Fun fact: Ho Chi Minh was a founder of the French Communist party in 1920. The longstanding insistence that he was nationalist, not communist, is entirely false.
Ho turned to Communism after being rebuffed by the French government about his ideas on Vietnamese independence at the end of WW1.
Ho was rebuffed again by the United States in 1945 at the end of WW2, after his armies spent years of fighting the Japanese in Indochina.
Ho was rebuffed a third time in 1956 when the US failed to uphold the Geneva Accords, which defined the French exit from Indochina called for a national election to unify Vietnam.
The West had multiple opportunities to co-opt Ho Chi Minh and his vision of an independent Vietnam, but chose French colonialism and civil war instead.