 I'm Walter Cronkite. Today, the 20th century presents its regular feature, Man of the Month. This month, while diplomats traveled and statesmen pondered, a freomand with a wispy beard in the drab, dug-in city of Hanoi held many of the answers to President Johnson's worldwide peace offensive. His name was Nguyen Shin Kung when he was born 75 years ago. Today he is Ho Chi Minh, the President of North Vietnam. 1945. The man who calls himself Ho Chi Minh, he who enlightens, is greeted by delirious crowds when he arrives with his guerrilla forces after Japan's defeat. Smaller crowds greet the French, returning to their colony. Hope proclaims Vietnam's independence in September 1945. The French treat him as the head of an independent state. Years before, the same man left his homeland, became a sailor, a pastry chef in London, a photo retoucher in France. And rented a dress suit and derby hat to petition President Wilson at Versailles in 1919. Hope pleaded for independence for Vietnam. No one listened to him except the French communists. He became a founding member of their party in 1920. Then began his long march to power. Moscow, New York, Berlin, prisons in Hong Kong and China were his way stations. He assumed a dozen different names as he rose in the hierarchy of world communism. But he never lost sight of his main goal, Vietnamese independence. In the summer of 1946, in Napoleon's castle of Fontainebleau, he seeks to obtain from the French full independence for his country. Paris treats the former photo retoucher with full honors, but behind the glittering exteriors lurk the realities of post-war France. A weak government at home and strongly entrenched colonial interests overseas. Until the end, Ho hopes for an agreement. Last minute talks with French overseas minister, Marius Muté, fail. The handshake is that of men about to enter the ring. A man who covered the story in annoy, today the New Yorker magazines corresponded in South Vietnam, and author of the book, The Lost Revolution, Robert Chaplin. You could say that this was the beginning of what I have described as one of the many lost opportunities in Indochina and Vietnam to force the French into a stronger, more liberal position, so that a decent alternative to communism might have been created earlier, or perhaps Ho might have been preteto-fied, if you want to put it that way. This opportunity obtained until certainly doing from the end of 1945 until the Indochina war broke out on November December 1946. But there was a year there during which the French could have certainly tried harder. It was their own fault that they didn't. And myself, I blame the collapse of those negotiations primarily on the French, on the conservative element among the French. November 1946, French guns hit the port of Haifeng. A few days later, Ho's guerrillas in turn attacked the French. Ho goes into the jungle. The Indochina war is on, and it is to last eight blood-filled years. Ho's troops, called the Viet Minh, are at first equipped with a medley of old French and Japanese weapons supplemented by American arms from World War II. Communist weapons will come later. Ho's headquarters is deep in the jungle. There, he and his most trusted associates forge their plans. Bo Nguyen Gia, the guerrilla expert. Trong Chin, the Communist Party secretary. Ho Chi Minh, the president who calls himself Uncle Ho, and Pham Van Dong, a nobleman by birth. Later, Ho is prime minister. Only in 1950, after Red Chinese troops arrive on Vietnam's borders, does Ho have any direct contact with another communist state. His arguments are nationalistic. He stresses that the fatherland must be freed of the foreigners, the French. A daily worker editor who has since quit the American Communist Party, interviewed Ho in the jungle in 1953. Joseph Sterobin, today an expert in communist studies at Columbia University. Well, I wanted to get from him under what circumstances did he think France would give up, if some negotiation could take place with France? I wanted to put the thing the other way around. How is this war going to end? He replied very abruptly, when they are beaten. Well, I had come prepared for some kind of insight into the possibilities of negotiation. He was very firm on the notion that they would have to be beaten. Then I asked him about American help to France. At that time, some of the bombers that were hitting us in the jungles during the day were of American make. His attitude was the more stuff you send to the French, the more we will capture and the stronger we will become. One of the points he made was, well, communism hasn't gone over in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Which I thought was rather strange. Only a man with Western experience could say that. But only a man with a certain liberalism in his communism would suggest at that particular moment that maybe communism isn't the answer to every people. And then Ho began to talk about the days of their contact with Americans, which was, of course, in 43, 44 and 45, when the American OSS, as part of the United War effort against Japan, made contact with the Vietnamese guerrillas. He seemed to be searching for the name of the one American with whom he had had a great deal to do. And I remember it as Holland. He himself stumbled on that. He tried to remember something about it. I've since learned that it was Hellowell that he had contact with. Colonel Paul J. Hellowell, former OSS man, now a Miami lawyer. When he came up and asked for arms, there were certain questions we usually asked. And one question that I asked him, and I asked him every time, was who was he going to shoot? And he said he was going to shoot Japanese, which was fine, and we would ask the question, well, what about the French? And to give the devil his due, he would never commit that he would not use the arms against the French at some point. Had he made that commitment, he possibly might have gotten more arms than he did. When American arms do go to Indochina, it is 1950 after Korea, and they go to the French. Ho and his cabinet must hide from roving bombers in a deep mineshaft. The French know that the enemy hides below them in the jungle. But Ho's fighters have in their favor their mastery of the art of guerrilla warfare, and above all, their fanaticism. In a final attempt to trap the illusory Viet-Minh, the French decide to tempt Ho's forces to fight in the open. As bait, they offer the elite of the French troops in Indochina in an isolated valley called Seat of the Border County Administration. In Vietnamese, Dien Bien Phu. Spurred on by Ho, the Viet-Minh forces accept the French challenge. The experts have predicted that no one could drag artillery pieces and tens of thousands of shells through roadless jungles and across swollen rivers. The Viet-Minh take the French position after 56 days of continuous assault. As the battle unfolds, Ho sends a message to his troops. The enemy will struggle with all his might. We must therefore double our efforts and be resolved to win total victory. Dien Bien Phu has fallen, and the French now are ready to talk. They agree to a peace conference in Geneva, May 1954. CBS News correspondent Alexander Kendrick was there. What I remember about the Geneva 1954 conference is the bright sunshine, the British Union Jack and the communist Chinese star flying side-by-side from the same lakefront hotel. John Foster Dulles' refusal to shake hands with Joe Enlai at a diplomatic reception. There were two conferences at Geneva, first the one on Korea, which got nowhere, and then the one on Indochina. Dulles left before the second one even began, and the United States became only an observer and didn't sign the final agreement. Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, made the Viet Minh accept the 17th parallel as the ceasefire line even though it meant giving up territory to the South. The Geneva agreements leave the victorious Ho Chi Minh in control of North Vietnam. The weak, newly independent state of South Vietnam survives with American support. Three-quarters of a million North Vietnamese flee to the South. Reunification elections to be held by July 1956 under the terms of the Geneva Accords never materialize. Each side will accuse the other of breaking the Accords first. When Ho calls for the liberation of the South, Black Garb militia loyal to Ho will spread guerrilla warfare below the 17th parallel. At home, the backbone of his regime is the feared goose-stepping people's army. To rebuild the North's shattered economy, Ho tries harsh collectivization measures copied from Red China. In 1956, his troops suppress a peasant revolt in his own home province. Ho blames pro-Chinese leaders for the brutal collectivization. For public consumption, Ho himself works on a primitive water wheel. He polishes his image as the gentle leader playing with children from the state-operated kindergarten near his residence, the former palace of colonial governors. What about the man behind the image? This reporter spoke with Professor Bernard B. Fahl of Howard University, whose book, The Two Vietnam's, contains the first Western biography of Ho. If Ho Chi Minh were a Westerner, he would probably have been known as the best public relations conscious Western ruler in the world. He is extremely response conscious. Everything is done with its effect, its ultimate effect on the populace. The uncle idea is his idea. It's Bac Ho in Vietnamese. It's Uncle Ho. Remember these words by an American officer who knew him back in 1945. He says, this awfully sweet old guy. You know, well you don't go around and call Stalin or even Golmuka or Khadar an awfully sweet guy or even Tito. These may be at certain times not totally despicable people. But nobody will ever say of Mao Zedong that he was an awfully sweet old guy. Whereas of Ho Chi Minh, this is the sort of thing come through. Now some people say this is a 24-hour day act. And it will point to the fact that when it comes down to the crunch, Ho Chi Minh in the past has at least allowed, if not ordered, the execution of some fairly old associates. But Ho Chi Minh has succeeded in preserving, in keeping a distance from all this. It's always the assumption if only Ho Chi Minh knew these things wouldn't take place. And this has really been a fantastic performance in this particular sense. Nothing that ever happens in North Vietnam that's bad reflects on Ho Chi Minh as a person. There's yet, in South Vietnam for example, anyone who's willing to go on record insulting Ho Chi Minh as a person. I'm sure you are as aware as I have that the South Vietnamese will say a great deal about the North Vietnamese, that there are communist puppets, that they're fighting there, the China's wars, et cetera, et cetera. But you will not say, find anybody who will say, Ho Chi Minh is a dirty bird. Some of the things that you hear in South Vietnam always is, well when everything's been said and done, Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of this country. And we are in the unhappy position of having to find a counter George Washington. And these are people hard to find these days anywhere. Ho Chi Minh now begins to mend his fences abroad. In 1955, he flies to Peking and gets $350 million in Chinese aid from Mao Tse Dong. A year later, Khrushchev makes his famous speech attacking Stalin and inaugurating the Sino-Soviet split. Ho, though pro-Russian, is caught in the middle. He needs Russian industrial help, but cannot forget Red China's control of his communication lines. Professor Faw. It's very easy to compare Ho Chi Minh to Mao Tse Dong. You are two Asian leaders, two old opera boys, et cetera, et cetera, almost of the same age by the way. Yet the fact is Ho Chi Minh spent 30 years in the West traveling from 1911 to 1931, to 1941, literally when he moved into China, whereas Mao Tse Dong spent most of his life in the grottoes and caves of northeast China. I mean, he's seen the French in France, he's seen the British in Britain, he's seen the Americans, presumably, in perhaps New York and Boston, I'm sure in New York is or more in Harlem. In other words, I don't feel that the problem of not understanding what the United States is about is really the problem of Ho Chi Minh. It may come with the junior leaders. The junior leaders of course have spent most of their life in isolation, but not Ho Chi Minh. His junior leaders, Pham Van Dong, prime minister, intelligent and tough, general G.O.P., defense minister and armed forces chief, a popular man, but in communist countries, military men rarely become politicians. Laysuan, the communist party boss during the French War, top party leader in the South. And there are others such as Trong Chin, whose adopted name, Long March, shows his Chinese allegiance. While the political struggle continues, communist aid and free world trade flow through the port of Haifeng. Government sources say that ships from 25 non-communist nations called on the port, bringing in machinery needed for the country's industrialization drive and exporting its coal. According to Secretary of State Rusk, no strategic items are traded, however. Ho realizes that only industrialization can strengthen his food-deficient country. But to industrialize, one must have trained workers. Soviet bloc and Chinese experts and economic aid of over one billion dollars have poured in over the past 10 years. In most cases, this is still an economy which depends on coolly labor. Modern factories are built by hordes of human hands. Built at the expense of the living standards of the people, such achievements as the Chinese thine-wind steel plant, or the Russian lamb-towel chemicals combine, are nonetheless impressive. So is Ho's own performance as a fence-straddler between Peking and Moscow. Again traveling abroad, he not only is well-received by Khrushchev in Moscow, but he also visits most of the East European satellites in several uncommitted countries. Everywhere Uncle Ho in the simple mouths he don't uniform is a social hit. He also calls upon that prime example of independent communism in the world, Marshal Tito of Yugoslavia, a gesture that surely is not appreciated in Peking. Could Ho Chi Minh become such a Tito? What do you want to? The drama comes into the open in November 1961 in Moscow at a party congress. As the last of the old Bolsheviks in power, Ho with Khrushchev enjoys an honored place next to Hungary's Kadar and Russia's future strongman Brezhnev on the parade grandstand atop Lenin's tomb. But seemingly nothing can heal the widening breach between the Soviets and Peking. The Chinese are hell-bent on proving that their type of militant communism is the only true path to victory over the capitalist world. They openly call for a repudiation of the Soviet leadership by the world's Communist parties. Ho and his party are at a crossroads. The old leader rises and in a quavering voice pleads for reconciliation between the two brother parties. But the Chinese stomp out and expect the North Vietnamese to follow suit. Ho leaves the Congress, but instead of going home he travels about Russia and finds time to dance with the students at Mintz High School. CBS News' chief European correspondent Charles Collingwood asks British scholar P. J. Honey of London University about Ho and the Sino-Soviet split. Obviously he's interested in the Sino-Soviet dispute. He has walked his tightrope. He has moved closer to China or to Russia as the occasion demanded. But this is really something outside. He's only interested in it insofar as it affects the running of his state and the execution of the policies of that state. I would describe him as a communist, but primarily as the ruler of North Vietnam. In other words, they're prepared to kowtow to the Chinese, but if the Chinese start intervening in North Vietnam, then the Vietnamese are not prepared to stand this. All that P. King has offered North Vietnam so far is a great deal of bellicose speeches. You can just visualize a meeting of this small in-group and the Muscovites saying to the P. Kingites in the group, you see what we've got from all your soft, from your big talking, a bomb by the United States, we're now embroiled in an open-ended war because the war is open-ended on both sides. What about the possibility of P. King raising volunteers? That is always possible, but again, Job has enough troops to feed him to South Vietnam for the next five or eight to ten years while they're running out of troops in the North. Here again, we speak of after all, an almost a half a million man army, which is more than one million men of trained reserves. Now, they feed him in at the present rate of about 40,000 troops a year, so they can go on for a long time. In the meantime, however, the North Vietnamese are intervening on their own in South Vietnam. Nguyen Hieu, though, the rarely seen leader of the Viet Cong, as a South Vietnamese liberation front is commonly called, operates from a headquarters deep in South Vietnam's jungles. What had started out in 1957 as a guerrilla operation has erupted into a major war involving more than a million men. The American response to the spreading war is first to send an adviser to the South Vietnamese army. When this proves insufficient, President Johnson orders the bombing of North Vietnam in February of 1965 and the landing of American military forces in March. In April, he offers Hau unconditional discussions. As in 1946, there were perhaps missed opportunities on both sides. But Hau's counteroffer, in the form of four points, is tantamount to a demand for Western surrender. Apparently, like the French, the Americans must be totally defeated. As American air power systematically destroys North Vietnamese military targets, Hau's country becomes a country once more at war. Children are evacuated from Hanoi and North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns and Russian Sam missiles take their toll of American war planes. Then comes the pause in American bombing of North Vietnam. December 24, 1965. But Hanoi still lives in fear of U.S. airstrikes. Hau again makes the rounds of his troops, playing the old role of kindly uncle. He still counts on more plentiful Soviet support. Such aid was promised by Soviet Premier Kosigin back in February 1965 and by Russian Party Secretary Shaleppin in January 1966. Their councils of moderation were violently attacked by Peking, while Hanoi remained silent. This may be an indication that Hau has swerved toward Peking or, as some observers feel, that he no longer is in control of the situation or isn't failing help. Professor PJ Honey. Physically, I think he's probably still reasonably healthy. But mentally, he's been on the slide for at least 18 months. He is, as far as I can make out, subject to periods of lucidity, but in between these, he's not really in control of his mental faculties. Consequently, when people visit North Vietnam, if he happens to be in good form, Ho Chi Minh is marched in and he talks to them. He has his photograph taken with them. He impresses them with his vitality and with his sense of humor. But I don't think any longer he is allowed to take major political decisions. One of the western journalists to see Ho Chi Minh most recently found no evidence of any senility. British newspaper man James Cameron. The door opens and in comes none other than Uncle Ho himself, looking, I must say, in uncommonly good form for a man of rising 76. He moved over without any sort of introduction and sat down, poured himself a bottle of beer and started to smoke what had must have been about 200 cigarettes. And, well, if indeed it is the case that he's paraded in his few lucid moments, this must have been certainly one of them because he gave me the impression of being physically very active. And certainly, in no sense did he talk like a gargah old character. But it is quite true to say he wouldn't talk about politics. When he came over, first of all he wouldn't be photographed properly. He says, today I don't feel photogenic. And he sat down, I said to him, you know, you're the most photogenic old man in Asia. Well, you know this. He said, not today, I've not. Perhaps as often in the past when in a difficult situation, Ho prefers to let the younger leaders bear the brunt of the unpopular decisions while he keeps up his kind old uncle image. Professor Ford. Ho Chi Minh personally told me, he says, well, it took us eight years to look, view the French. It'll probably take us 10 years to deal with the Americans, but we'll hold out. Well, the fact is, what he never realized, that the Americans aren't just three, four times stronger than the French, but something like tenths to the power of the French. We have a precise example. The French had a total combat air force of 200 airplanes. The United States uses 300 airplanes a day in some of those major raids. So very obviously, there's a great deal of agonizing, reappraising going on in North Vietnam. So Ho Chi Minh makes those mistakes. But internally, what means, what sounds to us as being extremely harsh or rough, you know, the American imperialists must leave Vietnam. That's what his people like to hear. This is the sort of old, give them hell Harry of President Truman. And of course, they are up against the very big, the biggest power in the world, and there are 18 million people. Ho Chi Minh is of the blood, sweat, and tear school. You don't fight the revolution for 30 years, getting clobbered every turn until finally you come out on top without being off the blood, sweat, and tear school. It's dangerous to second-think. Or to second-guess a man like Ho Chi Minh. They're much more complicated than that. But I'm very much afraid that if Ho Chi Minh were to make up his mind that this is the war to see through, that he might just be the man to see it through, too. The aged president is still a ferocious nationalist and a shrewd communist revolutionary. This month, the United States made abundantly clear its willingness to negotiate for peace. It's now up to the old man in Hanoi.