To those concerned about his Marxism, Ho offered soothing words. Maybe in fifty years, Vietnam would be ready for Communism, he told a group of journalists in Paris the week before, “but not now.” Any change to the economic system would be gradual, and the Vietnamese constitution—modeled, he emphasized, on the American one—contained safeguards for private property. “If the capitalists come to our country, it will be a good thing for them,” he added. “They will make money, but not as it was made in the old days. From now on it is fifty-fifty.”
