(2 of 2)
Jesse Helms, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attacked Clinton's recognition of "an unrepentant communist dictatorship." Senate majority leader Bob Dole condemned the move as "a strategic, diplomatic and moral mistake." Yet while both men threatened to block funding for a U.S. embassy in Hanoi, neither cared to acknowledge that the machinery of recognition had been set in motion by George Bush--and that the U.S., together with every other country, continues to have formal relations with all sorts of governments it does not altogether like.
American business, which is solidly behind rapprochement, will not get much from it beyond what Clinton's lifting of the trade embargo achieved last year. The real fruits would come from giving Vietnam most-favored-nation trading status. Still, the Vietnamese seem eager to plow ahead. Said Deac Jones of Connell Bros. Co., a distributor of U.S. consumer goods in Vietnam: "The majority of people here are very pro-American. If you have the exact same brand product, a shampoo made in the U.S. and the Philippines, they will pay more for the U.S. one."
The real anguish remaining at the heart of this vexed relationship will never be easily washed away, of course. The fact that America lost a cause draped in the noblest rhetoric but fought on cynical and divisive terms produced a sense of lingering self-doubt that may never vanish. In a significant way, though, the principles for which the war was waged are ascendant today in Vietnam. The free-market spirit of Saigon is what counts, not the Marxist maunderings of some old men in Hanoi. The Vietnamese, who lost many more lives than Americans did along the streets, rivers and paddy fields of a singularly ugly encounter, have put the past behind them. Americans need do no less.
--Reported by Dean Fischer/Washington, Tim Larimer/Hanoi and Carey Zessiger/Ho Chi Minh City