Uncle Ho

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David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War” has gotten a lot of attention since it came out in late September, with glowing reviews and the late author’s friends tag-teaming on a national publicity tour. Yet overlooked amid the hoopla is the reissue of a lesser-known Halberstam book about Southeast Asia — his 1971 mini-portrait, “Ho” (Rowman & Littlefield: 118 pp., $16.95 paper). An impressionistic look at onetime North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, this is less a biography than a political meditation, an inquiry into one man’s ability to affect not just the history of his country but also that of the world. “And how long do you Americans want to fight?” Halberstam quotes North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong toward the end of this potent little volume. “One year, two years, three years, five years, ten years, twenty years ... we will be happy to accommodate you.”

These days, of course, it’s impossible to read such a statement without relating it to current events. The power of “Ho,” however, is its specificity as a piece of history. Yes, Halberstam means to tell us, history offers lessons; we must learn from them or repeat them, as George Santayana famously said. But Ho was very much a man of his moment, a peasant for whom insurrection was, Halberstam suggests, inherently practical, a way to give his people back their land. “My portrait was of Ho not as a great Marxist theoretician, but as a nationalist-pragmatist, a man who was most assuredly a Marxist, but was first and foremost a nationalist and a patriot,” the author wrote in a preface to this new edition, completed just a month before his death on April 23. Here, we get a glimpse of Halberstam at his most revealing — an astute observer who could always see the forest for the trees.

David L. Ulin