North Vietnam Leader, Nobel Peace Prize Recipient. He was a Vietnamese revolutionary military figure, diplomat and politician. He was awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize, sharing half with United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. According to the Nobel Prize committee, the two men received the coveted award "for jointly having negotiated a cease fire in Vietnam in 1973". With continued aggression after the signed cease-fire and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, he refused his share of the Nobel Peace Prize as his "country was not at peace" and "on the grounds that his opposite number had violated the truce". The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded when lasting peace was obviously not a prerequisite. Besides being the first Asian to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, he was the first ever to voluntarily refuse a Nobel Peace Prize. From an early age, he had radical political ideas. After becoming a Communist, the French colonial authorities imprisoned him in one of the country's harshest prisons from 1930 to 1936 and again from 1939 to 1944. Being in prison did not change his focus of gaining liberty from the French, which had been in control of his country as part of French Indochina since 1883. As a child, he had been educated in French schools. While imprisoned, he advanced his education, studying French arts and literature, science and foreign languages. In 1930 he was one of the founders of the Vietnam Workers' Party, which became the Communist Party of Vietnam in 1976. During World War II, he gained a place in the Communist Party's leadership during Japan's occupation of Vietnam. The Communist leader Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam independent after the defeat of Japan in 1945, but the French returned. He became one of the military leaders of the resistance against the French. Following the defeat of the French in July of 1954, Vietnam was divided into two separate countries, the Communist controlled North Vietnam and South Vietnam, which was an ally of the United States. During the Vietnam War, from 1955 to 1975, he was in command of the insurgency of South Vietnam by North Vietnamese Communist guerilla fighters, the Viet Cong. On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Accords were signed marking the end of the Vietnam War. Following serving as an adviser to the North Vietnamese delegation to the Paris Peace Conferences from 1968 to 1973, he participated in the 1973 cease-fire and planned withdrawal of the last of the United States military from South Vietnam by March of that year, but soon after the agreement was signed, armed conflict ended the cease-fire. In 1975 he was the leader of the offensive force that overthrew the South Vietnamese government after the United States military left the country. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam was established in July of 1976. Likewise, he played a similar role in the first stage of Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978, and eventually, Communist governments were established in Cambodia as well as neighboring Laos. Le Duc Tho remained an active member of the ruling Communist Party until retiring in 1986. After receiving treatment in Paris, he reportedly, according to the "New York Times", died of throat cancer in a Hanoi hospital.