He was a founding member of the Lao revolutionary movement in 1945, and he became Chairman of the Lao Resistance Committee for the Eastern Region in 1949. In the
Lao Resistance Government, he was named Minister of Finance in 1950. He participated in the
founding congress of the Lao People's Party (later renamed the
Lao People's Revolutionary Party, LPRP) in 1955 and was elected as the second-ranking member of its
Central Committee (Deputy Director of the Central Committee). Nouhak was subsequently the secretary of the Lao People's Party cell in
Vientiane, the capital, and was a member of the
National Assembly in 1958. He was arrested in 1959 Also in 1989, he was chosen as chairman of the commission charged with
drafting a new constitution, which was adopted in 1991. With the adoption of this constitution, Kaysone assumed the presidency, which was transformed from a ceremonial to an executive position. After Kaysone's death, Nouhak was elected to succeed him as President of Laos by the Supreme People's Assembly in an extraordinary session on November 25, 1992. At the same time, Prime Minister
Khamtai Siphandon succeeded Kaysone as leader of the LPRP. As a result, despite the presidency's executive powers, Khamtai was now the
de facto leader of Laos, outranking Nouhak. When Khamtai decided to move from Prime Minister to President in 1998, Nouhak, who was by then one of the oldest heads of state in the world, retired, leaving office on 24 February 1998. Nouhak remained on the Central Committee and Politburo of the LPRP until the party's
6th Congress in 1996. At the 6th Congress in 1996 and the
7th Congress in 2001, he was named as Adviser to the Central Committee's Executive Committee. He reportedly remained in good health throughout his old age, and he was said to have continued making visits to the provinces by helicopter until 2007. == Later life ==