I'll just note that opinion about Ho Chi Minh is divided among Vietnamese as well. Stop by Little Saigon in California or other overseas Vietnamese communities and you'll find people who say Ho is on par with Stalin, Hitler, etc. That's an extreme opinion though.

French, Americans, and Vietnamese who disliked Ho did so for a few reasons including:

-He was a dedicated communist. He lived in Russia during Stalin's purges and still remained committed after that experience. This is not to say that he wasn't a nationalist too. He was both.

-During the early part of the Vietnamese revolution, the Viet Minh (led by theIndochinese Communist Party) assassinated many Trotskyist (a rival communist faction) and non-communist leaders in Vietnam.

-Under Ho's leadership, the land reform campaign in northern Vietnam set high quotas for its rectification campaign. Tens of thousands of people, even very minor landowners, were executed to meet this Chinese-style land reform program.

-Finally, non-communist Vietnamese resented the communist party's domination of the revolutionary movement and his alignment with Mao and Stalin. This caused many people to switch sides work with France and the other Vietnamese state (the State of Vietnam) to fight the Viet Minh government (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam).