Le Duan
Le Duan ran Vietnam for twenty-six years and is barely known outside it, because he took power in a party that spoke through Ho Chi Minh and kept speaking through him long after the decisions had moved elsewhere. He was born in 1907 in Quang Tri province, in the narrow waist of central Vietnam, into a family of modest means, and worked as a railway clerk before joining the Indochinese Communist Party at its founding in 1930. The French imprisoned him twice on the penal island of Con Dao, for a total of roughly eleven years; the prison functioned as the party's university, and he emerged from it with a network rather than a grievance. After the 1954 Geneva Accords partitioned the country he stayed in the south rather than regrouping north, running the clandestine organisation through the years when Saigon's police were dismantling it. That experience produced his 1956 tract The Path of Revolution in the South, which argued that waiting for political reunification was surrender and that armed struggle was the only route left. It was a minority position in Hanoi, where both the Soviet Union and China were counselling patience. It became the majority position in 1960, when he was made First Secretary. From then until his death he, with Le Duc Tho, formed the faction that actually set war policy, sidelining Vo Nguyen Giap's caution and Ho Chi Minh's preference for negotiation; Ho remained the face of the state until his death in 1969 and increasingly little more than that. Le Duan's instinct throughout was the general offensive - the single co-ordinated blow that would trigger a southern uprising - and the Tet Offensive of 1968 was his. It failed on its own terms, destroying the southern guerrilla organisation as a fighting force for the sake of an uprising that never came, and it succeeded on terms he had not aimed at, by breaking American political will. The Paris Accords of 1973 removed the Americans, and the offensive he ordered in 1975 took Saigon in fifty-five days. Victory was the end of his competence. He pushed the collectivisation of southern agriculture and the nationalisation of its commerce, sent hundreds of thousands of former southern officials to re-education camps, and presided over the expulsion and flight of the ethnic Chinese and the boat people. His answer to the Khmer Rouge's border raids was to invade Cambodia in December 1978 and take Phnom Penh, which ended Pol Pot's genocide and brought a Chinese punitive invasion of Vietnam's northern provinces in February 1979, a decade of occupation, and an international embargo that left the country dependent on Soviet aid. He died in office in July 1986. Five months later the Sixth Party Congress adopted Doi Moi and with it the market reforms that reversed almost everything he had built, and which could not have been adopted while he lived.
- Lived: 1907 CE – 1986 CE
- Nationality: Vietnamese
- Roles: head_of_government, revolutionary_leader, party_leader
