North Viet Nam's Match for Henry

WHILE world attention has focused on Henry Kissinger for his role in negotiating a peace agreement on the Viet Nam War, Kissinger's counterpart from Hanoi, Le Duc Tho, has remained a mysterious and largely unrecognized figure. Kissinger, 49, the witty bon vivant and cosmopolite, seems to relish the spotlight; Tho, 62, a starchy and somewhat parochial party loyalist, lingers in the shadows, partly because of his own personality and partly as a reflection of his country's wishes. Kissinger once pointed up his own sense of humor and Tho's more doctrinaire determination by telling his opposite number, "I admire your ability to change impossible demands to merely intolerable demands and call it progress."

Tho's inchworm approach to a settlement has been more cautious than his own progress through his country's Communist Party. Born in Nam Ha, North Viet Nam, the son of a middle-echelon official in the French colonial administration, Tho found foreign occupation so intolerable that at the age of 20 he became a founding member of the Indochinese Communist Party. By 1945 he had been appointed to the Central Committee, and in 1949 was sent to South Viet Nam as the second man in charge of reorganizing Communist political and military activities. His superior was Le Duan, now the head of the party. Of the two, Tho took the harder line on the fight for the South, arguing for an unremitting struggle. Recalled home after the Geneva accords of 1954, Tho continued to supervise guerrilla actions in the South while building his own reputation as one of the best organizational minds in Hanoi. During the 1960s, he prevailed over severe criticism of his Southern strategy, and eventually supervised a "purification of the ranks" during which thousands of his "deviationist" opponents were executed.

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Thus, when Kissinger finally sat down for his first secret talk with Tho in 1969, he faced one of the principal architects of Hanoi's campaign not only against the South but also against the U.S., a fact that helped rather than hurt the negotiations. Comments one American official: "His authority makes him easier to deal with. The others are incapable of making decisions." For three years the two have been meeting in a small villa outside of Paris, sipping tea and munching rice cookies while they traded demands, nuances and --more recently--concessions.

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