Activities and affiliations

Political and party leadership Vietnam state institutions 1890–1969 ○ Natural causes

He took on France, Japan and America in turn to win Vietnam's independence

“Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” — wartime radio address, 1966

Vietnamese revolutionary. After three decades of exile, including helping found the French Communist Party and the Communist Party of Vietnam, he led the Viet Minh to declare Vietnam's independence in 1945. He led North Vietnam through wars against France and the United States, becoming the symbol of Vietnamese independence.

Government and administration Vietnam state institutions 1906–2000 ○ Natural causes

Ho Chi Minh's closest lieutenant and Vietnam's longest-serving prime minister, governing for 32 years

In the late 1970s, Phạm Văn Đồng told a visitor: 'Waging a war is simple, but running a country is very difficult.'

A graduate of Ho Chi Minh's revolutionary training course in Guangzhou (1926), Phạm Văn Đồng spent his life on the front line of Vietnam's independence struggle. As head of the North Vietnamese delegation at the Geneva Conference (1954), he signed the accords that ended the First Indochina War; throughout the Vietnam War he served as North Vietnam's public face, leading diplomatic and press engagement with the world. As prime minister from 1955 to 1987 (32 years, the longest tenure in Vietnamese history) he directed the war effort, reunification, and postwar socialist construction, though his adherence to wartime command economics in peacetime deepened the country's economic crisis. A revolutionary whom Ho Chi Minh called 'my other self,' he was, alongside Võ Nguyên Giáp and Lê Duẩn, one of the architects of modern Vietnam.

Political and party leadership Vietnam state institutions 1907–1986 ○ Natural causes

The longest-serving General Secretary who reunified Vietnam and invaded Cambodia in his 26-year rule

“Our party is the unique and single leader that organised… the entire struggle of the Vietnamese people from the first day of the revolution.” — reunification victory speech, 1976

A Vietnamese communist politician and theorist. A founding member of the Indochina Communist Party in 1930, he endured two French prison terms before earning Ho Chi Minh's trust and taking charge of the southern revolutionary apparatus. In 1956 he authored The Road to the South, providing the theoretical basis for the armed liberation struggle against the Saigon regime, and at the 3rd National Congress in 1960 he was elected First Secretary, becoming the party's supreme leader after Ho's death in 1969. He completed Vietnam's reunification in 1975, ordered the invasion of Cambodia to overthrow the Khmer Rouge in 1978, and held power through the Sino-Vietnamese War (1979) until his death in 1986.

Military command Vietnam state institutions 1911–2013 ○ Natural causes

The history teacher who defeated two empires without ever attending a military academy

As a young history teacher at a Hanoi lycée, he would sketch detailed Napoleonic campaign plans on the blackboard. His students called him 'the General.' Fifteen years later he accepted the French surrender at Dien Bien Phu.

A history teacher with no formal military training who built the Viet Minh army and defeated France at Dien Bien Phu (1954), then the United States in the war that followed. As the first commander of a colonial liberation force to break a modern imperial army in pitched battle, he spent three decades building the People's Army into a mechanised combined-arms force and perfecting a people's war aimed at breaking the enemy's political will.

Government and administration Vietnam state institutions 1922–2008 ○ Died in Singapore in

Architect of Đổi Mới and prime minister of Vietnam

In a 2007 BBC Vietnamese Service interview he said "There are a hundred ways of being a patriot. The motherland of Vietnam doesn't belong to one person, one party or one group only", acknowledged the party's "serious mistakes" in the south after 1975, and urged national reconciliation.

Vietnamese politician and economic reformer. Born in 1922 to a peasant family in Vĩnh Long province in the Mekong Delta, he joined the Indochinese Communist Party in 1939 and fought in the wars against the French and then the US and South Vietnamese forces. He was party chief in Ho Chi Minh City from 1976 to 1982 and deputy prime minister from 1982 to 1991; as prime minister (1991–1997) he drove the Đổi Mới reforms and Vietnam's opening to the outside world. He died in Singapore on 11 June 2008.