NEWS ANALYSIS : Clinton Had Clear Vietnam Strategy--and Followed It : Foreign policy: Political sensitivity of the MIA issue caught his attention. Bush had already laid groundwork.

When Bill Clinton became President a year ago, the conventional wisdom among foreign policy experts was that improving relations between the United States and Vietnam had just moved onto a distant back burner.

Clinton had spent much of his campaign answering charges that he had maneuvered to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War. And only weeks after he came to the White House, the new President was embroiled in another emotional military issue, his order to allow gays to serve in the armed forces.

So it seemed unlikely that Clinton would take bold steps on the touchy question of Vietnam.

“If this issue waits for a Clinton Administration,” one Indochina expert said before the inauguration, “we might have to wait until (1995) or even longer.”

In fact, Clinton and his aides quietly began moving on Vietnam almost immediately--denying all the while that they had made any firm decisions. They devised what Assistant Secretary of State Winston Lord called “an incremental strategy,” moving one small step at a time through the political minefield of the prisoner-of-war issue. They frequently stopped to gauge public reactions before moving forward.

On Thursday, Clinton finally took a major public step, lifting the U.S. trade embargo that has applied to Communist-ruled North Vietnam for 30 years and to South Vietnam since it fell to the Communists 19 years ago.

“I have made the judgment that the best way to ensure cooperation from Vietnam (on accounting for troops missing in the war) . . . is to end the trade embargo,” Clinton said.

The move drew criticism from groups representing the families of Vietnam POWs and MIAs--but praise from most of Congress, including some frequent Clinton critics.

“I think the President has handled this very well, especially given the circumstances surrounding his involvement in the issue,” said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a conservative former POW who has campaigned for more normal relations with Vietnam.

Indeed, for a President who has come to grief in other forays into foreign policy, from Somalia and Bosnia to Haiti, the careful but steady march toward lifting the trade embargo stands out as a notable case of sure-footedness.

Officials offer several reasons for the Administration’s success.

One is that Clinton decided early in his Administration on a set of clear, precise goals, which has not been the case on some issues. A second important factor is that Vietnam, anxious for U.S. trade and investment, cooperated enthusiastically.

And a third, ironically, was the political sensitivity of the MIA issue. It captured Clinton’s attention in a way that only a few other foreign policy problems have, focused the policy clearly on winning cooperation from the Vietnamese--and ensured that the problem would get top-level treatment when decisions were needed.

“This is one issue where he has clearly delineated his priorities,” a senior official said of Clinton. “We often have some tension between goals when we’re pursuing relations with various countries--security, human rights, economics. . . . This is one case where the priorities were firmly established. In this case, (it was) the MIA issue.”

Clinton was lucky on one other count: He basically agreed with the policy that his predecessor, George Bush, was already following. In 1991, Bush had given Vietnam what officials called “a road map” for improved relations with the United States. At the top of the map was greater cooperation on clearing up the cases of more than 2,000 servicemen listed as missing from the Vietnam War.

In his campaign, Clinton never explicitly endorsed Bush’s policy, which had drawn criticism from POW-MIA family groups. Instead, battling his own Vietnam problem, he gave the impression that he would be extra tough on the issue.

“This is personally a very big issue with me,” he said. At a “town meeting” in Detroit, he told a POW activist that he would “make it clear to Vietnam and to the other countries in Southeast Asia that full normalization of relationships depends upon an accounting for every single one of those people.”

But two weeks after the election, Clinton offered a softer line--one that turned out to be the policy he followed. Instead of demanding a complete accounting, something military experts say is a practical impossibility, Clinton called on Vietnam to provide “the most extensive and good faith possible effort” to account for the missing.

The first steps were halting--and thrown off course by unexpected events.

State Department and National Security Council officials began drawing up policy papers within weeks of the inauguration. As an initial move, they suggested, Clinton could drop the U.S. objection to new loans for Vietnam from the International Monetary Fund.

But in February, the Administration found itself embroiled in the controversy over gays in the military, prompting caution on other military issues. And in April, a Harvard researcher published a document from Soviet archives which charged Vietnam with deliberately concealing the survival of hundreds of U.S. prisoners in 1972. That touched off an uproar among POW-MIA groups--and forced a three-month postponement of the IMF move.

By July, Clinton was ready to take his first major step. On the Friday before the July 4 weekend--a time chosen partly because Congress was out of town and the public was heading for the holidays--the White House announced that the United States was dropping its opposition to new international loans for Vietnam.

At the same time, Clinton laid out four specific areas where he wanted more cooperation from Hanoi before the United States would lift the embargo: the recovery of remains of servicemen who died in Vietnam; the resolution of cases in which MIAs might have survived; faster delivery of Vietnamese documents that could contain information about MIAs, and a joint effort with Laos to search that country’s border with Vietnam.

The White House held its breath for public reaction.

“Some people were worried that the sky would fall,” a senior official recalled. “They were pleasantly surprised when it didn’t.”

A few weeks later, Clinton sent three officials to Hanoi to assess Vietnam’s performance: Lord, Deputy Secretary of Veterans Affairs Herschel Gober and Lt. Gen. Michael E. Ryan, an aide to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The officials talked with much of Vietnam’s Communist hierarchy--and with the U.S. military experts sifting through aircraft crash sites on the ground.

They looked at cardboard boxes with bits of bones and teeth, at battered old dog tags, at tattered, faded logs from Vietnamese anti-aircraft units recounting the survival or death of U.S. pilots whose planes were shot down. And they came away impressed.

“They were clearly trying to cooperate,” one official said of the Vietnamese.

Gober, an old friend of Clinton’s from Arkansas, told the President that the Vietnamese performance was real.

“When Hershel Gober switches, when he’s convinced, that makes a big difference,” a White House official said. “They go back a long time. And not only that. Here’s a guy who understands deeply the way the families feel.”

Still, the President wanted to move slowly. In September, some officials suggested at least a partial lifting of the embargo. But Clinton was heading toward a showdown in Congress over the North American Free Trade Agreement.

“There was a lot of nervousness in the Senate about taking on the Vietnam problem,” recalled Sen. McCain.

So, instead, Clinton announced another partial measure: allowing U.S. firms to bid on projects in Vietnam financed by the IMF and other international institutions.

“These were projects financed partly by U.S. tax dollars,” an official explained. “It didn’t make sense to prohibit Americans from bidding for them.”

The move also reflected another new factor in the debate: the growing insistence of U.S. firms that Vietnam was turning into a major market--and that companies from Japan, France and other countries were moving in fast while Americans were standing on the sidelines.

Still, the White House announced its action only quietly--and on the same day that Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the Palestine Liberation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat sealed a peace agreement at the White House. Again, the timing helped forestall POW-MIA groups from mounting much of a protest.

Lord even joked about the pattern of “Stealth” announcements.

“Stay tuned for Christmas,” he told a group of State Department employees.

He was almost right. In December, he and other officials made another trip to Hanoi and found more evidence of real cooperation from the Vietnamese. According to one official, Lord told a Dec. 20 meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee--Clinton’s top advisers, including the secretaries of State and Defense--that the time had come to lift the embargo.

The White House and the State Department assured the POW-MIA groups--and the public--that no decision at all had been made.

Finally, two senators stepped in. John Kerry, a liberal Massachusetts Democrat who had won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam before turning against the war; and McCain, a conservative Republican, who had spent seven years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi.

Both agreed that it was time to lift the embargo--and neither feared accusations of softness on Vietnam.

Early last week, Kerry decided, virtually on the spur of the moment, to offer the Senate a resolution asking Clinton to lift the embargo. He told his national security adviser, Anthony Lake, of his plan.

To some senators, Clinton seemed--again--to be testing the wind without committing himself on the issue. And some believed that was not all bad.

“It was smart,” McCain said. It kept the issue bipartisan, he said.

Kerry’s resolution passed by a surprising 62-38 vote.

“It gave Clinton essential political cover,” McCain said.

Times staff writers David Lauter, Jim Mann and Michael Ross contributed to this report.