How Vietnam fell in love with John McCain

From a navy captain bombing Hanoi to an esteemed friend of the country, the late senator mirrors America’s complex relationship with Vietnam. But there’s more to McCain’s appeal in Vietnam – he was years ahead of his peers in rooting for friendship

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John McCain on his 2008 presidential campaign. Photo: Reuters

Published: 9:00pm, 31 Aug 2018Updated: 11:27am, 20 Sep 2018

ALMOST 51 YEARS after then-US navy captain John McCain was retrieved from Hanoi’s Truc Bach lake by a vengeful crowd, his former foes see the late American politician in a very similar light to the country he served – as an enemy turned friend.

“He recognised war is the best lesson for peace, so he is a veteran who pioneered reconciliation,” said Duong Trung Quoc, a historian and member of Vietnam’s National Assembly.

When McCain visited Vietnam in 1985, his first trip back after being released from a Hanoi prisoner-of-war camp in 1973 where he was incarcerated for more than five years, relations with the United States were almost as bad as they had been during the war. Vietnam was fighting a decade-long war in Cambodia against the Khmer Rouge, which was backed directly by Beijing and indirectly by Washington. A US embargo was in place, while a cold war with China, by then a covert strategic partner of Washington, occasionally flashed into bloodshed.

The Reagan administration maintained that Vietnam deserved no diplomatic recognition while its troops occupied Cambodia, while unfounded reports that missing American servicemen remained imprisoned in Vietnam made recognition of the Hanoi government politically unpopular.

McCain, however, made support for renewed relations one of his first of many rebukes of presidents from his own party, introducing failed legislation and penning an op-ed in The Washington Post in 1988 to pitch the idea.

John McCain is pulled out of a Hanoi lake by North Vietnamese Army soldiers and Vietnamese citizens in October 1967. Photo: Reuters

“McCain had respect for the Vietnamese and wanted closure on the war. Reagan was committed to ‘rolling back’ communist gains,” Abuza says. “Reagan and [then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping] both saw Hanoi as a Soviet proxy that had to be contained.”