WASHINGTON – Sen. John McCain gave a personal tour of the Senate to senior members of the Vietnamese Army today — 40 years after he was released from brutal captivity there.
It was latest in a long series of remarkable steps in the rapprochement between the two countries — and between McCain and his former captors.
Asked if he ever imagined he’d be giving such a tour, McCain quipped:
“I didn’t think so when I was in prison.”
McCain spent years in the infamous “Hanoi Hilton” in Veitnam after his Navy fighter jet got shot down over Hanoi.
Today, he showed the chief of staff of Vietnam’s army around some of the gilded sites of the Capitol at the height of tourist season.
“Who’s that?” asked one tourist, as the Arizona Republican and about 20 green-uniformed Vietnamese military members looked up at the Capitol rotunda. “The guy who ran for president,” responded another, while visitors snapped photos.
McCain made sure to show his guests the giant oil painting of the Battle of Lake Erie that hangs just off the Senate floor.
The painting shows a wide-eyed boy grabbing the cloak of Admiral William Hazard Perry while the naval battle rages.
“If you look at that you see a little boy in the boat looking up,”
McCain told the Post afterward. “I said some of my colleagues claim that’s me,” he joked. “I thought that was a pretty good line.”
He also showed off the balcony on the Senate’s West Front.
McCain has made several trips to Vietnam, a fast-developing country with improved U.S. relations that is now part of President Obama’s focus on Asia.
“When [Sen. John] Kerry and I got involved in this MIA / POW thing and we got involved in normalization of relations, I went back and forth many times just on that issue.”
He said many of the contacts are military-to-military because “they were the ones who were helping us with these quote missing in action.”
McCain urged further reforms within Vietnam’s government in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in March 13th on the 40th anniversary of his release.
“The government in Hanoi still imprisons and mistreats peaceful dissidents, journalists, bloggers, and ethnic and religious minorities for political reasons,” McCain wrote.