Whatever identity he took on, however, at the core Ho had been the same, singleminded man from the moment in Paris, in 1920, when he discovered Lenin's Third International and exclaimed, "Dead martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!" It was the path Ho followed with extraordinary fidelity for the rest of his life, through all the practical business of revolution--the faux compromises, the exemplary executions, the selling of colleagues, the alliances earnestly made and casually repudiated. He became the Third International incarnate. And after his death, his revolutionary spirit helped deal the mighty U.S. its first military defeat of the 20th century.

Born Nguyen Sinh Cung in the village of Kim Lien in 1890, the third child of an independence-minded Mandarin scholar and a mother who later ran guns to Vietnamese rebels, he shipped aboard the French liner Latouche-Treville as a kitchen helper, under the name of Ba--the first of many aliases. A few years later, in 1914, the young sailor was roughing it in London; in 1917 he moved to Paris. "You who wish to have a living remembrance of your parents," he advertised under a new name, "have your photos retouched at Nguyen Ai Quoc's, 9 Impasse Compoint, Paris 17th District."

In Paris he fed his insatiable intellectual appetite with Marx, Shakespeare and the world press at the Quai de Jemmapes library. He talked political shop with such socialist notables as Leon Blum and Jean Longuet, Marx's nephew, and he joined the Socialist Party. When Woodrow Wilson offered his egalitarian Fourteen Points at Versailles after World War I, the 28-year-old Nguyen showed up daily in the palace corridors, hoping to present eight points of his own, asking for Vietnamese autonomy under the flag of France. No one paid the slightest attention to the diffident young man in a rented black flannel suit.

At the same time, the revolution in Russia suggested how one might fight a revolution at home--one that Nguyen the patriot dared to think he might lead and, once committed, never doubted he would win. It was in this spirit that he had come upon Lenin's Thesis on the National and Colonial Questions in Paris. Ho was drawn not only by what he called Lenin's genius but also by "his disdain of luxury, his love of labor, the purity of his private life, his simplicity." The young man from Indochina had found his lifelong model and the course his life must take. He arrived in Moscow shortly after Lenin's death on Jan. 21, 1924--in time to mourn, and pen a moving elegy, but too late to sit at the master's knee. Still, this was the creation.

The Soviet Union was inchoate and volatile, its protean political terrain riven by the vicious rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky. As he would throughout his life--as he would when seamless communism was cracked by tensions between the U.S.S.R. and Red China--Ho ignored such polarities but learned how to use them. When the Soviet Union that year sent a mission, headed by propagandist Mikhail Borodin, to China to aid in the reorganization of both the Chinese army and the Kuomintang, Ho went along as translator Ly Thuy. As Comrade Vuong, he recruited the first cadres of the Vietnam Nationalist Movement (Vietnam Thanh Nien) in Canton, and established the Vietnam Revolutionary Youth Association (Cach Menh Dong Chi Hoi). Soon his trainees were percolating back into the political arteries of his homeland, tied to him by ideology and the Vietnamese cause, but also by his own matter-of-fact brand of terror: the identities of slackers were dropped to the French.

Back in Moscow after a Kuomintang-Soviet rift in 1927, Ho somehow eluded Stalin's show trials, and was never just a "party" animal--to him, communism and national independence were simply two faces of one coin. In the shadowland of secret agentry, he roamed Southeast Asia, gathering the underground threads of power into his almost translucently thin fingers. He appeared in Berlin and Brussels, Switzerland and Italy. He surfaced among the Vietnamese settlers in Siam in 1928 as a Buddhist monk. He flickered with invisibility, a man with no name and with many, fluent in French, English, German, Russian and the dialects of Vietnam and China. When the factions of Indochina's Communist Party squabbled at a 1929 meeting in Hong Kong, the Executive Committee of the Communist International commanded the famous patriot Nguyen Ai Quoc to put them in order, and he--that is, Ho--did.

The French armistice with Germany in 1940, and the Vichy regime's alliance with Japan, signaled to the aging revolutionary that it was time to go home. In February 1941 he returned to Vietnam for the first time in nearly 30 years, to the caves of Pac Bo, a remote jungle village in Cao Bang province, along the Chinese border. There he established the Viet Nam Doc Lap Dong Minh Hoi, or Vietnam Independence League--familiarly, the Viet Minh. Then he began to build the clandestine apparatus--the web of secret cells, agitprop and army--of the world's longest communist revolution. And he took a new nom de guerre. Captured on a secret mission to China and thrown into a spirit-cracking jail for 15 months, he abandoned the notorious Nguyen Ai Quoc and emerged as the heretofore unknown revolutionary Ho Chi Minh.

From his rough Pac Bo headquarters, Ho danced the Viet Minh through a succession of alliances--with China; with Vietnam's playboy emperor in exile, Bao Dai; with Vietnam nationalists; even with the French and Japanese, while his Viet Minh cadres raided at will. When China cut off assistance, Ho befriended the American Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA; his men rescued 17 downed U.S. airmen. By the time the Japanese overthrew Indochina's French regime in March 1945, Ho's was the de facto government. Five months later, after Japan's surrender, the Viet Minh entered Hanoi without a shot fired; within a fortnight the country was theirs as well. On Sept. 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam. His declaration of independence began, "All men were created equal; they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

That day must have seemed to Ho the end of an exhausting journey. In fact, his revolutionary odyssey had only begun. As the French began reoccupying Vietnam, Ho desperately courted peace--he had no illusions about his poorly equipped army's chances against the Legionnaires, or about the political fragility of his regime. Ho even attended futile negotiations in France, which he hadn't seen since the early 1920s. But the heavy-handed French presence wore away his willingness to deal. Finally, he concentrated on guerrilla war, aided by his comrade-in-arms from the Canton days, the talented attorney, history teacher and self- taught general, Vo Nguyen Giap. By the spring of 1950, Ho's army, Chinese trained and equipped, was ready to meet the French. After four years of skirmishing and stalemate, the final battle came in 1954, when Giap's forces effectively destroyed the French garrison trapped in the indefensible bowl of Dien Bien Phu.

On the second day of 1955, Ho again arrived in Hanoi, this time without fanfare, dressed in the rumpled khaki that had long been his preferred costume, riding in a captured French army truck. At age 65, he was retiring from the rough jungle life. He hoped he might also be finished with war. In the event, his people would fight 20 years longer.

As the Geneva Convention divided the country along the 17th parallel, Ho's government--like Stalin's and Mao's--let slip its communist reforms, the cruel broom that has always swept too clean. Nearly a million northern Vietnamese headed south, fleeing what one Frenchman called "undescribable butchery." Revolutionary tribunals indulged in the usual frenzy of kangaroo courts and executions. A half million more Vietnamese became political prisoners, and as many others were placed in a kind of economic Coventry that ended in death by starvation. Meanwhile, in the south, some Viet Minh units--the Viet Cong--lingered as a latent revolution. It was the harbinger of Ho's second war of independence, one that would take a terrible toll on both sides--and curdle something fine in the American spirit.

Ho lived to see the rain of bombs upon his capital, the loss of countless lives, the uglification of a beautiful land, the human price of the independence he'd spent his life pursuing. But time overtook him before his war was finally won. On Sept. 3, 1969, the aggregate stresses of a hard life, malaria, tuberculosis and a long love affair with American tobacco caused the 79-year-old heart to seize and fail. For a while, it seemed to be just another of those rumors--the man had died many times, after all, and then appeared with the wispy goatee and sardonic smile intact. But this time it was real. Twenty-four years and a day after proclaiming the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Uncle Ho was gone. His revolutionary war rumbled on.

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