It wasn’t long ago that picking up my daughter from school involved car seats and juice boxes, but these days, the conversations on the ride home are getting interesting.

Take yesterday, for example. She mentioned she’d had plenty to say in history class.

“Oh, really?” I said. “What are you learning about?”

“Treaty of Versailles,” she said.

She went on to tell me how the received opinion of the treaty — i.e., that the excessive punitive demands placed on Germany in 1919 had led directly to World War II — was being reconsidered by historians.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think the argument is pretty convincing. Especially when you contrast it with the way the Allies decided to rebuild Germany and Japan after the Second World War, and you see how it led to a lasting peace. Seems to me they learned their lesson.”

“We haven’t covered that yet,” she said. “But everybody likes to criticize Wilson, Clemenceau, and Lloyd George for being too hard on Germany. The thing to keep in mind is that they were all there to negotiate the best deal they could for their countries. Clemenceau had lived through the Prussian invasion of France in 1870 and remembered the harsh terms the Germans had forced on the French. They were all doing the best they could. Millions of people had been killed. Of course their constituents wanted revenge.”

I was proud of her for the force of her argument, and equally proud of her instinct that history played a crucial role in shaping — and constraining — political decisions.

But then she brought Ho Chi Minh into it.

“One of the things I talked about was how Ho Chi Minh was working in the hotel kitchen, and tried to influence Wilson on Indochina.”

That was a new one on me.

“Ho Chi Minh?” I said. “As in, Vietnam War Ho Chi Minh?”

“Yup,” she said. “He was an idealist. He believed in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” which basically argued for national self-determination.”

“But that idea didn’t extend to colonies?”

“Not enough, anyway,” she said.

By that time, we were almost home, and the conversation turned to chicken noodle soup and cello practice.

But I was left wanting to learn more about Ho Chi Minh in Paris.

As it turns out, the man we now know as Ho Chi Minh was born Nguyen Sinh Cung in the Annam Protectorate of French Indochina, in what is now central Vietnam. His father was a teacher and Confucian scholar whose career as a local magistrate was cut short by scandal. Cung learned Chinese and Vietnamese first, followed by French, but since a career in the French-speaking civil service was impossible after his father’s disgrace, he decided to travel and see the world.

Working as a kitchen helper on a French steamer, he first went to France and tried unsuccessfully to enroll in the French Colonial Administrative School. From there, he traveled widely, including several years in the United States. The future leader of the Viet Cong apparently baked rolls at the Parker House in Boston and worked the line at General Motors!

Eventually he made his way back to France and was working as a kitchen assistant at the Ritz Hotel during the Paris conferences in preparation for the Treaty of Versailles. Inspired by Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points,” he wrote up a list of grievances about the conditions in his native land and appealed to the American delegation to stand up for an independent Vietnam.

The fact that his appeal fell on deaf ears helped to radicalize Cung, who turned to the more sympathetic French Socialist Party. In 1920, he became a founding member of the French Communist Party, and shifted his political activities from Paris to Moscow.

An interesting sidebar: while Cung came to despise the French, he hated the Japanese even more. During World War II, he fought fiercely against the Japanese occupation of Vietnam and was supported clandestinely by the United States’ Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA.

In 1945, Cung declared independence from France in an astonishing document that quotes the opening of our own Declaration of Independence, followed by the opening of the French equivalent, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. No more, the document promised, would the people of Vietnam be oppressed by colonial overlords. There followed a bloody period of civil war and colonial proxy war that culminated in the expulsion of the French in 1954 and the establishment of a political alliance with Communist China.

So it turns out that our nation’s bitter experience in Vietnam was shaped by a man who had lived in our country, who once believed in the ideals espoused by an American president, and who used our own Declaration of Independence as a model to announce his break with colonial power!

I owe a debt to my daughter for leading me down this interesting path. I’d like to close with a final twist of irony: the Ritz-Carleton hotel chain has announced plans to open the first Ritz in Vietnam.

Where?

In the metropolis that used to be known as Saigon, but now goes by the name Ho Chi Minh City.