546
PARTISAN REVIEW
Cochinchina. France burdened the Vietnamese with unjust taxes; France
expropriated the people's land, rice fields and forests; France ruled by
decree and not by law; she built prisons instead of schools, and in
Indochina's darkest hour, France abandoned her to the Japanese.
Days earlier, Ho Chi Minh and his advisors had been laboring to recall
as much of Jefferson's language as they could. Ho had memorized the
opening lines of the Declaration when he visited the United States as a
menial laborer on a tramp steamer before World War
I,
but his memory
had faded. He wondered if one of the American intelligence officers serv–
ing in Vietnam could help. During World War
1[,
James Patti headed the
Viet Nam mission of the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the pre–
cursor of the CIA. During the summer and fall of 1945, Major Patti, along
with Brigadier General Philip Gallagher and Captain Farris, observed Ho
Chi Minh's Viet Minh party. For Patti, Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist, not
a "starry-eyed revolutionary or a flaming radical." "I felt he could be trust–
ed as an ally against the Japanese," Patti recalled. "I saw that his ultimate
goal was to attain American support for the cause of a free Viet Nam."
Ho explained to Patti that his draft of the Vietnamese declaration of
independence needed polishing. Someone translated Ho's words as Patti
listened carefully. Patti immediately realized that the translator was reading
very familiar words. After the translator read a few sentences, Patti turned
to Ho in amazement and asked if he really intended to use this text as his
declaration of independence. "I don't know why it nettled me," Patti
mused. "Perhaps a feeling of proprietary right, or something equally inane."
Ho sat back in his chair, his palms together with fingertips touching his lips
ever so lightly, as though meditating. "Should I not use it?" he asked. Patti
was embarrassed. Why should Ho not use it? The translator started again:
all men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights;
among these are liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness. "Life must come
before liberty," Patti remarked. Ho snapped to the point. "Why, of course,
there is no liberty without life." Ho pressed Patti for more, but that was all
the American could remember.
Would Ho Chi Minh have borrowed Jefferson's words for the joyous
celebration of Vietnamese independence if he had not understood and
identified with the Americans' eighteenth-century anti-colonial revolt, if
he had not admired their revolutionary spirit? Perhaps there was a practi–
cal side to Ho's stratagem too. He might have felt that his use ofJefferson's
Declaration would impart some legitimacy to his struggle, that it would be
a signal to the Americans that he respected them, that he wanted their
friendship as well as their support for his own sister revolution.
Indochinese independence had beCOITle a "near-obsession" for President
Roosevelt during 1943 and 1944, and Ho's expectation that the United
