In 1945, he received a team of OSS operatives who helped to train his men and even provided him with quinine and sulfa drugs, which may have saved his life after he contracted malaria and dysentery. Like most people who met him, the OSS officers were impressed by Ho’s “clear-cut talk” and “Buddha-like composure”;14 the rebel leader shared Ramon Magsaysay’s personal magnetism, a quality that his future rival, Ngo Dinh Diem, singularly lacked. The OSS men did not notice how skillfully Ho deflected questions about whether he was a Communist. That’s what “the French label . . . all Annamites who
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