Viet Minh leader sent his personal envoy, Pham Ngoc Thach, a physician who would later serve as Ho’s personal doctor, to Bangkok to stress to American diplomats stationed there the moderate nature of the Vietnamese revolution and the opportunities that would be available to U.S. investors following independence. Vietnam would not be Communist for decades, Thach assured these men, and even then the government would be a moderate, inclusive, nationally oriented one. Communism in Vietnam, as it had existed since the early 1930s, he even said at one point, “is nothing more than a means of arriving
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