Vietnam War, Peace Pivotal in Kerry's Life

Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) and Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 9127 Commander John Feller sing "God Bless America" at a Kerry campaign stop in Des Moines in May. (Charlie Neibergall -- AP)

Eighth in a series of occasional articles

In November 2000, the twilight of his presidency, Bill Clinton traveled to Vietnam, a place that he and thousands of other young Americans tried to avoid in the 1960s. He spoke at the Vietnam National University of Hanoi, and among those in the audience that he singled out for recognition was a tall man from New England who had been to Vietnam many times before.

His name was John F. Kerry, and he had played a key role in bringing about the first visit to Vietnam by an American president since Richard M. Nixon briefly met with U.S. troops there in 1969.

The Vietnam War was the defining event in Kerry's life, as it was for so many others of his generation. Today, as the Massachusetts senator seeks the Democratic presidential nomination, the war provides a critical underpinning for his candidacy. Kerry, a decorated combat veteran, would not easily be portrayed by President Bush and the Republicans as soft on national security issues.

But Kerry's time as a combatant, and his equally well-known role as a leader of the veterans who returned from Vietnam and opposed the war, account for only part of his personal odyssey involving the war and its aftermath that symbolically culminated in Clinton's visit to Hanoi. More than any other member of Congress, it was Kerry, with his ally Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who cleared the way for normal diplomatic relations between the United States and Vietnam, beginning the process of healing the deep wounds of war.

They did so largely out of the limelight, in the tedious and grinding work of a special Senate committee that was appointed to investigate the fates of Americans still missing from the war and the rumors that some of them were alive and being held captive in Southeast Asia. When the committee completed its work, Kerry, the chairman, had produced a unanimous, 585-page report that declared: "There is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."

McCain was the lightning rod for critics of the committee's more than yearlong search for the truth, but it was Kerry who held the enterprise together. A lawyer by training, he used his skills to mediate vast differences of opinion on an emotional topic within the committee and with many of those who appeared before it. According to those who watched the process, he was invariably calm, evenhanded and, above all, persistent.

"Kerry was always there saying, 'Hey, everybody calm down,' " said Mark Salter, McCain's chief of staff. "He kept it going. It should have imploded."

The committee's report did not eliminate the explosive POW/MIA issue, but it did much to defuse it and lift the cloud that had been hanging over the country since the fall of Saigon in 1973. A little more than a year after the report was issued in 1993, Clinton ended the U.S. trade embargo against Vietnam; the next year, the United States established formal diplomatic relations with the Vietnamese. Both steps were preceded by passage of Senate resolutions, co-sponsored by Kerry and McCain, urging the actions.

Kerry was only one of many who eased the country down the long road to reconciliation with a once-bitter enemy, but other participants in the process describe his role as "pivotal" and that of "the catalyst."

"John, on behalf of this nation, brought us back to Vietnam with our heads held high," said former senator Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.), who lost part of a leg and was awarded the Medal of Honor as a Navy Seal in Vietnam. "I think only John could have done it."

Shadow on the Trail

The Vietnam War shadows Kerry on the campaign trail. Part of this is by design. He does not dwell on it, but he almost always mentions the war in his speeches as a way to remind his listeners of who he once was: Lt. John F. Kerry, USN, commander of one of the "swift boats" that patrolled Vietnam's interior waters, frequently clashing with enemy forces.

There are often Vietnam veterans in Kerry's audiences, and they seek him out to share their experiences. Jim Cisco, 60, an Air Force veteran who was stationed in the Mekong Delta, recently told Kerry in Mount Pleasant, Iowa, how he and other airmen at the base would watch the heavily armed patrol boats careering along the Mekong River.

"We thought, damn, these guys are nuts," Cisco said.

"We were," Kerry replied, "and we thought [our superiors] were nuts for making us do it."

Kerry was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts in Vietnam. But it was not his bravery in battle that finally distinguished him; many others, whether recognized or not, were just as brave.

What made Kerry stand out was that he did not try to forget about the war, put Vietnam behind him and get on with his life. He became a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, took part in protests and testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Elected to the Senate in 1984, he returned to Vietnam in May 1991. Frances Zwenig, his chief of staff at the time and later the staff director of the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, recalled that even before returning to Washington, Kerry had instructed her to try to organize another trip to Vietnam by the leaders of American veterans organizations.

"This was totally his idea, and it was the right idea," Zwenig said. "If these people could see the need for going forward, that was exactly what we needed politically."

Bob Wallace, now executive director of the Veterans of Foreign Wars' Washington office, was among the veterans who returned to Vietnam in July 1991, when the United States was allowed to open a U.S. office for POW/MIA affairs in Hanoi.

"It came about because of John Kerry," Wallace said. "We had breakfast, and he said that the Vietnamese would welcome a trip from the veterans organizations. We firmly believed that if we wanted to make our point about the POWs and MIAs, we had to do it face to face. He was the catalyst."

Both countries were cautiously seeking a better relationship. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush announced a "road map" to normalization, inviting the Vietnamese to take a series of steps and promising a positive U.S. response.

The critical hurdle was the more than 2,200 Americans who were unaccounted for from the Vietnam War era. The families of the missing yearned for answers and had organized themselves into a politically potent force. Since the war ended, some had come to believe that Americans had been left behind in Southeast Asia and were alive. A cottage industry grew up around the issue, encouraging the darkest conspiracy theories about a coverup of their fate.

The issue was further inflamed in the early 1990s by the publication of a photograph purporting to show three such Americans being held in Southeast Asia. (The photograph was later shown to be a fake.) The Senate responded by passing a resolution, sponsored by Sen. Robert C. Smith (R-N.H.), that created the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. Its task was to try to get to the truth.

The Vietnam veterans who were in the Senate at the time were expected to serve on the committee, and they did -- reluctantly. It was seen as a time-consuming and thankless task, certain to be controversial and probably inconclusive, a distraction with no political upside. "It was a no-win situation," McCain said.

Kerry's staff unanimously urged him to reject the chairmanship, but he accepted it. "I thought as a Vietnam veteran that I had an obligation to my fellow Vietnam veterans and to all veterans to get the answers," he said.

The committee's hearings were contentious. Years of uncertainty had left relatives of the missing with raw emotions, and some of them lashed out.

"All of us who were veterans were accused of being murderers, being traitors," Kerrey said. "It got very, very ugly. People treated John McCain worst because he had been a POW and John Kerry the second-worst because he was chairman of the committee."

McCain, a Navy pilot who spent more than five years in Vietnamese POW camps, recalled that when he came under attack during the hearings, Kerry would frequently "put a restraining hand on my arm" in a silent show of support. "I became very grateful that he did," McCain said.

Anthony Lake, who was Clinton's first national security adviser, said the missing from the Vietnam War constitute "a difficult and emotional issue because, even though there are huge numbers of Americans missing and unaccounted for from World War I, World War II and the Korean War, we hadn't lost those wars. The issue of the return of the remains to their families is very important psychologically, not just to the families but as part of a sense of closure, of being able to put it behind us. If the families couldn't have that closure, it's hard to argue that the nation would."

There were divisions within the committee as well. Smith, sponsor of the resolution that created the panel, tended to side with those who were most distrustful of the government's handling of the POW/MIA issue. "Smith had been fed a lot of strange and unusual information by strange and unusual people," said retired Army Gen. John W. Vessey Jr., who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan as liaison to the Vietnamese on the POW/MIA issue in the 1980s.

Smith clashed frequently with the volatile McCain; it fell to Kerry to mediate their sharply different points of view. "Smith came in pretty much convinced that there were still a large number of Americans being held captive in Vietnam," McCain said. "That's why John did such a miraculous job in getting every member of the committee to sign off on the phrase that said there is no compelling evidence that there are [captive] Americans alive in Southeast Asia. Our hearings were so exhaustive and thorough that you couldn't arrive at any other conclusion."

The committee's final report was hammered out in Kerry's conference room during negotiations that stretched over days. Salter, McCain's chief of staff, said it took "an unbelievably skillful, herculean effort" by Kerry to produce the unanimous result.

Not everyone was satisfied with the outcome. Ann Mills Griffiths, executive director of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, said the committee never focused on the key question, which, she said, was the degree to which Vietnam was cooperating with American authorities on the issue and whether it could do more. "That is still the question," she said. The report "was done for conscious reasons. They had an agenda to normalize political relations with Vietnam."

Smith, who now sells real estate in Florida, signed the report but later tried to distance himself from some of its conclusions. "I didn't believe the Vietnamese were totally forthcoming with us. I still don't think they have been completely forthcoming," he said.

In the end, the select committee under Kerry's leadership turned out to be "a springboard to normalization," Smith said. That is not at all what he had in mind when he started the endeavor, he said.

One Last Obstacle

The select committee issued its report on Jan. 13, 1993, one week before Clinton took office. By then Kerry and McCain, initially distant when McCain entered the Senate in 1987, had forged a strong friendship. Together, they set out to move the new administration the next steps along the road to normalization.

Kerry said he began to think about that subject in the late 1980s. He traveled to the Far East, saw the emergence of China, began to think about his own country's long-term interests in the region.

"I felt that it was important to the United States, in terms of the region and our own security interests and our long-term interests, to begin to get over the past, the war relationship," he said.

Kerry said he also realized that some resolution of the POW/MIA issue was necessary before normal relations with Vietnam could even be considered.

"I knew it was a step in moving in that direction," he said. "So did others [on the select committee] who resisted. . . . It happened to be a step that was critical, but it also absolutely had to be resolved on its own merits. You couldn't live as a country with people who had serious evidence that you may have left some soldiers behind and you didn't care."

After Kerry's committee completed its work, one more political obstacle remained: the newly elected president and his history as an opponent of the Vietnam War who had avoided military service during the conflict.

"That's what the internal debate was about: Can the draft dodger do this or not?" Salter said. "That's what was going on in the White House, with some of the political people saying, 'Where's the upside in doing this?' "

Winston Lord, who was then assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs and a strong advocate for normalization, said, "The president and the White House staff were always quite nervous about this issue because of the president not serving in Vietnam. He and his aides were always concerned about attacks on him."

Lake, the national security adviser, agreed that the Clinton White House approached the normalization issue cautiously, but he said this was not only because of political concerns.

"There were good reasons to pursue [normalization], but there were also good reasons to pursue it carefully," Lake said. "Not just for political reasons, but also because, if in the process of doing it, you blew it up here at home, did it in the face of very strong objections from veterans groups or whatever, you would have precisely the wrong effect in terms of putting [the war] behind us. So you had to do it right, and there McCain and Kerry were pivotal."

Kerry and McCain were said at the time to be providing "political cover" for Clinton. On May 23, 1995, they went to the White House and met with Clinton in the Oval Office. McCain told Clinton it did not matter to him anymore who was for or against the war. Kerry, the lawyer, summarized the reasons why it was in the interests of the United States to normalize relations with Vietnam.

Six weeks later, Clinton took that step.

In his speech at the University of Hanoi, Clinton referred to Kerry and other American veterans who had returned to Vietnam. He said they had done so "to honor those who fought without refighting the battles; to remember our history, but not to perpetuate it; to give young people like you in both of our countries the chance to live in your tomorrows, not in our yesterdays."

Asked recently how he would explain to Americans who were born after the war why the path to normalization was important, Kerry said, "It was the true making of peace. It really was the making of peace. There wasn't peace until that. There was a great scar that was still open in America, a wound that was open."

Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report.