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During this past century, Ho Chi Minh, who was the leader of Vietnam for more than forty years defeating both France and the U.S., emerged as a leader of great personal style and tactical shrewdness, a very determined man of action who, as “Uncle Ho,” maintained a special relationship with his people.

His record, even by the standards of his enemies, was astounding: within forty years he brought his nation back to life, built a party and a state, defied a great colonial empire, and confronted and fought one of the world’s strongest powers. Through it all, he became for his country as well as many other countries, a guiding symbol, and for the United States, a key figure who significantly altered its political and intellectual climate.

Yet for all Ho’s amazing power, for all the richness of his life and his position as a symbol of the rebellion of the poor colored against the rich Caucasian, curiously little was known about him in the west. To the journalist Bernard Fall, he said in 1962, “So you are the young man who is so much interested in all small details about my life.” Fall: “Mr. President, you are, after all, a public figure and it certainly would not be a violation of a military secret to know whether you had a family or were in Russia at a given date.” Ho: “Ah, but you know I’m an old man, a very old man. An old man likes to have a little air of mystery about himself. I like to hold on to my little mysteries. I’m sure you will understand that…” There had been a question whether or not he had ever married. He sometimes seemed to delight in creating rumors he had. One night in 1945, Ho took Harold Isaacs, an American journalist, to the home of a Vietnamese friend. During the evening, the friend’s children brought out a packet of drawings inscribed to Ho. He seemed embarrassed by the attention. “I’m all alone, he told Isaacs afterward, “no family, nothing…I did have a wife once…”

Much of his life was cloaked in the anonymity that most Asians seemed to posses, as far as Caucasians were concerned, at the end of the last century. But Ho had as well the additional anonymity that is often attached to the persona of an underground figure – staying one step ahead of the police of several nations, changing his name regularly, then returning to Vietnam to lead an underground revolution, this time from the mountains, so that even his wartime acts and decisions were curiously private and secret. At one time, it had even been reported that he had died in a Hong Kong jail. Most often, in the Communist world, more is normally known about leaders; Khrushchev, Mao, Tito, Stalin – all had their cult of personality.

The film I propose examines this anonymity which Ho projected through various people from around the world who knew him. Examining this anonymity through the eyes of old friends is the point of departure for examining who Ho Chi Minh really was and why he was so remarkable an inspirational leader.

FRIENDS OF UNCLE HO probes this anonymity so as to explore why Ho deliberately did not seek the trappings of power and authority, as if he were so sure of himself and his relationship to both history and his people, that his did not need statues and bridges, books and photographs to prove himself to others. The film will reflect his remarkable confidence about who he was, what he had done, that there would be no problem communicating it to his people; indeed, to try to communicate it by any artificial means such as the Clinton’s U.S. administration does today might have created doubts among his people. We expect that the people effectively did this. This could be an effective revelation even for contemporary Western governments. Nevertheless, through the eyes of those who knew him, a personal and inspiring story of a man, including his quirks and flaws, should emerge to provide inspiration to all.