The Man Who Rejected the Nobel Peace Prize.

A Reflection on Phan Đình Khải, known as Lê Đức Thọ.

(The Nobel Prize for Peace this year went to a person - María Corina Machado – who has called upon the US government to bomb her own country, Venezuela, and has supported the Israeli government during its horrific genocide against the Palestinians. It is almost as if the Nobel Committee took orders from Washington rather than used its own intelligence to make its decision. Why it did not, for instance, honour the Palestinian emergency workers is a question that should haunt Oslo. We need an alternative Peace Prize. The Nobel Prize is a joke).

In October 1973, the Nobel Prize for Peace went to Henry Kissinger (of the United States) and Lê Đức Thọ (of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam) ‘for jointly having negotiated a ceasefire in Vietnam in 1973’. It is true that the United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam signed the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. However, the US Senate did not ratify the agreement, and the US once more imposed its horrific war on Vietnam, carpet bombing the north and neighbouring countries with chemical weapons that continue to paralyse the landscape. Two of the five members of the Nobel Committee – both from the Norwegian parliament - resigned because the award was given to Kissinger: Einar Hovdhaugen of the Centre Party and Helge Rognlien of the Liberal Party. The New York Times weighed in, calling it ‘the Nobel War Prize’.

A man of great distinction, Lê Đức Thọ informed the Nobel Prize Committee that he would not take the award. He said that the war had not ended and therefore a peace prize was premature. Kissinger later reacted to this with his characteristic anger, saying that Lê Đức Thọ’s decision was ‘another insolence’ from North Vietnam (Kissinger called Thọ ‘Ducky’ for the name Đức). Thọ, meanwhile, called Kissinger a ‘liar’ and a ‘horsetrader’. But Kissinger knew that this was an unpopular award. He did not go to Oslo to receive it, afraid of the protests that would greet him there. But he nonetheless took the award. His counterpart having declined it. Thọ later said, ‘Unfortunately, the Nobel Peace Prize Committee put the aggressor and the victim of aggression on the same par. That was a blunder’.

Who was Lê Đức Thọ? Born Phan Đình Khải in 1911, Lê Đức Thọ (the name he adopted) got involved with communist politics and the national liberation struggle. At the age of sixteen, in 1926, Thọ walked down the streets near the village of Dich Le, where he was born. A Frenchman was walking on a narrow sidewalk toward them. ‘My friend was just ahead of me’, he recalled. ‘I told him not to give way to the Frenchman, that he should step aside for us. That French gentleman gave my friend a hard slap’. It was a hard lesson. That year, he assembled his friend and began to read revolutionary literature. Hearing about this, Hồ Chí Minh and the Revolutionary Youth League sent a message to them to join. Which they did.

In 1930, Thọ co-founded the Indochinese Communist Party (later the Communist Party of Vietnam) under the leadership of Hồ Chí Minh. Thọ was frequently imprisoned by the French colonial authorities for his activities: from 1930 to 1936 and then from 1939 to 1944. He was kept at Poulo Condore in the South China Sea, and often taken to the ‘tiger cage’ (chuồng cọp), with each cell there no more than 1.4 square metres (the International Committee of the Red Cross recommends that a prison cell be no smaller than 5.4 square metres). Thọ was often in one of the 120 solitary confinement cells in the ‘tiger cage’. Nonetheless, he studied literature and languages, as well as built up the communist cells in the prison. But it is important to recall that Thọ had been held in prison for eleven of his thirty-three years, when he was released, and he spent considerable time in underground tiger cages. ‘We had to face very cruel torture by the French’, he said. ‘I consider that as the greatest trial of my revolutionary activity’.

Released near 1945, Thọ led the Việt Minh to victory in the north against the French and was present at the signing of the Geneva Accords. It was clear that he was the diplomat of choice for the Việt Minh, the communist-led national liberation platform. Thọ rose rapidly in the Communist Party, being elected to the Central Committee in 1945, becoming the head of the Organisation Department in 1948, entering the Politburo in 1955, and being responsible for the insurgency in the South against the US-back government in 1956. For almost a decade, from 1956 to 1968, Thọ was a warrior, leading the fight in the South. His role in this period requires much more research. It will be interesting to see if there will be a proper biography of Thọ in the years to come that will cover this period before 1968 (there is this one, and one more, but not many and none translated into French or English). For instance, it is said that Thọ helped to plan the Tet Offensive in 1968, along with General Võ Nguyên Giáp (1911-2013) and Le Duan.

At a Politburo meeting on 22 April 1968, Hồ Chí Minh, who understood the perils of negotiation with the United States, recommended that Thọ and his comrade Nguyễn Duy Trinh (1910-1985) lead the negotiations. Technically, Thọ was merely the ‘special advisor’ to Foreign Minister Xuân Thủy (1912-1985). Thọ’s philosophy in the meetings was ‘winning step by step’ and not immediately going to the intractable problems between the US and Vietnam. This was war diplomacy at its best. This meant that Thọ needed to work toward the transformation of the international balance of forces and ensure that most nations around the world supported Vietnam and to try and isolate the United States from the Third World and even from some of its allies. This approach had to be combined with military victories in Vietnam itself, because the negotiators wanted to have a position on the map that was not weakened on the ground.

The US thought that Lê Đức Thọ was a moderate. This was a total misjudgment. He was a communist and a close ally of Le Duan. He managed the discussions with care, but never allowing his commitment to total liberation to be compromised. The negotiations lasted for five years (1968-1973) with more than two hundred public discussions, forty-five private meetings, over five hundred press conferences, and over a thousand interviews. Thọ’s energy was endless, and his careful management of the discussions apparently unmatched. ‘In Paris, I was strong and that was good’, Thọ recalled. ‘Because the discussions were very hard. It was a match with Kissinger not only of brains, but of health. Luckily, I then I was in better health’.

After Paris Peace Accords, which had not resulted in actual cessation of hostilities, Thọ was in Vietnam and was involved in the war itself. He worked closely with both his comrade Lê Duẩn (1907-1986), who was the head of the Party, and General Văn Tiến Dũng (1917-2002), who headed the operations in Vietnam’s southern section. In April 1975, Thọ was in the jungle headquarters of the Vietnamese revolutionary army in Bến Cát with Phạm Hùng (1912-1988) and with General Dũng. On the radio, they heard that the US-backed government in Saigon had surrendered.

The next day, we entered the city. The roads were littered with clothing the puppet troops had taken off to flee, leaving even their weapons, their grenades. I hadn’t been to Saigon since I passed a night there on my way to prison in Poulo Condore. That time in handcuffs. This time, I was not in handcuffs. For me, it was a moment of indescribable emotion.

That is the reason, Thọ says, that he sent the Politburo his report as a poem:

Finished forever, our days

Of hunger, misery and great pain:

Our North and South are reunited

Like brothers, under the same roof.

The task entrusted us by Great Uncle Hồ

In his will

Has been achieved.

And now he surely sleeps in peace.

The sky, today, is infinitely beautiful, infinitely clear.

Kissinger tried to return his Nobel Prize because of the defeat of the United States in Vietnam. The Committee declined his request, saying that once accepted, it could not be returned.

Thọ had never accepted it. He would not take any laurels. He lived his life in a small, humble home, with a statue of Lenin on his work table and his life filled with Party work and his own writings (including his several volumes of poems – never translated out of Việt).

In 1985, Thọ welcomed some journalists from United Press International to spend three days with him. He was reflective at that time about the difficulties of the Vietnamese Revolution.

To make a revolution, one must have a dream. The road of revolution is full of thorns and to climb it, one must have a dream. Hồ Chí Minh said nothing is more precious than independence and freedom and that was our dream when I was young. I am one of the most fortunate because I am alive to see the dream come true. Occasionally we talk about it, my comrades and I, and we wonder that we are still alive to see the dream of independence realised after all those years in prison, all those years in the jungle. Our greatest dream now is to be able to stabilize the country and better the life of our people in a nation already independent and reunified.

Then, he recited to them a poem he had written in 1960:

The revolutionary path is an endless one.

Full of trial and test.

But also full of flowers

And fresh grass.

Lê Đức Thọ died in Hanoi in 1990.

(If you are interested in the Vietnamese Revolution, please read my collection of the writings of Hồ Chí Minh. In the introduction to that volume, I lay out the theory of national liberation Marxism to which Thọ and his comrades subscribed. You can find the book here. Cover by Tings Chak).