he hoped somehow that he would be able to induce the United States to
support the le--legitimacy of his government, rather than support a
return of the French. And this is one of the later messages that he
sent off to Washington in the hope that somehow the Americans would
see some benefit in--in supporting his movement.

LAMB: When was he no longer involved--really involved in the
decisions?

Prof. DUIKER: Generally, in the--in the political scene? It's
probably hard to be overly specific because in his last few years,
he--he suffered from a number of physical ailments, and also, I think,
I couldn't give any kind of a medical diagnosis on it, but it--from
people I've known who--who saw him in operation at that time,
occasionally, mentally, he would sort of drift out of the picture.
They would see him, for example, in--in important international
conferences and he'd be sort of staring off into space. And that
process was sort of an ongoing process.

I've had interviews with Vietnamese in particular who insist that up
to about 1964, 1965, he was very active in helping to direct the
Vietnamese political activities. But from 1965 on, apparently he went
downhill quite rapidly. And I--I think one of the--one of
the--one--one of the things I'm able to bring out in this book fairly
clearly is the degree to which he began to lose control or influence
over his movement, not only after 1965, but to a certain degree
beginning in the early- to mid-1950s.

LAMB: There's a story in here that he wanted to go south during the
American war, I believe, from the north to the south surreptitiously,
but didn't get to. Why? And what's that story?

Prof. DUIKER: It--it's a very moving story. This would have been
about 1967, 1968, when--this was around the time of the Tet offensive.
And he had--he had been in Beijing for medical treatment. He was
quite weak at the time. And as I said, I think perhaps some of his
mental acuity had begun to drain away at this point. And he'd always
wanted to visit the south. I mean, he felt very strongly about his
symbolic importance to the people in the south and the fact that they
had struggled so long for their own liberation. And I think he was
very sensitive to the fact that many Southerners complained that he
had sold them out at the Geneva Conference because he'd allowed the
division of the country.

And he wanted to go south, but--obviously to travel through NLF-held
areas and raise the spirits of the people. But his--his physical
condition, my sense is, simply didn't permit it. So that he was, you
know, being very unrealistic at this time. So that what his
colleagues had to do, many of--many of your viewers, of course, will
remember Le Duc Tho, who was Henry Kissinger's opposite number during
the Paris Treaty--he went to Beijing, I think, after the Tet offensive
to report to Ho Chi Minh on what had happened at Tet and to tell Ho
Chi Minh that negotiations were beginning. Ho--Ho hadn't been
involved in these decisions. And it may have been about that time
when Ho said, `I want to go south now because things are looking
better.' And Le Duc Tho more or less palmed him off and said, `Well,
we can't take you there. You'd be recognized and you might be--you
know, and you might be arrested,' and--and Ho Chi Minh said, `Well,
maybe you could take me secretly by sea down around to southern
Cambodia and sneak me in that way.'

LAMB: But he also said he wanted to--he could--he'd be willing to
shave his beard off.

Prof. DUIKER: He'd be willing to shave his beard so he wouldn't be
recognized. It--it's a really--it's quite a moving story. And if
you--if you--if you become, you know, in a sense, sort of attached to
Ho Chi Minh as an individual, whatever--you know, whatever one thinks
of his--his political ideology, it--it's--it's almost pathetic to see
this man desperately wanting, you know, to get a sort of hands-on
relationship with the people in the south.

LAMB: But you also said that--then--I--maybe Le Duc Tho said this,
`That if you shave off your beard, the people in the south aren't
going to know who you are.'

Prof. DUIKER: That's right.

LAMB: Where did that story came from, do you know?

Prof. DUIKER: It came from--it came from two or three different
reminiscences that have been published in the last few years,
reminiscences by Vietnamese and I think, to a certain degree, maybe
comments made by Le Duc Tho himself. But not, I might say, for--for
broad public dissemination in Vietnam. Because it--you know, it
obviously, undercuts the image of Uncle Ho as firmly in charge of the
country right to his--the end of his days.

LAMB: How many times have you been to Hanoi?

Prof. DUIKER: Probably somewhere between five and 10 times. First
trip, 1985 for research visit.

LAMB: Last trip?

Prof. DUIKER: Nice trip?

LAMB: Last trip?

Prof. DUIKER: Last trip, the--must have been about 1996 or '97.

LAMB: If I count right, this is your 14th book?

Prof. DUIKER: Somewhere in that range. I--I'm always a little
imprecise about it, not--not by any means trying to say I've written
so many, I don't think even about it. But some of the things
that--that I might think of as a book are relatively short and they
might be considered, you know, research papers or something of that
type. So it's somewhere around that range.

LAMB: Seven hundred pages, $35. It's a lot of pages. Big book.

Prof. DUIKER: A lot of dollars.

LAMB: Yeah. Are you worried that it's too big?

Prof. DUIKER: If the--if my editor isn't worried about it, I guess
I'm not worried about it.

LAMB: Where's the picture from?

Prof. DUIKER: That's a picture that was taken a--about 19--early
19--or mid-1954, just at the end of what we call the Franco-Vietnam
War when the French were fighting against the revolutionary forces.
And from what I've gathered from the context, this was a moment of
general repose when the war was just about won. And he's in
his--again, his bush jacket waiting to go back to Hanoi.

LAMB: How many names did he have in his life?

Prof. DUIKER: Somewhere between 50 and 100. And indeed, there are
undoubtedly more that we don't know about.

LAMB: What was he born, the name?

Prof. DUIKER: His name? His first name was what the Vietnamese call
a milk name, which is just the name that infant is given to begin
with. And his name was Nguyen Sinh Cung. At age 11 or 12, it's at
that point where adolescence begins and then the parents will give
a--a young man or a young woman a name representing their aspirations
for their child. And at that point, he was called Nguyen That Thanh,
which means--Nguyen, which is one of the familiar family names in--in
Vietnam. That Thanh meaning `He who will succeed or he who will
become.' He kept that name until he left Vietnam. And it was when he
left Vietnam that he began using various aliases.

LAMB: Where do you come down on the Vietnam War? Do you have a
position after all this time?

Prof. DUIKER: I have a position, but it's a--it's a--somewhat of a
conflicted one. And I've always been very honest about it. It may
have to do in part with my age and my background. I grew up at a time
when Americans still believed very strongly in the correctness of our
foreign policy objectives. I believed in US containment policy. I
believed that it was necessary, although I--I might say I thought I'd
been much to militarized. I went into the State Department almost
literally at the time John Kennedy entered the White House and felt
many of the same feelings of enthusiasm that that generation felt.

So when I was sent to Vietnam, when I--when I was in the foreign
service, I sort of carried as a badge of honor the idea that I was
doing a noble service. And then by the time I--by the time I got to
Vietnam, I--for whatever reason, I was already--already quite
skeptical that we could win. I had no particular pleasure in seeing
America lose. I certainly didn't glorify the revolutionary movement
in any particular way. I--I had no particular liking for Communism.
But I just thought it was a mistake. I thought we were, in effect,
throwing money into a--a lost situation. And it's almost like a
military campaign. If you're very exposed in a military campaign, you
don't throw all of your--your troops into that point. You back up and
you establish a--you establish a more defensible security perimeter.
And I just felt, based on my experience there and perhaps my study of
Chinese history, because there were so--some similarities there, I
just felt that we were unlikely to be successful in Vietnam. And from
that point on, I--I--I--in--in whatever way I could, I was hoping that
we would find some way of extricating ourselves from Vietnam with
honor and as much as possible a minimum of bloodshed for the
Vietnamese people.

LAMB: When did you leave the foreign service?

Prof. DUIKER: After the Vietnam assignment in the fall of 1965.

LAMB: How old were you then?

Prof. DUIKER: Thirty-three.

LAMB: And where did you go next?

Prof. DUIKER: I finished my doctoral studies at Georgetown
University. I had started them before I went overseas. And after I
finished my doctorate, hung my name out for a job and was accepted for
a position in the History Department at Penn State.

LAMB: How long did you spend at Penn State?

Prof. DUIKER: Thirty years, full--full career.

LAMB: What are you doing now?

Prof. DUIKER: I retired a couple of years ago and just decided last
year to move down to the Outer Banks of Hurricane Alley, as we call it
in North Carolina and love it down there.

LAMB: Where were you from originally?

Prof. DUIKER: I bounced around a--a lot. I was born in Chicago,
spent many years in Washington, DC. Every time I come to Washington,
I see a house I lived in or a friend's house. Spent some time during
my adolescence in Philadelphia, lived in Miami, Indiana. Went to
school at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

LAMB: There's a series of pictures in the book of wh--where he lived.
And I wanted to ask you: Which one do you think represents the Ho Chi
Minh that you've come to know in this book? Is it the one here on
top, which is the palace right near Ba Dinh Square...

Prof. DUIKER: Correct.

LAMB: ...or is it this near Ba Dinh Square, the stilt house? And how
much time did he spend...

Prof. DUIKER: Which is right next door to the Presidential Palace.

LAMB: And how much time did he spend in both places?

Prof. DUIKER: The Presidential Palace on top was a--a very
impressive, late 19th century building built by the French to
represent the grandeur of the French Colonial empire. He moved there
very, very briefly after the war. I think that is 1945, 1946, for
symbolic reasons. It was very important for the Vietnamese that they
control the Presidential Palace, rather than the French, during that
period after 1945 when they were negotiating with each other. But
from the start, he was very uncomfortable with living there, because
it was much too ostentatious. So he did not live there personally
during that particular period. He lived in an administrative office
over toward the center of town.

Then when the--the--the Vietminh movement, that is the party leaders
came back to Hanoi in October of 1954, he refused to occupy that
residence and he moved into the gardener's quarters on the grounds of
the Presidential Palace. And this would have been the mid- to
late-50s. That's correct. That's the fish pond that he often was
seen sitting there feeding the fish right beside it. And it was while
he was living in the gardener's quarters that the party arranged to
have this house built in the style of the mountain minorities. And he
lived there for most of the remainder of his life. During the--during
the bombing campaign of '65 to '68, he often lived in a bomb shelter
also adjacent to these quarters.

LAMB: Almost everything that's been written about your book is
positive, except one thing. And I don't know if you've seen this
review. Have you seen this in the Amazon.com from a fellow named...

Prof. DUIKER: The one from the Vietnamese?

LAMB: Yes.

Prof. DUIKER: Yes.

LAMB: Van Pham. And I just wanted to ask you about this because he
goes in--he's--he--it's--it's a little stilted English because
he--obviously, he knows English pretty well. But it's--it--but he--he
says, `I was eagerly awaiting this book, believing that it contains
information from the Russian, French and Vietnamese archives. I was
thoroughly disappointed. What bothered this--me about this book was
not so much the information the author conveyed but the information
that he either through coincident or on purpose deliberately hide from
his reader.' Do you want to just take that, you know, as--was this guy
on track at--at all?

Prof. DUIKER: I think in fairness to him, I probably would like to
talk with him and see whether he has information that wasn't available
to me because there's an enormous amount of information and
misinformation about Ho Chi Minh out around the world and certainly in
the Internet. And what I have tried to do is to corroborate
everything that I have seen; certainly anything that's controversial,
so that I didn't find myself simply repeating stories that--for--for
which there wasn't any proper evidence or maybe it was something put
out as a false scent.

I--I think what pub--puzzled me a little bit about that--about that
letter was that one of the things he quoted is the case of a young
woman who apparently became Ho Chi Minh's concubine toward the end of
his life. And there was a very messy story about the fact that she
was raped by Ho Chi Minh's Minister of the Interior, and later, her
body was found in the suburbs of Hanoi with the assumption that she
had been assassinated, perhaps because she'd given birth to Ho Chi
Minh's child and wanted--and--and wanted to marry him. And, of
course, this would have been unacceptable, given the image of Ho as a
celibate.

The fact is, I do report that story. I don't dwell on it
unnecessarily because it's a little hard to corroborate and I--I don't
want to accentuate things where there may be more that I don't know
about. But I do report it. And I--certainly, I--I gather from the
kind of things that he's saying that I downplay the degree of cruelty
and the degree of bloodshed that occurred in Vietnam. Maybe the
difference there is that I don't--I don't deny the brutality and the
bloodshed that took place, as I see it somewhat on both sides. But I
certainly can see the Leninist character of his government and I can
see, as I think I mentioned to you before, that there were times when
he was quite willing to commit actions or order actions that could
involve very high degree of casualties among his supporters as well as
among his enemies. And there were times when some of his colleagues
committed what, to me, are quite brutal acts in the suppression of
their enemies. And I--I find myself very aware that in some cases, Ho
Chi Minh appeared to lack the pol--political courage to stop it.

LAMB: You point out in your book that Ho Chi Minh wrote two
autobiographies under an assumed name...

Prof. DUIKER: Yes.

LAMB: ...about himself. And this upset this reviewer, who--he quotes
in here, he says, `Many'--this is Tran Dan Tien, who is an alias...

Prof. DUIKER: Yes.

LAMB: ...of Ho Chi Minh, saying--this is what he wrote. `Many Viet
and foreign writers and journalists have tried to write biographies of
the president of the Democratic Republican Vietnam.' He's talking
about himself. `But so far, they have not--had little success--they
had have little success. The reason is simple.' Again, he's writing
about himself. `The modest President Ho doesn't like to be talked
about too much.' Later on in the book when the question of biography
is mentioned, Ho replies, `Biography that is--that is a good thing.
But at present, our people still live in poverty. After 80 years of
slavery, our country is in ruin and we have a big task of
reconstruction. Let's do what is most urgent first. As for my
biography, it can wait.' A quote within a quote within an--an article
that's--yeah.

Prof. DUIKER: Yeah, I'm having trouble following it.

LAMB: It is. But in other words, Ho Chi Minh wrote these phony
biographies or autobiographies under an assumed name writing about
himself in the book that he wasn't interested in biography. What do
you take on--what's your take on that?

Prof. DUIKER: Well, I think that's part of Ho Chi Minh's image
making. He certainly began to see himself at some point as a symbol
of his cause. And I think he realized his talent. And--in--in
effect, making himself the public image of the movement. And he saw,
in effect, that it was the appeal to his personality and his
character, that it was a large part of the success of his movement.

LAMB: Do you read Vietnamese?

Prof. DUIKER: I--I read it reasonably well. I do keep a dictionary
handy.

LAMB: And this book, "Ho Chi Minh: A Life," has there ever been a
book written like this?

Prof. DUIKER: Not one of this length and not one that I think delves
as much as--as I have into his movements. There may be some people
who say, `You're talking a lot--awful lot about where he went and
when.' And I do that in part because that's been part of the mystery
of Ho Chi Minh is that he's seen everywhere, and wha--it's important,
I think, to tie down his--you know, hi--where he went and why he did
he what he did. And I've tried to let the story speak for itself.

LAMB: Here's the book. It's called "Ho Chi Minh" by William J.
Duiker. We thank you very much for joining us.

Prof. DUIKER: Thank you, Brian.

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Ho Chi Minh: A Life