One time I was sitting in the second floor bar in the Omni Parker House in Boston. Very cool, paneled, club chairs, overlooking the street below.
On the little bar menu: Ho Chi Minh Spring Rolls. No kidding.
Couple of weeks later I went back: The Spring Rolls were gone.
Ho Chi Minh worked on passenger freighters and he was a pastry chef at this very hotel in the 1920s. So that is why they had these thingys on the bar menu.
Where am I going with this?
Ho Chi Minh approached the OSS multiple times during WW2 (Viet Nam was occupied, I believe, by the Japanese and the latter were of course complete AHs to the VN people.
But the French were also complete AHs to the VN people, and treated them as essentially slave labor and were nasty to them.
So Bac Ho (Uncle Ho as he came to be known later) approached the FDR admin, wanting to get VN recognized as a free country, as was stated multiple times by FDR and Churchill in their phony documents related to the right of self-determinations of people and nations after WW2 was all said and done.
Nice sentiments, cranked out by FDR's Harvard staffers, but pure BS, it turned out.
And Ho used the phraseology and ideology of Jefferson as in the Declaration to justify his repeated requests to talk to the FDR -- and later the Truman -- admins in an attempt to establish a free Viet Nam after the War.
At every juncture, the OSS operatives were dismissive and blew off Ho Chi and the Vietnamese people.
What a HUGE stupid move!
Imagine if they had taken Ho Chi seriously. If they had taken an interest in Viet Nam as potentially, a Constitutional Republic!
Instead, they returned Vietnam to the detested French, who continued their abuse to the VN people.
UNTIL, Ho Chi went to the CCP.
I am convinced that Ho Chi could have been accomodated and could have been helped by the US in that very early, WW2 stage.
Had the OSS people at least passed on his interest and his willingness to talk to the FDR and Truman administrations, instead of squelching and dismissing it (if indeed this is what happened)...
Imagine an American ally like, even better than, Japan in SE Asia during the Cold War era. Imagine what might have been.
The Vietnamese Americans I know are very solid, squared away, conservatives.
Is it crazy to think like this? We will never know; there is no way to control the experiment by going back in time and make FDR have a sympathetic meeting with the young Ho Chi Minh.
But, cynical me says, NO, Ho Chi would always have been a commie, he was destined to hook up with Mao.
I don't know: I think Ho Chi wanted an independent nation at any, any cost.
I say we missed a great opportunity during WW2, letting our Ivy League geniuses do our thinking for us.
Ho Chi Minh was a co-founder of the French Communist Party, and a Comintern member from the outset, he was always a Soviet agent.
Nice sentiments, cranked out by FDR’s Harvard staffers, but pure BS, it turned out.
It was the USA which forced anti-colonialism upon the word after WWII, with disastrous results. Of course, the USSR was also pushing it to weaken the West.
I am not a Ho Chi Minh expert, but it is possible he was rebuffed by the FDR administration because of USA committments to the French in WWII. The FDR administration was pretty chummy with the Communists, and the communists in France were pretty powerful in the Resistance.
From what I have read, Ho Chi Minh became a dedicated communist in France as a student, long before WWII.
The Britannica shows him as founder of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930.
He went to Moscow in 1923. His biography describes a lifelong, dedicated communist.
It is highly doubtful he would have tolerated the creation of an independent, capitalist Vietnam.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ho-Chi-Minh