Pham Van Dong; Former Prime Minister of Vietnam

Pham Van Dong, one of Vietnam’s last revolutionary statesmen and the political architect of victories over France and the United States, has died in a Hanoi hospital after a long illness, government sources said. He was at least 94.

For more than three decades, Dong served as prime minister, first of North Vietnam, then of a reunified Vietnam, until stepping down in 1987. During the Vietnam War, he was the public face and voice of the Communist north. In terms of influence, he ranked alongside Ho Chi Minh and Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, North Vietnam’s military commander.

Although blind and frail, Dong continued to make public appearances in his trademark dark glasses and tan suits until a year or so ago and was widely loved by the Vietnamese people. Academics debated, as they did about Ho Chi Minh, whether he was a hard-core Communist or an ultranationalist--or both--but most of his public comments focused on his unshakable belief in the strength and determination of the Vietnamese people.

“It is impossible for Westerners to understand the force of the people’s will to resist and to continue to resist,” he said at the start of the U.S. buildup in the 1960s. “The struggle of the people exceeds the imagination. It has astonished us too.”

His death, on Saturday, was confirmed by government sources and diplomats but not officially announced until Tuesday, presumably because many newspapers did not publish Monday in observance of the May Day holiday. His official biography lists his birth date as March 1, 1906, but he had told some interviewers that he was born in 1903.

Voice of Vietnam said Dong’s body will lie in state Friday. Funeral and tribute ceremonies will be held the next day, when Dong will be buried in a cemetery on Hanoi’s outskirts reserved for revolutionary heroes, the radio said.

Dong was born in Quang Ngai to a life of privilege, the son of a secretary who served the court of Emperor Duy Tan. He was educated at the prestigious National Academy in Hue and studied law at Hanoi University. He rose to prominence after organizing a student strike in 1925 against French colonialism. When it failed, he fled to China.

There he joined Ho Chi Minh, the leader of an embryonic movement that was both Communist and nationalist and that 50 years later would unify Vietnam as a single independent country with the fall of Saigon. Dong spent four years in China, returned to Vietnam in 1929 and, when he continued to struggle for independence, was imprisoned by the French on Con Dao Island for seven years.

“There is nothing else in our history except struggle,” he once said. “Struggle against foreign invaders, always more powerful than ourselves, struggle against nature. Because we have nowhere else to go, we have had to fight things out where we were.”

Dong was a founding member of the Viet Minh, the guerrilla movement that fought the French and was a forerunner of the Viet Cong, which fought the United States. As foreign minister, he headed the Communist delegation to the 1954 Geneva conference that split the nation in two.

He became prime minister in 1955 and was known as a skilled negotiator, a man of humor, sophistication and charm. During the Vietnam War, Dong spoke for North Vietnam and was the official who greeted antiwar activists and occasional foreign correspondents allowed to visit Hanoi. His influence in the political arena was tantamount to Giap’s on the battlefield.

Dong’s prominence waned after Ho Chi Minh’s death in 1969. By 1975, Le Duan, a doctrinaire Communist who would lead Vietnam into a decade of political isolation and economic disaster, had come to dominate party councils. Dong, citing ill health and age, gave up his premiership in 1987 but continued to speak out on various issues.