ABSTRACT
In 2000, President William Jefferson Clinton became the first sitting United States president to visit Vietnam since the war. His visit was the culmination of a nearly ten-year process of normalization of relations with this former enemy in Southeast Asia. The major speech of his visit, delivered to a crowd of students at one of Hanoi’s universities, focused on the future cooperation of the two nations, said much in praise of Vietnam, and only briefly acknowledged the pain of the war. Clinton noted that the wounds of war would be healed by “embracing the spirit of reconciliation and the courage to build better tomorrows for our children” and that “a painful, painful past can be redeemed in a peaceful and prosperous future” (Shane-Armstrong 2003, 204-205). The United States lost over 58,000 soldiers in the war, and another 300,000 were wounded. The losses of Vietnamese soldiers were at least ten times the U.S. number, and Vietnamese civilian losses were in the millions. The human cost of this war was very high, yet the war has taken on greater significance than even this large number of lives would suggest. The Vietnam War, or, to the Vietnamese, “the American War”, has become a defining symbol of the Cold War, a triumphant example of Third World nationalism, and a tremendous crack in the national identity of the world’s greatest superpower. The Vietnam War has the reputation of being not only an American defeat but one of the nation’s biggest mistakes and thus might be one of the best test cases for the ability of a superpower to act on the ethic of contrition.
