Background
Linh was born Nguyen Van Cuc on July 1, 1914, in what is now Hai Hung province, south of Hanoi. Little is known about his family, although it is probable that he came from a bourgeois background.
Linh was born Nguyen Van Cuc on July 1, 1914, in what is now Hai Hung province, south of Hanoi. Little is known about his family, although it is probable that he came from a bourgeois background.
His official biography tells nothing about his education except to note that he was a student at the time he was jailed by the French in 1930 at the age of 16.
Linh joined the Communist Party during the Popular Front era, in 1936, and was assigned to recruitment duties in Saigon where he served until his second incarceration by the French (1941-1945). During the Vietnam war, Linh was the party's chief agent in Saigon and the surrounding provinces, heading a structure called Central Office in South Vietnam (COSVN). Most of his work was organizational rather than guerrilla warfare since the South was a distinct military backwater during the Vietnam war.
When the party decided to resume armed struggle in the South in 1959, Linh was a natural candidate to head the newly reconstituted COSVN. However, in the next three years, as party leader in the South, he was judged by Hanoi to have failed to defeat the Republic of Vietnam's counterinsurgency strategic hamlet program and was demoted to a deputy post under his replacement, General Nguyen Chi Thanh. After Thanh was killed, the assignment went to Pham Hung, and Linh stayed on as his deputy.
After the forced unification of North and South Vietnam in 1975, Linh, as secretary of the Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) Party Central Committee, became Hanoi's chief instrument in developing the institutions known as the reeducation camps and the New Economic Zone in the city and surrounding region. He also supervised the "Cholon coup d'état" in 1978 which emasculated the southern capitalist trade and consumer goods distribution systems. All of these programs were part of the Communist Party's effort to "break the Saigon machine"—that is, to destroy and then restructure the city's social and economic relationships. Southerners have never forgiven Linh for his part in these traumatic events.
Linh was named to the Politburo by the Fourth Party Congress in December 1976. For reasons never made clear, without announcement, he was dropped from the Politburo in March 1982. Until 1985, he was something of a non-person within the party. Then, also without announcement, he was returned to the Politburo sometime between April and July 1985.
Much of Linh's day-to-day work over the years was associated with the mass organizations which act as the chief instruments for mobilization and motivation of the general Vietnamese population. This involved supervising the continuing campaign to purge the party of the slack, the incompetent, and the corrupt.
In personality, Linh struck outsiders as a serious yet mild-mannered man, one who always expressed himself carefully, and one possessed of a sardonic wit. There is virtually no reliable information about his private life.
Linh was a strong advocate of "Doi Moi" (renovation), an economic plan whose aim is to turn Vietnam economy to a socialist-oriented market economy. As such, Linh was often touted as the Vietnamese Gorbachev after the Soviet leader, who introduced Perestroika.