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Jewish World Review Jan. 16, 2001 / 21 Teves, 5761
Chris Matthews
Here is the story of two men who have converted
these dueling nightmares into a shared dream.
Pete Peterson was a U.S. Air Force colonel, a
fighter pilot who spent more than six years in a
North Vietnamese prison. But when he allows his
mind a return ticket to the war years, it is not to his
own suffering as a POW but to the conflict's more
tragic victims: those uncounted women and children
killed and maimed in our relentless bombing raids
over North Vietnam.
It is to those victims that Peterson, the first
American ambassador to a united Vietnam,
dedicates his work of building an economic
partnership between the two countries.
Bob Schiffer, an aide to Peterson, didn't serve in
Vietnam. "I had a lot of guilt over the choices I
made during the war," he told me over the phone
from Hanoi this week. "People went to war when I
didn't. I found a way to come to peace with that."
Both men, the man who fought and the man who
didn't, now share a common mission: to help the
nation of Vietnam find its place in today's global
economy. That, and to build a positive relationship
between our two peoples who spent so many years
trying to kill each other. For Peterson, the mission
to Hanoi took him on a roundabout route. Flying
home after his release in 1973,
he remembers looking out the plane's window and
deciding he would focus on the future rather than
the past.
After serving as a U.S. congressman from Florida
and deciding he was tired of the partisan bickering
(if he only knew what was coming this past
November and December!), he was ready for the
chance to undo the damage done by the war.
I met Schiffer in a political campaign the same year
Peterson was released from his POW camp. After
giving up his job as an investment banker, Schiffer
had spent the past eight years as a Clinton political
appointee directing U.S. assistance programs in
South Africa, the former Soviet Union and
elsewhere around the world. Schiffer saw his
posting to Vietnam as a chance to atone for having
not served in the war. One of his first projects was
to bring 300 young Vietnamese to the United States
to study how we conduct business.
"The next generation is going to have lots of
opportunity to make this a vibrant place," he said
from Hanoi this week. "Why do you think there
were a million people on the streets for Bill
Clinton?" The larger goal of full U.S.- Vietnam trade
relations is now before Congress.
With George W. Bush as a big backer of that effort,
there's talk he will keep Peterson in the Hanoi
embassy to see the deal through.
Something is clearly happening in that country,
especially among the young. Asked to rank their
"heroes" in a recent survey, the name "Bill Clinton"
tied with that of communist hero Che Guevara. Far
more impressive was the showing of another
American: "Bill Gates" was right up there with Ho
Chi Minh and General Vo Nguyen Giap, the man
who won the war against the French and led the
North's forces in what the Vietnamese call "the
American war."
Talk about winning the hearts and
01/09/01: A pair of Boy Scouts
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