To print this page, select "Print" from the File menu of your browser salon.com > Politics2000 April 29, 2000 URL: http://www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/04/29/tucker McCain's crazy last days in Vietnam He goes out with a bang, while a reporter is left to whimper. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Jake Tapper As if Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., wasn't already convinced the hard-line communists were back in charge in the Vietnam Politburo, one of the six members of his traveling press corps was detained at the border and not allowed on a Lufthansa flight out from behind this iron curtain. Amid the confusion of our arrival in Hanoi on Tuesday morning, where McCain participated in a "repatriation" ceremony honoring the remains of what are suspected to be six U.S. soldiers missing in action since the Vietnam War, Tucker Carlson, 30, the talented bon vivant who writes for the Weekly Standard and Talk, didn't get his passport stamped. Thus, when Tucker and three other journalists -- Time's Jay Carney, U.S. News & World Reports Roger Simon and me -- proceeded to the border for checkout, Carlson's papers weren't in order. It's Carlson's story, so I'll leave him to write the rest of it. But suffice to say that when we met up with McCain and his staffers, who did all they could to help get Tucker out, it seemed pretty clear that the insane bureaucratic cogs and wheels of communism were already in play. By the time we got on the plane, leaving Tucker with a U.S. Embassy official and a translator, it seemed a fitting end to a trip where McCain expressed dismay about the hard-line direction of Vietnam's Politboru, Vietnamese officials raised a fuss about a few minor, salty comments from McCain and the media jumped on the easier story. "Yeah, the hard-liners are back in power," McCain muttered. When we arrived in Frankfurt, Germany, and checked up on Carlson's status, McCain was glad to hear Carlson had refused to sign a statement stating he had been in the country illegally. At the airport, McCain was concerned that his personal appeal for Carlson's freedom might have actually made matters worse. (As of Saturday afternoon, Carlson had extricated himself from the tentacles of communist bureaucracy and was expected back in Washington by Sunday.) More odd news came when we dove into copies of the International Herald Tribune and saw a story about McCain's week here, a New York Times report including a spin seemingly pulled from the front page of the government-run Vietnam News. McCain "launched a harsh attack on Vietnam's Communist government for everything from its ideology to its economy to its sincerity to its corruption to the fact that it displays the hammer and sickle on its banners." McCain's Wednesday visit to the Hanoi Hilton -- where he was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese for much of his five and a half years as a prisoner or war -- was, according to this account, a time when McCain "found it appropriate to get angry once again at the guards who had held him." He didn't seem angry to me, or to the other reporters in the pool who followed him. His criticisms were usually focused on trade, and his harshest rebukes turned toward the war and couched in the calming qualifier: "But that’s in the past." As he walked through the Hanoi Hilton, now converted to a ridiculously censored museum some of which honors the "humane" treatment of American P.O.W.s, his mood seemed just fine. He laughed. He pointed out that in one Vietnamese propaganda photo an American prisoner was scratching his chin with his middle finger. After reading a plaque describing the North Vietnamese army's wonderful treatment of P.O.W.s, he joked, "that’s entertainment." He was asked about any lingering anger toward the guards who tortured him and his fellow P.O.W.s. And, as he has said millions of times before, when it came to the guards, "I still bear them ill will, not because of what they did to me but because of what they did to some of my friends, including killing some of them." On Thursday, the Vietnam News quoted Vietnamese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh saying McCain's comments had run "counter to the norms of morality that those people who brought bombs and shells to sow death among our people and wreak havoc with a country now pass themselves off as having the right to criticize their victims-cum-saviors." Phan went on to say McCain's comments flew in the face of remarks he had made in 1994, in which he praised his captors for their exemplary hospitality. There is no record of McCain ever making such comments, of course, which is why they never appeared in the Vietnam News story. Maybe this shouldn't have been a huge surprise in the context of this trip. After McCain’s Wednesday visit with National Assembly Speaker Nong Duc Manh -- in which McCain strongly urged the Vietnamese government to sign the U.S.-Vietnam trade agreement, and Nong said that he hoped the United States would help pay for the "consequences" of the war, a vague allusion to the effects of U.S. use of Agent Orange, the Vietnam News reported that Nong had given McCain a stern lecture about Agent Orange. But, at least according to what the translator had said, such was not the case. The words "Agent" and "Orange" hadn't even been uttered. To McCain, the tone of the coverage in the Vietnam News this week has, indeed, been unsettling and significant. "They never reacted like that before," he said in Frankfurt. "It's another indicator that you’ve got the hard-liners in charge." During McCain's previous seven trips here -- according to his chief of staff, Mark Salter -- McCain has always been that frank when discussing his prison guards, or any other issue. And, as with this trip, his comments have always been within the context that, with the possible exception of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., himself a Vietnam veteran, there is no American elected official who has done more to help smooth relations with Vietnam. 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. salon.com | April 29, 2000   - - - - - - - - - - - - About the writer Jake Tapper is the Washington correspondent for Salon News.