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Show On books . . . 1 Correspondent spins tale of Ho Chi Minlif BY BILL WILSON Chronicle Staff "Ho" by David Halberstam, Random House, $4.95 pp.118. David Halberstam was the "New York Times" correspondent in Vietnam during the years from 1962-1964. During those two years he gained insight into our committment in Asia. This insight became the material for the book that he wrote in 1965 entitled "The Making Of A Quagmire." He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for his reporting while in Vietnam. Theodore White, famed author of the "Making of a President" series, wrote of Halberstam's "The Unifinished Odyssey of Robert Kennedy" that it was "a distinguished distin-guished work of literature and I politics by one of America's great reporters." Unique Qualifications All this is for the purpose of-establishing of-establishing the unique qualifications qualifica-tions of David Halberstam for writing this posthumous work on one of the fascinating figures in modern warfare. During his life time Ho Chi Minh managed to lead the fight against two western forces that were far greater equipped and vastly outnumbered his forces. Ho had something that neither the French or the Americans Ameri-cans had. And that is the will of his people. Halberstam relates the following details: Ho's father was a scholar. He was fired from his position as a Mandarin because he refused to learn the French language. His family back ground was strongly nationalistic, however rather than follow the famed nationalist Phan Boi Chau to Japan, Ho went to school in Hue. In 1912 he left Vietnam to study in Europe as a mess boy on the French liner "Latouche-Treville ." Writing of those year in Paris, Jean Lacouture, another Ho biographer, bio-grapher, states, "He was struck by the similarity between the lot of the exploited inhabitants of a colony and that of a European worker. Had he stayed home, he might never have progressed beyond be-yond an extremist form of nationalism, nation-alism, without ideological perspective and concerned exclusively exclu-sively with evicting the foreign invader a form of nationalism perhaps even tinged with racist as in the case of the Phu fjc: movement. Living immersed m while in a hierarchical, indusli ized society broadened his re-look re-look and gave a political stale his thought." j ( From Paris Ho returned China via Moscow fighting, ft i tions within the nationalists ' communist movement. The keys to Ho Chi IK effectiveness were three foil;': had and instilled in others ip: t of their peasant origins, he si intensly nationalistic and k (; lieved very stongly that ami' d ation of Marxism and gii warfare was the only )' 1 b( liberate his country. ft "Ho" gives a very clean 0 why we can't and haven't: m Vietnam. |
