nish to nurse his tuberculosis and other chronic diseases. As befit a professional conspirator, he employed a baffling assortment of aliases. Again and again, he was reported dead, only to pop up in a new place. In 1929 he assembled a few militants in Hong Kong and formed the Indochinese Communist Party. He portrayed himself as a celibate, a pose calculated to shape his moral character, but he had at least two wives or perhaps concubines. One was a Chinese woman; the other was Giap's sister-in-law, who was guillotined by the French. In 1940, Japan's legions swept into Indochina and French officials in Vietnam, loyal to the pro-German Vichy administration in France, collaborated with them. Nationalists in the region greeted the Japanese as liberators, but to Ho they were no better than the French were. Slipping across the Chinese frontier into Vietnam--his first return home in three decades--he urged his disciples to fight both the Japanese and the French. There, in a remote camp, he founded the Viet Minh, an acronym for the Vietnam Independence League, from which he derived his war name, Ho Chi Minh--roughly "Bringer of Light." What he brought was a spirit of rebellion against, first the French and later the Americans. As Ho's war grew more intense in the mid-1960s, it became clear to Lyndon Johnson that Vietnam would jeopardize his presidency. In 1965, Johnson tried a diplomatic approach. Accustomed to dispensing patronage to stubborn Congressmen, he was confident that the tactic would work. L.B.J. said,"Old Ho can't turn me down" (Nguyen 112). But Ho did. Any settlement, Ho realized, would mean accepting a permanent partition and forfeiting his dream to unify Vietnam under his flag. There was no flexibility in Ho's beliefs, no bending of his will. Even as the war increasingly destroyed the country, he remained committed to Vietnam's independence. And millions of Vietnamese fought and died to attain the same goal. Ho died on Sept. 2, ...
