U.S.

Clinton Planning Trip To Vietnam

September 14, 2000 / 8:22 AM EDT / AP

President Clinton plans to visit Vietnam as one of his final foreign tours as U.S. president, but will make the politically sensitive trip only after the November elections, officials said.

The White House plans to announce soon that President Clinton will tack the trip to the end of a scheduled visit to Brunei, said administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity. President Clinton is to attend the annual gathering of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in Bandar Seri Begawan, Brunei, a week after the Nov. 7 election.

The plan to make the visit in November was first reported by the newspaper, USA Today, in Thursday's editions.

President Clinton discussed the possibility of a trip last week during a brief meeting with Vietnamese President Tran Duc Long. Both leaders were in New York to attend the U.N. Millennium Summit.

The president has long said he would like to visit Vietnam, site of the war that helped define his generation. Vietnam's political isolation and President Clinton's personal baggage complicated and delayed that dream.

The Vietnam War cost 58,000 American and approximately 3 million Vietnamese lives.

President Clinton was in college and graduate school during the war years and did not serve in Vietnam. Some of his critics still call him a draft-dodger.

Mr. Clinton's choice of Gore, a Vietnam War veteran, as his running mate in 1992 was seen then as one attempt to overcome a potential political deficit.

Making the trip after the election would lessen the chance that controversy about President Clinton's visit could hog news coverage when Gore, now the Democratic presidential candidate, may need it most.

As president, Mr. Clinton has pursued a cautious rapprochement with Vietnam. He lifted the trade embargo against the communist government in 1994, and the next year restored diplomatic relations.

President Clinton reopened the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi in 1996 and in 1998 issued his first waiver of a law that bars trade relations with communist nations that deny citizens the right to emigrate.

Earlier this year, he dispatched Defense Secretary William Cohen to Vietnam as the first U.S. secretary of defense to visit since the war ended in April, 1975.

Cohen's trip was intended to reinforce the Defense Department's commitment to finding, recovering and returning to their families the remains of 2,000 U.S. servicemen still unaccounted for from the war.

It was also aimed at conveying the Clinton administration's interest in ties between American and Vietnamese armed forces.