Prisoners of our past

THE INK was barely dry on the January 1973 Paris Agreement when the North Vietnamese began violating its most important provisions, particularly their solemn commitment to return U.S. prisoners of war and help account for our missing in action. After years of bitter negotiation, the North Vietnamese had finally accepted these explicit obligations. Yet the lists of POWs that Hanoi produced were blatantly incomplete. In scores of cases, U.S. pilots or other servicemen were known to have reached the ground alive or been captured alive yet they turned up on no list, either of live POWs or of those who had died in captivity. Henry Kissinger, then National Security Advisor, visited Hanoi shortly after the Agreement was signed and presented detailed evidence on eighty of these cases directly to the highest leadership of Hanoi's Politburo, requesting a full explanation. Repeated protests, public and private, were made over the years. We never received that explanation.

Related Results

Nonetheless, the fact that a pilot had hit the ground alive was no guarantee that he was still alive months, even years, later, by the time the Agreement was reached. In fact, the prevailing assessment in the U.S. Government in 1973 was that the men were dead. In Laos, where the largest proportion of the so-called "discrepancy" cases had occurred, the brutality of the enemy and of the terrain argued especially strongly against survival. The North Vietnamese seemed to have nothing to gain from holding back live prisoners, but maybe reason to conceal cases of captives killed in circumstances whose brutality would have been embarrassing.

Many of these men continued to be carried on our books as POWs for a time, in the absence of verification of death, and many Pentagon officials remained convinced that some must still have been alive. Over the years, reported sightings of live Americans in Indochina--none of which have ever been corroborated-raised both the hopes of the families and the suspicion of a cover-up by our government.

In this environment, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs was created in 1991, chaired by Vietnam vet (and antiwar activist) Senator John Kerry. It had an opportunity to do a service to the country by clearing up the unanswered questions in an unbiased, serious manner. No such luck. Its September hearings on the Paris Agreement were marred by selective leaks from documents, and by a press campaign indicting Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger before either man's testimony was heard. The media played up comments by former Defense Secretaries Melvin Laird, Elliot Richardson, and James Schlesinger about the possibility of men left behind--based not on any new evidence but entirely on their speculations. These leaks suggested a Committee leadership and staff whose eagerness to find scapegoats exceeded their understanding of the documentary evidence at their disposal.

Dr. Kissinger and members of his negotiating team (among them, NR Senior Editor Peter Rodman) made a powerful case that Nixon and Kissinger had been given no convincing evidence that live POWs were still retained, and had made a determined effort to press the North Vietnamese to live up to their commitment on the MIAs--that is, until American leverage had been abruptly undermined by an antiwar Democratic Congress determined to drive us out of Indochina on almost any terms. Both the stick of military pressure and the carrot of possible economic cooperation with Hanoi had been banned by law during the first half of 1973, over Nixon's and Kissinger's passionate objections. Aside from the treacherous Stalinists in Hanoi, who are the real villains, it is the antiwar movement and the Democratic Congress of the day who bear the most blame for our inability to compel an honest accounting of our men.

The opportunity for a fair and meticulous investigation is still open. We hope the Senate Select Committee will now take it, above all for the sake of the prisoners' families, whose emotions have been toyed with by demagogues for twenty years.