When a State Department analyst in February 1949 noted the general absence of anti-American propaganda coming out of Viet Minh headquarters, and suggested that Ho Chi Minh still hoped for U.S. backing for—or at least noninterference in—his cause, Acheson was unmoved. The question, he said some weeks later, of whether Ho Chi Minh was as much a “nationalist as a Commie is irrelevant. All Stalinists in colonial areas are nationalists.” Ho, he said, was an “outright Commie.”3 To acknowledge the possibility of national Communism was to acknowledge that the world was a complex place, and this
...more
