Word: pham
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When I arrived in Hanoi one night in 1961 aboard a Russian military plane, the entire North Vietnamese Politburo was there to meet Laotian Prince Souvanna Phouma. I got to shake the hands of Premier Pham Van Dong, General Giap and Ho Chi Minh, who told me in near-perfect French: "Please tell the truth." The second time was totally different. There were no honor guards and no flowers at Hanoi's Gia Lam Airport-only a flock of black-suited men with black shoes, black socks and conservative ties...
Sipping tea at the Presidential Palace, Premier Pham Van Dong and Kissinger's familiar Paris adversary Le Duc Tho spent some of their time with the American in replaying the Paris talks, trying to assess each other's motives and tactics. They smiled often, obviously respecting each other's professional skills. There were few recriminations about the war. Instead there were realistic analyses of the problems that lie ahead...
...welcome in the capital of what had so recently been a bitter enemy. Kissinger was making his first visit to Hanoi at the invitation of his Paris antagonist, Le Due Tho. In three days of intensive talks, he was to meet Le Duan, the Communist Party leader, and Premier Pham Van Dong. The North Vietnamese had sought this visit with some urgency, possibly as a means of worrying South Viet Nam's President Nguyen Van Thieu. Hanoi can also use any rapprochement with Washington to give it more flexibility in dealing with both Moscow and Peking...
...oddly muted ceremonies, there were only a few sedate waves at the clicking cameras, no speeches, no spoken exchanges of any kind between the dignitaries. None of the key figures of the settlement-neither President Nixon nor Henry Kissinger, neither Hanoi's Premier Pham Van Dong nor Saigon's President Nguyen Van Thieu-was even present. The three Vietnamese parties were represented by their little-known Foreign Ministers, and the U.S. by its almost forgotten Secretary of State, William Rogers, who ended up signing his name on various sheets of paper 72 times with a battery...
...from the same loudspeakers that had honked warnings of U.S. air attacks less than a month before. In contrast to Thieu, North Viet Nam's leaders seemed ready-even eager-to admit that something had changed with the Paris agreement. At a presidential-palace reception, North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong, 64, had a smiling, two-word reply to a foreign diplomat who offered his congratulations: "At last...