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McCain's crazy last days in Vietnam | page 1, 2 Rightly or wrongly, McCain has led the charge on lifting the embargo against Vietnam, on establishing diplomatic relations, on trying to bring about a resolution to the P.O.W./M.I.A. controversy. Of course, McCain is not always diplomatic; he is not a diplomat. So, on Friday, in the lobby of the Rex Hotel when a reporter asked him what he thought about the outcome of the war, he said, rather nonchalantly, "Well, I think the wrong guys won." When pressed as to why McCain -- a former Navy flier, avowed anti-Communist and former P.O.W. -- felt it was bad that the North Vietnamese won, he said, "Well, I think they lost millions of their best people who left by boat, thousands by execution and hundreds of thousands who went to re-education camps." McCain went on to say that "the object of my relationship with Vietnam has been to heal the wounds that exist, particularly among our veterans, and to move forward with a positive relationship." That a spokeswoman for the Vietnamese Foreign Ministry would talk about "bombs and shells" and "sow[ing] death" is fine with him, McCain said, but that's not what he was here to talk about. "Apparently some in the Vietnamese government don't want to do that [moving forward] and that's their decision." Another eruption from the Foreign Ministry followed, one repeated in the New York Times with the leap that McCain was "accusing Vietnamese officials of only pretending to want to improve relations." But what McCain did focus on during this trip is that things here seem to be worsening. "The fact that they for years negotiated a trade agreement, initiated it and then went back on it, clearly there's been a change in who's running things," McCain said. But stories seem to focus on that salty curmudgeon McCain screwing things up with his big mouth. Additionally, McCain notes, "All they let me see [on this trip] was the foreign minister" and a couple of members of the National Assembly. The big three running the show are the Communist Party secretary, the president and the prime minister. "Of all the visits I made before this, there wasn't one when I didn't see one of the top three." And he was denied visits to any of the three this time long before we arrived. "That was before I said a word," McCain
says.
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