http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020204fr_archive03
Some excerpts:
Against the advice of his staff, who saw yet another committee as a political abyss, Kerry said yes when George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, asked him to chair it. "It was not a politically rewarding thing for him to take on," Senator Kennedy told me. "And it turned out to be a true national service."
McCain, the former prisoner, was named to the committee. He had travelled to Vietnam for President Bush, in support of General Vessey's efforts. He had met with Vietnamese leaders. "They've never understood all these allegations about their keeping people behind," he recalls. "Time after time, they would say to me, 'Why would we keep them?' " McCain saw the difficulty of coaxing Vietnamese officials, for the sake of a few hundred long-missing Americans, to coöperate in the kind of investigative work that Hanoi would never be able to do for the hundreds of thousands of its own missing soldiers. He knew that Buddhists believe that an uninterred or improperly interred corpse condemns a soul to eternal wandering, so the fate of their own missing sons was far from insignificant to the Vietnamese.
"Before that committee convened, whatever harebrained and wild allegation or story came up had instant credence," McCain told me. "By the methodical work that John Kerry did . . . Americans were made much more aware of the realities." Kerry travelled to Vietnam eight times; he supervised the examination of thousands of documents and photographs; and he took testimony from family members, leaders of veterans' organizations, intelligence officials, and negotiators from the Paris peace talks. He subpoenaed several hundred people, and put under oath for the first time those who had run the war, including Henry Kissinger.
Kerry and McCain, by "pulling in the same harness," in the words of one staff member, were able to get the Vietnamese to turn over troves of P.O.W. evidence; one batch included McCain's old flight helmet. What was perhaps more amazing, they were able to get the Department of Defense to declassify a million pages of documents. Every conceivable theory was aired, every charge levelled, and every hope given expression. And what this investigation revealed, in the words of its final report—twelve hundred and twenty-three pages long—was that "while the Committee has some evidence suggesting the possibility a POW may have survived to the present, and while some information remains yet to be investigated, there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."
...
"Listen," Kerry said to me, sitting forward in his chair at his Washington home. "I defended him in those hearings when some stupid-ass right-wing idiot accused him of being the Manchurian Candidate, that somehow the Vietnamese had brainwashed him. This is the most unbelievably callous, degrading, nonsensical piece of crap I've ever heard in my life, coming from some chicken hawk out there, to hurl at somebody who spent as long as he did being tortured and standing up for his country, and caring about it as much as he did. It's incredible that people would behave like that, absolutely stunning."
Sometimes McCain was attacked by his fellow-senators and sometimes by witnesses. He was the lightning rod. I was told by a member of the committee staff that when Kerry and McCain were sitting near each other on the senators' dais, Kerry would, at such moments, unobtrusively move his hand over to McCain and place it on his arm and leave it there, a quiet gesture of what was becoming absolute mutual support. I asked McCain if he had been aware of Kerry's touch. "Yes," he replied. "He did that several times, and I'm glad he did. I'm grateful to him."
(By A.M. Rosenthal)
In the winter of 1973, the Nixon-Kissinger team and its most passionate American enemies were in agreement on one overriding judgment: The war in Vietnam was lost and had to be ended.
About 17 years earlier, President Eisenhower had begun sending military advisers and intelligence operators into Vietnam --the first American involvement. Then Presidents Kennedy and Johnson each chose to deepen a war that tore apart American society long before it was over.
Richard Nixon became the only President to try, almost desperately, to end the war through negotiation. Without Henry Kissinger those negotiations would not have started, or ended in a peace agreement.
Two decades later Americans still want and deserve a full accounting of any U.S. prisoners of war not freed, and what was done about them, or left undone.
But the value of the Senate hearings on P.O.W.'s will be ruined if they become just one more arena for politicians, academics and journalists who cherish their vendetta against Mr. Kissinger, one more chance to treat a man without whom the peace agreement would have been impossible as some unindicted conspirator.
The very fact that he dares defend himself--with a kind of professional, respectful contempt--enrages them even more.
To select Mr. Kissinger as the target is unfair historically. And it lessens the chances of two central realities being made clear. One is that the villain was Hanoi, now cuddly Hanoi. Only the Communists could have kept any Americans hostage.
The other is that through callousness or sloth, every Administration during and since the war failed to clarify the P.O.W. story--else we would not still be asking questions.
As a condition of peace, Mr. Kissinger insisted on a Communist commitment to release all prisoners. Maybe tougher safeguards could have been written into the agreement. Would Congress and the peace activists have accepted the continuation of the war that might have meant?
Hardly likely. In 1971, two years before any peace agreement, John Kerry, a Vietnam veteran who became a peace activist, said that ``points'' presented by Hanoi-Vietcong delegations in Paris, and their conversations with him and other Americans, showed prisoners would be returned. So, he said, the U.S. should not ``stall'' any longer.
Mr. Kerry is now a talented Senator from Massachusetts. And now he is conducting a P.O.W. inquiry because so many Americans believe exactly what he thought could not happen--that the Communists kept some prisoners.
Not long after the peace agreement was signed, Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Nixon warned that some prisoners might still be held. Did the peace movement or Congress demand reprisal pressures against Hanoi?
Mr. Kissinger's essential role in ending the war does not wipe out the Senate's duty to investigate the fate of all P.O.W.'s, but it distorts reality to forget what happened in 1973.
Walter Isaacson, in his much-discussed biography ``Kissinger,'' is often sharply critical of his subject. But he puts criticism of the peace negotiations in this perspective:
``By the beginning of 1973, Kissinger and Nixon had brought the nation's military misadventure in Vietnam to an end. Instead of slinking away as the Vietnamese factions continued the war, Kissinger had secured a cease-fire that, at least for the moment, curtailed the killing. In addition, America's ally had been given a decent chance to survive.
``Officials in the previous two Administrations, many of whom became preening doves as soon as their responsibility ended, had overseen a foolish deployment of close to 550,000 American troops over eight years. The Nixon Administration immediately reversed the process and began withdrawing *.*.*.
``The Paris agreement was the final element of a reshaped American foreign policy that--rather amazingly--provided the nation with the chance to play as influential a role in the world as it had before the paralyzing despair of its Vietnam involvement.''
Senator Kerry can serve America by a full and fair inquiry. That opportunity will be lost if the investigation is influenced by any vendetta against Mr. Kissinger. The country deserves better. So does Henry Kissinger.
http://www.seanrobins.com/kerry/kerry_1992_09_30_Article.htm