Before, during and after US President Joe Biden’s visit to Hanoi, in mid-September 2023, a historical event was repeatedly mentioned by the Vietnamese media, which was “Ho Chi Minh in February 1946 sent a letter to US President Harry Truman to express his wish to establish diplomatic relations with the United States.” This event is exploited with the purpose of explaining to the people why Vietnam and the United States were once enemies but have now become strategic allies. They said that it was also according to Mr. Ho Chi Minh’s wishes.
In an interview with the press on the afternoon of September 8, before US President Joe Biden’s visit to Vietnam, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Ha Kim Ngoc emphasized that the US President’s visit will realize Uncle. Ho Chi Minh’s wishes, stated in a letter to US President Harry Truman in February 1946, with the hope that Vietnam would have full cooperative relations with the US.
Or recently, on September 19, Prime Minister Pham Minh Chinh visited and spoke at Georgetown University. Here, PM Chinh said “This shows the spirit of realizing President Ho Chi Minh’s ideology in his letter to US President Truman on February 16, 1946, expressing his desire to establish full relations with America.”
A historical event frozen in the past, even hidden by the Communists for many years, is now being actively dragged out and polished by Hanoi’s leadership with the purpose of reassuring the old revolutionaries and veterans who have always had an unfriendly attitude toward Americans.
Half a bread is still bread, but half the truth is not the truth. The story of Ho Chi Minh writing a letter to US President Truman but not receiving a response from the Americans is such a story.
What is the truth of this story?
Based on historical data:
The Viet Minh Front, is an organization founded by the Indochina Communist Party in 1941, and the Viet Minh once had cooperation with the US intelligence agency OSS.
In March 1945, Ho Chi Minh met General Chennault in Kunming, China. Ho Chi Minh then realized that the Americans wanted to use Vietnamese organizations to participate in the fight against the Japanese. Immediately, Ho Chi Minh established a relationship with US intelligence in rescuing American pilots and providing intelligence information to the OSS. In return, the OSS provided weapons, communications, medical assistance, advice, and small-scale military training to the Viet Minh.
On July 16, 1945, the Con Nai group of the US intelligence agency OSS parachuted into Tuyen Quang. Here, the Deer Team trained the Viet Minh force of about 200 people on how to use American weapons and guerrilla warfare tactics. On September 2, 1945, the Deer Team returned to Hanoi with the Viet Minh to attend the founding ceremony of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.
During the 1941-1946 period, Ho Chi Minh tried to convince Americans that he was not a Communist, but just a nationalist. Through the US intelligence agency OSS, in February 1946, Ho Chi Minh sent a letter to US President Truman, asking the US to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam.
However, at that time, Americans still considered Ho Chi Minh a spy of the Communist International, a puppet of Moscow, because Ho Chi Minh had been in Moscow for many years. CIA documents at that time affirmed, “Although the Indochina Communist Party announced its ‘dissolution’ in 1945, by 1946 they still had 50,000 party members, and by 1950 that number reached 400,000.”
That is why the Americans did not respond to Ho Chi Minh’s letter to President Truman. By the end of September 1946, the US Government decided to withdraw all intelligence officers in Vietnam and ended contact with the Vietnamese Government and Ho Chi Minh.
For very obvious reasons: Ho Chi Minh was a Communist.
To this day, Vietnamese leaders have understood and learned from the lessons of Ho Chi Minh’s failure when wanting to cooperate with America.
During the visit of US President Joe Biden, the move of Vietnam’s senior leaders to repeat the request that the United States recognize Vietnam as having a market economy is a way that the Vietnamese Communists secretly admitted that they had abandoned Communism, introduced to Vietnam by Ho Chi Minh, to follow capitalism.
To make it easier to understand, Architect Duong Quoc Chinh, a person living in Hanoi, wrote on his personal Facebook page that “Uncle Nguyen Tat Thanh has been ungrateful to America not since 1946, but since 1912. I got on the train to work as a waiter, then went to New York first, stayed all year, and even went to Massachusetts. Then he returned to England, then to France. Here, he read Lenin’s theses, saw the sun of truth shining through his heart and became a Communist.
That is the reason why US President Truman later rejected his letters requesting help, in 1946, because he was a Communist. As a result, it took several decades until yesterday.
So, he first rejected the American teacher, then abandoned the English teacher, then abandoned the French teacher, and finally studied with the Soviet and Chinese teachers. No need to mention the consequences.”
The lesson to be learned is that if you decide to study abroad, you will study thoroughly. If you quit halfway and stand on this mountain looking at that mountain, you will pay a very heavy price.
Thoibao.de (Translated)
