Ho had disclaimed Communism as his aim, saying that if he could secure independence, that was enough for his lifetime. “Perhaps,” he had added wryly, “fifty years from now the United States will be Communist and then Vietnam can be also.” Moffat concluded that the group in charge of Vietnam “are at this stage nationalist first” and an effective nationalist state must precede a Communist state, which as an objective “must for the time being be secondary.”
