Does Clinton Need This?

By Kevin Fedarko

AS RAIN TURNED TO SLEET IN WASHINGton last Thursday, a young man stood silently on the sidewalk next to a White House gate, balancing a flagpole from which hung a black banner inscribed POW-MIA. He is a frequent and unnecessary reminder to Bill Clinton that the psychological and emotional turf of a war that took the lives of more than 58,000 Americans is dangerous terrain to a President who did not serve in it.

The same day, 62 Senators on Capitol Hill voted to urge the President to tread into that territory and put an end to two decades of rancor with Vietnam. Although the Senate bill was nonbinding, its call to lift the 19- year-long embargo on trade with Vietnam offers Clinton license to take the politically sensitive step. The vote also provides the President with safe passage through a set of formidable obstacles strewn along the road to reconciliation; 2,238 of them to be exact -- the American soldiers whose fate in Indochina remains unsettled and whose families still demand that the freeze-out continue until they are given a full account of what happened to their loved ones.

Although the Clinton Administration is deliberately vague on timing, a senior White House aide confirmed that the President last week received a recommendation from his top advisers to lift the embargo. Some sources say the President could act as early as this week. When he does move, it will be the biggest step yet in a carefully choreographed pas de deux that the U.S. and Vietnam have been cautiously enacting for the past seven months. Aside from the financial incentives, Hanoi has been keen to reestablish links with the U.S. as a counterweight to the looming influence of China in the region. American businessmen are eager to cash in on the potential market a liberated Vietnam will open up. But all the economic and geopolitical considerations are hostage to the emotionally charged matter of the missing Americans. The question for Clinton is less geostrategic than political: Can he now afford to incur the wrath of a small but highly vocal constituency?

The U.S. has been flirting with the idea of ending the embargo ever since the Bush Administration, prodded by companies that feared they were losing out to foreign competitors, began allowing U.S. firms to bid for contracts and prepare to conduct business once the embargo was over. The most important step came in July, when Clinton gave the green light for international lending institutions to begin pumping money into Vietnam's dilapidated economy. But for Clinton, vulnerability on the issue of draft dodging made it impossible for him to act without the support of Congress. With that in mind, National Security Adviser Tony Lake made a trip up to Capitol Hill last fall to pay a call on John Kerry, Massachusetts' highly decorated Vietnam veteran. The President, Lake explained, was prepared to end the boycott, but he needed political cover. And cover he got. Within weeks, both Kerry and Arizona Republican John McCain, another veteran, had made trips to Hanoi and returned issuing statements that Vietnam was cooperating fully on the MIAS. That set the stage last week for the nonbinding vote, the closest thing to a carte blanche the White House can hope for.

At the same time, POW activists and the families of MIAS were gearing up to block any change. Most veterans' organizations and POW-MIA groups argue that neither Vietnam nor the U.S. has been forthcoming to assist the search for those missing. Says New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith, who spearheaded the opposition: "If we lift the embargo, we will lose the only remaining bargaining chip we have."

Such arguments have increasingly lost headway against a tide of evidence running in the other direction. Within the past two years, Vietnam has reversed its policy of forcing the U.S. to drag out answers one name at a time. For several weeks, nearly 100 Americans have been combing crash sites in remote areas of the countryside in search of remains. In the face of such cooperation, the demand that each of the MIAS still considered unaccounted for must either walk out of the jungle or have their remains located has begun to sound increasingly niggling and obstructionist -- not to mention impractical in a country whose topography and climate have thwarted the search for 300,000 of its own missing soldiers. Kerry and McCain say the best way to continue the search is by improving ties with Hanoi. "You can't do the accounting," says Kerry, "if you're not there, talking to the soldiers and generals who know about the war."

In the end, however, the issue of normalizing relations with Vietnam no longer hinges on the unanswered -- or unanswerable -- questions of what happened to America's missing soldiers; instead it has become a debate about whether the war is finally, conclusively over. And hard though it may be for those such as the wraith haunting the White House gate, perhaps the pain of the past is best ended simply by moving on.

With reporting by James Carney and Bruce van Voorst/Washington and William Dowell/ Hong Kong