"This book chronicles Ho's childhood as the son of a willfully poor and brilliant scholar. It follows Ho through his early years as an itinerant expatriate - forced to leave French Indochina to escape arrest, he shipped out as a cook on a passenger steamer and traveled the globe. It tells of his years in the heady environment of London and Paris during and after World War I, where he supported himself with a variety of jobs including sous-chef to the great Escoffier, all the while working tirelessly to push the anticolonialist cause among his comrades in international Communist circles.". "Duiker gives an account of Ho's rise to leadership of the Vietnamese Communist movement, his years of travel (often in disguise) fomenting revolution, his imprisonments and narrow escapes from the French Surete, and his phenomenal ability as the first president of his country to inspire and reconcile his often bitterly divided colleagues. Using files from Soviet and French archives, Duiker has also re-created Ho's ceaseless efforts to enlist Moscow, Beijing, and Washington in his cause, and his artful attempts to play the three off one another.". "By accessing original documents in five languages, Duiker has been able to shed new light on the question of Ho's primary motivation: Was he simply a patriot bent on achieving Vietnamese independence, or a chameleon who constructed a deceptive nationalist image solely to win support, at home and abroad, for global proletarian revolution?"--BOOK JACKET.