of North Vietnam 1959- Ho begins armed revolt against South Vietnam 1967- Ho Tells L.B.J. in 1967, "We will never negotiate." 1969- Ho dies of a heart attack in Hanoi (Archer 237). The youngest of three children, Ho was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in 1890 in a village in central Vietnam. The French through a puppet emperor indirectly ruled the area. Its poverty-stricken peasants, traditional dissidents, opposed France's presence. Ho's father, a functionary at the imperial court, manifested his sympathy for them by quitting his position and becoming an itinerant teacher. Inheriting his father's rebellious inclination, Ho participated in a series of tax revolts, acquiring a reputation as a troublemaker. But he was familiar with the lofty French principles of libert, galit, fraternit and yearned to see them in practice in France. In 1911, he sailed for Marseilles as a galley boy aboard a passenger liner. His record of dissent had already earned him a file in the French police dossiers. It was scarcely flattering: "Appearance awkward ... mouth half-open" (Halberstam 77). In Paris, Ho worked as a photo retoucher. The city's fancy restaurants were beyond his means, but he indulged in one luxury--American cigarettes, preferably Camels or Lucky Strikes. Occasionally he would drop into a music hall to listen to Maurice Chevalier, whose charming songs he would never forget. In 1919, Woodrow Wilson arrived in France to sign the treaty ending World War I, and Ho, supposing that the President's doctrine of self-determination applied to Asia, donned a cutaway coat and tried to present Wilson with a lengthy list of French abuses in Vietnam. Rejected, Ho joined the newly created French Communist Party. "It was patriotism, not communism, that inspired me," he later explained (Halberstam 95).Soon, Ho was roaming the earth as a covert agent for Moscow. Disguised as a Chinese journalist or a Buddhist monk, he would surface in Canton, Rangoon or Calcutta, then va...
