I decided that after returning to the US to pursue an academic career I would eventually study the life of Ho Chi Minh to find the secret of his success.

Many of the ideas of Sun Tzu and Mao Zedong came naturally to the young Ho Chi Minh, who would probably have applied the same strategy even had he not been aware of them.

I decided that after returning to the US to pursue an academic career I would eventually study the life of Ho Chi Minh to find the secret of his success.

In the longer term, I hope that as Vietnam evolves into a more prosperous society with active ties to the international marketplace, it will lose its inherent suspicion of the outside world and begin to develop along the lines of what has recently been happening in Thailand and Malaysia.

Ho Chi Minh sought to defeat both adversaries [French and American] primarily by using diplomatic and political means, combined with paramilitary activities.

I first became interested in Ho Chi Minh in 1964-1965 while I was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in South Vietnam as a foreign service officer with the Department of State. The government in Saigon was at the point of collapse and the [Lyndon] Johnson administration was preparing to send U.S. combat troops to prevent a communist victory there. I became convinced that the U.S. effort would not succeed because of the lack of conviction in the Saigon government compared to the discipline and sense of self-sacrifice among the Viet Cong.

From the outset, when [Ho Chi Minh] became a member of the French Communist Party in 1920, he was an independent thinker who adjusted Marxist-Leninist ideas and tactics to what he perceived to be the concrete situation in Indochina.