A biography of Ho Chi Minh, regarded by many as the father of his country and a figure who also became an icon

n for elements of the American left during the Viet nam War poses a problem, Pierre Brocheux announces in his preface. The biographe r cites American historian Alexander Woodside, who argues against writing "anoth er biography while certain periods of the subject's life are still obscure and q uestions remain about the man even today." Surprisingly, Mr. Brocheux does not confront this epistemological issue head-on in "Ho Chi Minh" (Cambridge University Press, 288 pages, $35). It is in the natu re of biography to probe what Herman Melville called "the ambiguities." It is im possible for biographers or historians for that matter to wait until all the evi dence is in and verified. That never happens. There is always more evidence and, sad to say, always more data that disappear along with dying witnesses to histo ry. Or is Ho a special case? Mr. Brocheux seems to think so. Recently opened Soviet archives are heavily restricted, he reports, and the Chinese, he adds, are engag ed in using their archives for patriotic purposes, ensuring that the available p apers are "carefully screened." Determined to heap even more difficulties on himself, Mr. Brocheux notes that Ho Chi Minh's tracks are vanishing at a "vertiginous pace" in Paris, Moscow, and V ietnam the places Ho inhabited like a character in a John le Carr novel, changing his name from Nguyen Sinh Cung to Nguyen Tat Thanh to Nguyen Ai Quoc and finall y to Ho Chi Minh. But wait! It gets worse: Ho gave four birth dates:1890, 1893, 1900, and 1903. Mr. Brocheux is much attached to 1890, noting in a footnote that Ho would have been 55 in 1945, "a suitable age to become President of the Democ ratic Republic of Vietnam." Okay, but is it verifiable? Apparently not. With Mr. Woodside's doubts shadowing Ho's latest biographer, Mr. Brocheux acknow ledges that five biographies in French, Russian, and English have preceded his. So why, indeed, another? The answer, Mr. Brocheux avows, is Montesquieu: "One's character is based largely on that of the people with whom one lives. Knowledge opens the mind. Travel also greatly expands the mind; we leave the circle of our nation's prejudices, and are hardly in a position to take on those of another." This Enlightenment view of self and society provides a kind of grid that is mean t to confine and clarify the elusive Ho's movements. Born in the Vietnamese vill age of Hoang Tru, a student in the imperial city of Hu, world traveler (by 1918, he has been to Paris, parts of Africa, America, and England), first a French soc ialist and then a communist (191823), and reputedly a student in Moscow (1923), H o joined a Soviet mission in Canton (1924), returned to Moscow in 1927, and then was on the move again in Europe and Southeast Asia, founding the Vietnamese Com munist Party in 1930. The British then arrested him in Hong Kong, and his death was announced in 1932, but more of the same peregrinations continue, culminating in Hanoi on September 2, 1945, when Ho declared Vietnam's independence from the French. Of course he was involved in plenty more history up to 1969 dying this time for good), six years before the communists declared Vietnam re-united in Ap ril 1975. Like the proverbial cat, Ho's many lives have baffled biographers, Mr. Brocheux insinuates, though I wish he had engaged in more of a debate with his predecesso rs. It seems to me, especially in the case of someone as slick as Ho, Mr. Broche ux ought to open up a debate with biographers. Instead he hugs his Montesquieu: Both the regional and family backgrounds of Ho Chi Minh suggest a certain geogra phical and sociological determinism, as well as individual destiny. Nghe An prov ince is known as the forge of great men, from the conventional to the rebellious , and as the theater of historical events that gave birth to a tradition of hero ism and sacrifice for the common good.

Ho, the biographer argues, clev erly merged this Confucian world view with commu nist teachings or rather this was the line he took as a nationalist who believed he al so needed an ideology to unite his people. But Ho was no more successful in providing his country with a co herent dogma th an he was in articulating a consistent self. For all the ambiguities, Mr. Broche ux certainly provides a clear conclusion "Ho, steeped in Confucian humanism, gav e into or rather was crushed under the weight of an implacable system that he ha d helped put in place through his in disputable charisma."