U.S. concluded Ho Chi Minh was a Vietnamese nationalist first and foremost, who used the U.S. Declaration of Independence as a model. Ho did not yet see the Soviet Union as a willing or able ally U.S. assurances to the Philippines that it would gain its independence after the end of WW2 encouraged the Vietnamese…
On September 2, 1945 over half a million people gathered in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square to hear Ho Chi Minh proclaim Vietnam’s independence, during which he cited the inspiration of the U.S. Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man that emerged from the French Revolution. The text of Ho Chi Minh’s…
Dewey’s last 1945 report to his superiors concluded “the French and British are finished here, and we ought to clear out of Southeast Asia” The U.S. was busy in Vietnam long before the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident led to a Congressional blank check for war. Nearly a decade prior to the defeat of the…
Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam an independent republic, free of French colonial rule, on September 2, 1945. Half a million people gathered in Hanoi to hear him read the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which was modeled on the U.S. Declaration of Independence. Below, Susan Dunn delves into the inspiration for Ho Chi Minh’s speech that…
