Nguyễn Phú Trọng (born 14 April 1944) is the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, elected at the party's 11th National Congress on 19 January 2011. This congress also selected Trọng as the No. 1 member of the Politburo, the party's executive committee. He was chairman of the National Assembly of Vietnam from 2006-11. He is a member of the Troika (rule split among three persons) which governs Vietnam.

Trọng was born in Đông Hội Commune, Đông Anh District, Hanoi. His official biography gives his family background only as "poor peasant". He studied philology at Vietnam National University, Hanoi from 1963-67. Trọng officially joined the Communist Party in December 1968. He worked for the Tạp chí Cộng Sản (Communist Review), the theoretical and political agency of the Communist Party of Vietnam (formerly the "Labor Party"), in the periods of 1967-73, 1976–80, and 1983-96. From 1991-96, he served as the editor-in-chief of the Tạp chí Cộng Sản.

He went to the USSR in 1981 to study at the USSR Academy of Social Sciences and got the Kandidat nauk degree in history in 1983. In 1998, Trọng entered in the party section devoted to political work, and he is one of the most prominent Vietnamese political theorician heading, from 2001-06, the CPVCC's Theoretical Council in charge of the Party's theoretical work.

Emperor Gia Long (8 February 1762 – 3 February 1820), born Nguyễn Phúc Ánh (Hán tự: 阮福映, often referred to simply as Nguyễn Ánh), was an first Emperor of Nguyễn Dynasty of Vietnam. Unifying what is now modern Vietnam in 1802, he founded the Nguyễn Dynasty, the last of the Vietnamese dynasties.

A nephew of the last Nguyen Lord who ruled over southern Vietnam, Nguyen Anh was forced into hiding in 1777 as a fifteen year old when his family was slain in the Tay Son revolt. After several changes of fortune in which his loyalists regained and again lost Saigon, he befriended the French Catholic priest Pigneau de Behaine. Pigneau championed his cause to the French government—and managed to recruit volunteers when this fell through—to help Nguyen Anh regain the throne. From 1789, Nguyen Anh was once again in the ascendancy and began his northward march to defeat the Tay Son, eventually moving by 1802 to the border with China, which had previously been under the control of the Trinh Lords. When this was over, he had reunited Vietnam after centuries of internecine feudal warfare with a greater land mass than ever before, stretching from China down to the Gulf of Siam.

John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, the 10th most senior United States Senator and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, but lost to then President George W. Bush.

The son of an Army Air Corps serviceman, Kerry was born in Aurora, Colorado. He attended boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and went on to graduate from Yale University class of 1966, where he majored in political science. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1966 and, during 1968-1969, served a four-month tour of duty in South Vietnam as officer-in-charge (OIC) of a Swift Boat. For that service he was awarded several combat medals that include the Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. After returning to the United States, Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War in which he served as a nationally recognized spokesperson and as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war. During that period, he appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs where he deemed United States war policy in Vietnam to be the cause of "war crimes".