Shaped after Saigon's fall

Return visits to Vietnam helped mold McCain as a conciliator

WASHINGTON - In November 1974, a year and a half after his release as a prisoner of war, John McCain traveled to Saigon to visit the South Vietnamese army war college, where he delivered a half-hearted pep talk to allies he knew were about to get routed.

Six months later, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese army, marking the war's end. McCain celebrated the 10th anniversary of the occasion by returning to Hanoi in 1985 with Walter Cronkite for a CBS documentary.

The two walked the city's streets, stopping at a statue covered in bird droppings of a well-known American "air pirate" whose plane had been shot down there. A curious crowd gathered, seeing the statue and the man himself, and shouted an approximation of his name: "Mah-cain! Mah-cain!"

Those two trips - one as McCain negotiated his reentry into American life and the other as he began his ascent as a national political figure - helped ensure that Vietnam would remain part of McCain long after the war's end, according to a review of McCain's congressional papers made available to the Globe.

The 1974 visit to Saigon, as the United States was withdrawing its support for the South Vietnamese, prompted McCain's generation-long search "in every prospective conflict for the shadow of Vietnam," as he later put it, shaping his approach to foreign policy that was marked by a vexing mix of caution and aggressiveness.

After the 1985 visit, McCain committed himself to ending a stalemate over American soldiers missing in action, pursuing steps that led to the eventual restoration of American diplomatic ties with Vietnam.

These legacies of the Vietnam war became signature causes of McCain's first decade in politics and helped to build his reputation as a conciliator unfazed by past antagonisms.

"He's got an open architecture; he's always rethinking things," said John Lehman, Navy secretary when McCain entered Congress. "He's had many emotions in his life, but they've never risen to the level of his intellectual assessment of a situation. Those trips back there are a good example of it."

Upon his return to the United States in 1973 after 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war, McCain showed little interest in reconsidering the war's causes and consequences. An essay he wrote for US News & World Report about his Vietnam experience offered a detailed narrative, but little reflection on broader questions.

Months later, invited to Saigon as part of a VIP delegation, McCain was forced to confront the complexities of the war still underway. He was dispirited as he tried to offer encouraging words to South Vietnamese soldiers he knew his government was abandoning.

"It was a conventional invasion of the South while our Congress cut the aid and cut and cut again," McCain told author Robert Timberg.

When he first ran for Congress in Arizona in 1982, McCain ran ads with wartime footage and, when accused of carpetbaggery, said that "the place I've lived longest in my life was Hanoi." But he did not dwell on Vietnam, saying "the war is over for me."

Yet McCain did not easily leave behind all his wartime grievances. He questioned the credibility of David Stockman, a conservative Reagan administration budget director, for having participated in student peace protests. "As Mr. Stockman was a member of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam conflict, I do not believe he should be the individual to evaluate military pay, benefits, and entitlement," McCain wrote to a constituent.

After McCain learned that antiwar activists Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden had been VIP attendees at a 1983 space-shuttle launch, he drafted a letter to White House aide Ken Duberstein protesting the "atrocity" and demanding that NASA's director "be held accountable."

"The fact that those two people who were responsible for so much agony and suffering upon my fellow POW's should be invited guests by this Administration is beyond my comprehension," McCain wrote.

Initially, however, McCain largely avoided the most contentious clash over Vietnam's legacy: the fate of American service members never recovered in Southeast Asia, a mystery fueled by recurring reports of "live sightings" of troops.

In October 1983, two weeks after the TV show "Real People" included a segment on the issue, adviser Jay Smith sent McCain a memo marked "Confidential" that proposed "the idea of having you, in your capacity as a US Congressman, take some action or initiative to break the deadlock in talks" between the United States and Vietnam over the missing.

McCain was long skeptical of the allegations that Americans were still being held in Vietnam. When an aide presented him in 1981 with a draft set of remarks about the issue, McCain drew an X through paragraphs referencing "eyewitness reports" of sightings. He crossed out the claim that Hanoi "knows Americans are being held captive" and replaced it with a demand that the government "must have a full accounting."

Smith saw a political opportunity in McCain's skepticism. "You are in a unique position to do something positive on the issue, even if the only tangible result of your effort proves to be the realization that, like it or not, Americans are going to have to live with the fact that many of our MIA's will be unaccounted for indefinitely," he wrote in the memo, which is now in the archives at Arizona State University.

Smith proposed asking President Reagan to name McCain an "official emissary of the US in going to Hanoi for the purpose of having talks with their leaders." Such a trip, Smith suggested, could offer footage for a "30-minute documentary film built around the subject of the MIAs and your effort to resolve the issue . . . if done well it may be something that PBS or some cable outlets would want to run nationally."

"Finally, in addition to the film (which we should not announce we are doing), the news that you are planning definitive action on the issue will play very well in Arizona," Smith wrote. "I think it's a winner from virtually all standpoints, as long as we maintain control over what we do and how the story is disseminated."

Smith was working to raise McCain's stature in anticipation of an expected Senate run in 1986.

It turned out that McCain never needed to produce his own documentary. In late 1984, CBS News invited McCain to join Cronkite in Hanoi for a special that would air on the anniversary of Saigon's fall.

McCain immediately defended himself against critics who saw the trip as accommodationist. "I can assure you that my visit will not be entirely pleasant," he responded to one critical letter writer.

"I decided to go back to Vietnam because I felt that those of us who were fortunate enough to return have an obligation to those who have not returned," he wrote elsewhere.

McCain's staff happily publicized the news that Vietnam's government initially refused to give McCain a visa: Communist officials were afraid he would push the MIA cause, they said.

McCain and Cronkite were eventually allowed to enter Vietnam, although denied a visit to the prison where McCain had been held. He was jarred by the despair he saw across Hanoi. "I found the capital almost unchanged from the grim, listless, eerily quiet place I had left twelve years before," McCain wrote in a memoir.

Famous in wartime as a Navy admiral's son, McCain was mobbed on his return to Hanoi - "perhaps the first time that someone was more recognized than Walter Cronkite," he joked - and also found his national profile raised at home when the CBS special aired two months later. "It put him on the map in a way that he had not been before," said Torie Clarke, then McCain's press secretary.

Most crucially, the Cronkite trip ensured that as a politician McCain would remain linked to Vietnam, as deeply entangled in the future of American relations with the country as he was in the past.

"His thinking that we needed to begin to solve the wounds of Vietnam came out of that trip," said Lorne Craner, a McCain foreign-affairs aide during the 1980s. "His belief that we could help Vietnam by being there was helped by that trip."

McCain returned to Vietnam regularly in the coming years, working toward his preferred framework for reconciliation: full diplomatic ties in exchange for help with the MIAs, the release of political prisoners, and allowing the departure of children born to American military personnel.

"He had a hard time revisiting those places and dealing pragmatically with a regime that at that time was Stalinist," said Lehman. "It was difficult emotionally for McCain to do it. Intellectually, he knew it was the right thing to do."

Vietnam assumed a prominent place on McCain's legislative agenda after he was elected to the Senate in 1986. With Representative Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, a combat veteran, McCain introduced a resolution to open a diplomatic office in Hanoi, a move Reagan opposed.

Later, McCain played a key role with Senator John Kerry on the Senate committee that in early 1993 concluded there was "no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia." A year later the United States lifted an economic embargo against Vietnam, a step toward full normalization in 1995.

When Ridge made his first trip back to Vietnam, a government official showed him the lakeside statue of McCain in Hanoi - initially erected as a testament to the "people's air defense," it had become a monument to the politician featured on it.

"The impression I got was how much they respected him," Ridge said. "They long ago distinguished the war from the warrior."