Land of Compulsory Joy

INDOCHINA

(See Cover)

Men with long megaphones prowled the streets of Hanoi, their exhortations echoing behind shuttered windows. "Dear compatriots," they droned, "your joy is indescribable!"

In Hanoi, the Viet Minh's red and yellow-starred flags hung from stores and warehouses, from shacks and villas, from cycle-taxis that darted along uncrowded boulevards. Portraits of Malenkov, Mao and Ho stared out from the stalls of the peddlers. At main intersections there were bamboo arches of triumph, decked with papier-mache peace doves and slogans that proclaimed "INDEPENDENCE" or "PEACE" or "PRESIDENT HO FOR TEN THOUSAND YEARS." No exception, no dissent was permitted in Hanoi's show of joy; nobody forgot to display his enthusiasm, or was too lazy to bother.

In Hanoi, capital of the new Red land of North Viet Nam, there were no more beggars, no shoeshine boys. President Ho Chi Minh recently inaugurated a "movement for good morals," so there were no more prostitutes, no nightclubs. Each day at 3 p.m. the people chanted patriotic folk songs and conducted group discussions. Each evening they danced in the streets beneath the gaze of impassive Viet Minh soldiers; the dance started at 8, never earlier, ended at 10, never later. Twice weekly at Hanoi's National Theater, before an audience of men in shapeless tunics and women officials in pigtails, the Viet Minh army "Culture Corps" recited a tone poem, to the wailing of reedy instruments. "Wipe away your tears," they intoned. "The enemy is gone. In the North, in the South we are the same family and nothing can divide us."

Wisdom & Discipline. In Hanoi, for 70 years a French colonial city, the people were glad to see the French go. Some of the people were also glad to see the Viet Minh come, and the rest were at least resigned to it. But underneath there was uncertainty and fear, a sudden throb of violence. There would be no more "squeeze" (graft for politicians)--but a shopkeeper was told one morning that he must pay 100% tax upon his inventory. There would be no more banditry--a robber was executed at the scene of his crime, and left to lie there in warning.

In Hanoi there was a sense of waiting for orders. Endlessly the men with the megaphones propagated the Eight Political Wisdoms of President Ho ("The clergy must fulfill their duties as citizens"), the Five Disciplines of President Ho ("Newspapers must support the peace policy"), and the Ten Disciplines of the Viet Minh army ("Troops are forbidden to be dissolute"). One day the men with the megaphones instructed the Hanoiese to set their clocks back one hour, to conform to Peking time.

"They Watch What You Do." This is the oblivion that is settling down upon the 12 million people of Northern Viet Nam, whose fate reflects the tragedy and helplessness of Asia. Born and raised under a French colonial rule that has much to answer for, subjected to 15 almost consecutive years of war, they are now condemned to the compulsory joy of the Communist empire.

"The Viet Minh are correct," says one of these millions, a onetime Viet Minh official who deserted to the West. "They don't violate women. They take nothing. If they borrow a cup of water today, they return it tomorrow. But they watch you. They watch you all the time. They watch what you do. They know what you eat, how much you spend every day on meat and vegetables, whether you have a servant, or want one.

" Little by little, in careful ways, they correct you so that you may lead a more worthy proletarian life. You learn to dress shabbily in drab colors, like the others, and to put your children to work. If you do not, your taxes are raised. You learn to be enthusiastic. If you are not, they will whisper from mouth to mouth in your village that you want to be rich, that you are a reactionary. They will threaten you with public discussion. They will isolate you: you will find that your neighbors will not dare speak to you. If this does not teach you joy, they will assign you work that will kill you. And it is never the Communists who do any of these things, it is the people; it is always in the name of the people."

Antagonism & Deception. Since the Geneva settlement a bare four months ago, the Viet Minh Communists have:

P: Imposed an unshakable authority over North Viet Nam, whose people were supposed to decide their future for themselves in free elections.

P: Doubled their army--in specific violation of Geneva--so that it now exceeds that of Pakistan (pop. 76 million) and is considered by Moscow to be more efficient than that of any Red satellite.

P: Infiltrated South Viet Nam (pop. 10 1/2 million) so deeply that effective Viet Minh control now extends through 85% of the country almost to the gates of the capital, Saigon--where the Nationalist administration of Bao Dai is disintegrating. The Viet Minh are also deeply embedded in Laos (pop. 1.1 million), a state theoretically protected by the Manila Defense Pact. The Viet Minh have assassinated 87 Nationalist leaders in South Viet Nam and the Defense Minister of Laos.

How did all this come to pass? Indo-China was a place where the grand antagonisms of the 20th century met, joined and clashed: colonialism, nationalism, Communism interacted violently upon one another. Sometimes such cataclysms throw up one forceful man. or he seizes a ready opportunity. But Indo-China was a place where one man was already waiting, a man who had spent 30 cunning, tortuous years preparing the event, weaving, dodging, converting reverses into successes and eventually triumphing. That man was a strange, blazing-eyed consumptive who called himself Ho Chi Minh.

Autumn Flutes & Saliva. "Have you met Ho Chi Minh?" an anti-Communist Vietnamese was asked. "Oh yes," the Vietnamese replied, quickening involuntarily. "He is the living example of a revolutionary. He has a blameless private life. He dresses simply. He is intelligent. He speaks French, Russian, English, Chinese and Vietnamese. He is very clever: when he speaks to the people he is direct so that an eight-year-old child can understand. He has infinite patience. He has sacrificed his own life completely for the revolution." Jawaharlal Nehru adds: "Extraordinarily likable and friendly ... a man of integrity desiring peace." And an American, who worked with Ho against the Japanese in World War II, wraps up the encomium: "Ho was a very nice guy." Ho Chi Minh is a wispy man (100 Ibs.), mild and slow-spoken, and disarmingly forthright. He is a man who sits on the edges of chairs, his hands folded meekly in his lap. "You must give the people an example of poverty, misery and denial," he sometimes adjures his disciples, and off he plods, ostentatiously, through the villages, with a knapsack on his back. Ho Chi Minh works from 16 to 18 hours a day, usually with a jacket slung across his shoulders as if he were perpetually cold.

Ho Chi Minh is a poet: Suddenly I hear the autumn flute sounding coldly like a signal on the screened hillside.

He considers himself a man of the world: "Moscow is heroic," he will remark, jocosely, "but Paris is the joy of living." Ho Chi Minh is a kindly man, it seems, who calls his associates "Little Brother," while they call him "Uncle Ho." Yet Uncle Ho, it also seems, keeps his favorite Swallow's Nest--a rare and expensive delicacy made from the saliva of sea swallows--in his room so that he will not have to share it; he keeps Philip Morrises in one pocket for himself and passes poor local cigarettes from another.

Then there is the question of murder. In 1945 Uncle Ho's Communists killed off 5,000 Vietnamese Nationalists. The wives and children of the purged ones thronged before him pleading mercy, but Uncle Ho ordered troops to disperse them. In 1946 Ho's Communists turned on the Trotskyites. One Trotskyite leader, an old friend, sent Ho a telegram asking clemency; Uncle Ho privately replied that he did not know the Trotskyite--who was promptly shot. Uncle Ho publicly maintained his reputation as a kindly man by weeping at the loss of his friend and by having the firing-squad commander replaced.

Stewpans & Silverware. Ho Chi Minh, dedicated Communist, is a matchless interplay of ruthlessness and guile. Before he was nine, in the central Viet Nam province of Nghean, Ho was carrying messages for his father's anti-French underground.* In 1911 he shipped out of Indo-China as a cabin boy on a French vessel, so that he could learn the foreign techniques of revolution and "come back to help my countrymen." He was not yet a Marxist, but already showed signs of an ascetic, fanatic single-mindedness.

In his three years at sea, Ho Chi Minh read avidly--Tolstoy, Zola, Shakespeare, Marx--and from all accounts had pretty rough sailing. He was seasick. He was almost swept overboard. He was too frail to lift the heavy copper stewpans, and got only ten francs for his first 8,000-mile voyage to France. At Marseille he was offended when prostitutes came on board. "Why don't the French civilize their own people," he asked, "before they pretend to civilize us?"

In 1914 Ho Chi Minh turned up in London, joined a secret society called "The Overseas Workers." Despite his poor health, he shoveled snow, stoked coal, and got a menial job cleaning silverware at London's Carlton Hotel restaurant. The great Escoffier was then master chef of the Carlton, and to hear the Communist legend-makers tell it, Escoffier took a fancy to the young Asian and called him over for a chat. "Put aside your revolutionary ideas," offered Escoffier to Ho, "and I will teach you the art of cooking." Loftily, Ho Chi Minh declined.

"Better & Better." Later, in Paris, young Ho Chi Minh worked as a photographer's assistant in a dead-end street behind Montmartre, and peddled enlargements ("Living Souvenirs of Your Friends and Relatives"). Each morning he would cook rice in his bare hotel room and at noon would chew half a sausage, or a fish; each evening, a picturesque and mannerly Asian intellectual, he had access to the clubs. With scholars, artists and future Cabinet ministers, Ho would contemplate and debate astronomy and hypnotism; he argued against Coueism ("Every day in every way I'm getting better and better") with Coue; but somehow, most nights the debate would zigzag back to Ho's one gnawing pang: Indo-China. "I am a revolutionary," Ho would explain.

He agitated among the 100,000 Vietnamese in Paris, and tried to drum up support for Indo-China reforms at the Versailles Peace Conference (Woodrow Wilson, apparently unwilling to offend the French, did not take up the matter).

Steadily and inexorably Ho was moving left. He preferred Communists to Socialists because "they seriously considered the colonial problem." He was intrigued when Communists sought his advice. In the summer of 1922 Ho gladly attended a Congress of the French Communist Party, which expounded its thesis for "solid front" revolution across the world. Modestly, Ho advocated an alternative plan, a subtler plan, that might go down well in Indo-China. Ho believed in 1) a revolution against French colonialism in the name of nationalism and a "democratic regime," to be followed by 2) a second revolution against nationalism, to achieve the total Socialist state.

Soon thereafter, it was noticed in Paris that Ho Chi Minh had disappeared.

Lost: an Open Mind. In secret, aboard an ice-covered Soviet vessel, Ho Chi Minh put into Leningrad. "So here you are!" a Communist contact greeted him, and for two years the Russians paid him flattery. In Leningrad they lent Ho a fur coat, treated him to roast meats and two-finger-long cigarettes. In Moscow they invited Ho, about 30 years old, to sit with the President of the Third International. In return, Ho helped the Russians organize their "University for Toilers of the East," and accepted training-like China's Chou En-lai--as a "professional revolutionist." There was no doubt about Ho's enthusiasm. "There comes a time when you end your period of study and become a man of action," an American who knew Ho much later explained it. "Ho was like that. He had widely read French, German, Russian philosophy, and he decided for himself what his own philosophy was to be. Ho's choice was Communism, and he never again had an open mind."

After graduation from Moscow in 1925, Ho embarked upon a slithering, 15-year journey through the Communist underground of the world. He would appear shaven-headed in Thailand, disguised as a Buddhist monk; he would show up in the Latin Quarter of Paris, explaining to waiters how to prepare his food. In Canton, Ho worked for Borodin, the Russian intriguer who helped undermine China. In Singapore, Ho organized Southeast Asia's Comintern. And when IndoChina's Nationalist Party rebelled against the French in 1930, Ho Chi Minh played it coldly; although he was constantly posing as a Nationalist, Ho and his Reds stood aside and let the Nationalists die. "My itinerary is carefully prescribed," Ho Chi Minh once confessed. "You cannot deviate from the route, can you?"

Men in Black. The patient Ho Chi Minh got his chance in World War II. Three months after the Germans swept into Paris, the Japanese, almost unopposed, took effective control of Indo-China. In what amounted in Asian eyes to a crowning loss of face, the Vichy-French agreed to cooperate with the Japanese. With flexibility and imagination, Ho patched together a "United Front" of Communists and Nationalists to harass both Frenchmen and Japanese. Ho called the new party the Viet Minh.

During the war years, the Viet Minh organized a guerrilla force of 10,000 men who did so well in the jungles that they became known as "Men in Black." And Ho Chi Minh, at almost no cost, gained a position from which he could: 1) guide and control the Nationalists; 2) win prestige in the country as the only effective anti-Japanese underground; 3) earn the good will of Nationalist China and the U.S. merely because he was helping to fight the Japanese. "I was a Communist," Ho Chi Minh would later remark, "but I am no longer one. I am a member of the Vietnamese family, nothing else."

Chief of State. In the fall of 1945, after Hiroshima and the Japanese collapse, Ho Chi Minh took the decision of his life. Despite the repeated cautions of Moscow, 4,000 miles away (the Red Chinese were still isolated in their caves), Ho struck for power. "General offensive on all fronts," Viet Minh Military Order No. 1 proclaimed, and Ho's men in black, emerging in cohesion from jungle lairs, received the surrender of many Japanese and their arms. A French commissioner, parachuting down to reclaim the colony, found himself stripped seminude, and under arrest. But Ho's victory was not to pass unchallenged.

Under the Big Three agreement at Potsdam, the Nationalist Chinese came in to occupy Hanoi and the North, the British (which meant the French, who arrived in British ships) came to liberate Saigon and the South. Ho defied them. "We hold these truths to be self-evident," Ho proclaimed, declaring his Viet Nam independent. The great deception began.

Ho Chi Minh sent a golden opium set to the Chinese Nationalist commander and persuaded him that the Viet Minh was the right outfit to keep check on the French. "I love France and French soldiers. You are welcome. You are all heroes," Ho Chi Minh later declared, and the French decided that Ho was a useful man to watch the Chinese. "Americans are the liberators of the free world," Ho cried out, bidding for U.S. moral support, and OSS officers mingled convivially with the Viet Minh as Ho turned to more serious problems. Serious Problem No. 1 was the Nationalist element of the Viet Minh, which was getting uneasy. One by one Nationalist leaders were assassinated; Ho professed to be saddened by such unruly behavior.

Serious Problem No. 2 was the French: there was a new determination in them, a special kind of pride born of French anxiety to wipe out the humiliations of the war and to re-emerge as a great power. As such, the French were quite definite about Indo-China: they wanted it back. With a ruthlessness and skill that matched Ho's own, the French army speedily got control of the South and could not be kept out much longer from Hanoi. So Ho negotiated: when the French army came back into the North, as the Chinese withdrew, Ho consented to lead his "Democratic Republic of Viet Nam" back within the French Union. The French recognized Ho as Chief of State.

The Onset of War. With guards of honor and flags, Ho Chi Minh returned to Paris to settle the details. There is evidence that Ho genuinely wanted agreement at this stage: Moscow was making its postwar play for French friendship, and Ho, with little more than guerrillas behind him, was a long way out on a limb. But the French became more and more stubborn, and Ho saw his conquest fading. Ho made the mistake of relying for support upon French Communists, which further stiffened the French negotiators. Meanwhile, in Indo-China, French-Viet Minh relations were disintegrating: lives were taken on both sides.

Toward the end of 1946, events moved decisively toward war. The talks in France broke down and Ho returned to Indo-China. There was a sharp, unexpected encounter at Haiphong, where French naval units, claiming that they had been attacked, bombarded the city. Ho prepared with guile for the onset of war. On Dec. 15 he congratulated the new French Premier Leon Blum (an old Socialist friend), and Ho's Interior Minister expressed a "sincere desire for fraternal cooperation." On Dec. 19 Ho ordered the Viet Minh army to attack the unsuspecting French army and civilian population in Hanoi. "For every ten men that you kill," Ho, man of war, warned the French, "we will kill one of yours. It is you who will have to give up in the end."

For seven years the fighting was a standoff: the French held the cities, but could not sweep the jungles; the Viet Minh presided over the jungles, but could not storm the towns. The political war was also a standoff: the French brought back Bao Dai, an ex-puppet of the Japanese, to reinspire Vietnamese nationalism on their behalf--but they got nowhere; the Viet Minh lost friends by their brutal emphasis upon forced labor, and by further purges of their nationalist element. But for the Indo-Chinese people, the war was an unrelenting horror: at war's end a staggering 2,000,000 Indo-Chinese civilians were homeless. Ho's patient preparation was finally rewarded last spring, when the Communists struck characteristically on two fronts 5,000 miles apart: with Red China field guns and Russian rocket launchers, they crumbled the valiant French garrison at Dien-bienphu; with Chou En-lai and Molotov, they crumbled Western resolution at Geneva. One day last month, in one of the most extraordinary spectacles of Asia's long, unfolding panorama, French tanks withdrew from Hanoi before Viet Minh infantrymen wearing sneakers.

"We Are Winning!" With victory, Ho Chi Minh's prestige reached a new high in Asia. Nationalists of many lands, for all their objection to Communism, could not help taking pride in the exploits of an Asian army against their old masters from Europe. Indo-China's wait-and-seeists no longer needed to wait and see. "We are winning! Why stay with the losers?" cried Viet Minh women, urging Vietnamese soldiers to desert. "Do you want your sons to curse your names?"

Besides the heady stimulant of victory, the Viet Minh could also claim:

P: The most effective jungle army in Southeast Asia, indoctrinated so deeply that there is a Red cell in every platoon, and commissars discuss politics with the wounded in the hospitals.

P: The best general in Southeast Asia, Vo Nguyen Giap, 42, top law student of his time at Hanoi University, graduate of Chinese military schools. A Communist since the late '30s, he is sometimes temperamental and needs to be watched by party theologians, but his hatred for the French is unwavering: his first wife went to jail for calling the Tricolor a "flag of dogs," and died of typhoid there.

P: A solid political organization. Ho Chi Minh has destroyed the Viet Minh's Nationalist elements, and he is unquestioned master of the Viet Minh Politburo.

P: Membership in the Communist empire and expert guidance. Red China officers swarm, and Red China goods are turning up in Hanoi. Seven of eleven top Viet Minh leaders were trained in Moscow. Ho Chi Minh, according to the best evidence, reports direct to Moscow, not through Peking.

And the Viet Minh, unlike its Western adversaries, has no impreciseness of purpose. "The party recognizes that the Viet Nam revolution is an integral part of the world revolution led by the Soviet Union," the Viet Minh proclaims.

Privilege & Presence. South Viet Nam, by contrast, which remains within the French Union, is demoralized and divided. Bao Dai, the porcine Chief of State, lives in France with his mistresses, his Ferrari and his Jaguar XK 120. Bao Dai's Premier in Saigon is Ngo Dinh Diem, 53, a high-minded patriot but an ineffective leader, who is more or less locked up inside his palace by Vietnamese generals who want to grab power for themselves. In many of the villages that the Viet Minh infiltrators do not control,* local sects and gangsters rule with private armies.

The French colonials make their own contribution to chaos. Some, hoping to maintain privileges in the rubber-rich South, are encouraging the Vietnamese generals to intrigue against Diem; other Frenchmen want to replace Diem with Buu Hoi, 39, a left-wing leprosy expert who has not lived in Indo-China for 20 years. In the Communist North, a 20-man French mission hopes to keep "the French presence" in the Viet Minh state, and do business there; there is even talk of French help to rebuild the vital strategic railroad from Hanoi to Langson on the Red China frontier.

In Saigon, some of the French are nonchalant. "Of course the whole country is gone," said a French journalist. Others are bitter. "These people have no appreciation, no understanding of all we have done for them," said a Frenchwoman on a terrace, sipping lemonade. Commissioner General Paul Ely is faithfully working with the U.S. to strengthen South Viet Nam, but others are not. "They treat Indo-China," complained an American, "like a Frenchman treats a mistress in whom he's losing interest. He doesn't want her for himself, but he gets sore if anyone else shows interest."

"Cork in the Bottle." The U.S. was certainly late in getting interested. In the closing days of World War II, President Roosevelt denounced the "shocking record" of French colonialism, and the U.S. later stipulated that its aid to France must not be used in the colonial war in Indo-China. It took Americans some time to realize that the French, for all their colonial faults, were fighting an enemy that for all its anticolonial pretensions, was actually and determinedly Communist. By then the hour was late. "We have here a sort of cork in the bottle" said President Eisenhower, of Indo-China Said Vice President Nixon, amid the sullen thunder of Dienbienphu : "If, to avoid further Communist expansion in Asia, we must take the risk of putting our boys in, I think the executive branch has ... to do it." But though the U.S. was spending about $800 million a year in Indo-China by war's end, it kept out of the shooting.

Now the U.S. was once more getting involved. President Eisenhower last week sent General J. Lawton Collins, onetime Army Chief of Staff, to South Viet Nam to see what could be done. "Lightning Joe" Collins found himself in a devil's brew of cynicism, intrigue and despair. His own role was difficult. He would not be able to give orders; he would only be able to recommend, pressure and persuade. U.S. officials on the scene would like the French to recall their mission from Hanoi and quit dealing with Ho Chi Minh, to call the Vietnamese generals off Diem, and to get rid, once and for all, of Bao Dai. Only then could Diem tackle South Viet Nam's basic problems: speed land reform, strengthen the army and restore confidence.

The U.S. itself is plagued with doubts: the Pentagon does not want to get bogged down upon the Asian mainland; the State Department is unwilling to commit U.S. prestige too deeply in South Viet Nam if the cause is already lost. Under the terms of the Geneva truce, all-Viet Nam elections are scheduled to be held in 1956, with the winner to take the entire country. As of today, that winner would be Ho Chi Minh. The Communist North, organized by tyranny, would easily out vote a South disrupted by chaos.

People on a Sandbar. In Hanoi last week, honoring the 37th anniversary of Russia's October Revolution, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed: "Today we have here in the East more than half the people in the world, together with the Soviet Union in the struggle . . . This is an extremely mighty force, which becomes mightier and mightier." Yet from North Viet Nam, since Geneva, about 450,000 Vietnamese have escaped through chinks in the new Viet Minh monolith, leaving the antiseptic tyranny of Uncle Ho for the South's cha otic freedom. The articulate among these huddles of refugees complain that the Viet Minh has destroyed the customs and friendlinesses of the past, and has spat upon family ties and religion.

In crude rafts, sampans and Western warships, with all that was left of their previous lives wrapped in cotton bundles, the refugees headed south -- aware that their very act of leaving might be their death warrant if Uncle Ho ever caught up with them. Last week several thousand refugees, fleeing from the Communist interior, got trapped on a sandbar off the coast of North Viet Nam. Before them lay the sea. Behind them lay the Communist land of compulsory joy. In frail craft, the braver, stronger ones made it out to the three-mile limit, where a French aircraft carrier waited to pick them up and take them south to freedom. But the others, it seemed, were doomed. If any ship came inside the three-mile limit to pick up the refugees, the Viet Minh coldly made it known, then that ship would be fired on. In the Asia of victorious Ho Chi Minh and his big brother Mao, there are millions marooned upon desolate sandbars: the act of rescue, if these Asians this late are considered worth saving, will take power, humanity and a steely nerve.

*Ho's real name and age are not precisely known. He was born Nguyen Tat Thanh, or Nguyen Sinh Huy, or Nguyen Van Thanh, in 1890, 1892 or 1894, son to a poor but well-read local official who lost his job for opposing the French. Ho was known for about 20 years as Nguyen Ai Quoc, meaning "Nguyen the Patriot." The name Ho Chi Minh, meaning "He who Enlightens," is the latest of about a dozen aliases; it was adopted during World War II. * In the South, the Viet Minh is so far behaving with outward correctness; the Viet Minh has even made a show of evacuating several hundred regular troops to the North.

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