For Some, Reconciliation Comes More Easily

The most surprising aspect of U.S.-Vietnamese relations is not how greatly they’ve improved in the past few years, but how long it took both countries to make the transition from enmity to reconciliation.

Japan and the United States, after all, normalized relations in 1951, six years after the end of World War II, and by 1970, 25 years after the war, American tourists were as common a sight on the streets of Tokyo as they were in London or Paris.

Vietnam and the United States didn’t restore relations until 1995, two decades after U.S.-backed South Vietnam fell to North Vietnam’s army. Even today, 25 years after the war, first-time American visitors and returning service personnel venture into Vietnam with a sense of uncertainty, as if they were entering a frontier awash in animosity, even potential danger.

Those anxieties are quickly laid to rest. The welcome the Vietnamese extend to Americans is warm and sincere. It is rooted in the belief that the U.S. government--not the American people--was the enemy during the war years and that former GIs are the best ambassadors of goodwill because they understand the suffering of the past and, by returning to Vietnam, show a desire to pursue the promised friendship of tomorrow.

“I don’t know why Americans are always surprised to find out we like them,” Nguyen Duc Bao, a retired North Vietnamese army colonel, said with a touch of the victor’s magnanimity. “America was a small part of our struggle for independence and unification. Only a blip in history, really.”

Moving a cordial personal relationship between two peoples to a correct diplomatic relationship between two governments has been a long and difficult journey. But if the war was characterized by missed opportunities for peace on both sides, so was the postwar period delineated by lost chances to chart a new and constructive direction in U.S.-Vietnamese relations.

In 1977, two years after the war’s end, Leonard Woodcock, then the chief of the U.S. liaison office in Beijing, led a presidential mission to Hanoi to clear the path for normalized relations. The next year, in September, secret negotiations in New York produced a breakthrough when Vietnam dropped its demand for financial aid as a precondition to an agreement. Both sides were so sure they had a deal that the abandoned villa once used by the U.S. consul general in Hanoi was painted in anticipation of the arrival of U.S. envoys.

At the time, the State Department was pressing for simultaneous recognition of China and Hanoi. But Vietnam was also making plans to invade China-backed Cambodia, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter’s national security advisor, considered Vietnam a “peripheral issue,” fearing that a deal with Hanoi would kill chances to normalize relations with Beijing. Both sides went home empty-handed.

Soon after, Vietnam signed a 25-year friendship treaty with the Soviet Union in early November, and in December attacked Cambodia. And the stately old villa on Hai Ba Trung Street in Hanoi remained empty, as it would until 1994, when President Clinton lifted the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam. Today it houses the American Club, a social and recreational facility for the 300 or so Americans who live in Hanoi.

For the past five years, U.S. envoys and Vietnamese officials have traveled through minefields that have slowed the normalization of relations: Agent Orange; troops from both sides still unaccounted for; human rights and religious freedom; free trade and aviation rights for foreign carriers; and the pace of reform in a Communist country unnerved by new directions.

Some differences have been resolved, others narrowed. But undeniably, Hanoi and Washington are moving toward a destination that many Vietnamese and Americans have already reached--respect rooted in the legacy of the past.

Today, while Clinton visits a crash site where a joint task force is searching for the remains of U.S. servicemen, the two sides will take another step toward that destination: The U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, returns to Vietnam for the first time since the war and will open an office in Hanoi.

Its budget will be modest, perhaps $10 million--a pittance compared with the $7.5 billion that USAID poured into South Vietnam during the war.

“This even has great significance in the reconciliation process,” said Robert Randolph, USAID’s assistant administrator for Asia and the Near East. “We left in ’75 after failing in our attempt to build a democratic society. Now we’re coming back in partnership with the Vietnamese government to turn a page of history, to create an alliance that will generate economic growth and prosperity to benefit both the Vietnamese and the American people.”