Word: duan
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Determination, organization, passion: all were key elements of Ho's extraordinarily complicated personality, as they were of the close little band of men he chose to help lead his crusade. Le Duan, Vo Nguyen Giap, Pham Van Dong-all sworn to create a Viet Nam free of foreign control, all dedicated Communists. But they were Communists of a distinctly nationalist breed. Influenced though they were by the writings of Marx and Lenin, all seemed to know that neither Peking nor Moscow could win their war for them...
These revolutionaries shared roughly similar origins: mostly from middle-class families, well educated, born before World War I. Their fathers were teachers or government officials (save for Le Duan), and in their formative years they learned at least distaste, more often hatred for the French colonial rulers. All spent months and years in prison and exile for their beliefs. Ho himself, when he returned to Viet Nam in February 1941, had been away from his native land for 30 years, and the name Ho Chi Minh was only the last in a bewildering list of pseudonyms. Born Nguyen That Thanh...
...general charge of the political campaign in the South is Communist Party Secretary Le Duan. Considerably less known in the West than his comrades, he prefers the role of éminence grise; he is the only one of North Viet Nam's revolutionary leaders who is of lower-class stock. Le Duan took responsibility for the campaign against the South in 1956 and helped create the National Liberation Front in 1960. An independent-minded hardliner, Le Duan resisted pressures to run the war along either Soviet or Chinese lines, proclaiming instead the "creative nature" of the Vietnamese revolution. Western...
...South China, where other Vietnamese exiles gathered round him. In February 1930, after a series of meetings in and near Hong Kong, Ho was able to reconcile the wildly divergent ideas of his fellow exiles and form the Indochinese Communist Party. With him during the China years were Le Duan, Giap and Pham, all brilliant and promising young...
...some ways, Le Duan's career has been advanced as much by luck as by leadership. In his early years of political activism, he managed, like the young Nikita Khrushchev, to be absent during periods of party turmoil. Between 1954 and 1956, he began to organize political subversion against the regime of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Le Duan was thus preoccupied with other matters at the time of the North Vietnamese land-reform debacle of 1956, which ended with the summoning of troops to put down a peasant revolt in Nghe An province. The crisis...