Since he came to Hanoi, Uncle Ho had suffered no more fits of fever. But he was still very thin. The wrinkles on his forehead and at the corners of his eyes grew more numerous and deeper every day.
In Bac Bo Palace, every morning he get [sic] up at five o’clock and did exercises. He wrote a letter calling on all his fellow-countrymen to do physical exercises too. He ended with this line: “I myself do so every day.”
At mealtimes, he ate in the dining-hall with us and the guards. We shared the same table and took the same food. One day taken up by some urgent business, he was late. We did not save his share of meat and vegetables for him, each thinking the others had done it. We all felt greatly concerned, but he cheerfully sat at table and simply ate his rice.
After lunch, he usually took a fifteen-minute nap in an armchair in the sitting-room. Then he read newspapers and news bulletins.
When in the guerilla base, he used to go to bed early because there was no light. Now he sat up late. The guards often saw lights burning in his room up to a late hour as he read books and examined documents.
His working-day began with a brief meeting of the Party Bureau. He set great store by collective work. He told the Bureau members to come and see him every day at six before beginning their own work.
His day was usually very busy. Party and State affairs besieged him. He had to attend to everything: directing the fight against famine, against illiteracy, against foreign aggression; dealing with the enemy in the North, conducting the resistance in the South; internal affairs and foreign affairs.
The newly-established Government offices were rudimentary and needed some running in. Uncle Ho would listen directly to those in charge of various departments or coming from various regions, to learn about the state of affairs and discuss solutions. The cadres were small in number and inexperienced. Uncle Ho often typed his own letters and sent them out himself.
He wrote many letters, appeals and newspaper articles to explain the decisions and policies of the Provisional Government, exhorting the people from all walks of life to carry them out and to join patriotic organizations.
He stated his views in a practical, concise and concrete manner. His words were familiar, simple ones, which the people would use in their daily life. The only difference was the new content he put into them. But in spite of that newness the listeners found them easy to understand; they conformed to both reason and sentiment.
The things he asked his people to do were what he himself had been doing all his life. If there was anything new, he set an example by doing it himself. For instance, he called on the people to go without a meal once every ten days to help the hungry. Three times a month, when the fast-day came, he would take his share of rice and put it into the relief-box with his own hands. On one such day, he was invited to dinner by Tieu Van, the Chinese commander. When he was back, he was told that his share of rice had been put aside for relief. Nevertheless, he decided to skip a meal the next day.
For him, everything, big or small, had its importance. He used to advise the cadres “to set examples to the people”, “to match words with deeds” and “not to behave arrogantly like ‘mandarins’ of the revolution, whom the people will dislike, despise and not support.”
Uncle Ho devoted a lot of time to visits, often unannounced, to various places. He visited a youth congress, the offices of the Hanoi Administrative Committee, the Viet Nam Politico-Military School, the Nam Dihh Textile Mill, he went to Bac Ninh, Thai Binh, etc. Those contacts allowed him not only to encourage and educate people, but also to get first-hand information about the life, thought and feelings of the population, and the cadres’ style of work.
Every day, he received many guests.
Those guests were of various kinds. Generals of the Chiang army came to ask for rice, a lot of rice, for money, housing facilities, electric bulbs, sugar, and even opium, anything they had failed to plunder from our people.
Once it was just a Chiang company commander. He earnestly requested an audience with the President for a “special affair” which he refused to tell anyone else. It turned out to be just this: he wanted to sell a few hundred guns.
Sometimes the guests were members of the Allied missions, American or British. Those visits differed in purpose, bur [sic] none was marked by goodwill.
Sometimes they were foreign journalists who wanted to learn about the Viet Minh movement, the lines and policies of our Government. Some of these were sham journalists who used interviews to probe our attitudes and collect intelligence.
But most numerous were the guests from inside the country: representatives of patriotic organizations, workers, peasants, youth and women, representatives of religious communities or business circles; public figures; a group of cadres and fighters from the South, who were moved to tears when they met Uncle Ho for the first time and told him of the feelings of the millions of our compatriots who were fighting there; a delegation of highland people, who had shared maize soup and bamboo shoots with revolutionary fighters in the Liberated Areas and were now visiting the capital city for the first time. Once it was a bearded old man who wanted to “contribute a few ideas on national reconstruction, now that the country is independent”. Sometimes, it was someone who just wanted to have a sight of Uncle Ho, under the pretext of seeking explanations on a point of policy.
Many a time he was late for dinner because of those guests. Finding him tired and too busy, we once suggested that he should cut down on interviews which were not really necessary. He said, “Our administration is newly established. The people and cadres want to know about many things. This is an occasion for us to explain the Government’s decisions and policies to everyone. We should not let our compatriots feel that it is as difficult to meet members of our Government as it was to see a mandarin in former times.”
The Liberation Army fighters on sentry duty and the drivers were given much care by Uncle Ho. For them, he was not only the President of the Republic, but a father. They all felt that what they did for him was so little in comparison with what he did for them.
Though very busy, Uncle Ho often found time to chat with them, inquiring about the quality of their meals or the situation of their families. He paid great attention to order and hygiene in the soldiers’ quarters.
In the evening, as it was too hot in their rooms in the basement, Uncle Ho told the soldiers to spend the night in the empty office-rooms upstairs. One day, in his absence, two men had a wrestling match and broke the marble top of a table. The administrative officer angrily ordered all of them downstairs. When he returned Uncle Ho allowed them to come up again, and said:
“You are soldiers and young men, you must play and exercise. Wrestling is a good sport. But for this, you must go out to some grassy plot of land, where you won’t hurt yourselves when falling and won’t damage public property. Well, don’t do this again. When you hold a wrestling party in the garden, let me know. I’ll come and watch.”
The driver was doing little reading. So whenever Uncle Ho found him idle, he would call him up, tell him to sit in the next room and give him some books or newspapers to read. From time to time, he would pop in to check up on him. Once, he found the driver had dozed off, leaving the paper open on the table. He quietly went out. Later he told him: “At first, you don’t understand much of what you’re reading, so you get sleepy. But if you keep on reading, you will understand more and more of the stuff and interest will grow. Then you won’t feel sleepy any more.”
Winter came. Women’s organizations in many places thought of warm clothes for Uncle Ho. Girls and women from Hanoi, Quang Yen and other towns came with thick woollen jackets for him. Each time, Uncle Ho would thank the women and tell them to take those clothes back to their places and give them to some of the oldest and poorest folks there.
One cold morning, a comrade came to work with him in a thin summer jacket. Uncle Ho went to fetch his own woollen jersey and gave it to him.
In Hanoi, in Bac Bo Palace, the President of the Republic lived as simple and frugal a life as when he was in the guerilla base.