Ho Chi Minh is a difficult figure to analyze because he deliberately cultivated at least two different personalities. The first was of the kindly, elder nationalist and father to the nation. But he also was a committed communist internationalist. He was both. Not one or the either. But, this is precisely why the Indochinese Communist Party chose him as their leader. Men like Tran Phu and Truong Chinh, (‘Long March') were committed internationalists that would alienate potential non-communist allies.

The debate about Ho Chi Minh is tied up in the politics of the war. In the late 1960s-70s scholars opposed to the Vietnam War, consciously and subconsciously, used their scholarship on Vietnam as a means to oppose American policies in Indochina. Following the orientalist work of a French scholar Paul Mus, Frances Fitzgerald wrote Fire in the Lake. This became the ‘Orthodox' view of the war. Ho Chi Minh represented the only authentic nationalism in Vietnam, combining nationalism with Confucian values. He and other Vietnamese had adopted communism only as a means to liberate their country. But they were not really communists. All Vietnamese understood this, and therefore the artificial South Vietnamese regime and US were fighting against the course of history. At the same time, there were writers like Douglas Pike producing much more critical studies of Vietnamese communism that supported US policies. More recently, a ‘Revisionist’ group of writers, most well known in Mark Moyar’s Triumph Forsaken, that argues that Washington had it right all along. Their policies in Vietnam were wrong, only in that they gave up too soon. Ho was just a brutal autocrat.

Both views are inadequate. Frances Fitzgerald and the Orthodox view is orientalist and simplistic. It’s rather insulting to Ho and other Vietnamese. They were intelligent, rational, and believed in socialist modernity -- to say they chose communism because it was their only choice is false and insulting. And the Revisionist view of Ho as communist Asian despot is just as simplistic and problematic.

Before I get to Ho’s actions, I want to note that during the period you reference in your question, the American period of Vietnam’s civil war from ~1965-1972, Ho Chi Minh was only a figurehead. He held no real power. It was a man from southern Vietnam named Le Duan who held control. Le Duan was transparently aggressive both in escalating the Vietnam war, and domestically against opponents in the communist Vietnamese Workers Party that opposed his war in South Vietnam. Ho at this time was limited to making public trips to visit allies like Mao, Kim Il-Sung, etc, serving as the regime’s kind public face, and little else. But he chose to continue on as the figure head.

However, Ho was never all powerful, not even in the 1940s. He faced strong domestic pressure from the Indochinese Communist Party (ICP) members who wanted a more communist regime from the start. Ho’s ambassador to France, Tran Ngoc Danh, even defected to the Soviet bloc and wrote scathing reports to the USSR citing Ho’s lack of commitment to communism. There were factions inside Vietnam opposed to Ho’s attempts to form a united front that could attract non-communists as well.

This would soon change after 1949. But first, I want to note that the Viet Minh front group, run by the ICP, was indeed brutal towards its opponents. From the moment the Vietnamese civil war began in 1945, before the French returned, the ICP was killing Vietnamese rivals (and some of their rivals were killing ICP and Viet Minh). Many were executed in the first weeks, and fighting between the Viet Minh and rival religious and political groups persisted. Ho was complicit in this, but certainly was not deeply involved, and in some cases would have opposed it. Local ICP leaders were often running their own show. While Ho was in Paris negotiating in 1946, Vo Nguyen Giap attacked the armed forces of non-communist revolutionary groups (with the complicity of the French army). After that point, there was no real opposition to the ICP within the revolutionary Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) government.

The other main charge against Ho comes from the bloody land reform that took place in 1953-54. After 1949, China began supplying the DRV with weapons and advisors. Not long after China and the USSR formally recognized Ho’s government. No longer needing the support of the non-communists in the countryside, the ICP came back into the open as the Vietnam Workers Party (VWP) and began instituting communist policies. Much control was ceded to the Chinese ‘experts', who guided the VWP’s policies and held ultimate control. But the VWP was also an enthusiastic participant, eager to embark on its path to modernization.

The land reform was a vicious affair. Based on the Chinese land reform model, a set percentage of the Vietnamese population was determined to be exploitative landowners. Cadres went into the countryside and met this quota. They incited the population to denounce landowners, coached their opinions. After this a staged trial took place under portraits of Stalin, Mao, and Ho. The cadres then carried out a death sentence on behalf of the people. The method varied, sometimes employing a sword or gun, in some cases people were burned alive. Even revolutionary figures who had owned land were targeted. A woman named Nguyen Thi Nam was one of the first executions — the intended message that even if you supported the revolution, it would not absolve your class crimes. The toll of this is unknown. Based on research in Vietnamese archives, it’s likely at least 20,000 were killed. It could be higher toward 50,000. We won’t know unless the current regime falls and we have access to all the records.

Where is Ho in all of this? Well we know very little about decision-making in the government. For ‘Orthodox' writers favorable to Ho in their critiques of US policy, the tendency is to downplay these abuses, eliminate their ideological character, and and say that Ho was powerless at this time. I should note that these are often Americanists who do not know much about Vietnam and haven’t researched there. Perhaps representative, in his Pulitzer winning book Embers of War, Fredrik Logevall writes that land reform was to end food shortages, and Ho was powerless, overtaken by extreme elements (no mention of the Chinese advisors), and opposed Nguyen Thi Nam’s execution. Yet another historian Alex-Thai Vo, has shown that Ho Chi Minh published a vicious denunciation of Nguyen Thi Nam that approved of her execution. He may have even attended the trial.

Did Ho full-hearted approve of this, or was he simply falling in line? Much like the assassinations of non-communist rivals, perhaps he was not enthusiastic about these things. But nevertheless he participated and lent his support. The same can be said of the DRV/North Vietnam’s suppression of academic freedom. In an infamous incident called the Nhan Van Giai Pham affair, the regime arrested or ostracized some of the country’s most prominent writers and intellectuals because they had called for freedom of expression or mild reforms in 1955-56.

Was the DRV an oppressive police state? Yes. It remained so after the war, though much less so than the 1940s-80s. Was American involvement driven by that rationale? No. It had much more to do with geopolitics. And while the government of South Vietnam was a freer society than its northern counterpart, it still committed its fair share of abuses and arrested opponents for nothing more than speaking against it. That however did not dissuade the US from supporting South Vietnam.