Burying the hatchet

American presidents have had a hard time dealing with Vietnam. Franklin Roosevelt made a stab at helping it toward independence, but Harry Truman didn’t follow through. Dwight Eisenhower backed French colonialism until it collapsed. John Kennedy cautiously began the American military intervention. Johnson escalated the war, destroying his presidency. Richard Nixon kept the war going for five years, negotiated a peace treaty that didn’t hold, and finally (after resigning) met with humiliating defeat.

The defeat was too painful for Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan or George Bush to do much about Vietnam or mark closure to America’s longest war. Mr. Reagan, in his sunny way, dismissed it as “a noble effort.” Challenger George McGovern called it a defeat and got clobbered.

That left closure to Bill Clinton, and he carried it off well. In his three-day barnstorming visit to Hanoi and Saigon, he finessed the divisive issues that kept domestic politics and much of the world in turmoil for decades. Instead of arguing the rights and wrongs of the conflict, he spoke in sadness about all of the war dead, the 58,000 Americans and the 3 million Vietnamese soldiers and civilians on both sides.

His national security adviser, Samuel R. Berger, explaining Mr. Clinton’s avoidance of moral judgments, said the president wanted to focus on the future.

In careful terms, Mr. Clinton raised Vietnam’s suppression of dissent and limits on emigration, sensitive matters for the one-party communist government that above all wants to stay in power. He called for more openness, but added, “We do not seek to impose these ideals, nor could we.” Mr. Clinton could have been taking a page from a book by Richard J. Kerry, “The Star-Spangled Mirror,” which warns against U.S. efforts to remake other nations in its own image.

American and Vietnamese leaders alike seemed amazed at the warm popular reception of Mr. Clinton, as he strode into crowds and pressed the flesh just as if he were campaigning once more at home. He wasn’t, and that explains why he could do what former presidents could not. Looking toward the future, he pointed the way toward expanded trade and friendship between the two countries.

He apparently said nothing about a huge multi-billion-dollar economic aid package as suggested by Mr. Nixon when the 1973 peace treaty was signed. A new book, by A.J. Langguth, “Our Vietnam,” gives the text of the Nixon aid plan, perhaps for the first time, and advocates resurrecting it. “We should give the Vietnamese the kind of substantial aid we once gave to Germany and Japan,” Mr. Langguth writes. “It is time to forgive them for winning.”

The State Department is cool toward the idea, noting correctly that both sides quickly violated the terms of the treaty and that most U.S. foreign aid has been on a far smaller scale in recent times.

But Mr. Clinton may have seen the book, at least he took a line from it when he said, “Vietnam is not a war. It’s a country.”