Lift Vietnam Embargo, Senators Urge Clinton : Trade: Bipartisan group offers amendment to ease the move politically. Opponents promise to introduce rival measures.

The debate over normalizing relations with Vietnam erupted in the Senate on Wednesday when a bipartisan group of lawmakers offered an amendment urging President Clinton to lift the trade embargo imposed on Hanoi in the aftermath of the Vietnam War.

Sensing that Clinton is already preparing to take the step, opponents of the move said they plan to counter it with amendments designed to retain the current trade restrictions until the President certifies that Vietnam has done all it can to account for American servicemen still listed as missing in Indochina.

With Administration officials acknowledging privately that they have reached a consensus on lifting the embargo, each side said it was moving to preempt the other by seeking to attach rival amendments to a $12-billion State Department authorization bill now moving through the Senate.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a former prisoner of war who favors lifting the embargo, predicted that the amendment offered Wednesday by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and 17 other lawmakers will pass by “a very significant margin of victory.”

While the authority to lift the embargo rests with Clinton, Kerry’s non-binding amendment would make it politically easier for him to do so by expressing the “sense of the Senate” that Vietnam’s efforts to account for missing servicemen have been substantial and now warrant a reciprocal gesture by the United States.

Although congressional sources say that the Administration wants to lift the embargo, the issue is a particularly sensitive one for Clinton because of the controversy he generated by avoiding military service during the Vietnam War.

Believing that Vietnam is still withholding information about missing Americans, veterans groups and MIA family organizations bitterly oppose lifting the embargo in the belief that the Administration will lose the only leverage it has to pressure Hanoi into giving a fuller accounting.

The American Legion, for instance, has called upon its 3.1 million members to wage a campaign to keep the embargo intact.

But Kerry, a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran who headed an exhaustive Senate investigation of the POW issue last year, argued that considerable progress has already been made in resolving the fates of missing servicemen.

He said the best way to resolve the remaining “discrepancy cases” is to improve ties with Hanoi and expand the U.S. presence there.

“This is not a question of taking away leverage . . . but a question of giving leverage to us,” Kerry said, adding that “you can’t do the accounting if you are not there, not talking to the Vietnamese, to the soldiers and generals who know about the war.”

Leading the opposition to Kerry, Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.) said he plans to introduce an alternative amendment that would allow Clinton to lift the embargo only after he certifies to Congress that Vietnam has done all he believes that it can do to account for the more than 2,200 Americans still officially listed as missing.

“I’m not advocating 100% accountability. I know they can never do that. But what we want is the fullest possible accounting, based on the information they (the Vietnamese) have in their files, before the embargo is lifted,” said Smith.