The Vietnamese censors are demanding substantial cuts to an official translation of William J. Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life, which reveals that the great man found time for a secret marriage and several passionate affairs while building the movement that brought humiliating defeat to the French and the Americans and won Vietnam its independence. But the subject is so delicate that authorities in Hanoi cannot even bring themselves to spell out their concerns. And they have banned distribution of an issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine that carried a small item about the controversy. In a letter to New York publisher Hyperion Books, the state-run National Politics Publishing House has said only that it wants to remove certain passages from the Duiker biography that "do not conform with the information in our files".



According to Duiker, the offending material is obvious. "My contacts told me that some people at the top are unhappy with the references to Ho Chi Minh's love life," he told The Age from his home in North Carolina. "The Vietnamese try to leave the impression that Ho led a celibate life. While not flatly saying that he was a virgin . . . they very strongly deny any formal, serious relationships after he became a professional revolutionary. But the footprints of those relationships are all over his life."

Duiker's book, which includes substantial new material from French and Russian intelligence archives, says Ho was married briefly in 1927 to a "poorly educated but comely" Chinese woman in Canton and had an extended affair with prominent communist cadre Nguyen Thi Minh Khai, whom the French later executed. The records also reveal that Ho had several affairs while living in France and Russia, including with a woman who was his instructor at the Stalin School in Moscow. Druiker, a former US foreign service officer based in Saigon during the Vietnam War, spent more than 20 years researching the subject and his book has won critical acclaim. A Washington Post reviewer called it "the most authoritative account of Ho's life we are likely to have for a long time". The author says he did not set out to seek salacious material about Ho's private life, but was compelled to report what he found. Duiker said his editors at Hyperion were preparing to write to the authorities in Hanoi insisting that publication would only be approved if no substantial cuts were made.

But he predicted that the authorities might publish a sanitised version anyway. Duiker believes the government is losing the battle to preserve its idealised account of Ho's private life. "In the long run it will become common knowledge . . . and it might help liven him up a bit with younger Vietnamese."

Popular doubts that Ho Chi Minh totally eschewed the pleasures of the flesh have been fuelled by persistent rumours that Communist Party general secretary Nong Duc Manh is Ho's illegitimate son - rumours Comrade Manh appears happy to see perpetuated as an affirmation of his revolutionary credentials. But William Duiker says that if Manh's birth date is correct - September 11, 1940 - his father cannot be Ho, who was in China then and did not return to Vietnam until 1941.