Viet Premier Dies of Heart Attack at 75

BANGKOK, Thailand — Vietnamese Premier Pham Hung, who helped plan the 1968 Tet offensive, a turning point in U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, died of a heart attack while at work Thursday, Vietnamese officials said today. He was 75.

Pham Hung was named premier June 18, 1987, replacing Pham Van Dong, one of the last associates of Vietnam’s wartime leader Ho Chi Minh.

“Comrade Pham Hung died as he was leading work in Ho Chi Minh City and other provinces,” said Radio Vietnam. The broadcast was not precise about where Pham Hung died.

Radio Vietnam said the Central Committee Presidium has declared three days of official mourning from March 13-15 with a state funeral March 15 in Hanoi.

Pham was sent south by the communist government in Hanoi in 1967 to help plan and manage the 1968 Tet offensive that shook U.S. political support for the war, but cost the communists dearly in troops. He was one of the key strategists of the communists’ final victory in 1975.

Sentenced to Death

A southerner from the Mekong River delta south of Ho Chi Minh City, the communist name for Saigon, Pham began his revolutionary career by leading a riot that killed a French colonial official in 1931.

He was arrested for the killing and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment at hard labor. He remained in prison until his release with other communists in 1945.

He rose to power through skillful handling of security for the Viet Cong, the communist rebels in the south, in their decades-long war to oust Western-backed governments from South Vietnam in the once-partitioned country.

Despite the power of his post, Pham was known as personally affable. Despite opposition from ideologues in Hanoi, he sponsored policies aimed at softening the transition of the south to socialism.

He tried to ease friction between northerners and southerners by such measures as replacing northern police in Saigon with southerners.