Christopher, in Hanoi, Seeks a ‘Better Future’ : Southeast Asia: On first visit by a secretary of state to Vietnam’s capital, he urges reconciliation. Earlier, in Phnom Penh, he reassures Cambodia.

Secretary of State Warren Christopher arrived in Hanoi today on a mission aimed at consummating President Clinton’s recent decision to establish diplomatic relations with Vietnam.

Stepping off the plane on a cloudy, humid day at Noi Bai Airport, once the target of American bombing missions, Christopher became the first American secretary of state ever to visit Hanoi. His visit ends two decades of enmity in which top-level American officials shunned and sought to isolate the only government to which the United States has lost a war.

“I am here to lay the basis for a better future, even as we continue to account for the past,” he said.

“The world has been transformed in the last two decades. The spirit of reconciliation is building bridges of hope from Northern Ireland to South Africa to the Middle East. In that spirit, we can build a bridge of cooperation between America and Vietnam.

“A generation ago, the trauma of war bound together the history of our nations for all time. Let us now lay our past of conflict to rest, and dedicate ourselves to a future of productive cooperation.”

Clinton announced July 11 that he was formally establishing diplomatic ties with Vietnam, after he concluded that its Communist government is cooperating in efforts to locate the remains of the approximately 1,600 Americans still missing in action in Vietnam.

Immediately after landing, Christopher took part in ceremonies in which the remains of four of the missing Americans were turned over to U.S. military officials for identification.

During his two-day visit, the secretary of state will meet with top Vietnamese leaders, including President Le Duc Anh and Communist Party General Secretary Do Muoi. He will also participate in flag-raising ceremonies Sunday at the new U.S. Embassy in Hanoi and will give a speech to Vietnamese university students on the future of relations between the two countries.

Christopher’s return was filled with emotion for some of the U.S. officials aboard his plane.

Lt. Gen. Daniel W. Christman, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was a company commander in Vietnam during the war. Dressed in his army uniform, he observed as he was about to touch down in Vietnam for the first time since the war: “We look on Vietnam as a country. We look at [the Vietnamese] as a people. That doesn’t mean we don’t go back with a good deal of memories and a good deal of pain.”

Asked whether, in retrospect, the war had been worth so many American lives, Christman replied: “What we are doing today is moving beyond the war. . . . That issue is too emotional.”

The last time a secretary of state visited Vietnam was during the Richard Nixon Administration when William Rogers flew to Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, the capital of what was then South Vietnam. Henry A. Kissinger visited Hanoi at the beginning of 1973, when he was national security adviser.

Christopher arrived on a flight from Phnom Penh after a daylong visit to Cambodia on Friday.

He came to nurture Cambodia’s current, wavering experiment with democracy. But Christopher also found himself drawn into the past. He came close to an expression of apology for America’s conduct in Cambodia in the Vietnam War era.

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“No doubt, with the benefit of hindsight, the United States could have done many things better in Cambodia,” he told a news conference, specifically mentioning the Richard Nixon Administration’s bombing and invasion of this country.

“The United States did not provide the positive leadership that we might have,” he acknowledged. “None of us are fully satisfied with the role of the United States during that period.”

In 1970, the United States bombed and sent ground troops into Cambodia in an effort to prevent North Vietnam’s Communist regime from using the country to infiltrate troops into the South. A coup against Sihanouk brought in a new government willing to support the American war effort.

That regime failed, and on April 17, 1975, two weeks before the fall of Saigon, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge guerrillas captured Phnom Penh. What followed was, for a small country, a reign of terror comparable to those of Hitler and Stalin.

In the three years that followed, 1 million to 2 million people died--out of a population of little more than 7 million. It ended when Vietnam invaded Cambodia at the beginning of 1979, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge and keeping its own troops in the country for more than a decade.

Christopher remembered the Cambodian genocide with a visit Friday afternoon to Tuol Sleng, the former Khmer Rouge interrogation center. In white shirt sleeves, he listened intently, his eyebrows bobbing, as a guide explained how prisoners had their throats slit.

“It’s horrible, beyond belief, man’s inhumanity to man,” the secretary murmured afterward. “It’s hard to conceive, the whole country turned on itself.”

Phnom Penh’s reception for the secretary of state was subdued. This is once again a tranquil city, a place of boulevards and pagodas. Some of the Cambodians who met with Christopher seemed concerned that their country should not be harmed again by America’s renewed involvement in Vietnam.

In a private meeting with the secretary of state, Kem Sokha, a member of the National Assembly and chairman of the Commission on Human Rights, told Christopher, “Now that you’re going back to Vietnam, don’t forget Cambodia.”

Cambodia this year got $40 million in foreign aid from the United States. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns acknowledged that some of the other officials and legislators meeting with Christopher had voiced the fear that the United States might start giving money to Vietnam and cut back on what it gives to Cambodia.

“I told them we would work to continue aid to Cambodia,” Christopher said at the news conference. “I would think this would be one of the last [foreign aid] programs Congress would want to abandon.” He also promised to support Cambodia’s effort to obtain most-favored-nation trade benefits, in order to export its goods to the United States with low tariffs.

Christopher met with the two prime ministers who share power in Phnom Penh: Prince Norodom Ranariddh, Sihanouk’s son; and Hun Sen, who was installed to run the government during Vietnam’s decade-long occupation of Cambodia.

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Some Cambodians voiced concern that the United States not give too strong or unqualified an endorsement to the current government. Critics complain that corruption is rampant here and that the government has been imposing ever-stricter restraints on political dissent.

Pin Sam Khon, president of the Khmer Journalists Assn., who was among those meeting with Christopher on Friday, said a newly adopted press law has allowed authorities to impose fines and jail terms on journalists.