One of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s (DRV) most eminent diplomats and behind-the-scenes leaders during the Indochina War. Born in Binh Dinh province in central Vietnam, he was the son of a wealthy school principal; his mother was of royal blood. Around 1909, while teaching in Qui Nhon, his father helped the future Ho Chi Minh prepare his exams to become a teacher. This early link between the two families might explain why Pham Ngoc Thach, anything but a hardcore communist in the 1930s, later served as a personal and trusted advisor to the president of the DRV, Ho Chi Minh. Pham Ngoc Thach completed his secondary education in Hanoi at the Lycée Albert Sarraut before entering the Faculté de médecine in Hanoi, where he shone. He continued his medical studies in France, where he was awarded his doctorate of medicine in 1934 and named assistant at the Faculté de médecine de Paris before taking a similar post in the Sanatorium de l’Albarine. He worked closely with the doctors Monod and Lelong, renowned specialists in tuberculosis. It was also at this time that he married a French nurse working there, Marie Louise Jeandot. They moved to Saigon in 1936 where Pham Ngoc Thach opened his own private practice. According to Jacques Dalloz, he also became a Freemason during this time. In 1942, Pham Ngoc Thach and his friends, such as Kha Van Can and Thai Van Lung, began to use the scouting movement to promote their nationalist politics. It became the driving force of the Vanguard Youth Movement (Thanh Nien Tien Phong), in which Pham Ngoc Thach played the leading role in 1945, with a green light from the Japanese.
Sometime before the end of World War II, Pham Ngoc Thach became a member of the Indochinese Communist Party. He enthusiastically supported the DRV’s nationalist cause and mobilized the youth movement in its favor in the south. He became minister of Public Health in the newly created government and served as Ho Chi Minh’s private physician. In September 1945, he was named commissar for External Affairs for Nam Bo and helped run the “Bureau for Nam Bo” created in Hanoi before returning secretly to southern Vietnam shortly thereafter. To the anger of the high commissioner for Indochina, Georges Thierry d’Argenlieu, Pham Ngoc Thach successfully made his way to the Dalat Conference of April 1946, entering the Lang Bian Palace as the DRV’s delegate from the south. Borrowing the expression from Vo Nguyen Giap, French journalist Georges Chaffard wrote: “Voilà qui est plus fort que la bombe atomique”. Thach insisted that southern Vietnam was an integral part of the Vietnamese nation led by the DRV and that any attempt to break off Cochinchina, as Thierry d’Argenlieu sought to do, was doomed to failure. The French saw this as a provocation, arrested, and incarcerated him. When the dashing young Jean-Pierre Dannaud, an advisor to Jean Cédile, arrived in his cell confident he could win over Thach to the French cause, Pham Ngoc Thach sent him packing on nationalist grounds. Disappointed, the French finally expelled Pham Ngoc Thach to Hanoi.
During a ministerial shake-up on 3 November 1946, Pham Ngoc Thach was named under-secretary of state in the Presidency of the Council led by Ho Chi Minh. The latter saw in Thach a trustworthy and sophisticated individual vital to building and leading the government’s nascent diplomacy. Between 1945 and 1948, Pham Ngoc Thach traveled the globe to win support for the new Vietnamese nation-state, meeting leaders from Asia, Europe, France, and the United States. In 1947, he made a secret trip to Europe apparently on Ho Chi Minh’s personal behest in a bid to win over support from the French and Soviet communist parties. The results were disappointing. Upon his return to northern Vietnam in 1948, he ceded his position to Hoang Van Hoan.
However, Thach continued to carry out a number of important missions for the government. In 1948, he was referred to in the Vietnamese press as president of the Council, a post that Ho Chi Minh had held. Noting this, the French political advisor to the high commissioner for Indochina wrote privately of Pham Ngoc Thach as follows: “Intelligent, quoique utopiste, nationaliste passionné, ennemi irréductible – non de la France – mais de ses représentants en Indochine – Thach, dans son nouveau poste qu’il soit réel ou fictif, ne peut être que le partisan d’une politique de lutte à outrance”. Between 1950 and early 1953, he served as president of the Resistance and Administrative Committee for the Special Zone of Saigon-Cholon and the government’s delegate to the southern resistance administration. It was also during this time that he began an offensive to win over southern intellectuals in the cities to the DRV nationalist cause. He met with journalists, artists, intellectuals, teachers, and students. He liaised with leftist and sympathetic European intellectuals, such as Georges Boudarel and those of the Groupe marxiste culturel in Saigon. As the Indochina War drew to an end, his urban connections and networks allowed him to recruit one of the DRV’s most famous southern spies, Pham Xuan An. As one Vietnamese described Dr. Thach: “No matter how much he walked he never tired; and the enthusiasm he invested in his work was equal to that of three persons” (Di bo khong biet met va lam viec hang hai bang ba nguoi).