Ho Chi Minh did appeal to the United States for assistance (as did many others), but he was not pro-American any more than it served his goals. Ho was a Stalinist and a nationalist seeking support to prevent the return of France.

He did try to see Woodrow Wilson and other world leaders at the Versailles peace conference in 1919 to appeal for Vietnamese 'self-determination'. But he did not get near them, much less meet them. Wilson never saw his appeal. Ho went on to live in Paris and join the communist party. He then lived in the USSR and trained at the Comintern at the height of the Stalinist purges and 'cult of personality'. It did not put Ho off. He would pen an emotional eulogy for Stain in 1953.

Ho did work with several OSS agents during WWII, though they did not do so until after the Soviet-German split and Moscow joined the Allied powers. They did not want to contradict Soviet policy. In Sept 1945, Ho did of course cite the American declaration of independence in his declaration of independence -- he also quoted the French declaration of the rights of man. Why? France and the US were the two powers capable of preventing a widening of war in Vietnam.

Many historians will also note that he sent a telegram to Truman asking for assistance against France in 1946. They all neglect to mention, or perhaps do not know, that Ho sent the same appeal to Stalin. I'll also note that the image of Ho was and is highly manicured, from the plain suit, the fake tears at official ceremonies, his preference for cheap vietnamese cigarettes (he really like American ones), or his young wife. Just as the communist party disbanded itself in 1945 because of its unpopularity, so too did the DRV want to push this idealized version of Ho at first. That soon changed when the party came into the open, then he was exalted as a communist. He was later powerless, a figure head for the regime in the 1960s taken over by more hardline elements. Ho was relegated to making trips to across the Soviet bloc, to North Korea to visit Kim Il Sung.

In the end, Ho was communist, nationalist, and a strategist. Some American diplomatic historians want to look for lost opportunities and imagine a world where Truman supported Ho and thirty years of horrible war were avoided. There is a reasonable impulse there, the US government did contradict its principles and let Cold War imperatives guide its actions. But when Ho was a communist, as were many others in the Indochinese Communist Party who desired a Marxist state. Ho was dependent for support from many of the hardline ICP members. Moreover, since 1945, a war was already raging in Vietnam, between communist and non-communist Vietnamese fighting for control of the post-colonial state. That civil war had begun in the 1930s in colonial prisons and in southern China among competing Vietnamese revolutionaries. In 1945 it simply came into the open.