Ex-POW Is Picked as Ambassador to Vietnam

President Clinton on Friday announced his choice of Rep. Pete Peterson (D-Fla.), a former bomber pilot who spent 6 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, as the first U.S. ambassador to Hanoi.

“The quarters and the food will be much better this time,” Peterson said of the job that will put him in the forefront of efforts to build a peaceful relationship between the former enemies more than 20 years after the war’s end.

“I went back to Vietnam in ’91 and ‘94” as a member of congressional delegations, he said in an interview Friday. “I’ve gone through all the emotional struggles that one goes through to get well. It will not be a big emotional process for me personally.”

Asked if he expects to encounter any of his former jailers in new roles as government officials, Peterson replied: “I’m sure I will.

“There are a couple that I won’t have too many warm feelings for,” he said. “But there were some who also helped me.”

By selecting a former POW who reached the rank of colonel during a 27-year career in the Air Force, Clinton appears to have insulated himself from criticism by veterans groups of the first exchange of ambassadors with Communist-ruled Vietnam.

Clinton avoided military service during the Vietnam War.

The choice of Peterson drew an immediate endorsement from another prominent former POW on Capitol Hill, Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

“Pete Peterson served his country both in uniform and as a member of Congress,” McCain said. “I believe he is very well qualified. I know that he performed exceedingly well in prison and he had a fine reputation.”

The post seems an almost perfect fit for Peterson, a three-term lawmaker from the northern Florida Panhandle.

He announced in September that he will not run for reelection this November because he believes that the increasingly partisan Congress has no room for political moderates.

“Throughout my tenure, I have worked as a bridge-builder to find bipartisan solutions to our nation’s problems,” Peterson said then. “Unfortunately, the current political climate on Capitol Hill and throughout the nation has rendered this approach ineffective.”

There is little question that the ambassadorial post in Hanoi demands a bridge-builder.

“At this stage of the relationship, it will be good to have such a person,” said Fred Brown, associate director of Southeast Asia studies at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies. “He is a smart cookie who can hold his own with the Vietnamese. He has a better chance of getting confirmed by the Senate than anyone. He will help the relationship mature over the next couple of years.

“It is a sensible, politic choice,” Brown added. “Obviously he cannot be attacked on the grounds of being soft on the POW/MIA question.”

Peterson said he believes that his most important job will be to seek full cooperation with the Vietnamese government in accounting for all service personnel still listed as missing in action.

But unlike some MIA activists, Peterson said it is unlikely that any MIAs remain alive.

“I would never say ‘never,’ ” he said. “But it is highly unlikely that any American prisoner is being held by any of the governments of Southeast Asia at this juncture. It is becoming more and more unlikely that any American prisoners were transferred to the Soviet Union. I would say it is highly unlikely that anyone is held against their will anywhere in Southeast Asia.”

That is a view that has been advanced by the White House over the last several administrations.

But some MIA activists reject that conclusion, occasionally accusing the United States and Vietnamese governments of a conspiracy to cover up the truth.

Peterson, 60, said that too little was done to resolve MIA cases during the first few crucial years after the war ended.

For a while, he said, the Vietnamese were “playing hardball with us” and the U.S. government seemed to do nothing about it, establishing public distrust that persists to this day.

Now, he said, cooperation “is as good as we could have it. . . . They are allowing us to walk into prisons, talk to anyone spontaneously anywhere in the country. They are allowing us into their archives, as limited as they are.”

Peterson, a native of Omaha, flew 66 bombing missions over Vietnam before being shot down in 1966 near Hanoi. After his release, he returned to active duty in the Air Force and served until retiring in 1981.

He went into the computer business and served as director of the specialized treatment program in the psychology department of Florida State University before being elected to Congress in 1990. He also was headmaster of the Dozier School for Boys, a state institution for juvenile offenders.

In 1988, the Republican governor sought to close the school in an economy move, but Peterson lobbied successfully to keep it open.

During his tenure in the House of Representatives, Peterson’s voting record has been close to the Democratic mainstream, although he opposed Clinton on the North American Free Trade Agreement and on the ban on assault weapons.

Peterson also tried to dissuade Clinton from sending U.S. troops to Haiti, although he supported the operation once forces were deployed.

In 1991, as a freshman lawmaker, Peterson became an instant celebrity when he opposed U.S. participation in the Persian Gulf War. Urging then-President George Bush to rely on economic sanctions instead to roll back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Peterson said he learned in Vietnam that the United States should never commit troops to combat without firm public support.

When Iraqi television displayed captured U.S. pilots in February 1991, Peterson related stories of his own imprisonment in a series of newspaper interviews.

“I saw myself on that screen,” he told the St. Petersburg Times. “I saw my first days in captivity. I relived those moments.”