Ho Chi Minh Map

• With the outcome of the Vietnam War still in question, Hồ Chí Minh died at 9:47 a.m. on the morning of 2 September 1969, at his home in Hanoi at age 79 from heart failure. His embalmed body is currently on display in a mausoleum in Ba Dinh Square in Hanoi.

• News of his death was withheld from the North Vietnamese public for nearly 48 hours due to not wanting to announce his death on the anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. He was not initially replaced as president, but a "collective leadership" composed of several ministers and military leaders took over. They took control of North Vietnam to continue Hồ's goal of finishing the war with South Vietnam and uniting it under his founding government.

• Six years after his death, after the communists were successful in the war against South Vietnam, several North Vietnamese tanks in Saigon displayed a poster with the following quote; "You are always marching with us, Uncle Hồ".

• The 1954 Geneva Accords, concluded between France and the Việt Minh, provided that communist forces regroup in the North and non-communist forces regroup in the South. Hồ’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated to Hanoi and became the government of North Vietnam, a communist-led single party state. The Geneva accords also provided for a national election to reunify the country in 1956, but this provision was rejected by South Vietnam’s government and the United States. The U.S. committed itself to oppose communism in Asia beginning in 1950, when it funded 80 percent of the French effort. After Geneva, the U.S. replaced France as South Vietnam’s chief sponsor and financial backer, but there never was a treaty between the U.S. and South Vietnam.

• Following the Geneva Accords, there was to be a 300-day period in which people could freely move between the zones of the two Vietnams. Some 900,000 to 1 million Vietnamese, mostly Roman Catholic, as well as many anti-communists, intellectuals, former French colonial civil servants and wealthy Vietnamese, left for South Vietnam, while a much smaller number, mostly communists, went from South to North. This was partly due to propaganda claims by a CIA mission led by Colonel Edward Lansdale that the Virgin Mary had moved South out of distaste for life under communism. Some Canadian observers claimed that some were forced by North Vietnamese authorities to remain against their will. During this era, Hồ, following the communist doctrine initiated by Stalin and Mao, started a land reform in which thousands of people accused of being landlords were summarily executed or tortured and starved in prison. With the backing of the U.S., the 1956 elections were canceled by Diem. Hồ Chí Minh's regime oversaw clumsy land reform in the North, causing thousands of deaths and starvation.

• At the end of 1959, Lê Duẩn was appointed acting party leader and began sending aid to the Vietcong insurgency in South Vietnam. This represented a loss of power by Hồ, who is said to have preferred the more moderate Giáp for the position. The so called Ho Chi Minh Trail was built in 1959 to allow aid to be sent to the Vietcong through Laos and Cambodia, thus escalating the war. Duẩn was officially named party leader in 1960, leaving Hồ a figurehead president and symbol of Vietnamese Communism.

• In 1963, Hồ corresponded with South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem in the hope of achieving a negotiated peace. This correspondence was a factor in the U.S. decision to tacitly support a coup against Diem later that year.

• In late 1964, North Vietnamese combat troops were sent southwest into neutral Laos. During the mid to late 1960s, Lê Duẩn permitted 320,000 Chinese volunteers into northern North Vietnam to help build infrastructure for the country, thereby freeing a similar number of North Vietnamese forces to go south.

• By early 1965, U.S. combat troops began arriving in South Vietnam to counter the threat imposed by both the local Vietcong and the North Vietnamese troops in the border areas. As the fighting escalated, widespread bombing of North Vietnam by the U.S. Air Force and Navy escalated as Operation Rolling Thunder. Hồ remained in Hanoi during his final years, demanding the unconditional withdrawal of all foreign troops in South Vietnam. By July, 1967, Hồ and most of the Politburo of North Vietnam met in a high-level conference where they concluded that the war was not going well for them since the American military blunted every attempt by the Peoples Army of Vietnam to make gains, and inflicted heavy casualties. But Hồ and the rest his government knew that there was one weakness, that American public opinion was not wholeheartedly in favor of the war. With Hồ's permission, the North Vietnamese army and politicians planned to execute the Tet Offensive as a gamble to take the South by force and defeat the U.S. military.

• Although the offensive was a huge tactical failure which resulted in the decimation of whole units of Viet Cong, the end result was a moral victory. It broke the U.S. will to fight the war and public opinion in the U.S. turned against the government. The bombing of North Vietnam was halted, and negotiations with U.S. officials opened to discuss how to end the war.

• By 1969, with negotiations still dragging on, Hồ's health began to deteriorate from multiple health problems, including diabetes among other ailments, which prevented him from participating in further active politics. However, he insisted that his forces in South Vietnam continue fighting until all of Vietnam was reunited under his government, regardless of the length of time that it might take, believing that time and politics were on his side.