Le Duc Tho (1911-1990), a top-ranking Vietnamese Communist Party official and representative of what was then the government of North Vietnam, became the first Asian and the first member of a Communist government to receive a Nobel Prize for peace. He shared the peace prize in 1973 with the United States secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger (see Kissinger, Henry Alfred ). The two men were awarded the prize after taking part in long and difficult negotiations to bring about a cease-fire in the Vietnam War (1957-1975). But the award proved controversial. Many people resented its being given to Le Duc Tho because of his record as a Communist actively involved in the Indochina conflicts of the mid-1900’s. Le Duc Tho himself pointed out that the cease-fire did not mark the end of the war in Vietnam and therefore he refused his share of the peace prize.
Little is known for certain about the early life of Le Duc Tho. According to an official biographical sketch issued in 1973, he was born in the village of Dich Le, in Nam Ha province, Vietnam. His real name was apparently Phan Dinh Khai. His father is said to have been a middle-ranking civil servant in the French colonial administration. By 1930, Le Duc Tho had committed himself to the struggle for Vietnamese independence from French rule. While working in the postal service as a radiotelegrapher, he organized demonstrations and riots against the French and worked with Ho Chi Minh and other youthful revolutionaries in setting up the Indochinese Communist Party (see Ho Chi Minh ). For his anti-French actions, he was imprisoned in a forced labor camp on the island of Poulo Condor (now known as Con Son). After his release in 1936, he immediately resumed his political work, leading a Communist propaganda organization in the city of Nam Dinh. The French authorities imprisoned him again in 1939, but it is unclear how he spent the years of World War II (1939-1945). His official biography says that he was held in prison until 1944. Other sources report that he escaped from prison in 1940 and fled to China, where he helped Ho Chi Minh found the Vietminh, a Communist nationalist organization.
By mid-1945, Le Duc Tho was living in Hanoi in northern Vietnam, and was a member of the central committee and the standing committee of the Indochinese Communist Party. During the war of liberation against the French (1946-1954), he was sent to the south of the country, where he helped establish the Vietnamese Communist Party’s Central Office for South Vietnam. In 1954, under an agreement signed in Geneva, the French finally left Vietnam. Pending democratic elections, Vietnam was temporarily divided into South Vietnam, governed by a pro-Western regime in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) and North Vietnam, ruled by a Communist government in Hanoi, headed by Ho Chi Minh. In 1955, Le Duc Tho moved to North Vietnam and became a member of the Communist Party’s politburo (chief ruling political body). In 1956, he visited Moscow as a representative of the North Vietnamese government. In 1960, he became secretary of the Central Committee.
The elections promised under the Geneva agreement failed to take place by 1956, and the South Vietnamese Communists, whose guerrilla forces became known as the Viet Cong, launched a military campaign to unify the country under Communist rule. The North Vietnamese government backed the Viet Cong against the South Vietnamese army. This civil war gradually broadened into the Vietnam War of the 1960’s and early 1970’s, in which the United States became increasingly involved. Le Duc Tho was a hard-line supporter of the war against the south. He supervised North Vietnam’s secret control of the Viet Cong’s activities. In 1968, cease-fire negotiations opened in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam. Le Duc Tho was officially an adviser to the North Vietnamese delegation, but in reality, as a very high-ranking member of the Politburo, he was the chief negotiator. The public talks faltered and became bogged down, but in 1969 Le Duc Tho and U.S. secretary of State Henry Kissinger began secret discussions. Le Duc Tho proved a tough but courteous and authoritative negotiator. His meetings with Kissinger made slow but steady progress. In 1972, U.S. President Richard Nixon made the secret talks public. Eventually, a cease-fire agreement was hammered out and signed on Jan. 27, 1973. Under it, all United States troops withdrew from Vietnam by April 1973.
The Paris cease-fire remained largely unobserved on both sides, and fighting continued. Le Duc Tho was present in South Vietnam during the final offensive against the Saigon-based regime, which finally surrendered in April 1975. In 1982, he expressed his support for economic reform in Vietnam. He was reportedly ranked fourth in the Vietnamese Communist Party hierarchy when he retired from the Central Committee in 1986. He remained an adviser to the central committee for some time afterward.
