Le Duc Tho (14 October 1911 – 13 October 1990) was Head of the Central Organizing Commission of the Communist Party of Vietnam from 1956 to 1973 and from 1976 to 1980.
Biography[]
Le Duc Tho was born in Nam Dinh, French Indochina in 1911 to a learned gentry family. He joined hte Indochinese Communist Party upon its foundation in 1930, and he was briefly imprisoned by the French before escpaing to China. He helped found the Viet Minh in 1941, and after World War II lived as a party representative in South Vietnam. He joined the Politburo in 1955 in charge of the party's Organization Department. He became the chief negotiator for the North Vietnamese during the Vietnam War. In 1968, he failed to achieve a halt to the US bomber offensives against North Vietnam. However, he was in a much stronger bargaining position as the war proceeded, so that at the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, he was able to achieve a ceasefire. For this, he and his US counterpart Henry Kissinger formed perhaps the oddest couple ever to be offered the Nobel Peace Prize. While Kissinger accepted, he refused. He remained a member of the Politburo of Vietnam until his resignation in late 1986, and he died in 1990.