North Viet Nam: The Thang-Bang Team

To serve as North Viet Nam’s vice president, Ho Chi Minh in 1960 chose a man who offered three distinct ad vantages. He was unquestionably loyal to Ho’s cause, he constituted no threat to Ho’s power, and he enabled Ho to avoid choosing a potential heir from among several younger, more ambitious men. For very similar reasons, Ton Due Thang, at 81 the oldest living member of Hanoi’s Lao Dong (Worker’s Party), last week was elevated from the vice-presidency to the post left vacant by Ho’s death in September. Thang’s accession to the presidency confirmed that none of the four real rivals for Ho’s mantle — Premier Pham Van Dong, Party Boss Le Duan, National Assembly Chairman Truong Chinh and Defense Minister Vo Nguyen Giap — are yet strong enough to claim it for themselves.

Euphonious Combination. As if to emphasize that the figurehead Vice President would be no more than a figurehead President, the National Assem bly did not even permit Thang to choose his second-in-command. Ignoring the constitution, which authorizes a President to name his Vice President, the Assembly made the decision for him, electing Nguyen Luong Bang, about 65, a member of the party Central Committee and North Viet Nam’s Ambassador to Moscow from 1952 to 1957. Whatever other assets the new Vice President brings to his job, his election gives North Viet Nam the world’s most euphonious governmental team—Thang and Bang.

Thang, a Southerner, probably met Ho when both attended Saigon’s Ecole Industrielle d’Extréme Orient in 1910. Involved in nationalist agitation from his youth, he found it prudent to get out of the country for a while and moved to France. In 1919, as a draftee in the French navy, Thang joined a Communist-led mutiny when his battleship sailed to the Black Sea port of Sevastopol with other Allied vessels in an effort to overthrow the Bolshevik regime. He was expelled from the service and returned to Indo-China, where in 1929 he was sent to the penal colony at Poulo Condore for seditious activity. Not until 1945 was he released, in time to join in the war against the French.

No Tampering. Though Thang has served as president of the North Viet Nam-U.S.S.R. Friendship Association and has been awarded the Order of Lenin and the Stalin Peace Prize, he is not expected to tamper with Hanoi’s delicate relations with the Soviet Union and China. For that matter, he will probably be allowed to tamper with very little. To avert a bruising struggle for the succession, the contenders have quite deliberately removed the presidency from the arena. Until North Viet Nam’s power vacuum is filled, “Uncle Ton,” as Thang is sometimes called, is expected to do little more than urge unity and praise the late Uncle Ho.