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Some of the bafflement arises from a curious inability to come to terms with a failed policy, with America's greatest military defeat. But it is also due to the continuing attitude of the U.S. Government. Fifteen years after U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin slipped away in the predawn darkness of a collapsing Saigon, the U.S. has yet to establish diplomatic relations with the government of Vietnam. Washington continues to act as if Hanoi had sent its troops to invade Virginia instead of down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Since 1975, the U.S. has imposed a trade embargo against Vietnam that has been more effective than the mining of Haiphong harbor ever was. It has helped keep Vietnam's badly managed economy on its knees, which in turn has encouraged a steady flow of refugees to Hong Kong and Malaysia.
Three Administrations in Washington have insisted that Vietnam meet several conditions before diplomatic or commercial relations can return to normal. All Vietnamese troops must be permanently withdrawn from Cambodia and a peaceful settlement must be reached in that ravaged land. The roughly 15,000 Amerasian children (now young adults, like many of the children of the MIAs) must be allowed to leave Vietnam if they wish, and political prisoners freed from re- education camps. Questions about the remaining POW/MIAs should be resolved. So runs the checklist of U.S.-Vietnamese policy, as it has for much of the past decade. Hanoi insists that it has met the conditions. Although progress has been made on all of these issues, Washington is not yet satisfied.
Either way, a sizable number of Americans are saying the time has come for a different course of action. In a poll for TIME/CNN by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman, 48% of those questioned said the U.S. should re-establish relations with Vietnam; 32% are opposed. Vietnam veterans seem to agree: of the 208 vets surveyed for TIME/CNN at the Vietnam memorial, 44% said the U.S. should open an embassy in Hanoi.
"Of course we should establish relations," says Rob Pfeiffer, a high school counselor in Oakland, Me. "We're pretending Vietnam just doesn't exist." An official in the Maine chapter of Veterans for Peace, Pfeiffer says his fellow members support recognition as a means to gain more on-site information about the effects of Agent Orange. "Open it up," says McClellan. "If we established relations with China, why not with Vietnam?" Former antiwar activist Anne Weills, who created a furor in 1968 when she went to Hanoi with a delegation that brought back three American prisoners, comes to the same conclusion from a different perspective. "We owe Vietnam a great debt," says the Berkeley attorney. "Americans have a role to play in the reconstruction of Vietnam because we had such a large role in destroying it."
Weills' view is not widely shared: in the TIME/CNN poll, 80% say the U.S. does not owe Vietnam anything. Nor is the push to establish full diplomatic relations generally embraced by the Vietnamese who escaped in 1975 or have fled in flimsy boats since then. "The U.S. should not normalize until the Vietnamese government guarantees human rights," says Phac X. Nguyen, advertising manager of a Vietnamese-language newspaper in San Jose. "They lowered people to the life of animals."