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the seventeenth parallel, but stipulated that a Vietnam-wide election would
take place in 1956 to decide the question of reunification. The United
States refused to sign the Geneva accord, and the stipulated elections never
took place.
Ho Chi Minh once again turned to American history-this time not
for inspiration but rather to underline America's betrayal of her own rev–
olutionary ideals. Pointing to George Washington, the military leader of
the colonial revolt, to Lincoln, the courageous warrior for equality and
national unity , and to the anticolonial Roosevelt, Ho composed an open
letter to President Dwight Eisenhower. "You are, Mr. President, the inher–
itor of the great leaders of the United States," he wrote, "Washington,
Lincoln or Roosevelt....You speak often of peace and justice....But, in
your actions toward Viet Nam, your policy is the opposite." How different
twentieth-century history might have been if Presidents Truman,
Eisenhower, and Kennedy had understood the depth of the anticolonial
aspirations in Vietnam. But Kennedy dismissed the warning of Charles de
Gaulle who cautioned the young American president not to become
entrapped in the "bottomless military and political swamp" of Vietnam.
An earlier American president too had been deaf to Vietnamese pleas for
support for their independence.
That was in 1919. The activi ty in Versailles was intense: di plomats and
their assis tants rushing around, dozens of typewri ters pounding away, the
monotone voices of translators echoing in the great mirrored halls. The
Big Four, the victors of the war, held court. Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd
George, Georges Clemenceau, and Vittorio Orlando were setting the
terms of the peace-and of the future.
T.
E. Lawrence, garbed in his exot–
ic Arab headcloth, his khaki uniform and British badges, arrived with
Prince Feisal to appeal for independence for Syria and Mesopotamia. A less
conspicuous and less celebrated petitioner than Lawrence of Arabia also
appeared, desiring an audience for his cause. He was a young, small man,
uncomfortable in his rented tuxedo. He was a Vietnamese-or an
"Annamite," as the French then said-named Nguyen Ai Quoc, one of the
dozens of aliases of the future Ho Chi Minh.
He had come to Versailles inspired by President Wilson's Fourteen
Points, especially Wilson's recognition of the right of nations to self–
determination. Still, the program he hoped to present to President Wilson
in Versailles was a modest one. He was not asking for anything so bold as
independence for Vietnam. His "eight points" included equality before the
law for Vietnamese as well as for French citizens in Indochina, amnesty for
political prisoners, government by law, not by decree, a permanent delega–
tion of Vietnamese representatives in the French parliament, and some civil
rights-freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
