Lê Duẩn

Biography

Lê Duẩn was born Lê Văn Nhuận in 1907 into a poor family in Quảng Trị Province, in the French protectorate of Annam. While working as a railway clerk in Hanoi in the 1920s he met communist activists, joined the Revolutionary Youth League in 1928 and was among the founders of the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930. He spent most of the next fifteen years in French prisons, from 1931 to 1937 and again from the end of the 1930s until the August Revolution of 1945.

During the war against France he led the party in the south, first as regional secretary in Cochinchina and then at the head of the Central Office for South Vietnam. After the 1954 Geneva Accords he organized the Viet Minh cadres left behind in the south, and his tract The Road to the South argued for overthrowing Ngo Dinh Diem's government by force. Rising steadily, he joined the Politburo and the Secretariat, and the party's third congress in 1960 made him First Secretary, in practice its leader under the aging Hồ Chí Minh.

A consistent advocate of all-out war for reunification, he sidelined more cautious colleagues, backed the creation of the Viet Cong in 1960 and pressed for the 1968 Tet Offensive. After Hồ's death in 1969 he was first among equals in a collective leadership, and his leadership launched the 1975 offensive that ended with the fall of Saigon.

As General Secretary of the reunified Communist Party of Vietnam from 1976, he pursued rapid collectivization and heavy industry, policies that brought falling living standards, food shortages and soaring inflation. He tied Vietnam to the Soviet Union with a 1978 friendship treaty, invaded Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge, and fought a short border war with China in 1979. He accepted limited market reforms in the early 1980s and died in office in Hanoi in July 1986.