Who was the Communist leader in Vietnam who wanted to unite both north and south under Communism?

Ho Chi Minh, a founding member of the French Communist
Party after World War I, hoped to work from within to end France's dominion over
Vietnam.  His father was a strong Vietnamese nationalist, and Ho Chi Minh followed the
same political path.  During the 1920s and 1930s, Ho Chi traveled to China, where he
familiarized himself with Mae Tse-sung's anticolonial revolutions; returning to Vietnam,
he helped organize the IndoChina Communist Party in
1929.

In the South Ngo Dinh Diem defeated three separate
groups to unite South Vietnam.  Knowing that the emperor, Bao Dai, was too weak, he
assumed rule of the South. So, in 1954 Bao Dai gave Diem dictatorial powers in South
Vietnam. In 1955 the Eisenhower administration helped create a new nation, the
Government of the Republic of Viet Nam.  Diem was elected president in a dubious
election the following year.  However, he was assasinated in 1963 by young military
leaders who believed that he no longer possessed the confidence of the Vietnamese
people.  By this time, the United States became involved supposedly in order to prevent
a Communist takeover.  Beginning in 1959 troops were deployed; in 1960, because of the
unpopularity of the Diem regime, Hanoi authorized the creation of the National
Liberation Front as a common front controlled by the Communist Party. North Vietnam
became infiltrated and troops and military supplies from the north came in by the
infamous Ho Chi Minh Trail. Diem's paranoia, repression and incompetency eventually led
to his defeat as a significant number of Vietnamese of the South began to support
Communism and the Viet Minh.

In 1965 U.S. combat units
began arriving.  Ten years later, the capture of Saigon by the North Vietnamese in April
1975 ended the Conflict that was never officially deemed a war.  58,000+ Americans died
and thousands of others were wounded physically and mentally in this civil war of
Vietnam.