own independence. But his appeals to President Truman—there were at least eight letters from Ho between October 1945 and February 1946—went unanswered. Administration officials had little enthusiasm for the return of French colonialism, but they also had no desire to aid a veteran Comintern operative. Many analysts would later see this as a squandered opportunity, although in those days, before Tito’s 1948 break with Stalin, few Americans could have imagined that a Communist leader could be independent of the Soviet Union.
