Clinton visits scene of Vietnam war that he opposed

Deb Riechmann

Saturday, Nov. 11, 2000 | 4:53 a.m.

WASHINGTON - During the Vietnam War, a youthful Bill Clinton denounced the draft and avoided military service. Now, in the waning days of his presidency, he will become the first U.S. president to visit communist Vietnam since the end of a war that divided America.

As a college student, Clinton wrote a paper that called Selective Service "illegitimate." At age 54, the two-term president is playing conciliator, helping Vietnam further end its isolation and participate in the global economy.

"It's a step to heal wounds that have not healed within our country, remove rifts that still divide," said Douglas Eakeley, a classmate of Clinton's at Britain's Oxford University where Clinton protested the war.

It was Eakeley who gave the president an English walking stick and cap at an Oxford party held to say goodbye to Clinton when he returned to Arkansas to answer the draft, or find a way around it. The stick and cap were gag gifts to help Clinton navigate the jungles of Vietnam, a country he finally will see this week.

Eakeley suggested that it is good that the United States is sending to Vietnam a leader who did not participate in a war in which 58,000 Americans and about 3 million Vietnamese died. "In some ways, it helps the reconciliation process," he said.

The president's three-day visit that begins Thursday is largely symbolic.

It will involve talks about a trade agreement both governments still must approve, human rights and unfinished business from the war, which ended when communist forces captured the capital of South Vietnam on April 30, 1975. At that time, Clinton was teaching law at the University of Arkansas.

Nearly two decades later, as Clinton became president, America still had neither trade nor diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Under Clinton's watch, a trade embargo ended in 1994, diplomatic relations were restored in 1995 and the first postwar American ambassador - former POW Douglas "Pete" Peterson - set up residence in Hanoi.

In a Veteran's Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, the president said: "In our national memory, Vietnam was a war, but Vietnam is also a country, a country emerging from almost 50 years of conflict, upheaval and isolation, and turning its face to a very different world; a country that can succeed in this new global age, only if it becomes more interdependent and open to the world. This is something we should encourage."

Today, half the people of Vietnam and about one-third of all Americans were born after the end of the war. Americans' view of Vietnam might be frozen in the 1972 wrenching photo of a naked 9-year-old Vietnamese girl fleeing a napalm attack. But while government repression continues in Vietnam, U.S. tourists and American culture, movies and fashion are embraced.

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a Vietnam veteran who has pushed for better relations with Vietnam, said Clinton's trip is a capstone, not a turning point. For more than a decade, relations have improved concerning trade, educational exchanges and work to find, recover and return to their families the remains of 2,000 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for from the war, he said.

Clinton's visit to Vietnam is not about the war or "the choices that members of my generation made about serving in the war," Kerry said in a statement. "It will and should focus on the future."

The war shaped their generation.

During the height of the war, Clinton was a student at Georgetown University, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and a law student at Yale. Accusations that Clinton dodged the draft to avoid military service have dogged him throughout his political life.

"I know Vietnam veterans who admire him for his honesty in opposing the war. I know other guys who hate him for it," said David Leopoulos of Arkansas, who has known Clinton since they were boys.

"I was in the Army. I went to visit him at Oxford. I never got the sense that he was this radical nut running around. He was an intelligent man who realized that it (the war) was ridiculous."

Ret. Lt. Gen. Charles W. Dyke, who spent three years in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Division, said that while he did not vote for Clinton, the president's diplomatic gesture is a positive step that he hopes will lead to greater foreign investment in Vietnam.

But he said the president must be careful not to apologize for America's involvement in the war, or Vietnamese casualties. Some American Vietnam veterans would view that as a "sellout, a copout," Dyke said.