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Morning News

Clinton in Vietnam: U.S. President's Trip Promises News Relations, Stirs Up Painful Memories

Aired November 17, 2000 - 9:21 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: President Clinton is in Vietnam today. That makes him the first American president to visit Vietnam since the war ended. He is also the first ever to visit Hanoi.

Our John King has details on this historic trip.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN KING, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Routine, yet remarkable: the anthem that always greets the U.S. president, the trademark review of the troops; but never before in Hanoi, never before under the watchful gaze of Ho Chi Minh. It was a day designed to focus on the future, promises of friendship with the Vietnamese people, and new partnerships with its communist government.

WILLIAM J. CLINTON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: May our children learn from us that good people, through respectful dialogue, can discover and rediscover their common humanity and that a painful, painful past can be redeemed in a peaceful and prosperous future.

KING: A new U.S.-Vietnam trade pact is the centerpiece of this growing relationship, and there were modest agreements on child labor and cooperation on science and technology issues.

Human rights is the biggest sore spot. Mr. Clinton took time in a nationally televised address at Vietnam National University to hold up the United States as an example.

CLINTON: In our experience, young people are much more likely to have confidence in their future if they have a say in shaping it, in choosing their governmental leaders and having a government that is accountable to those it serves.

KING: But Mr. Clinton said he was not here to lecture, and he praised Vietnam's cooperation in searching for the remains of the nearly 2,000 Americans still unaccounted for 25 years after the war ended.

CLINTON: No two nations have ever before done the things we are doing together to find the missing from the Vietnam conflict.

KING: The warm welcome lifted the president's spirits. But there were also reminders of that painful past: crowds on streets once targeted by U.S. pilots, a drive by the mausoleum of the man who led the North in the war that left 58,000 Americans and some three million Vietnamese dead.

(on camera): Mr. Clinton made no mention of his own remarkable -- some would say controversial -- journey from a young man who opposed the war, and once wrote he despised it, to the becoming the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam since the conflict ended.

John King, CNN, Hanoi.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

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