THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, July 11, 1995 TAG: 9507110257
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: STAFF AND WIRE REPORTS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long : 124 lines
Embracing a peaceful epilogue to America's only lost war, President Clinton plans to announce today that the United States has decided to re-establish full diplomatic ties with Vietnam.
The future U.S. ambassador will be the first to return to Vietnam since Graham Martin left the former U.S. Embassy in Saigon by helicopter in April 1975 with an American flag tucked under his arm.
Clinton's action, to be announced this afternoon in the White House East Room, comes as Congress is returning to work from a holiday recess and before the Senate could debate competing resolutions about whether the United States should formally recognize its former enemy.
Clinton planned to privately outline his politically charged decision to Republican and Democratic congressional leaders at a dinner Monday evening at the White House.
Influential POW-MIA groups, which already have condemned Clinton's decision, are to receive a special briefing before today's announcement.
``We still think it's a bad idea,'' said Phil Budahn, a spokesman for the American Legion, whose 3.1 million-member group is the country's largest veterans organization. ``We're convinced that diplomatic relations is the sole lever that we have to pry information from Vietnam about the whereabouts of missing Americans.
``The agony of the families is not over.''
Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas was skeptical of reports about Clinton's decision. Dole, Sen. Robert Smith, R-N.H., and other opponents of normalized relations are trying to cut off funds for a U.S. diplomatic mission to Vietnam unless Clinton can prove that the Vietnamese have made full disclosure on the POW issue.
``Just as the Vietnam War divided Americans in the '60s and '70s, the issue of how to finalize peace with Vietnam divides Americans today,'' Dole said.
``The debate over normalization is not a debate over the ends of American policy, it is a debate over the means,'' Dole said.
``The historical record shows that Vietnam cooperates on POW-MIA issues only when pressured by the United States. And in the absence of sustained pressure, there is little progress on POW-MIA concerns.''
Other critics zeroed in on Clinton's history as an antiwar protester who skipped military service during the Vietnam era.
Rep. Robert Dornan, a Republican from California who, like Dole, is campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination, said ``this is the ultimate for Clinton, the triple draft dodger, to come full circle. He did give aid and comfort to the enemy . . . and he gives aid and comfort to the enemy now.''
Clinton, however, will be supported and flanked by a contingent of Vietnam War heroes at the ceremony. Scheduled to join him are: Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona who spent more than five years as a POW; Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat from Nebraska who won the Medal of Honor and lost a leg in Vietnam; and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who won the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts in combat.
The issue is no less volatile in Hampton Roads.
Larry Hammonds, vice president of the Hampton Roads chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America, said local veterans are deeply split over Clinton's decision.
``A lot of us agree that we should have some sort of open dialogue for humanitarian purposes,'' Hammonds said.
His group is working directly with veterans' groups in Vietnam to locate the remains of missing servicemen and to resolve lingering health concerns surrounding the defoliant Agent Orange that was used during the war.
``We think normal relations would help. It would increase our access to the countryside and their records.''
White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry said the establishment of diplomatic ties would bolster continuing efforts to account for missing GIs.
``I think it's been our judgment that there's been considerable progress in achieving the fullest possible accounting for POWs and MIAs,'' he said.
``One argument in favor of closer relations with Vietnam is to continue that progress.''
White House officials said the president will also stress that the time has come, 20 years after the U.S. pullout in 1975, for the nation to put the politically divisive and emotionally wrenching war behind it.
Clinton's action caps a campaign over the last 30 months to prepare the nation for full diplomatic relations. His goal was to overcome lingering U.S. resentment and suspicions about a communist regime that had battled American forces in a Cold War-era conflict that divided America at home and inflicted a military defeat that still chastens U.S. foreign policy.
Clinton gradually fashioned political support for reversing the policy with a highly public, step-by-step approach designed to ventilate strongly held sentiments about the war.
The strategy seemed to pay dividends.
The latest nationwide public opinion survey on the issue by the Michigan-based EPIC-MRA-Mitchell poll in late June showed 50 percent of the 1,000 adults surveyed favored ``official recognition'' of Hanoi while only 32 percent opposed the step.
Clinton relied upon prominent U.S. military leaders led by retired Army Gen. John Vessey, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to vouch for Hanoi's cooperation on ticklish questions over POWs and MIAs.
Clinton quietly fostered broader U.S. commercial ties with Vietnam, confident that business leaders would support wider diplomatic contacts as they tried to catch up with mounting foreign investment in Vietnam from Japan, Australia, France and Britain.
Three weeks after taking office, he quietly authorized a 30-member U.S. trade delegation to go to Vietnam to open business offices to sign contracts for future work, pending the end of the trade embargo. MEMO: Staff writer Bill Sizemore contributed to this report.
ILLUSTRATION: STAFF GRAPHIC
U.S. RELATIONS WITH VIETNAM
[Timeline]
SOURCES: KRT, WORLD BOOK ENCYCLOPEDIA
[For a copy of the graphic, see microfilm for this date.]
The president slowly built toward this, but opposition is still
strong.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
An American pilot, seated in the doorway, tries to limit a rush onto
his plane by Vietnamese civilians in April 1975 during the
evacuation of Nha Trang. North Vietnamese troops were making their
way south toward Saigon, leading up to the fall of South Vietnam on
April 30. As the entire country was placed under communist rule,
which still remains, the U.S. trade embargo was then extended to all
of Vietnam.
KEYWORDS: VIETNAM by CNB