The Most Famous
POLITICIANS from Vietnam
This page contains a list of the greatest Vietnamese Politicians. The pantheon dataset contains 19,576 Politicians, 65 of which were born in Vietnam. This makes Vietnam the birth place of the 45th most number of Politicians behind Estonia, and Ireland.
Top 10
The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Vietnamese Politicians of all time. This list of famous Vietnamese Politicians is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Vietnamese Politicians.
1. Ho Chi Minh (1890 - 1969)
With an HPI of 78.16, Ho Chi Minh is the most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 123 different languages on wikipedia.
Hồ Chí Minh (né Nguyễn Sinh Cung; 19 May 1890 – 2 September 1969), colloquially known as Uncle Ho (Bác Hồ) or just Uncle (Bác), and by other aliases and sobriquets, was a Vietnamese communist revolutionary, nationalist, and politician. He served as prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam from 1945 to 1955 and as president from 1945 until his death in 1969. Ideologically a Marxist–Leninist, he was the Chairman and First Secretary of the Workers' Party of Vietnam, the predecessor of the current Communist Party of Vietnam. Hồ Chí Minh was born in Nghệ An province in the French protectorate of Annam. From 1911, he left French Indochina to continue his revolutionary activities. He was also one of the founding members of the French Communist Party. In 1930, he founded the Communist Party of Vietnam and in 1941, he returned to Vietnam and founded the Việt Minh independence movement, an umbrella group. Then, Hồ led the August Revolution against the Japanese in August 1945, which resulted in the independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. After the French returned to power the following month, Hồ's government retreated to the Việt Bắc region and began guerrilla warfare. The Việt Minh defeated the French Union in 1954 at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ, ending the First Indochina War, and resulting in the division of Vietnam, with the Việt Minh in control of North Vietnam, and anti-communists in control of South Vietnam. He was a key figure in the People's Army of Vietnam during the Vietnam War, which lasted from 1955 to 1975. Hồ officially stepped down from power in 1965 due to health problems and died in 1969. North Vietnam was ultimately victorious against South Vietnam and its allies. Vietnam was officially unified in 1976. Saigon, the former capital of South Vietnam, was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in his honor. The details of Hồ Chí Minh's life before he came to power in Vietnam are uncertain. He is known to have used between 50: 582 and 200 pseudonyms. Information on his birth and early life is ambiguous and subject to academic debate. At least four existing official biographies vary on names, dates, places, and other hard facts while unofficial biographies vary even more widely. Aside from being a politician, Hồ was a writer, poet, and journalist. He wrote several books, articles, and poems in Chinese, Vietnamese, and French. Hồ Chí Minh (胡志明) was born as Nguyễn Sinh Cung (阮生恭) in 1890 in the village of Làng Chùa or Hoàng Trù in Kim Liên commune, Nam Đàn district, Nghệ An province, in Central Vietnam which was then a French protectorate. Although 1890 is generally accepted as his birth year, at various times he used four other birth years: 1891, 1892, 1894 and 1895. He lived in his father Nguyễn Sinh Sắc's village of Làng Sen in Kim Liên until 1895 when his father sent him to Huế for study. He had three siblings: his sister Bạch Liên (Nguyễn Thị Thanh), a clerk in the French Army; his brother Nguyễn Sinh Khiêm (Nguyễn Tất Đạt), a geomancer and traditional herbalist; and another brother (Nguyễn Sinh Nhuận), who died in infancy. As a young child, Cung (Hồ) studied with his father before more formal classes with a scholar named Vương Thúc Quý. He quickly mastered chữ Hán, a prerequisite for any serious study of Confucianism while honing his colloquial Vietnamese writing.: 21 In addition to his studies, he was fond of adventure and loved to fly kites and go fishing.: 21 Following Confucian tradition, his father gave him a new name at the age of 10: Nguyễn Tất Thành. His father was a Confucian scholar and teacher and later an imperial magistrate in the small remote district of Binh Khe (Qui Nhơn). He was demoted for abuse of power after an influential local figure died several days after having received 102 strokes of the cane as punishment for an infraction.: 21 His father was eligible to serve in the imperial bureaucracy, but he refused because it meant serving the French. This exposed Thành (Hồ) to rebellion at a young age and seemed to be the norm for the province. Nevertheless, he received a French education, attending Collège Quốc học (lycée or secondary education) in Huế in Central Vietnam. His disciples, Phạm Văn Đồng and Võ Nguyên Giáp, also attended the school, as did Ngô Đình Diệm, the future President of South Vietnam and political rival. His early life is uncertain but there are some documents indicating activities regarding an early revolutionary spirit during French-occupied Vietnam, but conflicting sources remain. Previously, it was believed that Thành (Hồ) was involved in an anti-slavery (anti-corvée) demonstration of poor peasants in Huế in May 1908, which endangered his student status at Collège Quốc học. However, a document from the Centre des archives d'Outre-mer in France shows that he was admitted to Collège Quốc học on 8 August 1908, which was several months after the anti-corvée demonstration (9–13 April 1908). In Saigon, he applied to work as a kitchen helper on a French merchant steamer, the Amiral de Latouche-Tréville, using the alias Văn Ba. The ship departed on 5 June 1911 and arrived in Marseille, France on 5 July 1911. The ship then left for Le Havre and Dunkirk, returning to Marseille in mid-September. There, he applied for the French Colonial School but did not succeed. He instead decided to begin traveling the world by working on ships and visiting many countries from 1911 to 1917. While working as the cook's helper on a ship in 1912, Thành (Hồ) traveled to the United States. From 1912 to 1913, he may have lived in New York City (Harlem) and Boston, where he claimed to have worked as a baker at the Parker House Hotel. The only evidence that he was in the United States is a single letter to French colonial administrators dated 15 December 1912 and postmarked New York City (he gave his address as the poste restante in Le Havre and his occupation as a sailor) and a postcard to Phan Chu Trinh in Paris where he mentioned working at the Omni Parker House Hotel. Inquiries to the Parker House management revealed no records of his ever having worked there.: 51 It is believed that while in the US he made contact with Korean nationalists, an experience that developed his political outlook. Sophie Quinn-Judge states that this is "in the realm of conjecture". He was also influenced by Pan-Africanist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey during his stay, and said he attended meetings of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. At various points from 1913 to 1919, Thành (Hồ) claimed to have lived in West Ealing and later in Crouch End, Hornsey. He reportedly worked as either a chef or dishwasher (reports vary) at the Drayton Court Hotel in West Ealing. Claims that he was trained as a pastry chef under Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel in Haymarket, Westminster are not supported by documentary evidence. However, the wall of New Zealand House, home of the New Zealand High Commission which now stands on the site of the Carlton Hotel, displays a blue plaque. During 1913, Thành was also employed as a pastry chef on the Newhaven–Dieppe ferry route. From 1919 to 1923, Thành (Hồ) began to show an interest in politics while living in France, being influenced by his friend and Socialist Party of France comrade Marcel Cachin. Thành claimed to have arrived in Paris from London in 1917, but the French police had only documents recording his arrival in June 1919. When he arrived, he met a scholar named Phan Châu Trinh as well as his friend Phan Văn Trường. In Paris he joined the Groupe des Patriotes Annamites (The Group of Vietnamese Patriots) that included Phan Chu Trinh, Phan Văn Trường, Nguyễn Thế Truyền and Nguyễn An Ninh. They had been publishing newspaper articles advocating for Vietnamese independence under the pseudonym Nguyễn Ái Quốc ("Nguyễn the Patriot") prior to Thành's arrival in Paris. The group petitioned for recognition of the civil rights of the Vietnamese people in French Indochina to the Western powers at the Versailles peace talks, but they were ignored. Citing the principle of self-determination outlined before the peace accords, they requested the allied powers to end French colonial rule of Vietnam and ensure the formation of an independent government. Before the conference, the group sent their letter to allied leaders, including French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau and United States President Woodrow Wilson. They were unable to obtain consideration at Versailles, but the episode would later help establish the future Hồ Chí Minh as the symbolic leader of the anti-colonial movement at home in Vietnam. Since Thành was the public face behind the publication of the document (although it was written by Phan Văn Trường), he soon became known as Nguyễn Ái Quốc, and first used the name in September during an interview with a Chinese newspaper correspondent. Many authors have stated that 1919 was a lost "Wilsonian moment", where the future Hồ Chí Minh could have adopted a pro-American and less radical position if only President Wilson had received him. However, at the time of the Versailles Conference, Hồ Chí Minh was committed to a socialist program. While the conference was ongoing, Nguyễn Ái Quốc was already delivering speeches on the prospects of Bolshevism in Asia and was attempting to persuade French socialists to join Lenin's Communist International. Upon hearing of the October 1920 death of Irish republican hunger striker (and Lord Mayor of Cork) Terence MacSwiney, Quốc (Hồ) was said to have burst into tears and said “a country with a citizen like this will never surrender”. In December 1920, Quốc (Hồ) became a representative to the Congress of Tours of the Socialist Party of France, voted for the Third International, and was a founding member of the French Communist Party. Taking a position in the Colonial Committee of the party, he tried to draw his comrades' attention towards people in French colonies including Indochina, but his efforts were often unsuccessful. While living in Paris, he reportedly had a relationship with a dressmaker named Marie Brière. As a French police document discovered in 2018, Quốc also had relations with the members of Provisional Government of the Republic of Korea like Kim Kyu-sik, Jo So-ang while in Paris. During this period, he began to write journal articles and short stories as well as run his Vietnamese nationalist group. In May 1922, he wrote an article for a French magazine criticizing the use of English words by French sportswriters. The article implored Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to outlaw such Franglais as le manager, le round and le knock-out. His articles and speeches caught the attention of Dmitry Manuilsky, who would soon sponsor his trip to the Soviet Union and under whose tutelage he would become a high-ranking member of the Soviet Comintern. In 1923, Quốc (Hồ) left Paris for Moscow carrying a passport with the name Chen Vang, a Chinese merchant,: 86 where he was employed by the Comintern, studied at the Communist University of the Toilers of the East: 92 and participated in the Fifth Comintern Congress in June 1924 before arriving in Canton (present-day Guangzhou), China in November 1924 using the name Ly Thuy. In 1925–1926, he organized "Youth Education Classes" and occasionally gave socialist lectures to Vietnamese revolutionary young people living in Canton at the Whampoa Military Academy. These young people would become the seeds of a new revolutionary, pro-communist movement in Vietnam several years later. According to William Duiker, he lived with a Chinese woman, Zeng Xueming (Tăng Tuyết Minh), whom he married on 18 October 1926. When his comrades objected to the match, he told them: "I will get married despite your disapproval because I need a woman to teach me the language and keep house". She was 21 and he was 36. They married in the same place where Zhou Enlai had married earlier and then lived in the residence of a Comintern agent, Mikhail Borodin. Hoàng Văn Chí argued that in June 1925 he betrayed Phan Bội Châu, the famous leader of a rival revolutionary faction and his father's old friend, to French Secret Service agents in Shanghai for 100,000 piastres. A source states that he later claimed he did it because he expected Châu's trial to stir up anti-French sentiment and because he needed the money to establish a communist organization. In Ho Chi Minh: A Life, William Duiker considered this hypothesis, but ultimately rejected it.: 126–128 Other sources claim that Nguyễn Thượng Huyện was responsible for Chau's capture. Chau, sentenced to lifetime house arrest, never denounced Quốc. After Chiang Kai-shek's 1927 anti-communist coup, Quốc (Hồ) left Canton again in April 1927 and returned to Moscow, spending part of the summer of 1927 recuperating from tuberculosis in Crimea before returning to Paris once more in November. He then returned to Asia by way of Brussels, Berlin, Switzerland, and Italy, where he sailed to Bangkok, Thailand, arriving in July 1928. "Although we have been separated for almost a year, our feelings for each other do not have to be said to be felt", he reassured Zeng in an intercepted letter. In this period, he served as a senior agent undertaking Comintern activities in Southeast Asia. Quốc (Hồ) remained in Thailand, staying in the Thai village of Nachokuntil late 1929, when he moved on to India and then Shanghai. In Hong Kong in early 1930, he chaired a meeting with representatives from two Vietnamese communist parties to merge them into a unified organization, the Communist Party of Vietnam. He also founded the Indochinese Communist Party. In June 1931, Hồ was arrested in Hong Kong as part of a collaboration between the French colonial authorities in Indochina and the Hong Kong Police Force; scheduled to be deported back to French Indochina, Hồ was successfully defended by British solicitor Frank Loseby. Eventually, after appeals to the Privy Council in London, Hồ was reported as dead in 1932 to avoid a French extradition agreement; it was ruled that, though he would be deported from Hong Kong as an undesirable, it would not be to a destination controlled by France. Hồ was eventually released and, disguised as a Chinese scholar, boarded a ship to Shanghai. He subsequently returned to the Soviet Union and in Moscow studied and taught at the Lenin Institute. In this period Hồ reportedly lost his positions in the Comintern because of a concern that he had betrayed the organization. However, according to Ton That Thien's research, he was a member of the inner circle of the Comintern, a protégé of Dmitry Manuilsky and a member in good standing of the Comintern throughout the Great Purge. Hồ was removed from control of the Party he had founded. Those who replaced him charged him with nationalist tendencies. In 1938, Quốc (Hồ) returned to China and served as an advisor to the Chinese Communist armed forces. He was also the senior Comintern agent in charge of Asian affairs. He worked extensively in Chongqing and traveled to Guiyang, Kunming, and Guilin. He was using the name Hồ Quang during this period. When France was defeated by Germany in 1940, Hồ and his lieutenants, Võ Nguyên Giáp and Phạm Văn Đồng, saw this as an opportunity to advance their own cause. In 1941, Hồ Chí Minh returned to Vietnam to lead the Việt Minh independence movement. The Japanese occupation of Indochina that year, the first step toward an invasion of the rest of Southeast Asia, created an opportunity for patriotic Vietnamese. The so-called "men in black" were a 10,000-member guerrilla force that operated with the Việt Minh. He oversaw many successful military actions against the Vichy France and the Japanese occupation of Vietnam during World War II, supported closely yet clandestinely by the United States Office of Strategic Services and later against the French bid to reoccupy the country (1946–1954). He was jailed in China by Chiang Kai-shek's local authorities before being rescued by Chinese Communists. Following his release in 1943, he returned to Vietnam. It was during this time that he began regularly using the name Hồ Chí Minh, a Vietnamese name combining a common Vietnamese surname (Hồ, 胡) with a given name meaning "Bright spirit" or "Clear will" (from Sino-Vietnamese 志 明: Chí meaning "will" or "spirit" and Minh meaning "bright").: 248–249 His new name was a tribute to General Hou Zhiming (侯志明), Chief Commissar of the 4th Military Region of the National Revolutionary Army, who helped release him from a KMT prison in 1943. In April 1945, he met with the OSS agent Archimedes Patti and offered to provide intelligence, asking only for "a line of communication" between his Viet Minh and the Allies. The OSS agreed to this and later sent a military team of OSS members to train his men and Hồ Chí Minh himself was treated for malaria and dysentery by an OSS doctor. Following the August Revolution organized by the Việt Minh, Hồ Chí Minh became Chairman of the Provisional Government (Premier of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and issued a Proclamation of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Although he convinced Emperor Bảo Đại to abdicate, his government was not recognized by any country. He repeatedly petitioned President Harry S. Truman for support for Vietnamese independence, citing the Atlantic Charter, but Truman never responded. In 1946, future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion and Hồ Chí Minh became acquainted when they stayed at the same hotel in Paris. He offered Ben-Gurion a Jewish home-in-exile in Vietnam, which Ben-Gurion declined. In 1946, when he traveled outside of the country, his subordinates imprisoned 2,500 non-Communist nationalists and forced 6,000 others to flee. Hundreds of political opponents were jailed or exiled in July 1946, notably, members of the Nationalist Party of Vietnam and the Dai Viet National Party after a failed attempt to raise a coup against the Viet Minh government. All rival political parties were hereafter banned and local governments were purged to minimize opposition later on. However, it was noted that the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's first Congress had over two-thirds of its members come from non-Việt Minh political factions, some without an election. Nationalist Party of Vietnam leader Nguyễn Hải Thần was named vice president. They also held four out of ten ministerial positions (Government of the Union of Resistance of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam). Following Emperor Bảo Đại's abdication in August, Hồ Chí Minh read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam on 2 September 1945 under the name of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. In Saigon, with violence between rival Vietnamese factions and French forces increasing, the British commander, General Sir Douglas Gracey, declared martial law. On 24 September, the Việt Minh leaders responded with a call for a general strike. In the same month, a force of 200,000 Chinese National Revolutionary Army troops arrived in Hanoi to accept the surrender of the Japanese occupiers in northern Indochina. Hồ Chí Minh made a compromise with their general, Lu Han, to dissolve the Communist Party and to hold an election that would yield a coalition government. When Chiang forced the French to give the French concessions in Shanghai back to China in exchange for withdrawing from northern Indochina, he had no choice but to sign an agreement with France on 6 March 1946 in which Vietnam would be recognized as an autonomous state in the Indochinese Federation and the French Union. The agreement soon broke down. The purpose of the agreement, for both the French and Vietminh, was for Chiang's army to leave North Vietnam. Fighting broke out in the North soon after the Chinese left. Historian Professor Liam Kelley of the University of Hawaii at Manoa on his Le Minh Khai's Asian History Blog challenged the authenticity of the alleged quote where Hồ Chí Minh said he "would rather smell French shit for five years than eat Chinese shit for a thousand," noting that Stanley Karnow provided no source for the extended quote attributed to him in his 1983 Vietnam: A History and that the original quote was most likely forged by the Frenchman Paul Mus in his 1952 book Vietnam: Sociologie d'une Guerre. Mus was a supporter of French colonialism in Vietnam and Hồ Chí Minh believed there was no danger of Chinese troops staying in Vietnam. The Vietnamese at the time were busy spreading anti-French propaganda as evidence of French atrocities in Vietnam emerged, while Hồ Chí Minh showed no qualms about accepting Chinese aid after 1949. The Việt Minh then collaborated with French colonial forces to massacre supporters of rival Vietnamese nationalist movements in 1945–1946, and of the Trotskyists. Trotskyism in Vietnam did not rival the Party outside of the major cities, but particularly in the South, in Saigon-Cochinchina, they had been a challenge. From the outset, they had called for armed resistance to a French restoration and an immediate transfer of industry to workers and land to peasants. The French Socialist leader Daniel Guérin recalls that when in Paris in 1946 he asked Hồ Chí Minh about the fate of the Trotskyist leader Tạ Thu Thâu, Hồ Chí Minh had replied, "with unfeigned emotion," that "'Thâu was a great patriot and we mourn him', but then a moment later added in a steady voice 'All those who do not follow the line which I have laid down will be broken.'" The Communists eventually suppressed all non-Communist parties, but they failed to secure a peace deal with France. In the final days of 1946, after a year of diplomatic failure and many concessions in agreements, such as the Dalat and Fontainebleau conferences, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam government found that war was inevitable. The bombardment of Haiphong by the French Navy only strengthened the belief that France had no intention of allowing an autonomous, independent state in Vietnam. The attack reportedly killed more than 6,000 Vietnamese civilians in Haiphong. French forces marched into Hanoi, now the capital city of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. On 19 December 1946, after the Haiphong incident, Hồ Chí Minh declared war against the French Union, marking the beginning of the Indochina War. The Vietnam National Army, mostly armed with machetes and muskets immediately attacked. They assaulted the French positions, smoking them out with straw bundled with chili pepper, destroying armored vehicles with "lunge mines" (a hollow-charge warhead on the end of a pole, detonated by thrusting the charge against the side of a tank; typically a suicide weapon) and Molotov cocktails, holding off attackers by using roadblocks, landmines and gravel. After two months of fighting, the exhausted Việt Minh forces withdrew after systematically destroying any valuable infrastructure. Hồ was mistakenly reported to be captured by a group of French soldiers, led by Jean Étienne Valluy at Việt Bắc, during Operation Léa. The person in question turned out to be a Việt Minh advisor who was killed trying to escape. According to journalist Bernard Fall, Hồ decided to negotiate a truce after fighting the French for several years. When the French negotiators arrived at the meeting site, they found a mud hut with a thatched roof. Inside they found a long table with chairs. In one corner of the room, a silver ice bucket contained ice and a bottle of good champagne, indicating that Hồ expected the negotiations to succeed. One demand by the French was the return to French custody of several Japanese military officers (who had been helping the Vietnamese armed forces by training them in the use of weapons of Japanese origin) for them to stand trial for war crimes committed during World War II. Hồ Chí Minh replied that the Japanese officers were allies and friends whom he could not betray, therefore he walked out to seven more years of war. In February 1950, after the Battle of Route Coloniale 4 successfully broke the French border blockade, he met with Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in Moscow after the Soviet Union recognized his government. They all agreed that China would be responsible for backing the Việt Minh. Mao Zedong's emissary to Moscow stated in August that China planned to train 60,000–70,000 Viet Minh shortly. The road to the outside world was open for Việt Minh forces to receive additional supplies which would allow them to escalate the fight against the French regime throughout Indochina. At the outset of the conflict, Hồ reportedly told a French visitor: "You can kill ten of my men for every one I kill of yours. But even at those odds, you will lose and I will win". In 1954, the First Indochina War came to an end after the decisive Battle of Dien Bien Phu, where more than 10,000 French soldiers surrendered to the Viet Minh. The subsequent Geneva Accords peace process partitioned North Vietnam at the 17th parallel. Arthur Dommen estimates that the Việt Minh killed between 100,000 and 150,000 civilians during the war. Benjamin Valentino estimates that the French were responsible for 60,000–250,000 civilian deaths. The 1954 Geneva Conference concluded the war between France and the Việt Minh, allowing the latter's forces to regroup in the North whilst anti-Communist groups settled in the South. Hồ's Democratic Republic of Vietnam relocated to Hanoi and became the government of North Vietnam, a Communist-led one-party state. Following the Geneva Accords, there was to be a 300-day period in which people could freely move between the two regions of Vietnam, later known as South Vietnam and North Vietnam. During the 300 days, Ngô Đình Diệm and CIA adviser Colonel Edward Lansdale staged a campaign to convince Northerners to move to South Vietnam. The campaign was particularly focused on Vietnam's Catholics, who were to provide Diệm's power base in his later years, with the use of the slogan "God has gone south". Between 800,000 and 1 million people migrated to the South, mostly Catholics. At the start of 1955, French Indochina was dissolved, leaving Diệm in temporary control of the South. All the parties at Geneva called for reunification elections, but they could not agree on the details. Recently appointed Việt Minh acting foreign minister Phạm Văn Đồng proposed elections under the supervision of "local commissions". The United States, with the support of Britain and the Associated States of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, suggested United Nations supervision. This plan was rejected by Soviet representative Vyacheslav Molotov, who argued for a commission composed of an equal number of communist and non-communist members, which could determine "important" issues only by unanimous agreement. The negotiators were unable to agree on a date for the elections for reunification. North Vietnam argued that the elections should be held within six months of the ceasefire while the Western allies sought to have no deadline. Molotov proposed June 1955, then later softened this to any time in 1955 and finally July 1956. The Diệm government supported reunification elections, but only with effective international supervision, arguing that genuinely free elections were otherwise impossible in the totalitarian North. By the afternoon of 20 July 1954, the remaining outstanding issues were resolved as the parties agreed that the partition line should be at the 17th parallel and the elections for a reunified government should be held in July 1956, two years after the ceasefire. The Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities in Vietnam was only signed by the French and Việt Minh military commands, with no participation or consultation of the State of Vietnam. Based on a proposal by Chinese delegation head Zhou Enlai, an International Control Commission (ICC) chaired by India, with Canada and Poland as members, was placed in charge of supervising the ceasefire. Because issues were to be decided unanimously, Poland's presence in the ICC provided the Communists with effective veto power over supervision of the treaty. The unsigned Final Declaration of the Geneva Conference called for reunification elections, which the majority of delegates expected to be supervised by the ICC. The Việt Minh never accepted ICC authority over such elections, insisting that the ICC's "competence was to be limited to the supervision and control of the implementation of the Agreement on the Cessation of Hostilities by both parties". Of the nine nations represented, only the United States and the State of Vietnam refused to accept the declaration. Undersecretary of state Walter Bedell Smith delivered a "unilateral declaration" of the United States position, reiterating: "We shall seek to achieve unity through free elections supervised by the United Nations to ensure that they are conducted fairly". Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform", which were accompanied with executions of "reactionary and evil landlords." During the land reform, testimonies by North Vietnamese witnesses suggested a ratio of one execution per 160 village residents, which if extrapolated would indicate a nationwide total of nearly 100,000 executions. Because the campaign was concentrated mainly in the Red River Delta area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions was widely accepted by scholars at the time. However, declassified documents from the Vietnamese and Hungarian archives indicate that the number of executions was much lower than reported at the time, although it was likely greater than 13,500. In early 1956, North Vietnam ended the land reform and initiated a "correction of errors" to rectify the mistakes and damage done. That year, Hồ Chí Minh apologised and acknowledged the serious errors the government had made in the land reform. As part of the campaign, as many as 23,748 political prisoners were released by North Vietnam by September 1957. By 1958, the correction campaign had resulted in the return of land to many of those harmed by the land reform. As early as June 1956, the idea of overthrowing the South Vietnamese government was presented at a Politburo meeting. In 1959, Hồ Chí Minh began urging the Politburo to send aid to the Việt Cộng in South Vietnam; a "people's war" on the South was approved at a session in January 1959, and this decision was confirmed by the Politburo in March. North Vietnam invaded Laos in July 1959, aided by the Pathet Lao, and used 30,000 men to build a network of supply and reinforcement routes running through Laos and Cambodia that became known as the Hồ Chí Minh trail. It allowed the North to send manpower and material to the Việt Cộng with much less exposure to South Vietnamese forces, achieving a considerable advantage. To counter the accusation that North Vietnam was violating the Geneva Accord, the independence of the Việt Cộng was stressed in communist propaganda. North Vietnam created the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam in December 1960 as a "united front", or political branch of the Việt Cộng, intended to encourage the participation of non-Communists. At the end of 1959, aware that the planned national elections would never be held and that Diệm intended to purge opposing forces (mostly ex-Việt Minh) from South Vietnamese society, Hồ Chí Minh informally chose Lê Duẩn to become the next party leader. This was interpreted by Western analysts as a loss of influence for Hồ, who was said to have preferred the more moderate Võ Nguyên Giáp for the position. From 1959 onward, the elderly Hồ became increasingly worried about the prospect of his death, and that year he wrote down his will. Hồ stepped down as General Secretary of the Vietnam Communist party in September 1960 and Lê Duẩn was officially named party leader, leaving Hồ to function in a secondary role as head of state and member of the Politburo. He nevertheless maintained considerable influence in the government. Lê Duẩn, Tố Hữu, Trường Chinh and Phạm Văn Đồng often shared dinner with Hồ, and all of them remained key figures throughout and after the war. In the early 1960s, the North Vietnamese Politburo was divided into the "North First" faction which favored focusing on the economic development of North Vietnam, and the "South First" faction, which favored a guerrilla war in South Vietnam to reunite the country within the short term. Between 1961 and 1963, 40,000 Communist soldiers infiltrated South Vietnam from the North. In 1963, Hồ purportedly corresponded with South Vietnamese President Diệm in hopes of achieving a negotiated peace. During the so-called "Maneli Affair" of 1963, a French diplomatic initiative was launched to achieve a federation of the two Vietnams, which would be neutral in the Cold War. The four principal diplomats involved in the Maneli affair were Ramchundur Goburdhun, the Indian Chief Commissioner of the ICC; Mieczysław Maneli, the Polish Commissioner to the ICC; Roger Lalouette, the French ambassador to South Vietnam; and Giovanni d'Orlandi, the Italian ambassador to South Vietnam. Maneli reported that Hồ was very interested in the signs of a split between President Diệm and President Kennedy and that his attitude was: "Our real enemies are the Americans. Get rid of them, and we can cope with Diệm and Nhu afterward". Hồ and Maneli also discussed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which passed through officially neutral Cambodia and Laos, saying "Indochina is just one single entity". At a meeting in Hanoi held in French, Hồ told Goburdhun that Diệm was "in his way a patriot", noting that Diệm had opposed French rule over Vietnam, and ended the meeting saying that the next time Goburdhun met Diệm "shake hands with him for me". The North Vietnamese Premier Phạm Văn Đồng, speaking on behalf of Hồ, told Maneli he was interested in the peace plan, saying that just as long as the American advisers left South Vietnam "we can agree with any Vietnamese". On 2 September 1963, Maneli met with Ngô Đình Nhu, the younger brother and right-hand man to Diệm to discuss the French peace plan. It remains unclear if the Ngo brothers were serious about the French peace plan or were merely using the possibility of accepting it to blackmail the United States into supporting them at a time when the Buddhist crisis had seriously strained relations between Saigon and Washington. Supporting the latter theory is the fact that Nhu promptly leaked his meeting with Maneli to the American columnist Joseph Alsop, who publicized it in a column entitled "Very Ugly Stuff". The possibility that the Ngo brothers might accept the peace plan contributed to the Kennedy administration's plan to support a coup against them. On 1 November 1963, a coup overthrew Diệm, who was killed the next day together with his brother. Diệm had followed a policy of "deconstructing the state" by creating several overlapping agencies and departments that were encouraged to feud with one another to disorganize the South Vietnamese state to such an extent that he hoped that it would make a coup against him impossible. When Diệm was overthrown and killed, without any kind of arbiter between the rival arms of the South Vietnamese state, regime authority in South Vietnam promptly disintegrated. The American Defense Secretary Robert McNamara reported after visiting South Vietnam in December 1963 that "there is no organized government worthy of the name" in Saigon. At a meeting of the plenum of the Politburo in December 1963, Lê Duẩn's "South first" faction triumphed, with the Politburo passing a resolution calling for North Vietnam to complete the overthrow of the regime in Saigon as soon as possible; while the members of the "North first" faction were dismissed. As the South descended into chaos, whatever interest Hồ might have had in the French peace plan faded, as it became clear the Việt Cộng could overthrow the Saigon government. A CIA report from 1964 stated that factionalism in South Vietnam had reached "almost the point of anarchy" as various South Vietnamese leaders fought one another, making any sort of concerted effort against the Việt Cộng impossible; leading to much of the South Vietnamese countryside being rapidly taken over by communist guerilla forces. As South Vietnam collapsed into factionalism and in-fighting while the Việt Cộng continued to win the war, it became increasingly apparent to President Lyndon Johnson that only American military intervention could save South Vietnam. Though Johnson did not wish to commit American forces until he had won the 1964 election, he decided to make his intentions clear to Hanoi. In June 1964, the "Seaborn Mission" began as J. Blair Seaborn, the Canadian commissioner to the ICC, arrived in Hanoi with a message from Johnson offering billions of American economic aid and diplomatic recognition in exchange for which North Vietnam would cease trying to overthrow the government of South Vietnam. Seaborn also warned that North Vietnam would suffer the "greatest devastation" from American bombing, saying that Johnson was seriously considering a strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam. Little came of the backchannel of the "Seaborn Mission" as the North Vietnamese distrusted Seaborn, who pointedly was never allowed to meet Hồ. In late 1964, the People's Army of Vietnam combat troops were sent southwest into officially neutral Laos and Cambodia. By March 1965, American combat troops began arriving in South Vietnam, first to protect the airbases around Chu Lai and Da Nang, later to take on most of the fight as "[m]ore and more American troops were put in to replace Saigon troops who could not or would not, get involved in the fighting". As fighting escalated, widespread aerial and artillery bombardment all over North Vietnam by the United States Air Force and Navy began with Operation Rolling Thunder. On 8–9 April 1965, Hồ made a secret visit to Beijing to meet Mao Zedong. It was agreed that no Chinese combat troops would enter North Vietnam unless the United States invaded North Vietnam, but that China would send support troops to North Vietnam to help maintain the infrastructure damaged by American bombing. There was deep distrust and fear of China within the North Vietnamese Politburo and the suggestion that Chinese troops, even support troops, be allowed into North Vietnam caused outrage in the Politburo. Hồ had to use all his moral authority to obtain Politburo's approval. According to Chen Jian, during the mid-to-late 1960s, Lê Duẩn permitted 320,000 Chinese volunteers into North Vietnam to help build infrastructure for the country, thereby freeing a similar number of PAVN personnel to go south. There are no sources from Vietnam, the United States, or the Soviet Union that confirm the number of Chinese troops stationed in North Vietnam. However, the Chinese government later admitted to sending 320,000 Chinese soldiers to Vietnam during the 1960s and spent over $20 billion to support Hanoi's regular North Vietnamese Army and Việt Cộng guerrilla units. To counter the American bombing, the entire population of North Vietnam was mobilized for the war effort, with vast teams of women being used to repair the damage to roads and bridges done by the aerial bombers, often at a speed that astonished the Americans. The bombing of North Vietnam proved to be the principal obstacle to opening peace talks, as Hồ repeatedly stated that no peace talks would be possible unless the United States unconditionally ceased bombing North Vietnam. Like many of the other leaders of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa, Hồ was extremely sensitive about threats, whether perceived or real, to his nation's independence and sovereignty. Hồ regarded the American bombing as a violation of North Vietnam's sovereignty, and he felt that to negotiate with the Americans reserving the right to bomb North Vietnam should he not behave as they wanted him to do, would diminish North Vietnam's independence. In March 1966, a Canadian diplomat, Chester Ronning, arrived in Hanoi with an offer to use his "good offices" to begin peace talks. However, the Ronning mission foundered upon the bombing issue, as the North Vietnamese demanded an unconditional halt to the bombing, an undertaking that Johnson refused to give. In June 1966, Janusz Lewandowski, the Polish Commissioner to the ICC, was able via d'Orlandi to see Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, the American ambassador to South Vietnam, with an offer from Hồ. Hồ's offer for a "political compromise" as transmitted by Lewandowski included allowing South Vietnam to maintain its alliance with the U.S., instead of becoming neutral; having the Việt Cộng "take part" in negotiations for a coalition government, instead of being allowed to automatically enter a coalition government; and allowing a "reasonable calendar" for the withdrawal of American troops instead of an immediate withdrawal. Operation Marigold, as the Lewandowski channel came to be codenamed, almost led to American-North Vietnamese talks in Warsaw in December 1966; but such plans ultimately collapsed over the bombing issue. In January 1967, General Nguyễn Chí Thanh, the commander of communist forces in South Vietnam, returned to Hanoi to present a plan that became the genesis of the Tet Offensive a year later. Thanh expressed much concern about the Americans invading Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and to preempt this possibility, urged an all-out offensive to win the war with a sudden blow. Lê' Duẩn supported Thanh's plans, which were stoutly opposed by the Defense Minister, General Võ Nguyên Giáp, who preferred to continue with guerrilla war, arguing that superior American firepower would ensure the failure of Thanh's proposed offensive. With the Politburo divided, it was agreed to study and debate the issue more. In July 1967, Hồ Chí Minh and most of the Politburo of the Communist Party met in a high-profile conference, where they concluded that the war had fallen into a stalemate. The American military presence forced the PAVN to expend the majority of their resources on maintaining the Hồ Chí Minh trail, rather than reinforcing their comrades' ranks in the South. Hồ seems to have agreed to Thanh's offensive because he wanted to see Vietnam reunified within his lifetime, and the increasingly ailing Hồ was painfully aware that he did not have much time left. With Hồ's permission, the Việt Cộng planned a massive offensive that would commence on 31 January 1968, to take much of the South by force and deal a heavy blow to the American military. The offensive was executed at great cost and with heavy casualties on Việt Cộng's political branches and armed forces. The scope of the action shocked the world, which until then had been assured that the Communists were "on the ropes". The optimistic spin that the American military command had sustained for years was no longer credible. The bombing of North Vietnam and the Hồ Chí Minh trail was halted, and American and Vietnamese negotiators held discussions on how the war might be ended. From then on, Hồ Chí Minh and his government's strategy materialized: Hanoi's terms would eventually be accepted not by engaging in conventional warfare against the might of the United States Army, but by wearing down American resolve through a prolonged guerilla conflict. In early 1969, Hồ suffered a heart attack and was in increasingly bad health for the rest of the year. In July 1969, Jean Sainteny, a former French official in Vietnam who knew Hồ secretly relayed a letter written to him from President Richard Nixon. Nixon's letter proposed working together to end this "tragic war", but also warned that if North Vietnam made no concessions at the peace talks in Paris by 1 November, Nixon would resort to "measures of great consequence and force". Hồ's reply letter, which Nixon received on 30 August 1969, welcomed peace talks with the U.S. to look for a way to end the war but made no concessions, as Nixon's threats made no impression on him. In addition to being a politician, Hồ Chí Minh was also a writer, journalist, poet and polyglot. His father was a scholar and teacher who received a high degree in the Nguyễn dynasty Imperial examination. Hồ was taught to master Classical Chinese at a young age. Before the August Revolution, he often wrote poetry in Chữ Hán (the Vietnamese name for the Chinese writing system). One of those is Poems from the Prison Diary, written when he was imprisoned by the police of the Republic of China. This poetry chronicle is Vietnam National Treasure No. 10 and was translated into many languages. It is used in Vietnamese high schools. After Vietnam gained independence from France, the new government exclusively promoted Chữ Quốc Ngữ (Vietnamese writing system in Latin characters) to eliminate illiteracy. Hồ started to create more poems in the modern Vietnamese language for dissemination to a wider range of readers. From when he became president until the appearance of serious health problems, a short poem of his was regularly published in the Tết (Lunar new year) edition of Nhân Dân newspaper to encourage his people in working, studying or fighting Americans in the new year. Because he was in exile for nearly 30 years, Hồ could speak fluently as well as read and write professionally in several different languages, including French, Russian, English, Cantonese and Mandarin, as well as his mother tongue Vietnamese. In addition, he was reported to speak conversational Esperanto. In the 1920s, he was bureau chief/editor of many newspapers which he established to criticize French Colonial Government of Indochina and serving communist propaganda purposes. Examples are Le Paria (The Pariah) first published in Paris 1922 or Thanh Nien (Youth) first published on 21 June 1925 (21 June was named by The Socialist Republic of Vietnam Government as Vietnam Revolutionary Journalism Day). In many state official visits to the Soviet Union and China, he often talked directly to their communist leaders without interpreters, especially about top-secret information. While being interviewed by Western journalists, he used French. His Vietnamese had a strong accent from his birthplace in the central province of Nghệ An, but could be widely understood throughout the country. As president, he held formal receptions for foreign heads of state and ambassadors at the Presidential Palace, but he did not live there. He ordered the building of a stilt house at the back of the palace, which is today known as the Presidential Palace Historical Site. His hobbies (according to his secretary Vũ Kỳ) included reading, gardening, feeding fish (many of which are still living), and visiting schools and children's homes. Hồ Chí Minh remained in Hanoi during his final years, demanding the unconditional withdrawal of all non-Vietnamese troops from South Vietnam. By 1969, with negotiations still dragging on, his health began to deteriorate from multiple health problems, including diabetes which prevented him from participating in further active politics. However, he insisted that his forces in the South continue fighting until all of Vietnam was reunited regardless of the length of time that it might take, believing that time was on his side. Hồ Chí Minh's marriage has long been swathed in secrecy and mystery. He is believed by several scholars of Vietnamese history, to have married Zeng Xueming in October 1926, although only being able to live with her for less than a year. Historian Peter Neville claimed that Hồ (at the time known as Ly Thuy) wanted to engage Zeng in the communist movements but she demonstrated a lack of ability and interest in it. In 1927, the mounting repression of Chiang Kai-shek's KMT against the Chinese Communists compelled Hồ to leave for Hong Kong, and his relationship with Zeng appeared to have ended at that time. In addition to the marriage with Zeng Xueming, there is a number of published studies indicating that Hồ had a romantic relationship with Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai. As a young and high-spirited female revolutionary, Minh Khai was delegated to Hong Kong to serve as an assistant to Ho Chi Minh in April 1930 and quickly drew Hồ's attention owing to her physical attractiveness. Hồ even approached the Far Eastern Bureau and requested permission to marry Minh Khai even though the previous marriage with Zeng remained legally valid. However, the marriage was unable to take place since Minh Khai had been detained by the British authorities in April 1931. With the outcome of the Vietnam war still in question, Hồ Chí Minh died of heart failure at his home in Hanoi at 9:47 on the morning of 2 September 1969; he was 79 years old. His embalmed body is currently on display in the President Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum in Ba Đình Square in Hanoi, despite his will which stated that he wanted to be cremated.: 565 Due to the sensitivity of 2 September being Independence Day, the North Vietnamese government originally delayed announcing Hồ's death until 3 September. A week of mourning for his death was decreed nationwide in North Vietnam from 4 to 11 September 1969. His funeral was attended by about 250,000 people and 5,000 official guests, which included many international mourners. Representatives from 40 countries and regions were also presented. During the mourning period, North Vietnam received more than 22,000 condolences letters from 20 organizations and 110 countries across the world, such as France, Ethiopia, Yugoslavia, Cuba, Zambia, China, the USSR and many others, mostly Socialist countries. He was not initially replaced as president; instead, a "collective leadership" composed of several ministers and military leaders took over, known as the Politburo. During North Vietnam's final campaign in 1975, a famous song written by composer Huy Thuc was often sung by PAVN soldiers: "Bác vẫn cùng chúng cháu hành quân" ("You are still marching with us, Uncle Hồ"). During the Fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975, several PAVN tanks displayed a poster with those same words on it. The day after the battle ended, on 1 May, veteran Australian journalist Denis Warner reported that "When the North Vietnamese marched into Saigon yesterday, they were led by a man who wasn't there". The Socialist Republic of Vietnam still praises the legacy of Uncle Hồ (Bác Hồ), the Bringer of Light (Chí Minh). Although Hồ Chí Minh wished for his body to be cremated and his ashes spread to North, Central, and South Vietnam, the body instead is embalmed on view in a mausoleum. His image is featured in many public buildings and schoolrooms, and other displays of reverence. There is at least one temple dedicated to him, built in then Việt Cộng-controlled Vĩnh Long shortly after his death in 1970. In The Communist Road to Power in Vietnam (1982), Duiker suggests that Hồ Chí Minh's cult of personality is indicative of a larger legacy, one that drew on "elements traditional to the exercise of control and authority in Vietnamese society." Duiker is drawn to an "irresistible and persuasive" comparison with China. As in China, leading party cadres were "most likely to be intellectuals descended [like Hồ Chí Minh] from rural scholar-gentry families" in the interior (the protectorates of Annam and Tonkin). Conversely, the pioneers of constitutional nationalism tended to be from the more "Westernised" coastal south (Saigon and surrounding French direct-rule Cochinchina) and to be from "commercial families without a traditional Confucian background". In Vietnam, as in China, Communism presented itself as a root and branch rejection of Confucianism, condemned for its ritualism, inherent conservatism, and resistance to change. Once in power, the Vietnamese Communists may not have fought Confucianism "as bitterly as did their Chinese counterparts", but its social prestige was "essentially destroyed." In the political sphere, the puppet son of heaven (which had been weakly represented by the Bảo Đại) was replaced by the people's republic. Orthodox materialism accorded no place to heaven, gods, or other supernatural forces. Socialist collectivism undermined the tradition of the Confucian family leader (Gia Truong). The socialist conception of social equality destroyed the Confucian views of class. Duiker argues many were to find the new ideology "congenial" precisely because of its similarities with the teachings of the old Master: "the belief in one truth, embodied in quasi-sacred texts"; in "an anointed elite, trained in an all-embracing doctrine and responsible for leading the broad masses and indoctrinating them in proper thought and behavior"; in "the subordination of the individual to the community"; and in the perfectibility, through corrective action, of human nature. All of this, Duiker suggests, was in some manner present in the aura of the new Master, Chi Minh, "the bringer of light", "Uncle Hồ" to whom "all the desirable qualities of Confucian ethics" are ascribed. Under Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnamese Marxism developed, in effect, as a kind of "reformed Confucianism" revised to meet "the challenges of the modern era" and, not least among these, of "total mobilization in the struggle for national independence and state power." This "congeniality" with Confucian tradition was remarked on by Nguyen Khac Vien, a leading Hanoi intellectual of the 1960s and 70s. In Confucianism and Marxism in Vietnam Nguyen Khac Vien, saw definite parallels between Confucian and party discipline, between the traditional scholar gentry and Hồ Chí Minh's party cadres. A completely different form of the cult of Hồ Chí Minh (and one tolerated by the government with uneasiness) is his identification in Vietnamese folk religion with the Jade Emperor, who supposedly incarnated again on earth as Hồ Chí Minh. Today, Hồ Chí Minh as the Jade Emperor is supposed to speak from the spirit world through Spiritualist mediums. The first such medium was one Madam Lang in the 1990s, but the cult acquired a significant number of followers through another medium, Madam Xoan. She established on 1 January 2001 the Đạo Ngọc Phật Hồ Chí Minh (the Way of Hồ Chí Minh as the Jade Buddha), also known as Đạo Bác Hồ (the Way of Uncle Hồ) at đền Hòa Bình (the Peace Temple) in Chí Linh-Sao Đỏ district of Hải Dương province. She then founded the Peace Society of Heavenly Mediums (Đoàn đồng thiên Hòa Bình). Reportedly, the movement had around 24,000 followers by 2014. The Vietnamese government's attempts to immortalize Hồ Chí Minh were also met with significant controversies and opposition. The regime is sensitive to anything that might question the official hagiography. This includes references to Hồ Chí Minh's personal life that might detract from the image of the dedicated "father of the revolution", the "celibate married only to the cause of revolution". William Duiker's Ho Chi Minh: A Life (2000) was candid on the matter of Hồ Chí Minh's liaisons.: 605, fn 58 The government sought cuts in the Vietnamese translation and banned distribution of an issue of the Far Eastern Economic Review, which carried a small item about the controversy. Many authors writing on Vietnam argued on the question of whether Hồ Chí Minh was fundamentally a nationalist or a Communist. Busts, statues, and memorial plaques and exhibitions are displayed in destinations on his extensive world journey in exile from 1911 to 1941 including France, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and Thailand. Many activists and musicians wrote songs about Hồ Chí Minh and his revolution in different languages during the Vietnam War to demonstrate against the United States. Spanish songs were composed by Félix Pita Rodríguez, Carlos Puebla and Alí Primera. In addition, the Chilean folk singer Víctor Jara referenced Hồ Chí Minh in his anti-war song "El derecho de vivir en paz" ("The Right to Live in Peace"). Pete Seeger wrote "Teacher Uncle Ho". Ewan MacColl produced "The Ballad of Ho Chi Minh" in 1954, describing "a man who is the father of the Indo-Chinese people, And his name [it] is Ho Chi Minh." Russian songs about him were written by Vladimir Fere, and German songs about him were written by Kurt Demmler. Various places, boulevards, and squares are named after him around the world, especially in Socialist states and former Communist states. In Russia, there is a Hồ Chí Minh square and monument in Moscow, a Hồ Chí Minh boulevard in Saint Petersburg, and a Hồ Chí Minh square in Ulyanovsk (the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin, a sister city of Vinh, the birthplace of Hồ Chí Minh). During the Vietnam War, the then-West Bengal government, in the hands of CPI(M), renamed Harrington Street to Ho Chi Minh Sarani, which is also the location of the consulate general of the United States in Kolkata. According to the Vietnamese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, as many as 20 countries across Asia, Europe, America and Africa have erected monuments or statues in remembrance of Hồ Chí Minh. Hồ Chí Minh is considered one of the most influential leaders in the world. Time magazine listed him in the list of 100 Most Important People of the Twentieth Century (Time 100) in 1998. His thought and revolution inspired many leaders and people on a global scale in Asia, Africa and Latin America during the decolonization movement which occurred after World War II. As a communist, he was one of the few international figures who were relatively well regarded in the West, and did not face the same extent of international criticism as much as other Communist rulers and factions, even winning praise for his actions. In 1987, UNESCO officially recommended that its member states "join in the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of President Hồ Chí Minh by organizing various events as a tribute to his memory", considering "the important and many-sided contributions of President Hồ Chí Minh to the fields of culture, education and the arts" who "devoted his whole life to the national liberation of the Vietnamese people, contributing to the common struggle of peoples for peace, national independence, democracy, and social progress". One of Hồ Chí Minh's works, The Black Race, much of it originally written in French, highlights his views on the oppression of peoples from colonialism and imperialism in 20 written articles. Other books such as Revolution which published selected works and articles of Hồ Chí Minh in English also highlighted Hồ Chí Minh's interpretation and beliefs in socialism and communism, and in fighting against what he perceived to be evils stemming from capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. Communism in Vietnam First Indochina War Vietnam War Fall, Bernard B., ed. (1967). Ho Chi Minh on Revolution and War: Selected Writings 1920–1966. New American Library. Duiker, William J. (2001). Ho Chi Minh: A Life. New York: Hyperion. Halberstam, David (1971). Ho. Rowman & Littlefield. Hồ chí Minh toàn tập. NXB chính trị quốc gia Khắc Huyên, N. (1971). Vision Accomplished? The Enigma of Ho Chi Minh. The Macmillan Company. Lacouture, Jean (1968) [1968, "Ho Chi Minh", Allen Lane]. Ho Chi Minh: A Political Biography. Random House. Morris, Virginia; Hills, Clive (2018). Ho Chi Minh's Blueprint for Revolution: In the Words of Vietnamese Strategists and Operatives. McFarland & Co. Osborne, Milton (November 1980). "Ho Chi Minh". History Today. Vol. 30, no. 11. pp. 40–46. Tôn Thất, Thiện (1990). Was Ho Chi Minh a Nationalist? Ho Chi Minh and the Comintern. Singapore: Information and Resource Centre. Hoang Van Chi. 1964. From colonialism to communism. Praeger. Trương Như Tảng. 1986. A Viet Cong Memoir. Vintage. Frances FitzGerald. 1972. Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam. Little, Brown and Company. David Hunt. 1993. The American War in Vietnam, SEAP Publications Ilya Gaiduck 2003 Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy Toward the Indochina Conflict, 1954–1963, Stanford University Press Nguyen Lien-Hang T. 2012 Hanoi's War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam, University of North Carolina Press Henry A. Kissinger. 1979. White House Years. Little, Brown. Richard Nixon. 1987. No More Vietnams. Arbor House Pub Co. Chi Minh Ho (1890–1969) at IMDb Works by or about Ho Chi Minh at Internet Archive Hồ Chí Minh obituary at The New York Times (4 September 1969) Time 100: Hồ Chí Minh (archived 31 May 2000) Ho Chi Minh Selected Writings (PDF) Hồ Chí Minh's biography (archived 14 July 2007) Satellite photo of the mausoleum on Google Maps Final Tribute to Hồ from the Central Committee of the Vietnam Workers' Party Bibliography: Writings by and about Hồ Chí Minh
2. Ngo Dinh Diem (1901 - 1963)
With an HPI of 72.77, Ngo Dinh Diem is the 2nd most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 63 different languages.
Ngô Đình Diệm ( dyem, YEE-əm or zeem; Vietnamese: [ŋō ɗìn jîəmˀ] ; 3 January 1901 – 2 November 1963) was a South Vietnamese politician who was the final prime minister of the State of Vietnam (1954–1955) and later the first president of South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) from 1955 until his capture and assassination during the CIA-backed 1963 South Vietnamese coup. He was born into a prominent Catholic family with his father, Ngô Đình Khả, being a high-ranking mandarin for Emperor Thành Thái during the French colonial era. Diệm was educated at French-speaking schools and considered following his brother Ngô Đình Thục into the priesthood, but eventually chose to pursue a career in the civil-service. He progressed rapidly in the court of Emperor Bảo Đại, becoming governor of Bình Thuận Province in 1929 and interior minister in 1933. However, he resigned from the latter position after three months and publicly denounced the emperor as a tool of France. Diệm came to support Vietnamese nationalism, promoting both anti-communism, in opposition to Hồ Chí Minh, and decolonization, in opposition to Bảo Đại. He established the Cần Lao Party to support his political doctrine of Person Dignity Theory, which was heavily influenced by the teachings of Personalism, mainly from French philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, and Confucianism, which Diệm had greatly admired. After several years in exile in Japan, the United States, and Europe, Diệm returned home in July 1954 and was appointed prime minister by Bảo Đại. The 1954 Geneva Conference took place soon after he took office, formally partitioning Vietnam along the 17th parallel. Diệm, with the aid of his younger brother Ngô Đình Nhu, soon consolidated power in South Vietnam. After the 1955 State of Vietnam referendum, he proclaimed the creation of the Republic of Vietnam, with himself as president. His government was supported by other anti-communist countries, most notably the United States. Diệm pursued a series of nation-building projects, promoting industrial and rural development. From 1957 onward, as part of the Vietnam War, he faced a communist insurgency backed by North Vietnam, eventually formally organized under the banner of the Viet Cong. He was subject to several assassination and coup attempts, and in 1962 established the Strategic Hamlet Program as the cornerstone of his counterinsurgency effort. In 1963, Diệm's favoritism towards Catholics and persecution of practitioners of Buddhism in Vietnam led to the Buddhist crisis. The event damaged relations with the United States and other previously sympathetic countries, and his organization lost favor with the leadership of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. On 1 November 1963, the country's leading generals launched a coup d'état with assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency. Diệm and his brother, Nhu, initially escaped, but were recaptured the following day and assassinated on the orders of Dương Văn Minh, who succeeded him as president. Diệm has been a controversial historical figure. Some historians have considered him a tool of the United States, while others portrayed him as an avatar of Vietnamese tradition. At the time of his assassination, he was widely considered to be a corrupt dictator.
3. Nguyễn Phú Trọng (1944 - 2024)
With an HPI of 65.59, Nguyễn Phú Trọng is the 3rd most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 49 different languages.
Nguyễn Phú Trọng (Vietnamese: [ŋwiən˦ˀ˥ fu˧˦ t͡ɕawŋ͡m˧˨ʔ] new-yen foo chong; 14 April 1944 – 19 July 2024) was a Vietnamese politician and communist theorist who served as general secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam from 2011 until his death in 2024. As the head of the party's Secretariat, Politburo and Central Military Commission, Trọng was considered Vietnam's paramount leader. From 2018 to 2021, he also served concurrently as president of Vietnam. A conservative Marxist–Leninist, Trọng joined the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1967 and rose through the section devoted to political work. He later joined the party's Central Committee in 1994, its Politburo in 1997 and Vietnam's National Assembly in 2002. Between 2000 and 2006, he was the Party Secretary for Hanoi, effectively the city's highest-ranking position. He served as Chairman of the National Assembly from 2006 to 2011. Trọng rose to the general secretaryship at the party's 11th National Congress in 2011 and was re-elected at the 12th National Congress in 2016. He became state president in 2018 following the death of President Trần Đại Quang, becoming the third person to simultaneously head the party and state after Hồ Chí Minh and Trường Chinh. At the 13th National Congress in 2021, he was re-elected as general secretary, becoming the third leader of Vietnam to secure a third term (after Hồ Chí Minh and Lê Duẩn), and was succeeded by Nguyễn Xuân Phúc as president. During his tenure, Trọng pursued a wide anti-corruption campaign, implicating numerous senior officials to a degree unprecedented in Vietnamese political history. His foreign policy, known as "bamboo diplomacy", sought to balance Vietnam's relations with both the United States and China. He presided over a period of rapid economic growth. Trọng is considered one of the most influential Vietnamese leaders since Hồ Chí Minh.
4. Bảo Đại (1913 - 1997)
With an HPI of 65.39, Bảo Đại is the 4th most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 51 different languages.
Bảo Đại (Vietnamese: [ɓa᷉ːw ɗâːjˀ], chữ Hán: 保大, lit. "keeper of greatness", 22 October 1913 – 31 July 1997), born Nguyễn Phúc/Phước Vĩnh Thụy (chữ Hán: 阮福永瑞), was the 13th and final emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, the last ruling dynasty of Vietnam. From 1926 to 1945, he was emperor of Annam and de jure monarch of Tonkin, which were then protectorates in French Indochina, covering the present-day central and northern Vietnam. Bảo Đại ascended the throne in 1932. The Japanese ousted the Provisional French administration in March 1945 and ruled through Bảo Đại, who proclaimed the Empire of Vietnam. He abdicated in August 1945 when Japan surrendered. From 1949 to 1955, Bảo Đại was the chief of state of the non-communist State of Vietnam. Viewed as a puppet ruler, Bảo Đại was criticized for being too closely associated with France and spending much of his time outside Vietnam. He was eventually ousted in a referendum in 1955 by Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm, who was supported by the United States.
5. Ieng Sary (1925 - 2013)
With an HPI of 64.31, Ieng Sary is the 5th most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 32 different languages.
Ieng Sary (Khmer: អៀង សារី; born Kim Trang; 24 October 1925 – 14 March 2013) was the co-founder and senior member of the Khmer Rouge and one of the main architects of the Cambodian Genocide. He was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Kampuchea led by Pol Pot and served in the 1975–79 government of Democratic Kampuchea as foreign minister and deputy prime minister. He was known as "Brother Number Three", as he was third in command after Pol Pot and Nuon Chea. His wife, Ieng Thirith (née Khieu), served in the Khmer Rouge government as social affairs minister. Ieng Sary was arrested in 2007 and was charged with crimes against humanity but died of heart failure before the case against him could be brought to a verdict.
6. Lady Sun (b. 192)
With an HPI of 63.87, Lady Sun is the 6th most famous Vietnamese Politician. Her biography has been translated into 20 different languages.
Lady Sun (fl.180s - 211), also known as Sun Ren in the 14th-century historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Sun Shangxiang in Chinese opera and contemporary culture, was a Chinese noblewoman who lived during the late Eastern Han dynasty. She was a daughter of the warlord Sun Jian, and her (known) older brothers were the warlords Sun Ce and Sun Quan, who founded the state of Eastern Wu in the Three Kingdoms period. Sometime in 209, she married the warlord Liu Bei to strengthen an alliance between Liu Bei and Sun Quan. Around 211, she returned to Sun Quan's domain when Liu Bei left Jing Province (covering present-day Hubei and Hunan) and settled in Yi Province (covering present-day Sichuan and Chongqing).
7. Dương Văn Minh (1916 - 2001)
With an HPI of 63.59, Dương Văn Minh is the 7th most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 35 different languages.
Dương Văn Minh (Vietnamese: [jɨəŋ van miŋ̟] ; 16 February 1916 – 6 August 2001), popularly known as Big Minh, was a South Vietnamese politician and a senior general in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and a politician during the presidency of Ngô Đình Diệm. In 1963, he became chief of a military junta after leading a coup in which Diệm was assassinated. Minh lasted only three months before being toppled by Nguyễn Khánh, but assumed power again as the fourth and last President of South Vietnam in April 1975, two days before surrendering to North Vietnamese forces. He earned his nickname "Big Minh", because he was approximately 1.83 m (6 ft) tall and weighed 90 kg (198 lb). Born in Tiền Giang province in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam, Minh joined the French Army at the start of World War II, and was captured and tortured by the Imperial Japanese, who invaded and seized French Indochina. After his release, he joined the French-backed Vietnamese National Army (VNA) and was imprisoned by the communist-dominated Viet Minh before breaking out. In 1955, when Vietnam was partitioned and the State of Vietnam controlled the southern half under Prime Minister Ngô Đình Diệm, Minh led the VNA in decisively defeating the Bình Xuyên paramilitary crime syndicate in street combat and dismantling the Hòa Hảo religious tradition's private army. This made him popular with the people and Diệm, but the latter later put him in a powerless position, regarding him as a threat. In 1963, the authoritarian Diệm became increasingly unpopular due to the Buddhist crisis and the ARVN generals decided to launch a coup, which Minh eventually led. Diệm was assassinated on 2 November 1963 shortly after being deposed. Minh was accused of ordering an aide, Nguyễn Văn Nhung, to kill Diệm. Minh then led a junta for three months, but he was an unsuccessful leader and was heavily criticized for being lethargic and uninterested. During his three months of rule, many civilian problems intensified and the communist Viet Cong made significant gains. Angered at not receiving his desired post, General Nguyễn Khánh led a group of similarly motivated officers in a January 1964 coup. Khánh allowed Minh to stay on as a token head of state in order to capitalize on Minh's public standing, but retained real power. After a power struggle, Khanh had Minh exiled. Minh stayed away before deciding to return and challenge General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu in the presidential election of 1971. When it became obvious that Thieu would rig the poll, Minh withdrew and did not return until 1972, keeping a low profile. Minh then advocated a "third force", maintaining that Vietnam could be reunified without a military victory to a hardline communist or anti-communist government. However, this was not something that Thiệu agreed with. In April 1975, as South Vietnam was on the verge of being overrun, Thieu resigned. A week later, Minh was forcibly chosen by the legislature and became president on 28 April. Saigon fell two days later on 30 April, and Minh ordered a surrender to prevent bloody urban street fighting. Minh was spared the lengthy incarceration meted out to South Vietnamese military personnel and civil servants, and lived quietly until being allowed to emigrate to France in 1983. He later moved to California, where he died.
8. Lê Duẩn (1907 - 1986)
With an HPI of 63.31, Lê Duẩn is the 8th most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 38 different languages.
Lê Duẩn (Vietnamese: [lē zʷə̂n]; 7 April 1907 – 10 July 1986) was a Vietnamese communist politician. He rose in the party hierarchy in the late 1950s and became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Vietnam (VCP) at the 3rd National Congress in 1960. He continued Hồ Chí Minh's policy of ruling through collective leadership. From the mid-1960s (when Hồ's health was failing) until his own death in 1986, he was the top decision-maker in Vietnam. He was born into a lower-class family in Quảng Trị Province, in the Annam Protectorate of French Indochina as Lê Văn Nhuận. Little is known about his family and childhood. He first came in contact with revolutionary thoughts in the 1920s through his work as a railway clerk. Lê Duẩn was a founding member of the Indochina Communist Party (the future Communist Party of Vietnam) in 1930. He was imprisoned in 1931 and released in 1937. From 1937 to 1939, he climbed the party ladder. He was rearrested in 1939, this time for fomenting an uprising in the South. Lê Duẩn was released from jail following the successful Communist-led August Revolution of August 1945. During the First Indochina War (1946-1954), Lê Duẩn was an active revolutionary leader in South Vietnam. He headed the Central Office of South Vietnam, a Party organ, from 1951 until 1954. During the 1950s Lê Duẩn became increasingly aggressive towards South Vietnam and called for reunification through war. By the mid-to-late 1950s Lê Duẩn had become the second-most powerful policy-maker within the Party, eclipsing former party First Secretary Trường Chinh. By 1960 he was officially the second-most powerful Party member, after Party chairman Hồ. Throughout the 1960s Hồ's health declined and Lê Duẩn assumed more of his responsibilities. On 2 September 1969 Hồ died and Lê Duẩn became the most powerful figure in the North. He became the General Secretary in 1960, officially becoming the main personality in the party after Hồ Chí Minh. After Hồ's death, Lê Duẩn took over the leadership of North Vietnam. Throughout the Vietnam War of 1955 to 1975, Lê Duẩn took an aggressive posture, seeing attack as the key to victory. When South Vietnam was reunited with North Vietnam in 1976 and the party was restructured, Lê Duẩn became General Secretary of the Party. Lê Duẩn and his associates were overly optimistic about the future. The Second Five-Year Plan (1976–1980) failed and left the Vietnamese economy in crisis. He endorsed the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia on December 1978, after a series of failed diplomatic attempts, due to the constant attacks on Vietnamese villages near the border murdering thousands. They went with the invasion, overthrowing the Chinese-backed genocidal Khmer Rouge regime of Democratic Kampuchea on 7 January 1979. This had a serious impact on relations between Vietnam and China, with Vietnam responding with a period of deportation of ethnic Chinese Hoa people. China carried out an invasion on the Vietnamese northern border which was to be known as the Sino-Vietnamese War in 1979, though was short-lived and remained inconclusive. From then on, Vietnam maintained a closer alliance with the Soviet Union and joined Comecon in 1978. Lê remained General Secretary until his death in 1986. He died in Hanoi; his successor was initially Trường Chinh. Lê Duẩn was also known as Lê Dung, and was known in public as "anh Ba" (third brother).
9. Kaysone Phomvihane (1920 - 1992)
With an HPI of 63.20, Kaysone Phomvihane is the 9th most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 32 different languages.
Kaysone Phomvihane (Lao: ໄກສອນ ພົມວິຫານ, pronounced [ˈ kɑɪsɒn ˈˈpɒmvɪhɑːn]; 13 December 1920 – 21 November 1992) was the first leader of the Communist Lao People's Revolutionary Party from 1955 until his death in 1992. After the Communists seized power in the wake of the Laotian Civil War, he was the de facto leader of Laos from 1975 until his death. He served as the first Prime Minister of the Lao People's Democratic Republic from 1975 to 1991 and then as the second President from 1991 to 1992.
10. Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (1923 - 2001)
With an HPI of 63.18, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu is the 10th most famous Vietnamese Politician. His biography has been translated into 37 different languages.
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu ( Vietnamese pronunciation: [ŋʷǐənˀ vān tʰîəwˀ] ; 5 April 1923 – 29 September 2001) was a South Vietnamese military officer and politician who was the president of South Vietnam from 1967 to 1975. He was a general in the Republic of Vietnam Armed Forces (RVNAF), became head of a military junta in 1965, and then president after winning a rigged election in 1967. He established rule over South Vietnam until he resigned and left the nation and relocated to Taipei a few days before the fall of Saigon and the ultimate North Vietnamese victory. Born in Phan Rang in the south central coast of Vietnam, Thieu joined the communist-dominated Việt Minh of Hồ Chí Minh in 1945 but quit after a year and joined the Vietnamese National Army (VNA) of the French-backed State of Vietnam. He gradually rose up the ranks and, in 1954, led a battalion in expelling the communists from his native village. Following the withdrawal of France, the VNA became the ARVN and Thiệu was the head of the Vietnamese National Military Academy for four years before becoming a division commander and colonel. In November 1960, he helped put down a coup attempt against President Ngô Đình Diệm. During this time, he also converted to Catholicism and joined the regime's secret Cần Lao Party; Diệm was thought to give preferential treatment to his co-religionists and Thiệu was accused of being one of many who converted for political advancement. Despite this, Thiệu agreed to join the coup against Ngô Đình Diệm in November 1963 in the midst of the Buddhist crisis, leading the siege on Gia Long Palace. Diệm was captured and executed and Thiệu made a general. Following Diệm's death, there were several short-lived juntas as coups occurred frequently. Thiệu gradually moved up the ranks of the junta by adopting a cautious approach while other officers around him defeated and sidelined one another. In 1965, stability came to South Vietnam when he became the figurehead head of state, while Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ became prime minister, although the men were rivals. In 1967, a transition to elected government was scheduled; and, after a power struggle within the military, Thiệu ran for the presidency with Kỳ as his running mate—both men had wanted the top job. To allow the two to work together, their fellow officers had agreed to have a military body controlled by Kỳ shape policy behind the scenes. Leadership tensions became evident, and Thiệu prevailed, sidelining Kỳ supporters from key military and cabinet posts. Thiệu then passed legislation to restrict candidacy eligibility for the 1971 election, banning almost all would-be opponents, while the rest withdrew as it was obvious that the poll would be a sham; Thiệu won 100% of the vote and the election was uncontested, while Kỳ retired from politics. During his rule, Thiệu was accused of turning a blind eye to and indulging in corruption, and appointing loyalists rather than competent officers to lead ARVN units. During the 1971 Operation Lam Sơn 719 and the communists' Easter Offensive, the I Corps in the north of the country was under the command of his confidant, Hoàng Xuân Lãm, whose incompetence led to heavy defeats until Thiệu finally replaced him with Ngô Quang Trưởng. After the signing of the Paris Peace Accords—which Thiệu opposed—and the US withdrawal, South Vietnam resisted the communists for another two years until the communists' final push for victory, which saw the South openly invaded by the entire North Vietnamese army. Thiệu gave contradictory orders to Trưởng to stand and fight or withdraw and consolidate, leading to mass panic and collapse in the south of the country. This allowed the communists to generate much momentum and within a month they were close to Saigon, prompting Thiệu to resign and leave the country. He eventually settled near Boston, Massachusetts, preferring not to talk to the media. He died in 2001. Thiệu has been described as dictatorial, similar to Ngô Đình Diệm. Born in Phan Rang on the south central coast of Vietnam, Thiệu was a son of a small, well-off landowner who earned his living by farming and fishing. Thiệu was the youngest of five children. According to some reports, Thiệu was born in November 1924, but adopted 5 April 1923, as his birthday on grounds that it was a more auspicious day. His elder brothers raised money so that he could attend the elite schools run by France, who were Vietnam's colonial rulers. Although not yet a Catholic (he converted later in life after getting married), Thiệu attended Pellerin, a French-run Catholic school in Huế, the imperial seat of the Nguyễn dynasty. He returned to his hometown after graduating. During World War II, Imperial Japan invaded French Indochina and seized control. Ninh Thuận was taken over by the Japanese in 1942, but the reaction from the locals was muted, and Thiệu continued to work the ricelands alongside his father for another three years. When World War II ended, Thiệu joined the Việt Minh, led by Hồ Chí Minh, whose goal was to gain independence for Vietnam from France. With no rifles, Thiệu's class of Việt Minh recruits trained in jungle clearings with bamboo. He rose to be district chief, but left the movement after just one year, following the return of the French to southern Vietnam in 1946 to contest Việt Minh control. Thiệu said, "By August of 1946, I knew that Việt Minh were Communists … They shot people. They overthrew the village committee. They seized the land." He defected and moved to Saigon and joined the forces of the French-backed State of Vietnam. With the help of his brother, Nguyễn Văn Hiếu, a Paris-trained lawyer who served in the upper echelons of the State of Vietnam government, Thiệu initially was enrolled in the Merchant Marine Academy. After a year, he was given his officer's commission, but he rejected a position on a ship when he discovered that the French owners were going to pay him less than his French colleagues. This incident was said to have made him suspicious of foreigners. Thiệu later became known for his paranoia and distrust of his American allies when he rose to the top of politics. Thiệu transferred to the National Military Academy in Đà Lạt. In 1949, upon graduation, he was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant from the first officer candidates' course of the Vietnam National Army, which had been created by former Emperor Bảo Đại who had agreed to be the Chief of State of the State of Vietnam to fight against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam of the Việt Minh. Thiệu started as the commander of an infantry platoon fighting against the Việt Minh. He quickly rose up the ranks, and was known as a good strategist, albeit cautious, with an aversion to attacking unless victory appeared almost assured. He was sent to France to train at the Infantry School at Coëtquidan, before returning home to attend the Staff College in Hanoi. Nevertheless, Thiệu was regarded as "very much a country boy, lacking the manners of more sophisticated urban dwellers who aspired to become officers". By 1954, he was a major and led a battalion that attacked a Việt Minh unit, forcing the communists to withdraw from Phan Rang. At first the Việt Minh retreated into Thiệu's old family home, confident that he would not attack his own house, but they were mistaken. Thiệu was a lieutenant colonel when the Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) was founded and officially gained full sovereignty after the withdrawal of French forces in 1955, following the 1954 Geneva Agreement. In 1956, he was appointed as head of the National Military Academy in Đà Lạt, and held the post for four years. There he formed ties with many of the younger officers and trainees and who went on to become his generals, colonels and majors when he ascended to the presidency a decade later. In 1957, and again in 1960, Thiệu was sent to the United States for military training. He studied at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and in weapons training at Fort Bliss, Texas, as well as at the Joint and Combined Planning School of the Pacific Command in Okinawa. On 11 November 1960, Colonels Vương Văn Đông and Nguyễn Chánh Thi launched a coup attempt against President Ngô Đình Diệm, but after surrounding the palace, they stopped attacking and decided to negotiate a power-sharing agreement. Diệm falsely promised reform, allowing time for loyalists to come to the rescue. The rebels had also failed to seal the highways into the capital to block loyalist reinforcements. Thiệu sent infantry from his 7th Division from Biên Hòa, a town just north of Saigon, to help rescue Diệm. As the false promises of reform were being aired, Trần Thiện Khiêm's men approached the palace grounds. Some of the rebels switched sides as the power balance changed. After a brief but violent battle that killed around 400 people, the coup attempt was crushed. On 21 October 1961, Thiệu was transferred to command the 1st Division, based in Huế, the former imperial capital in central Vietnam. He remained in the post until 8 December 1962, when General Đỗ Cao Trí took over. Twelve days later, Thiệu was appointed commander of the 5th Division, which was based in Biên Hòa, the 7th having been moved to Mỹ Tho. Diệm did not trust Thiệu's predecessor, Nguyễn Đức Thắng, but Thiệu's appointment proved to be a mistake. Thiệu turned against Diệm late, and led his 5th Division in the revolt. Late on the night of 1 November, as light drizzle fell, Thiệu's tanks, artillery, and troops advanced towards the grounds of Gia Long Palace. A little before 22:00, infantry started the assault, covered by tank and artillery fire, which flattened the Presidential Guard barracks. Demolition units set charges to the palace, and rebel flamethrowers sprayed buildings, as the two sides exchanged gunfire. After a lull, shortly after 3:00, the shelling resumed, and just after 5:00, Thiệu ordered the start of the final stage of the siege. By 6:37, the palace fell. He was then made a general by the junta after they took power. Diệm had been promised exile by the generals, but, after escaping from the palace, was executed on the journey back to military headquarters after having been captured. Dương Văn Minh, the junta and coup leader, was generally blamed for having ordered Diệm's assassination, but there has been debate about the culpability. When Thiệu rose to become president, Minh blamed him for the assassinations. In 1971, Minh claimed that Thiệu had caused the deaths by hesitating and delaying the attack on Gia Long Palace, implying that if Diệm was captured there, junior officers could not have killed him while in a small group. General Trần Văn Đôn, another plotter, was reported to have pressured Thiệu during the night of the siege, asking him on the phone, "Why are you so slow in doing it? Do you need more troops? If you do, ask Đính to send more troops—and do it quickly because after taking the palace you will be made a general." Thiệu stridently denied responsibility and issued a statement that Minh did not dispute: "Dương Văn Minh has to assume entire responsibility for the death of Ngô Đình Diệm." Diệm remained a taboo subject until Thiệu became president. His regime first approved of public memorial services for Diệm upon the eighth anniversary of his death in 1971, and this was the third year that such services were permitted. Madame Thiệu, the First Lady, was seen weeping at a requiem mass for Diệm at the Saigon Notre-Dame Basilica. Thiệu was rewarded with membership in the 12-man Military Revolutionary Council led by General Minh, and served as the secretary general; the leading figures in the MRC were Generals Minh, Trần Văn Đôn, Lê Văn Kim and Tôn Thất Đính. In August 1964, the current junta head, General Nguyễn Khánh, who had in fact deposed Minh and his colleagues in January or at least heavily weakened him – as he had to formally retain Minh in recognition of the United States' will – decided to increase his authority by declaring a state of emergency, increasing police powers, banning protests, tightening censorship and allowing the police arbitrary search and imprisonment powers. He drafted a new constitution, which would have augmented his personal power. However, these moves served only to weaken Khánh as large demonstrations and riots broke out in the cities, with majority Buddhists prominent, calling for an end to the state of emergency and the abandonment of the new constitution, as well as a progression back to civilian rule. Fearing that he could be toppled by the intensifying protests, Khánh made concessions, repealing the new constitution and police measures, and promising to reinstate civilian rule and remove the Cần Lao, a Catholic political apparatus covertly used to maintain the Diệm regime in power by seeking out dissenters, etc. Many senior officers, in particular the Catholics, such as Khiêm and Thiệu, decried what they viewed as a handing of power to the Buddhist leaders, They then tried to remove Khánh in favour of Minh again, and recruited many officers into their plot. Khiêm and Thiệu sought out US Ambassador Maxwell Taylor and sought a private endorsement for a coup, but, as this would have been the third coup in a few months, Taylor did not want any more changes in leadership, fearing a corrosive effect on the already unstable government. This deterred Khiêm's group from following through on their plans. The division among the generals came to a head at a meeting of the MRC on 26/27 August. Khánh claimed the instability was due to troublemaking by members and supporters of the Catholic-aligned Nationalist Party of Greater Vietnam. Prominent officers associated with the Đại Việt included Thiệu and Khiêm. Khiêm blamed Khánh's concessions to Buddhist activists as the reason for the trouble. Thiệu and another Catholic General, Nguyễn Hữu Có, called for the replacement of Khánh with the original junta leader Minh, but the latter refused. Feeling pressured by the strong condemnations of his colleagues, Khánh said that he would resign. However, after further deadlock, Khánh, Minh, and Khiêm were put together in a triumvirate to resolve the problem, but tensions remained as Khánh dominated the decision-making. On 15 September 1964, Thiệu became the commander of IV Corps, which oversaw the Mekong Delta region of the country, and three divisions. This came after the Buddhists had lobbied Khánh to remove General Dương Văn Đức from command of IV Corps; Đức had responded with a failed coup attempt, along with Lâm Văn Phát, on 13 September. During the coup attempt, Khiêm and Thiệu's torpor, combined with their criticism of Khánh was seen as tacit support of the rebels. US Embassy logs during the coup claimed that Thiệu and Khiêm "seem so passive that they appear to have been either tacitly supporting or associated with his move by Đức and Phát". However, after the coup faltered, the pair "issued expressions of firm support for Khánh somewhat belatedly". Thiệu was part of a group of younger officers called the Young Turks—the most prominent apart from himself included commander of the Republic of Vietnam Air Force, Air Marshal Nguyễn Cao Kỳ, commander of I Corps General Nguyễn Chánh Thi and Admiral Chung Tấn Cang, the head of the Republic of Vietnam Navy. They and Khánh wanted to forcibly retire officers with more than 25 years of service, as they thought them to be lethargic, out of touch, and ineffective, but most importantly, as rivals for power. Specific targets of this proposed policy were Generals Minh, Trần Văn Đôn, Lê Văn Kim and Mai Hữu Xuân. The signature of Chief of State Phan Khắc Sửu was required to pass the ruling, but he referred the matter to the High National Council (HNC), an appointed civilian advisory body, to get their opinion. The HNC turned down the request. This was speculated to be due to the fact that many of the HNC members were old, and did not appreciate the generals' negativity towards seniors. On 19 December, the generals dissolved the HNC and arrested some of the members as well as other civilian politicians. This prompted US Ambassador Maxwell D. Taylor to angrily berate Thiệu, Thi, Kỳ and Cang in a private meeting and threaten to cut off aid if they did not reverse their decision. However, this galvanized the officers around Khánh for a time and they ignored Taylor's threats without repercussions as the Americans were too intent on defeating the communists to cut funding. Thiệu was again plotting the following month when the junta-appointed Prime Minister, Trần Văn Hương, introduced a series of war expansion measures, notably by widening the terms of conscription. This provoked widespread anti-Hương demonstrations and riots across the country, mainly from conscription-aged students and pro-negotiations Buddhists. Reliant on Buddhist support, Khánh did little to try to contain the protests, and then decided to have the armed forces take over the government, and he removed Hương on 27 January. Khánh's action nullified a counter-plot involving Hương that had developed during the civil disorders that forced him from office. In an attempt to pre-empt his deposal, Hương had backed a plot led by some Đại Việt-oriented Catholic officers, including Thiệu and Có, who planned to remove Khánh and bring Khiêm back from Washington. The US Embassy in Saigon was privately supportive of the aim as Taylor and Khánh had become implacable enemies, but they did not fully back the move as they regarded it as poorly thought out and potentially a political embarrassment due to the need to use an American plane to transport some plotters between Saigon and Washington, and as a result, they promised asylum only for Hương if necessary. The plot continued over the next month with US encouragement, especially when evidence emerged that Khánh wanted to make a deal with the communists. Taylor told the generals that the US was "in no way propping up General Khanh or backing him in any fashion". At this stage, Taylor and his staff in Saigon thought highly of Thiệu, Có and Cang as possible replacements for Khánh. Thiệu was quoted in a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report as being described by an unnamed American official as "intelligent, highly ambitious, and likely to remain a coup plotter with the aim of personal advancement". Thiệu took a cautious approach, as did Có and Cang, and they were pre-empted by Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo, an undetected communist double agent, who launched a coup with Phát on a hardline Catholic platform without US backing. With US support against both Khánh and the plotters, Kỳ and Thi put down the coup attempt and then ousted Khánh. This left Kỳ, Thi and Thiệu as the three most prominent members in the new junta. There were claims that Thiệu ordered the military to capture and extrajudicially kill Colonel Phạm Ngọc Thảo, who died in 1965 after a series of coup attempts between various ARVN officers. Other sources blame Kỳ. During this period, Thiệu became more prominent as other generals fought and defeated one another in coups, which forced several into exile. In mid-1965, Thiệu became the figurehead chief of state of a military junta, with Kỳ as the prime minister. After a series of short-lived juntas, their pairing put an end to a series of leadership changes that had occurred since the assassination of Diệm. Kỳ and Thiệu's military junta decided to inaugurate their rule by holding a "no breathing week". They imposed censorship, closed many newspapers that published material deemed unacceptable, and suspended civil liberties. They then sidelined the civilian politicians to a "village of old trees" to "conduct seminars and draw up plans and programs in support of government policy". They decided to ignore religious and other opposition groups "with the stipulation that troublemakers will be shot". Kỳ and Thiệu were more concerned with attacking the communists than their predecessors. The generals began to mobilize the populace into paramilitary organizations. After one month, Thích Trí Quang began to call for the removal of Thiệu because he was a member of Diệm's Catholic Cần Lao apparatus, decrying his "fascistic tendencies", and claiming that Cần Lao members were undermining Kỳ. For Quang, Thiệu was a symbol of the Diệm era of Catholic domination, when advancement was based on religion. He had desired that General Thi, known for his pro-Buddhist position, would lead the country, and denounced Thiệu for alleged past crimes against Buddhists. In 1966, with Kỳ leading the way, Thi was sacked in a power struggle, provoking widespread civil unrest in his base in I Corps; Quang led Buddhist protests against Kỳ and Thiệu and many units in I Corps began disobeying orders, siding with Thi and the Buddhist movement. Eventually, Kỳ's military forces forced the dissidents to back down and defeated those who did not. Thi was exiled and Quang put under house arrest, ending Buddhist opposition and any effective threat to Kỳ and Thiệu's regime. Under US insistence on constitutional rule, elections for the presidency and legislature were scheduled. On 3 September 1967, Thiệu ran successfully for the presidency with Kỳ as his running mate. Thiệu took 34% of the vote and held the position until 21 April 1975. He promised democracy, social reform and vowed to "open wide the door of peace and leave it open". However, the poll was the start of a power struggle with Kỳ, who had been the main leader of South Vietnam in the preceding two years. The military had decided that they would support one candidate, and after both men wanted the job, Kỳ only backed down after being promised real influence behind the scenes through a military committee that would control proceedings. Thiệu was intent on concentrating power in his own hands. During the Lunar New Year of 1968, the communists launched a massive attack on the cities of Vietnam in an attempt to topple Thiệu and reunify the country under their rule. At the time of the attack on Saigon, Thiệu was out of town, having travelled to celebrate the new year at his wife's family's home at Mỹ Tho in the Mekong Delta. Kỳ, who was still in the capital, stepped into the spotlight and took command, organising the military forces in Saigon in the battle. The ARVN and the Americans repelled the communist onslaught. Kỳ's overshadowing of his superior during South Vietnam's deepest crisis further strained relations between the two men. Although the communists were repelled and suffered heavy losses, South Vietnam suffered heavily as the conflict reached the cities for the first time in a substantial way. As ARVN troops were pulled back to defend the towns, the Việt Cộng gained in the countryside. The violence and destruction witnessed damaged public confidence in Thiệu, who apparently couldn't protect the citizens. Thiệu's regime estimated the civilian dead at 14,300 with 24,000 wounded. 630,000 new refugees had been generated, joining the nearly 800,000 others already displaced by the war. By the end of 1968, 8% of the populace was living in a refugee camp. More than 70,000 homes had been destroyed and the nation's infrastructure was severely damaged. 1968 became the deadliest year of the war to date for South Vietnam, with 27,915 men killed. In the wake of the offensive, however, Thiệu's regime became more energetic. On 1 February, Thiệu declared martial law, and in June, the National Assembly approved his request for a general mobilization of the population and the induction of 200,000 draftees into the armed forces by the end of the year; the bill had been blocked before the Tết Offensive. This increased South Vietnam's military to more than 900,000 men. Mobilization and token anti-corruption campaigns were carried out. Three of the four ARVN corps commanders were replaced for poor performance during the offensive. Thiệu also established a National Recovery Committee to oversee food distribution, resettlement, and housing construction for the new refugees. The government perceived a new determination among the ordinary citizens, especially among previously apathetic urbanites who were angered by the communist attacks. Thiệu used the period to consolidate his personal power. His only real political rival was Vice President Kỳ. In the aftermath of Tết, Kỳ supporters in the military and the administration were quickly removed from power, arrested, or exiled. A crack-down on the South Vietnamese press followed and there was a return of some of Diệm's Cần Lao members to positions of power. Within six months, the populace began to call him "the little dictator". Over the next few years, Kỳ became increasingly sidelined to the point of irrelevance. In 1971, Thiệu ran for re-election, but his reputation for corruption made his political opponents believe the poll would be rigged, and they declined to run. As the only candidate, Thiệu was thus easily re-elected on 2 October, receiving 94% of the vote on an 87% turn-out, a figure widely held to be fraudulent. The signing of the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973 failed to end the fighting in South Vietnam, as North Vietnam immediately violated the cease-fire and attempted to make territorial gains, resulting in large battles. In late 1973, the communists issued Resolution 21, which called for "strategic raids" against South Vietnam to gain territory and to gauge the reaction of Thiệu and the American government. This started between March and November 1974, when the communists attacked Quang Duc Province and Biên Hòa. The US failed to respond to the communist violations and the ARVN lost a lot of supplies in the fighting. Thiệu expressed his stance on the ceasefire by publicly proclaiming the "Four Nos": no negotiations with the communists; no communist political activities south of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ); no coalition government; and no surrender of territory to the North Vietnamese or Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), which went against the deal. Thiệu believed the American promise to reintroduce air power against the communists if they made any serious violations of the agreement, and he and his government also assumed that US aid would continue to be forthcoming at previous levels. On 1 July 1973, however, the US Congress passed legislation that all but prohibited any US combat activities over or in Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. On 7 November, the legislative branch overrode Nixon's veto of the War Powers Act. In 1973–74, US funding was slashed to $965 million, a reduction of more than 50%. Despite Nixon's growing political difficulties and an increasingly hostile working relationship with the legislature over Vietnam, Thiệu, and most of the Saigon leadership, remained optimistic about ongoing aid. According to Vietnamese Air Force General Đổng Văn Khuyên, "Our leaders continued to believe in U.S. air intervention even after the U.S. Congress had expressly forbidden it ... [T]hey deluded themselves." As North Vietnam needed to replenish its armed forces in 1974, Thiệu decided to go on the attack. He stretched his own forces thinly by launching offensives that regained most of the territory captured by PAVN forces during the 1973 campaign, and retook 15% of the total land area controlled by the communists at the time of the cease-fire. In April, Thiệu launched the Svay Rieng Campaign against communist strongholds in eastern Cambodia near Tây Ninh, in what was the last major ARVN offensive. While these operations were successful, the cost in terms of manpower and resources was high. By the end of the year the military was experiencing equipment shortages as a result of decreased American aid, while communist forces continued to gain strength. By the end of October, the North Vietnamese had formulated their strategy for 1975 and 1976. In what became known as Resolution of 1975, the party leadership reported that the war had reached its "final stage". The army was to consolidate its gains, eliminate South Vietnamese border outposts and secure its logistical corridor, and continue its force build-up in the south. During 1976, the final general offensive would begin. The communists decided to start by attacking Phước Long Province, around 140 km north of Saigon. In the meantime, morale in and supplies for the ARVN continued to fade away. Desertion increased, and only 65% of registered personnel were present. Morale fell due to Thiệu's continued policy of promoting officers on the grounds of religion, loyalty and cronyism. Corruption and incompetence were endemic, with some officers "raising it almost to an art form". Under heavy criticism, Thiệu reluctantly sacked General Nguyễn Văn Toàn, a loyalist notorious for corruption. The aid cuts meant that an artillery piece could only fire four rounds a day, and each soldier had only 85 bullets per month. Due to lack of fuel and spare parts, air force transport operations shrank by up to 70%. Due to Thiệu's insistence on not surrendering any territory, the army was spread very thinly, defending useless terrain along a 600 mile (966 km) frontier, while the strategic reserve was occupied in static defensive roles. The situation was exacerbated by the collapse of the economy and a massive influx of refugees into the cities. Worldwide rises in fuel price due to the 1972 Arab oil embargo, and poor rice harvests throughout Asia, hit hard. By the end of 1974, around 370,000 communist troops were in South Vietnam, augmented by ever increasing influxes of military hardware. In mid-December, the communists attacked Phước Long, and quickly gained the upper hand, besieging the city. On 2 January 1975, Thiệu held an emergency meeting with General Dư Quốc Đống, who was in charge of the Phước Long situation, and other senior military figures. Đống presented a plan for the relief of Phước Long, but it was rejected because a lack of reserve forces of sufficient size available, a lack of airlift capability, and the belief that the besieged defenders could not hold out long enough for reinforcements. Thiệu decided to cede the entire province to the North Vietnamese, since it was considered to be less important than Tây Ninh, Pleiku, or Huế — economically, politically, and demographically. On 6 January 1975, Phước Long City became the first provincial capital permanently seized by the communists. Less than a sixth of the ARVN forces survived. Lê Duẩn declared that "Never have we had military and political conditions so perfect or a strategic advantage so great as we have now." The communists thus decided to initiate a full-scale offensive against the central highlands, which had been named Campaign 275. General Văn Tiến Dũng planned to take Buôn Ma Thuột, using 75,000–80,000 men to surround the city before capturing it. Major General Phạm Văn Phú, the II Corps commander, was given adequate warnings of the impending attacks, but was not worried. He thought the true objective was Pleiku or Kon Tum and that Buôn Ma Thuột was a diversion. The town was therefore lightly defended and communists outnumbered defenders by more than 8:1. The battle for Buôn Ma Thuột began on 10 March and ended only eight days later. Reinforcements were flown in, but were dismantled and fled in chaos. On 18 March the communists took complete control of Đắk Lắk Province. ARVN forces began to rapidly shift positions in an attempt to keep the North Vietnamese from quickly pushing eastward to the coastal lowlands along Route 21. In the face of rapid communist advances, Thiệu had sent a delegation to Washington in early March to request an increase in aid. The US Ambassador Graham Martin also traveled to Washington to present the case to President Gerald Ford. However, the US Congress, increasingly reluctant to invest in what was seen as a lost cause, slashed a proposed $1.45 billion military aid package for 1975 to $700 million. The Ford administration, however, continued to encourage Thiệu to believe that money would eventually come. During this time, Thiệu was feeling the increased pressure and became increasingly paranoid. According to one of his closest advisors Nguyễn Tiến Hưng, he became "suspicious ... secretive ... and ever watchful for a coup d'état against him." His increasing isolation had begun to deny him "the services of competent people, adequate staff work, consultation, and coordination". Thieu's military decisions were followed faithfully by his officers who generally agreed that he "made all the decisions as to how the war should be conducted." By 11 March, Thiệu concluded that there was no hope of receiving the $300 million supplemental aid package from the US. On that basis he called a meeting attended by Generals Quang and Viên. After reviewing the situation, Thiệu pulled out a small-scale map of South Vietnam and discussed the possible redeployment of the armed forces to "hold and defend only those populous and flourishing areas which were really most important". Thiệu sketched on the map those areas which he considered most important, all of the III and IV Corps Tactical Zones. He also pointed out those areas that were currently under communist control which would have to be retaken. The key to the location of these operations were concentrations of natural resources such as rice, rubber and industries. The necessary territory included coastal areas where oil had been discovered on the continental shelf. These areas were to become, in Thiệu's words: "Our untouchable heartland, the irreducible national stronghold." With respect to the I and II Corps Zones, he drew a series of phase lines on the map indicating that South Vietnamese forces should hold what they could, but that they could redeploy southward if needed. Thiệu declared this new strategy as "Light at the top, heavy on the bottom." The critical decision was made on 14 March when Thiệu met with Phú. Thiệu had decided to abandon Pleiku and Kon Tum so that the II Corps forces could concentrate on retaking Buôn Ma Thuột, which he considered more important. Phú then decided that the only possible means of doing this was to retreat to the coast along Interprovincial Route 7B, a dilapidated, rough track with several downed bridges, before recuperating and counterattacking back into the highlands. The large-scale retreat of hundreds of thousands of military personnel and civilians would be dangerous. However, it was poorly planned, many senior officers were not kept informed, and some units were left behind or retreated incoherently. This was exacerbated by a three-day delay when the convoy encountered a broken bridge and had to rebuild it. The communist forces caught up, surrounded the convoy, and attacked it. Heavy losses were incurred against the numerically dominant communists, who shelled and rocketed the soldiers and peasants alike. More bridge delays played into communist hands, and by the time the convoy reached Tuy Hòa on 27 March, it was estimated by the ARVN that only 20,000 of the 60,000 troops had survived, while only 25% of the estimated 180,000 civilians had escaped. Thiệu's order to evacuate, which was too late, had resulted in chaos and a bloodbath that left more than 150,000 dead. The planned operation to retake Buôn Ma Thuột never materialized because II Corps had been reduced to only 25% strength. Buoyed by their easy triumph the North Vietnamese overran the whole region. However, a worse collapse occurred in the northernmost I Corps, after a series of U-turns by Thiệu. It added to the fall of the highlands, which had already earned Thiệu much criticism. I Corps fielded three infantry divisions, the elite Airborne and Marine Divisions, four Ranger Groups and an armored brigade, under the command of Ngô Quang Trưởng, regarded as the nation's finest general. Until mid-March, the North Vietnamese had only tried to cut the highways, despite having five divisions and 27 further regiments. At a meeting on 13 March, Trưởng and the new III Corps commander, Lieutenant General Nguyễn Văn Toàn briefed Thiệu. Thiệu laid out his plan to consolidate a smaller proportion. As Trưởng understood it, he was free to redeploy his forces south to hold Đà Nẵng, South Vietnam's second largest city, thereby abandoning Huế. Offshore oil deposits were thought to be nearby. Thiệu also decided to remove the Airborne and Marines, leaving I Corps exposed. Thiệu called Trưởng to Saigon on 19 March to detail his withdrawal plan. The president then stunned Trưởng by announcing that he had misinterpreted his previous orders: The old imperial capital of Huế was not to be abandoned, despite losing two divisions. In the meantime, the withdrawal preparations and the increasing North Vietnamese pressure caused civilians to flee, clogging the highway and hampering the withdrawal. Trưởng requested permission for a withdrawal of his forces into the three enclaves as planned; Thiệu ordered him to "hold onto any territory he could with whatever forces he now had, including the Marine Division", implying that he could retreat if and when needed. Trưởng returned to Đà Nẵng to the start of a North Vietnamese offensive. Thiệu made a nationwide radio broadcast that afternoon proclaiming that Huế would be held "at all costs", contradicting the previous order. That evening Trưởng ordered a retreat to a new defense line at the Mỹ Chánh River to defend Huế, thereby ceding all of Quảng Trị Province. He was confident that his forces could hold Huế, but was then astounded by a late afternoon message from Thiệu that ordered "that because of inability to simultaneously defend all three enclaves, the I Corps commander was free ... to redeploy his forces for the defense of Đà Nẵng only." The people of Quảng Trị and Huế began to leave their homes by the hundreds of thousands, joining an ever-growing exodus toward Đà Nẵng. Meanwhile, the North Vietnamese closed in on Đà Nẵng amid the chaos caused by Thiệu's confused leadership. Within a few days I Corps was beyond control. The South Vietnamese tried to evacuate from the other urban enclaves into Đà Nẵng, but the 1st Division collapsed after its commander, Brigadier General Nguyễn Văn Diệm, angered by Thiệu's abandonment, told his men that "We've been betrayed ... [i]t is now "sauve qui peu" ["every man for himself"] ... See you in Đà Nẵng." The overland march, pummelled by communist artillery the entire way, degenerated into chaos as it moved toward Đà Nẵng. The remainder of the force deserted or began looting. Only a minority survived and some disillusioned officers committed suicide. As anarchy and looting enveloped Đà Nẵng, with a defense of the city becoming impossible, Trưởng requested permission to evacuate by sea, but Thiệu, baffled, refused to make a decision. When his communications with Saigon were sundered by communist shelling, Trưởng ordered a naval withdrawal, as Thiệu was not making a decision either way. With no support or leadership from Đà Nẵng, the evacuation turned into a costly debacle, as the communists pounded the city with artillery, killing tens of thousands. Many drowned while jostling for room on the boats; with no logistical support, those vessels sent were far too few for the millions of would-be evacuees. Only around 16,000 soldiers were pulled out, and of the almost two million civilians that packed Đà Nẵng, little more than 50,000 were evacuated. As a result, 70,000 troops were taken prisoner, along with around 100 fighter jets. During the fall of Đà Nẵng, no pitched battles had been fought. In quick succession, the few remaining cities along the coastline "fell like a row of porcelain vases sliding off a shelf" and half the country had fallen in two weeks. When his hometown of Phan Rang fell, retreating ARVN troops showed their disgust at Thiệu by demolishing his family's ancestral shrines and graves. By this time, the North Vietnamese Politburo no longer felt it necessary to wait until 1976 for the final offensive, and they sought to secure victory within two months, before the monsoon season began. On 7 April 1975, Lê Đức Thọ arrived at General Văn Tiến Dũng's headquarters near Loc Ninh to oversee the final battles. General Dũng prepared a three-pronged attack, which would seize the vital highway intersection at Xuân Lộc, the capital of Long Khánh Province and "the gateway to Saigon", before heading for Biên Hòa. The week-long fighting that erupted on 8 April in and around Xuân Lộc was the most significant engagement of the entire offensive. The South Vietnamese eventually committed 25,000 troops to the battle, almost one-third of their remaining forces. After conducting a valiant defense, the 18th Division was overwhelmed by a 6:1 numerical ratio, and the communists encircled Saigon. On 10 April, US President Gerald Ford went to Congress to request a US $722 million supplemental military aid package for South Vietnam plus $250 million in economic and refugee aid but Congress was not impressed. On 17 April the discussion ended—there would be no further military funding for Thiệu. On 21 April 1975, Thiệu, under intense political pressure, resigned as president after losing the confidence of his closest domestic allies. In his televised farewell speech during which he was close to tears, he admitted, for the first time, having ordered the evacuation of the Central Highlands and the north that had led to debacle. He then stated that it had been the inevitable course of action considering the situation, but still blamed the generals. In a rambling and incoherent speech, Thiệu went on to excoriate the US, attacking "our great ally, [the] leader of the free world". "The United States has not respected its promises" he declared. "It is inhumane. It is not trustworthy. It is irresponsible." He added, "The United States did not keep its word. Is an American's word reliable these days?", and "The United States did not keep its promise to help us fight for freedom and it was in the same fight that the United States lost 50,000 of its young men." Thiệu bemoaned the American funding cuts, which he equated to desertion, saying, "You don't fight by miracles, you need high morale and bravery. But even if you are brave, you can't just stand there and bite the enemy. And we are fighting against Russia and China. We're having to bargain for aid from the United States like haggling for fish in the market and I am not going to continue this bargaining for a few million dollars when your [South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians] lives are at stake." He criticised the American policy, saying, "You Americans with your 500,000 soldiers in Vietnam! You were not defeated...you ran away!" He lambasted US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for signing the Paris Peace Accords, which the communists violated, and which he regarded as an American abandonment, stating "I never thought that such a good Secretary of State would produce a treaty that would bring us to our death". Thiệu also blamed the local media and foreign broadcasting organisations for lowering the morale of the military and the population by reporting on the corruption and setbacks of his government. Immediately following the speech, Vice President Trần Văn Hương took the presidency. However, the Communist tide could not be stopped. They overran what was left of the ARVN within nine days and took Saigon on 30 April 1975, ending the war. In his farewell speech, Thiệu said, "I resign, but I do not desert," but he fled to Taiwan on a C-118 transport plane five days later. According to Morley Safer, the CIA was involved in the flight of Thiệu, his aides, and a "planeload of suitcases containing heavy metal," though it was revealed in 2015 by Tuổi Trẻ, a Vietnamese news source, that the "heavy metal", which was 16 tons of gold, was left behind and given to the Soviet Union from 1979 onwards as debt payment. Thiệu also brought 15 tons of luggage with him. Thiệu initially lived in Taiwan at the house of his brother Nguyen Van Kieu, the Ambassador of South Vietnam to Taiwan before moving to a rented property in Tianmu, downtown Taipei. According to a New York Times report, Thiệu suffered from depression at this time as a result of going into exile. After a brief spell in Taiwan, he then settled in London, having obtained a visa there because his son was studying at Eton College and lived in a house in Kingston upon Thames. Thiệu kept a low profile, and in 1990 even the British Foreign Office claimed to have no information on his personal life or whereabouts. In the early 1990s, Thiệu took up residence in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where he lived reclusively. He never produced an autobiography, rarely assented to interviews and shunned visitors. Neighbours had little contact with him or knowledge of him, aside from seeing him walking his dog. He did, however, give an interview to the West German magazine Der Spiegel in 1979 and appeared in the 1980 documentary television mini-series Vietnam: The Ten Thousand Day War, discussing his time as president of South Vietnam. Thiệu's aversion to public appearances was attributed to a fear of hostility from South Vietnamese who believed that he had failed them. He acknowledged his compatriots' low esteem of his administration in a 1992 interview, but said, "You say that you blame me for the fall of South Vietnam, you criticize me, everything. I let you do that. I [sic] like to see you do better than I." Thiệu continually predicted the demise of the Vietnamese Communist Party's grip on power and warned the United States government not to establish diplomatic relations with the communist regime. Relations between the US and the communist regime in Hanoi were formally established in 1995. Thiệu said that when the communists are deposed and "democracy is recovered," he would return to his homeland, but their hold on Vietnam remained unchallenged during his lifetime. He futilely offered to represent the refugee community in reconciliation talks with Hanoi so exiles could be allowed to return home. Thiệu was criticized by many opponents and historians, but he was appreciated by others. The US ambassador to South Vietnam, Ellsworth Bunker, told former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird about Thiệu: "He is an individual of very considerable intellectual capacity. He made the decision in the beginning to follow the constitutional road, not to rule with a clique of generals, which many of them expected he would do. He has been acting more and more like a politician, getting out into the country, following up on pacification, talking to people, seeing what they want." The military historian Lewis Sorley suggests that Thiệu "was arguably a more honest and decent man than Lyndon Johnson, and – given the differences in their respective circumstances – quite likely a more effective president of his country." Thiệu and his wife Mai Anh celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary in Hawaii when the September 11 attacks happened. The fact that both planes (American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175) that crashed into the World Trade Center had departed from Logan International Airport in Boston, had certain psychological effects on Thiệu and also affected his health. Because much of the air travel was affected by the attacks, the couple was stuck in Hawaii for more than a week. When they got home, Thiệu's condition had worsened. He died on 29 September 2001, aged 78, at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, after he collapsed and was put on a respirator due to a stroke which he suffered at his Foxborough home. His funeral was held on 6 October 2001, in Newton, Massachusetts. He was cremated and the location of his ashes is unknown. According to Mai Anh, before his death, Thiệu expressed his wish to be buried in his hometown of Phan Rang, otherwise his ashes will be scattered half into the sea and half on the mountain. In 1951, Thiệu married Nguyễn Thị Mai Anh, the daughter of a wealthy herbal medicine practitioner from the Mekong Delta. She was a Roman Catholic, and Thiệu converted to Catholicism in 1958. Critics claimed that he did so in order to improve his prospects of rising up the military ranks, because Diệm was known to favor Catholics. The couple had two sons and one daughter. He spoke Vietnamese, English and French fluently. South Vietnam: National Order of Vietnam (Grand Cross) National Order of Vietnam (Commander) Army Distinguished Service Order (1st class) Air Force Distinguished Service Order (1st class) Navy Distinguished Service Order (1st class) Military Merit Medal Good Conduct Medal (2nd class) Military Service Medal (2nd class) Armed Forces Honor Medal (1st class) Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with 3 palms Army Meritorious Service Medal Vietnam Campaign Medal France: Croix de guerre des théâtres d'opérations extérieures South Korea: Honorary Recipient of the Grand Order of Mugunghwa (1969) United States: Legion of Merit (Commander) Morocco Grand Officer of the Order of Ouissam Alaouite (1953) Cao Van Vien (1983). The Final Collapse. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. ISBN 9781410219558. Dong Van Khuyen (1979). The RVNAF. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. Dougan, Clark; Fulghum, David; et al. (1985). The Fall of the South. Boston: Boston Publishing Company. ISBN 0939526166. Dougan, Clark; Weiss, Stephen; et al. (1983). Nineteen Sixty-Eight. Boston, Massachusetts: Boston Publishing Company. ISBN 0939526069. Hammer, Ellen J. (1987). A Death in November: America in Vietnam, 1963. New York: E. P. Dutton. ISBN 0-525-24210-4. Hoang Ngoc Lung (1978). The General Offensives of 1968–69. McLean, Virginia: General Research Corporation. Hosmer, Stephen T.; Konrad Kellen; Jenkins, Brian M. (1980). The fall of South Vietnam : statements by Vietnamese military and civilian leaders. New York: Crane, Russak. ISBN 0844813451. Isaacs, Arnold R. (1983). Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801830605. Jacobs, Seth (2006). Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America's War in Vietnam, 1950–1963. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-4447-8. Joes, Anthony J. (1990). The War for South Vietnam, 1954–1975. New York: Praeger. ISBN 0275938921. Jones, Howard (2003). Death of a Generation: how the assassinations of Diem and JFK prolonged the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-505286-2. Kahin, George McT. (1986). Intervention : how America became involved in Vietnam. New York: Knopf. ISBN 039454367X. Karnow, Stanley (1997). Vietnam: A history. New York: Penguin Books. ISBN 0-670-84218-4. Langguth, A. J. (2000). Our Vietnam: the war, 1954–1975. New York: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-684-81202-9. Le Gro; William E. (1981). From Cease-Fire to Capitulation. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History. Lipsman, Samuel; Weiss, Stephen (1985). The False Peace: 1972–74. Boston, Massachusetts: Boston Publishing Company. ISBN 0-939526-15-8. McAllister, James (November 2004). ""A Fiasco of Noble Proportions": The Johnson Administration and the South Vietnamese Elections of 1967". The Pacific Historical Review. 73 (4). Berkeley, California: University of California Press: 619–651. doi:10.1525/phr.2004.73.4.619. McAllister, James (2008). "'Only Religions Count in Vietnam': Thich Tri Quang and the Vietnam War". Modern Asian Studies. 42 (4). New York: Cambridge University Press: 751–782. doi:10.1017/s0026749x07002855. S2CID 145595067. Military History Institute of Vietnam (2002). Victory in Vietnam: A History of the People's Army of Vietnam, 1954–1975. trans. Pribbenow, Merle. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press. ISBN 0700611754. Moyar, Mark (2004). "Political Monks: The Militant Buddhist Movement during the Vietnam War". Modern Asian Studies. 38 (4). New York: Cambridge University Press: 749–784. doi:10.1017/S0026749X04001295. S2CID 145723264. Moyar, Mark (2006). Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954–1965. New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521869110. Nguyen Tien Hung; Schecter, Jerrold L. (1986). The Palace File. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0060156406. Penniman, Howard R. (1972). Elections in South Vietnam. Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Smedberg, Marco (2008). Vietnamkrigen: 1880–1980. Lund, Scania: Historiska Media. ISBN 978-9185507887. Snepp, Frank (1977). Decent Interval: An Insider's Account of Saigon's Indecent End Told by the CIA's Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam. New York: Random House. ISBN 0394407431. Truong Nhu Tang (1986). Journal of a Vietcong. Cape. ISBN 0224028197. Willbanks, James H. (2004). Abandoning Vietnam: How America Left and South Vietnam Lost Its War. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Press. ISBN 0-7006-1331-5. Zaffiri, Samuel (1994). Westmoreland. New York: William Morrow. ISBN 0688111793. "Nguyen Van Thieu, 78; S. Vietnam's President", Los Angeles Times, 1 October 2001 "Nguyen Van Thieu Is Dead at 76; Last President of South Vietnam", New York Times, 1 October 2001 "Nguyen Van Thieu", The Independent (UK), 2 October 2001 "1975: Vietnam's President Thieu resigns" BBC
People
Pantheon has 69 people classified as Vietnamese politicians born between 192 and 1978. Of these 69, 15 (21.74%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living Vietnamese politicians include Nguyễn Xuân Phúc, Trương Tấn Sang, and Nguyễn Minh Triết. The most famous deceased Vietnamese politicians include Ho Chi Minh, Ngo Dinh Diem, and Nguyễn Phú Trọng. As of April 2024, 4 new Vietnamese politicians have been added to Pantheon including Trần Nhân Tông, Võ Văn Thưởng, and Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ.
Living Vietnamese Politicians
Go to all Rankings
Nguyễn Xuân Phúc
1954 - Present
HPI: 59.22
Trương Tấn Sang
1949 - Present
HPI: 55.43
Nguyễn Minh Triết
1942 - Present
HPI: 55.25
Phạm Minh Chính
1958 - Present
HPI: 54.55
Trần Đức Lương
1936 - Present
HPI: 53.72
Nông Đức Mạnh
1939 - Present
HPI: 53.55
Nguyễn Tấn Dũng
1949 - Present
HPI: 53.24
Võ Văn Thưởng
1970 - Present
HPI: 50.26
Đặng Thị Ngọc Thịnh
1959 - Present
HPI: 49.60
Nguyễn Thị Kim Ngân
1954 - Present
HPI: 45.28
Philipp Rösler
1973 - Present
HPI: 44.10
Võ Thị Ánh Xuân
1970 - Present
HPI: 43.11
Deceased Vietnamese Politicians
Go to all RankingsHo Chi Minh
1890 - 1969
HPI: 78.16
Ngo Dinh Diem
1901 - 1963
HPI: 72.77
Nguyễn Phú Trọng
1944 - 2024
HPI: 65.59
Bảo Đại
1913 - 1997
HPI: 65.39
Ieng Sary
1925 - 2013
HPI: 64.31
Lady Sun
192 - Present
HPI: 63.87
Dương Văn Minh
1916 - 2001
HPI: 63.59
Lê Duẩn
1907 - 1986
HPI: 63.31
Kaysone Phomvihane
1920 - 1992
HPI: 63.20
Nguyễn Văn Thiệu
1923 - 2001
HPI: 63.18
Gia Long
1762 - 1820
HPI: 62.29
Madame Nhu
1924 - 2011
HPI: 60.46
Newly Added Vietnamese Politicians (2024)
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Trần Nhân Tông
1258 - 1308
HPI: 52.41
Võ Văn Thưởng
1970 - Present
HPI: 50.26
Nguyễn Ngọc Thơ
1908 - 1976
HPI: 46.06
Võ Thị Ánh Xuân
1970 - Present
HPI: 43.11
Overlapping Lives
Which Politicians were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 25 most globally memorable Politicians since 1700.
