Leading southern intellectual who agitated against the French during the Indochina War. Born in Cholon, the son of a rubber plantation manager, he left for France in 1921 where he studied law. He returned to Vietnam in 1933 and joined the Cochinchinese Bar the following year. In April 1932, he requested French citizenship but his application was apparently refused. We know little about his activities in the 1930s and during World War II.
While he supported the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), serving in late 1945 as the president of the Tribunal of Can Tho, he was also one of the supporters of the Mouvement populaire cochinchinois. Such activities apparently landed him in hot water for DRV forces arrested him on 7 July 1947 and put him under house arrest until his liberation on 12 September 1947. In June 1949, he returned to the political scene when he helped create the anti-war newspaper, Pour la Paix, in association with French leftists in the Groupe culturel marxiste in Saigon. Nguyen Huu Tho is said to have joined the Indochinese Communist Party at that time.
On 19 March 1950, he participated in student demonstrations against the visit of an American warship to Saigon in particular and against stepped-up American intervention in the Indochina War in general. The Public Security Services of the Associated State of Vietnam arrested him for this. He was provisionally released on 27 March 1950 on bail, but was arrested again on 15 April 1950 for handing out political pamphlets. In August 1950, French and Vietnamese authorities exiled him to a remote village in Lai Chau province in northern Vietnam and then placed him under house arrest in Son Tay in June 1951, when DRV agents attempted to contact him. An amnesty granted in 1952 allowed him to walk free. He returned to Saigon and in April 1954 helped create the Mouvement pour la défense de la paix and was a vocal supporter of the implementation of the Geneva Accords and the holding of elections in 1956. He served as one of the movement’s vice presidents. Vietnamese communists would renew their collaboration with him during the Vietnam War, making him chairman of the southern National Liberation Front in 1960. See also ATTENTISME; COLLABORATION; CROSSOVERS.