IIRC - read some article on this long ago - in fact it was strongly recommended to Washington by the OSS to support Ho, but the politicos in Washington were more interested in making the French happy ( :smack: ) and so screwed over their field operative and his local catch. Which of course, sounds like every bad spy novel ever written and is probably much more complex.
I know you meant well, but WHOOOSH. 
Archimedes Patti. Archimedes. Screw.
That, and at the time the situation in South East Asia wasn’t of great strategic interest. That really happened because of Korea and China going Red. Vietnam wasn’t even on our radar until the 1950’s - and we weren’t going to expend what little pull we had with France to make it happen, and not for a Communist cause.
There’s also the question of what we would do about it if we could. France wasn’t going to willingly give up Vietnam - not at least without a lot of compensation. Our standing with them wasn’t the best anyway; there was a lot of tension of France’s perceived obnoxiousness and intransigence concerning post-war Germany and Berlin and its attitude during the Cold War. We weren’t going to threaten them and they knew it, so our ability to force them out of colonial ventures was extremely limited. I highly doubt the post-war French government would give the U.S. the time of day on the matter. Certainly not De Gaulle.
It’s somewhat in the nature of America to blame ourselves both for involving ourselves and not being involved in every bad thing that happens in the world. Short of crystal balls becoming cheap and effective, we’re really not going to figure out ways of making the world a nice and happy place anytime soon. So we make judgment calls and a lot of them are going to turn out very, very badly no matter whom you follow, or what creed you adhere to, politically.
My fiancee is Vietnamese. She was born there in the 60’s and came to USA only 10 years ago.
I’ve asked her about the living situation in Vietnam as we may retire there when our daughter is grown.
I assumed that education would be free and available to all Vietnamese, as it is free in Cuba, which turns out many high-quality physicians. Not so. Poor people can’t afford to educate their children at all. Instead they go to work, often at garment factories, and usually learn to read enough to get by in the city by time they’re grown.
From what she tells me, it’s a typical Asian corrupt society. There are lots of regulations over starting a business, but if you make friends with the local officials and give them the right gifts, you’ll have an easy time with it.
If you give the cops free meals at your restaurant, or free haircuts at your salon, you’ll never have a stick-up. If you don’t comp them, you may get robbed and the police might not respond when called.
Most large cities like Hanoi, Saigon, Hue and Da Nang have indoor plumbing, but the water’s not safe to drink without a reverse osmosis filter (imported from China) or boiling.
The doctor isn’t free, but most working people can afford medical care. Instead of insurance, people rely on their extended family for major medical expenses.
There are many people, most over 35, missing legs from stepping on landmines.
Well, I heard you can get a lobster dinner in Vietnam for like a dollar, so it can’t all be bad…
Or, maybe that was Cambodia. Same diff I’m sure…
Fiancee has several Vietnamese travel DVDs. It looks like the sidewalks in the large cities are full of outdoor cafes and fast food carts.
I’ve been to Vietnam twice as a tourist (there’s a long story where I was at one point pretty intimate with a Vietnamese family), and there are really two Vietnams. (Or Viet Nam–I can only speak a few phrases in Vietnamese, but I’ll always remember that basically every word in the language has only one syllable.) If you go to Saigon and stay in the Hyatt there or one of the nice hotels and go to a lot of the touristy areas, visit some of the places in the countryside Westerners will often go you’ll have a really good trip but won’t necessarily have a good idea what the country is about.
The Vietnamese I knew lived in the outerskirts of Saigon where it’s more like a slum until the last ten years the street the Vietnamese family I knew lived on had never had a car on it as it was really just an alley and no one in the vicinity owned a car in any case. They had a communal pond with a wooden shack built over the water that was their toilet, the houses did not have running water so the women would have to go to communal pumps and acquire a large amount of water each day for drinking/bathing and bring it back to the houses. There’s a lot of small gardens and low level economic activity like women selling vegetables and fruit and such at market stalls.
For the poor there, I don’t really know how it’s a Communist country at all. By and large they have little to no interactions with the government and receive few government benefits. I think certain things, like medical care and dental work you can get done and there’s no charge but day to day most poor Vietnamese don’t have a relationship with the government and it’s more of a pre-modern type attitude about a lot of things. For example their children all went to a school where you had to pay for the child to attend. There were two types as it was explained to me, full day school cost more but was considered better and half day school cost less. Some of the kids in the family went to full day and some half day based on the parents ability to pay (all this was in the same small house btw, most Vietnamese at least the poor ones live in a single house with multiple nuclear families all part of the same extended family.)
The family I was familiar with had relatives that owned a large amount of property in the countryside about a 20 minute drive on a dilapidated truck from the ocean. Talking with them about this, they described the land situation for them as “our grandfather in the 80s explored this land so now it is ours.” They built a house there and then over time have sold the land in parcels to other people including members of their extended family. If you read about the laws of Vietnam, you’ll note there is no legal private land ownership, only leases from the government. But given the total lack of any interaction these people had with the government I’m not sure if they even have a legal lease, or if they just paid some money to a random government functionary or if they’re just acting outside the bounds of the law out of ignorance and the government is so weak it has no idea about situations like that.
My impression was government was extremely corrupt in Vietnam. One of the relatives of the Vietnamese family I knew was a health inspector and he basically described his job as walking around restaurants in Saigon and being given large amounts of free food and alcohol that he brought back to his house. He also seemed to fill out forms as well, but didn’t actually know anything about food safety or anything like that. I’ll note he didn’t talk as though he were corrupt, just that he was “given lots of gifts” while working his area at work.
So my impression of Vietnam after my trips there are that’s it’s basically a pretty poor country that has some good things going for it and a government so minimal in scope and power that it’s hard to call it communist. Ho Chi Minh’s picture is in every school classroom and such, but it’s really far removed from American conceptions of other communist countries like the Soviet Union or China before market reforms.
That doesn’t really disprove my theory. Somebody like President Xi is certainly a very wealthy man (although not quite a billionaire). However Xi was never a private businessman; he entered the communist party from college (his father had been a prominent government official) and began working for the government. As he rose through the ranks of government service, he (along with the members of his immediate family) acquired a sizeable fortune.
Now as I wrote before the communists in China regard capitalism as “a resource to be used by the government.” In Xi’s case, it appears he figured one of the ways capitalism could serve the government was taking care of Xi Jinping.
Sure, he entered the Communist Party, but I don’t think any of those guys believe in communism. It’s just a means to power.
I’ve read of how Xi, Hu – many of the leaders – have hidden a lot of wealth abroad. I think he really would be recognized as a billionaire if that were to be uncovered.
My point is that he appears to have made his fortune as a result of his political power.
Probably. And a lot of the money seems to be in his wife’s name or other family member’s.