U.S. Takes Low-Key Approach Toward Vietnam : Policy: White House seeks to remain inconspicuous as it moves to improve relations with Hanoi.

A top State Department official joked this week about how the Clinton Administration is tiptoeing toward improved U.S. relations with Vietnam--in a way that will attract as little news coverage as possible.

The Administration took two small steps toward lifting the U.S. trade embargo against Hanoi while the country’s attention was focused on other events, Winston Lord, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, told a group of State Department employees.

First, it dropped U.S. opposition to World Bank and International Monetary Fund lending to Vietnam during the July 4 weekend. Then, as Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were shaking hands at the White House on Sept. 13, the Administration announced that U.S. companies could bid for contracts in Vietnam that are financed by such loans.

“So stay tuned for Christmas,” he said.

Lord, who is about to make a new trip to Vietnam, hurriedly added that he was joking about Christmas. But his remark illustrated the quiet, almost furtive approach President Clinton and his Administration have adopted in their policy toward Vietnam.

Worried about a domestic backlash and determined to avoid charges that they have forsaken the families of Americans missing since the Vietnam War, officials have been trying to move toward normalization of ties with Hanoi through a series of small steps, rather than all at once.

Perhaps a model for the Clinton approach was President John F. Kennedy’s famous line about the best way to announce the sensitive news that he had chosen his brother Bobby as attorney general.

“I think I’ll open the front door some morning about 2 a.m., look up and down the street, and, if there’s no one there, I’ll whisper, ‘It’s Bobby,’ ” Kennedy joked.

That may be Clinton’s way of announcing a restoration of relations with Vietnam. He seems to want his policy to creep to a point where the country wakes up one morning and realizes that normalization has occurred--or is so close that the final step doesn’t matter much.

Lord this week characterized the Administration’s tactic for Vietnam “the incremental approach.” Changes in economic ties with that nation will probably come more quickly than moves toward diplomatic relations, he suggested.

And, seeming to throw cold water on hopes that the Clinton Administration may be preparing at year end for some big step--such as a wholesale lifting of the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam--Lord told State Department employees, “I think the incremental approach is one that you’re apt to see in the future.”

Other countries are not waiting for the United States, however.

Asian and European companies are rushing into Vietnam, in many cases trying to get contracts signed while their American competitors are still barred by the trade embargo from doing business. Air France, for example, is introducing new flights into and out of Vietnam.

In response to pressures from the American business community, the Clinton Administration took the first two steps, in July and on the sunny September afternoon of the Rabin-Arafat handshake.

The withdrawal of U.S. opposition to a restoration of World Bank and IMF lending to Vietnam amounted to an acceptance of the inevitable. Other major countries, such as Japan and France, had served notice that they would no longer support the international lending ban. If the United States had not changed its policy, it might have suffered the embarrassment of being outvoted by its allies at the World Bank.

But in allowing American companies to bid on only some projects in Vietnam, Clinton and his aides have moved much more slowly than most observers expected.

The reason, officials regularly say, is the need to get the fullest possible accounting of more than 2,200 American MIAs from the Vietnam War. “The President has . . . put the MIA question first,” Lord said this week. “ . . . There is a feeling if we had had great leaps forward with respect to diplomatic relations or lifting the embargo the last couple of years, we would have lost some leverage with Vietnam (on the MIAs).”

Lord, who is Clinton’s top policy-maker for Asia, traveled to Hanoi in July. His return there next week could enable him to discuss with top Vietnamese leaders the Administration’s plans and conditions for normalized relations.

While there, he is expected to attend ceremonies at which the United States will send home the remains of some servicemen killed in the Vietnam War.

The Administration’s caution may be a result not only of the MIA issue but also--perhaps especially--of Clinton’s own political sensitivities.

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton’s opponents criticized his efforts to avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War. And early in his Administration, amid the series of budget cutbacks and the controversy over gays in the military, he had touchy relations with U.S. military leaders.

One senior U.S. official said a few months ago that the Administration believes current, active-duty servicemen generally do not object to a restoration of ties with Vietnam. However, he noted, some veterans’ groups strongly oppose the idea.

If Clinton wants to avoid controversy and continue moving at a slow pace toward normalization with Vietnam, he could wait to take the final steps until after the midterm congressional elections next November. That is the course President Jimmy Carter took when he established diplomatic relations with China as of Jan. 1, 1979, a few weeks after the 1978 midterm elections.