Reconciliation Between Peace and Normalization, 1975-1995
Prepared for US Institute of Peace
Dialogue on War Legacies and Peace,
October 13, 2022 (excerpted but not delivered because
of length)
By John McAuliff
My concept of reconciliation is linked to my arrival in Ha
Noi for the first time on April 30, 1975 as a staff member in the Peace
Education division of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker
organization. By happenstance the arrival
of a delegation of five anti-war activists coincided with the last day of the
war and the departure from Saigon of US ambassador Graham Martin.
I remained with AFSC for seven more years, addressing the
tumultuous post war era of reunification, the US trade embargo, denial of
diplomatic relations, refugees, reeducation camps, the Khmer Rouge Year Zero,
their brutal attacks in the Mekong Delta and defeat by Vietnam’s military; then China’s retaliatory invasion. I made my first trip to the south in 1978, discovering
a complex reality that was both liberation and occupation.
When I finished my decade of work with AFSC, I wanted to
find ways to realistically reconcile the US with Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and
created the US-Indochina Reconciliation Project. Our primary focuses were academics and
non-governmental organizations that could not only provide substantial
assistance through their interaction with counterparts in Indochina but would
create ripples throughout US society and culture. Undertaking these programs was closely tied
to my ongoing contact with governmental and semi-governmental figures in all
four countries. My unusual experience
and interaction with “other sides” gave credibility and allowed me to share
insights in all directions, some useful, some overoptimistic and no doubt
presumptuous. My goal was to convey
spirit, not messages.
I believed that reconciliation requires mutual respect, that
you reconcile with a former antagonist based on who they are, not on who you
want them to be. Reconciliation was not
forgetting, but it was putting aside pain and unfinished business in order to
move forward. It requires trust to begin
and builds trust as it goes.
The post-war US and Vietnam were psychologically as well as
physically wounded and politically dominated by suspicion of the motives and
methods of the other. In the immediate aftermath of the war polls
showed a significant majority of Americans had wanted to normalize relations
and even provide humanitarian aid. However many government and military officials
were embittered by the shock of our first lost war and the deaths of friends
and comrades, both American and Vietnamese.
Dramatic accounts of suffering of boat people and in reeducation camps and
the personal stories of resettled refugees changed the atmosphere in the US. With the general public films like Rambo
created a retrospective negativism about the enemy. Vietnam felt the deaths of two or three
million people, hundreds of thousands of civilian and military still burdened
by war wounds, a heavily bombed economy in the north and despoiled countryside
in the south.
Indicative of the distance that had to be covered to achieve
reconciliation, Vietnam rejected normalization of relations at the beginning of
the Carter Administration because it did not include reconstruction aid as
pledged in the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement.
This happened when the Woodcock Commission visited Hanoi and Ken Quinn
met in Paris with Phan Hien. After the
Vietnamese reconsidered, the US rejected normalization late in the same administration
when Nguyen Co Thach met in New York with Dick Holbrook, ostensibly because of a
new refugee exodus and Vietnam’s anticipated offensive against the Khmer Rouge. A more likely explanation is the Brzezinski
priority for alignment with China against the Soviet Union. A
useful policy step toward reconciliation was Vietnam becoming a UN member 45
years ago this month without objection from the US.
Below the policy level the Carter Administration did assist
reconciliation, enabling Vietnam to send delegations to the US. One was from the Women’s Union with a superb
interpreter who is on this panel, Ton Nu Thi Ninh. Carter also let the Vietnamese Mission to the
UN escape their 25 mile travel limit by coming to Philadelphia to visit farms
and the Philadelphia Inquirer and to enjoy a picnic with NGOs that had or
aspired to projects in their country .
The picnic continued through the more hostile Reagan and Bush eras at
the home of Bill and Kathy Rieser in Bucks County and goes forward in a more
modest form today at our home in Riverhead.
Fortunately for both countries there were people to people
paths outside of, and sometimes despite, official channels. In fact it was the multiplicity of paths,
reflecting different motives and identities in the US that gave the Vietnamese
a multi-level understanding of what the US was about when it was not waging
war.
In the twenty years it took to get from the end of the war
to normalization of relations, the process of reconciliation was uneven,
sometimes, as the Vietnamese taught us, one step forward, two steps back. I am focusing on this period, both because
that was the time of my greatest involvement and because it is often left out
of policy makers’ memoirs of the normalization process. (While I have tried to be inclusive, I
guarantee that I have left out several important organizations and people.)
As I summarized reconciliation initiatives, it is striking
how many took place in 1988-99. Was that
because it took thirteen or fourteen years for Americans to heal and integrate
their memories and relationships with Vietnam?
Or was it because the Vietnamese made it possible, a consequence of the
Sixth Party Congress in 1986? In
addition to the fundamental economic reforms of doi moi, the Congress called
for broad engagement with the world rather than dependence on the Soviet Union.
Peace oriented religious NGOs that had provided humanitarian
assistance to both sides during the war had quickly reentered reunified Vietnam,
notably AFSC, the Mennonite Central Committee and Church World Service of the
National Council of Churches. In
addition to resuming their own programs, eventually with the first in country
staff, they collaborated with peace activists on Friendshipment, a boatload of wheat
from Houston in April 1978. It was
coordinated by Cora Weiss, a leader of the primary antiwar coalitions and the
cofounder of the Committee of Liaison wartime channel to US POWs. The US Committee for Scientific Cooperation
with Vietnam (Ed Cooperman, 1978) was also an early player based on more
ideological alignment. USIRP organized
delegations about twice a year to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos beginning in
1985. They were largely made up of
university professors who studied the country or the war and of staff of academic
organizations. As proved to be the case,
we believed that academics would be a substantive doorway, benefiting their own
research, publication, public education and institutional engagement. This led to numerous professional links
between US and Vietnamese institutions.
Veterans added an essential dimension to reconciliation.
especially appealing to the media. driven by the personal need at least for
closure and sometimes for atonement. Vietnam
Veterans of America created the template of engagement with counterparts from
the other side (Bobby Muller, John Terzano. 1981); the William Joiner Center
convened gatherings of Vietnamese and American writers (Kevin Bowen, 1987), Vietnam
Friendship Village (George Mizo, 1988) took on care of Agent Orange victims,
Vets with a Mission (Bill Kimball, 1988) and the Veterans Vietnam Restoration
Project (Freddy Champaign, 1989) sent volunteers to construct schools and
clinics. The Indochina Arts Project sponsored “As Seen by Both Sides”
exhibitions in 17 US galleries (David Thomas, 1991).
More mainstream NGOs like World
Vision and Save the Children began aid with private funds motivated by Richard
Childress at the National Security Council to fulfill a breakthrough agreement
negotiated by General John Vessey and Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach in
August 1987. This took reconciliation to
a governmental level as each side acknowledged the other’s humanitarian needs:
return of MIA remains and aid to address the consequences of the war. Senators visited Vietnam, most symbolically
veterans Larry Pressler (1988), John Kerry and John McCain. C-SPAN documented their trips, in part probably
because founder Brian Lamb was a veteran.
Educational institutions such as the Harvard Institute for International
Development, the Social Science Research Council (1988), the American Council
of Learned Societies and the Institute of International Education established
cooperation with counterparts. Harvard’s program which began in 1989 deserves
special attention. With assistance and advice
from the Christopher Reynolds Foundation In 1990 and 1991, Tom Vallely and David
Dapice took state planners, economic ministers, and other high officials to
Indonesia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand to observe and discuss the
economic success of their neighbors.
The US business community was a factor that became
especially important in economic and thus political reconciliation between
the pre-normalization lifting of the US embargo
and achieving Vietnam’s membership in the World Trade Organization and a
bilateral trade agreement. The key
catalyst was the US-Vietnam Trade Council launched in 1989 after discussions
between Foreign Minister Thach and Virginia Foote.
US foundations both supported the creative reconciliation
ideas of American organizations and shaped pioneering initiatives. The American
Express Foundation helped preserve the Temple of Literature and stimulated
corporate philanthropy. The Christopher
Reynolds Foundation aided humanitarian, education and policy work. The Kunstadter Family Foundation focused on
cultural institutions and individual artists.
The Ford Foundation demonstrated the national development impact of
sophisticated funding with engaged government partners.
We should also not neglect the role that Ann Mills Griffiths
and Richard Childress played in reconciliation.
While there were times we seemed at loggerheads, their underlying
conviction was correct that the return and accounting for MIA remains was an
essential component of the process and could motivate critical sectors of US
opinion.
The vital engagement of Vietnamese Americans was largely
although not exclusively a post normalization development as the exile
community in the US was dominated by hard liners who did not stop at killing other
Vietnamese and probably one American that publicly advocated reconciliation. They demonstrated outside our conferences,
public events with delegations from Vietnam and even the art exhibits organized
in 1991 by David Thomas, himself a veteran.
Exceptions with which I had personal contact were East Meets West (Lay Ly
Hayslip, 1988) and Private Agencies Collaborating Together (PACT) (Dao
Spencer). Minh Kauffman and her
American husband Fred opened the Educational
Exchange center in Bangkok in 1990 under the Mennonite Central Committee,
moving to Hanoi in 1994. The renamed Center for Educational Exchange with
Vietnam (CEEVN) became a unit of the American Council of Learned Societies
and played a central role in administration of the unprecedented
pre-normalization Fulbright program engineered by Senator Kerry.
The Aspen Institute’s Indochina Policy Forum from 1987 to
1992 was itself an explicit exercise in reconciliation bringing together war
era US military and State Department officials with academics, NGOs, Vietnamese
Americans, businesspeople and former peace activists, laying the intellectual
and emotional groundwork for meetings between US Congress people and Vietnamese
officials under Aspen’s Vietnamese-American Dialogue Forum. Its opening meeting featured passionate
debate about whether Vietnam mattered at all, much less whether it was worth
normalizing with.
In March of 1988 the US government moved to discourage too
much spontaneous grass roots reconciliation, raiding the offices of Lindblad
Travel and threatening companies that were organizing trips for veterans. The veterans were not intimidated, famously
noting that they had been threatened with arrest if they didn’t go to Vietnam
when they were young and now if they did go.
In the pre-normalization period, one role USIRP delegations
played was to break through the intellectual isolation of the war and post-war
periods by bringing their own and other books.
In addition to volumes on contemporary US politics and history, we
brought sets of the Encyclopedia Britannica. In that era they were the real printed volumes
not CDs. During a decade, we left sets
in Ha Noi, Da Nang, Hue, Da Lat, Ho Chi Minh City, as well as in Phnom Penh and
Vientiane. When Foreign Minister Nguyen
Co Thach came to our home in New York for dinner, he spotted on a shelf a copy
of Paul Samuelson’s “Economics” and asked for a copy. After we gave him the latest edition, he
directed Ministry staff to translate and publish it in two volumes. I later sent the Vietnamese edition to Dr.
Samuelson and fortunately he did not exercise his copyright. Provision of books was institutionalized and
magnified by Books for Asia.
An equally important dimension was the visit of Vietnamese
experts to the US in the Carter and Bush Administrations. One of the first was Dr. Ton That Tung who
had founded the Ministry of Health in Hanoi and had been one of the first to expose
the scourge of Agent Orange. I remember
him speaking at a medical school in Philadelphia during the Carter
Administration when a Vietnamese American accused him of being a communist. Tung shut that down by proudly proclaiming,
“I am a member of the Royal family in Hue”.
The visit we sponsored in 1988 by economist Nguyen Xuan Oanh
was particularly powerful because of his former prominence in South Vietnamese
government and banking and his high visibility as an advocate of doi moi
market economics. Twelve years after the
war ended, his government permitted him to travel to the US. But despite his Harvard PhD and friendship
with many Americans in wartime Saigon, the State Department denied him a visa
in May. That produced a New York Times
story and a critical editorial. With the
help of Mort Halperin in the American Civil Liberties Union Washington office he
came in October, creating much excitement among Vietnamese Americans and US oil
companies. His trip opened the way for
visits by many official and semi-official delegations.
Another page in our reconciliation portfolio between 1988
and 1995 was to sponsor 22 Vietnamese and Cambodians to study at the Intensive
English Language Institute of SUNY Buffalo.
They came from Ministries of Education, Foreign Affairs and Commerce,
the National Center for Social Sciences, journalism and business. In addition to language skills, they gained
insight into the US university system and the potential of exchanges. The experience inspired creation of the US-Indochina Educational Exchange
Enhancement Project with Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos undertaken 1997-2001 in
partnership with the Institute of International Education and in collaboration
with NAFSA: Association of International Educators. One of the most illustrious alumni of
SUNY Buffalo is Ha Kim Ngoc, former ambassador to Washington and eloquent
speaker at a previous USIP conference, currently serving as Vice Minister of
Foreign Affairs.
Because of the focus of this conference, I have described
only our reconciliation with Vietnam.
However there was one project that crossed over. In collaboration with Eileen Blumenthal, we
brought the Cambodian classical dancers to the US for the first time. The mantra from Cambodian exiles here was
that Vietnamese occupiers had corrupted Cambodian culture rather than restoring
it after the Khmer Rouge campaign of annihilation. The extraordinary artistic success of the
dancers and their few survivor teachers destroyed that line of propaganda. A concerted effort was made by exile groups
to entice dancers to defect, not a hard task while war was ongoing between the
new Cambodian government supported by Vietnamese troops and the Khmer Rouge
backed by the US and ASEAN. I was
attacked so successfully in the press for imprisoning the dancers in their
hotel rooms to prevent further defections that Representative Steven Solarz
intervened. The State Department sent
Tim Carney to interview each dancer in private. The only additional dancer to defect was
prearranged with the company because as a star she felt obliged to complete the
tour. The last attack from a right-wing
Australian origin academic appeared in the Boston Herald, confirming my
invidious connection to the Vietnamese because of a coincident dinner in our
apartment for Foreign Minister Thach.
The Herald story was picked up by the VOA or Radio Free Asia. In our farewell reception for the dancers
after returning to Phnom Penh, they were anxious I would be arrested because of
the allegations broadcast by US government radio.
A constant challenge during the pre-normalization period was
developing trust. Our first group of
academics in 1985 had an easy and fulfilling visit because their program was
sponsored by Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach.
Our twice annual visits thereafter were uneven and uncertain as we had
been handed over to the State tourism company and it was never certain before
we arrived whether we had visas and permission to do non-tourist activities
such as meetings with universities. The
nadir was in June 1990 when Vietnamese security expelled the first American to
teach English in a university shortly before our group’s arrival. However rather than blame her sponsor, the
Mennonite Central Committee, the police paper, Cong An Nhan Dan, linked her to
a Vietnamese language program we organized the previous summer. I was summoned to an interview with a police
or intelligence officer who furiously insisted I speak to him in
Vietnamese. Sadly I had discovered
during our classes that I could neither hear nor speak the tones that are
essential.
A common language is important for trust. Le Van Bang who became reunified Viet Nam’s
first ambassador to Washington told us that there was no Vietnamese word for
non-governmental organization and that suspicious cadre thought the correct
translation was “anti-governmental” organization. Former Ambassador Mike Marine has remarked a
couple of times that the wide range of non-governmental interaction with
Vietnamese lay the groundwork for official relations.
One way we built trust between NGOs and Vietnamese, Lao and
Cambodian counterparts was to hold increasingly larger conferences, the first
eight in the US, then in Laos and Cambodia, peaking at more that 400
participants and ultimately involving local as well as international NGOs. These were the first place that discussions
took place about sensitive legacy of war issues like land mines, unexploded
ordnance and Agent Orange. Viet Nam had
not raised them in official discussions with the US, presumably because it did
not want to complicate the process of normalizing relations and achieving a
trade agreement. Many NGO projects in indochina
can trace their roots to these conferences.
One of the most rewarding projects in reconciliation was
when we brought members of the OSS Deer Team to Vietnam to meet with Viet Minh
with whom they had worked in Tan Trao in 1945.
Their mission was training and supply of weapons and radios for military
cooperation against the evacuation home of Japanese occupying forces. Reportedly their medic saved the life of Ho
Chi Minh. The group had a moving
meeting with General Giap. Desaix
Anderson reports on receiving them in his memoir but does not credit either our
organization or the Ford Foundation for bringing them to his door. A couple of years later we invited the Viet
Minh veterans to New York to meet with their OSS friends. Both encounters included roundtable
discussions with US scholars, culminating in a public program at the Asia
Society in New York with a stirring conclusion from Deputy Foreign Minister Le
Mai. Reminding American and Vietnamese
leaders of an earlier era of friendship and reconciliation may have helped
strengthen the new one.
Reconciliation can mean avoiding hard problems such as historical
judgement about the morality and legality of US intervention to preserve and
then replace French colonialism; responsibility for consequences of weapons and
methods like napalm, cluster bombs, Agent Orange, rural depopulation and Phoenix
assassinations; as well as objective evaluation
of crimes of war alleged to the forces of both sides.
Reconciliation can also be undertaken for strategic motives. Ironically the same concern about Chinese
power that motivated our mistaken alliances in 1945 and 1954 is a driving force
once more. The US and Vietnam’s shared
concern about China’s nine dash line aggression in the East Sea, known
internationally as the South China Sea, predated and motivated official
reconciliation.
Finally reconciliation does not solve all problems. Because of different ideologies, histories
and values, our respective concepts of human rights and democracy are likely to
conflict indefinitely. The US has a
tendency to universalize its perspective into a kind of natural law and fault
those who believe otherwise. Any effort
to force our views on Vietnam the way we try to do with Cuba risks undermining
reconciliation.
We were invited to reflect on how aspects of the
U.S.-Vietnam postwar experience might be relevant to other countries. I am happy to do so because my growing
concern since 1997 has been how to achieve similar normalization with Cuba. President Obama’s historic step to establish diplomatic
relations substantially changed the atmosphere, but did not constitute reconciliation
as long as he could only tinker at the edges of the classic economic warfare of
a harsh unilateral and universally denounced embargo. Critics say the Cubans did not move fast
enough to change economically and politically after the opening. True, but they ignore how a harsh embargo and
covert democracy programs contributed to Cuban suspicion. The Trump/Rubio Administration did everything
possible to confirm accusations that Obama was a trojan horse and the Biden/Menendez
Administration so far has only marginally repaired the damage.
For further insight, see the two part binational 2020 zoom
described on the ivory flyer.
Normalization of Viet Nam - US Relations, Reflections
from the Ground Up:
The Contribution of NGOs and Peoples Organizations from
1975 to 1995
https://vnpeacecomm.blogspot.com/2020/07/webinars-on-normalization-of-us-viet.html
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