July 3, 2015 at 6:06am “For millions of Americans 20 years ago, July 11th, was a different form of independence day. Vietnam had captured our imagination and taken up somuch space in our spirit that there were people who were wounded and injured, and no American my age didn’t know at least someone who was killed here. There were raging debates at home. People on both sides thought the others were crazy. And somehow when finally our Vietnamese friends said they would accept us and we said we would accept them, we were set free. … I want to read you one sentence that my old mentor said 50 years ago thatdescribes what we have tried to do with each other. He said, “We should make our own society for an example of human happiness, make ourselves the friend of social revolution, and go beyond simple reciprocity in the effort to reconcile hostile worlds beyond our border.” He was right then, he’sright today, and in the end it’s what we’re really celebrating — A decision to go with an outstretched hand, not a clenched fist. That decision is at the heart of every conflict in the world today and the decisions other people make about their own identity and whether they are better or worse, stronger or weaker, with an outstretched hand or a clenched fist will decide the whole shape of the 21st Century. So I hope this day will set them free too.” Remarks by Former President Bill Clinton At theTwentieth Anniversary July 4 CelebrationHanoi, Vietnam July 2, 2015 President Clinton: First I thank all of you for the warmwelcome. Ambassador Osius, Mr. Bond, Deputy Prime Minister Pham BinhMinh, thank you for what has been said already today. To former Ambassador Pete Peterson, former Ambassador MichaelMichalak, Chargé Desaix Anderson and other members of the diplomatic corps. I’d also like to say I don’t know whether you felt the same, but I wasvery moved by the choir who sung Vietnam’s National Anthem, and I am very movedby the fact that the young Air Force enlisted person who sang our NationalAnthem is part of the first U.S. Air Force Band to play in Vietnam since wenormalized relations 20 years ago. So let’s give them all a big hand. When the Ambassador was up here introducing me in Vietnamese, yourDeputy Prime Minister said he’s pretty good. [Laughter]. I saidwell he should be, he was part of the original crew that helped us set up shophere, and then he came back and worked in the National Security Council when Iwas in office. I’m glad he got a well-deserved promotion and I thank himfor what he’s doing. The normalization of relations in Vietnam was for personal, politicaland geostrategic reasons one of the most important achievements of my[career]. It helped to heal the wounds of war, to build bonds of genuinefriendship, and provide proof in an increasingly divided world that cooperationwas far better than conflict. I think most every Vietnamese person could say what Vietnam has gottenout of it. I would like to tell you that from my point of view Americamay have won the war, so my friends say. To me the symbol of why we didthe right thing will always be Ambassador Pete Peterson and his wonderfulwife. Many of you know, he spent more than six years as a guest of theVietnamese government during the war. He then went home and did his bestto put his family back together, ran for Congress, got elected, became ourAmbassador — our first Ambassador, one of the best appointments I ever made –and then married his wonderful wife and moved to Australia so he could come toVietnam once a month and visit here. I tell you all this because for millions of Americans 20 yearsago, actually July 11th, was a different form of independence day. Vietnam had captured our imagination and taken up so much space in our spiritthat there were people who were wounded and injured, and no American my agedidn’t know at least someone who was killed here. There were ragingdebates at home. People on both sides thought the others werecrazy. And somehow when finally our Vietnamese friends said they wouldaccept us and we said we would accept them, we were set free. Those beingset free included those who made this day possible, members of the Senate inboth parties including President Johnson’s son-in-law, Senator Chuck Robb whosupported this, and who probably lost more men under his command, more than anyother person working on this; Senator Max Cleland from Georgia who lost twolegs and an arm; and of course Senator John Kerry, now Secretary of State; andSenator John McCain, now Chairman of the Armed Services Committee of theSenate. I want to thank them. They were the win beneath the wingsof this movement. They made what I was able to do as Presidentpossible. They knew it was a bigger movement in America than it was inVietnam. Our partnership has taken so many different forms. I think themost moving one to me when I came here first in 2007 was going to a site whereVietnamese and Americans were working together to excavate the place where aplane had crashed to recover the last available remains of an American pilotnamed [Mark Everett]. By then his children, infants when he died, weregrown. But they were there, and I saw the tears in their eyes when theysaw the Vietnamese people alongside the Americans stomping in the mud,desperately looking for shards of bones or other evidence of life. Hillary and I were standing there and she said I never saw in my life, in thissmall piece of land people buried up to their knees in mud looking for theremains of one soldier. It was a symbol of what was to come. I also want to thank the Vietnamese government and the Deputy PrimeMinister for the fact that the recovery efforts continue along with ourcooperation in removing and remediating unexploded mines and toxic spilledcontamination in too much land in Vietnam. We’ve had some success andwe’ve had some disasters together. Look at all the other places our cooperation has gone. Threeyears ago I announced that Senator McCain and Senator Kerry were establishing afoundation with about 100 scholarships for Vietnamese students to study inAmerica. We thought that was a big deal. There are now about 17,000Vietnamese students studying in universities in America, more than from ourneighboring countries, Canada and Mexico, the eighth largest number in theworld. Now a government that presided over a country with an income of barelya dollar a day 20 years ago, has seen explosive economic growth and spent 20percent of its budget on education — far more than we do — and ranks,according to the latest international test [scores], 12th in the world in theperformance of its students in basic math, science and literaturecategories. Twelfth in the world. You should be very proud. Twenty years ago our trade was $500 million a year; now it’s[inaudible] and rising. And Vietnam just passed Malaysia and Thailand tobecome ASEAN’s top exporter in merchandise to the U.S. And listen tothis. Cargo container deliveries are averaging 1700 every single day. Now, as you know, President Obama is trying to add to this record ofeconomic cooperation with the TPP negotiations. I hope more than anythingelse that there will be as much bipartisan support for it as there was for thenormalization of relations, and if we can get good labor and human rights andenvironmental standards, if we can get a resolution of the [inaudible] programthat is generally open and representative and accountable to all elements insociety, we can perhaps achieve that. I am very hopeful that in theselast days the final details will command the support of a broad swath of theAmerican people. I want to thank both the Ambassador and the Deputy Prime Minister formaking [inaudible] health access and making it much easier to get life-savingmedicine to people who have HIV and AIDS, to help those with malaria, thosewith tuberculosis, and help people, children mostly, who have[inaudible]. And I want to thank the people from our project here who arein this crowd today. They’ve saved a lot of lives and loved doing it. One more area of cooperation I wish to mention. In January ViceForeign Minister Ngoc opened a conference exhorting our two countries to movebeyond bilateral cooperation to regional and global collaboration, a strategythat the current U.S. government strongly supports. Vietnam’s partnershipin the Global Initiative to Combat Nuclear Terrorism, agreements to [inaudible]port security and counternarcotics, this is the beginning of what I hope willbe a regional way of attacking problems, seizing opportunities, and resolving[disputes]. Every country in this region without regard to their size orthe size of their military deserves the right to be free [inaudible] andindependence and to have their claims fairly adjudicated, and I thank theVietnamese government and the people for asking the United States to supporttheir program. I am very glad that your Party General Secretary, Mr. Trong, will sooncome to America. A lot of us are going to try to make him feel verywelcome. I hope he likes what he sees. But I hope in the process ofcovering his visit our media will cover the rest of you so that America willcome to see what Vietnam has become in the past 20 years. An amazinglydiverse, multi-faceted society of gifted, hard-working people, beautifullandscape, deep culture, and a really bright future. I want to end by asking you to consider the implications of anotherplanned anniversary, that of the Fulbright Economic Teaching Program. Soon it will move into Fulbright University of Vietnam, the first private,not-for-profit university in the nation. The program grew out of the famousFulbright Scholarship program allowing people in other countries to go to theUnited States for school. The Deputy Prime Minister who was one of thevery first Fulbright scholars of Vietnam, earning his Master’s degree ininternational law and diplomacy from Tufts University, one of our greatest[pieces] of our education [system]. There are a lot of younger people here who have no idea who SenatorFulbright was. He was the strongest opponent of the Vietnam War in theUnited States Congress, the Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, andinstead of calling the people who disagreed with him names and having a fightall the time, he held the most educational set of hearings I believe ever heldby a congressional committee just to teach people about Southeast Asia, toteach people about the history of Vietnam, to teach people about the dynamicsof the conflict, and he believed that if he could only get enough people tolisten it would change America’s core. He was an astonishing man and Iworked for him for two years when I was in university. We were friendsuntil he died at 87 when I was President. Iwant to read you one sentence that my old mentor said 50 years ago thatdescribes what we have tried to do with each other. He said, “We shouldmake our own society for an example of human happiness, make ourselves thefriend of social revolution, and go beyond simple reciprocity in the effort toreconcile hostile worlds beyond our border.” He was right then, he’sright today, and in the end it’s what we’re really celebrating — A decision togo with an outstretched hand, not a clenched fist. That decision is atthe heart of every conflict in the world today and the decisions other peoplemake about their own identity and whether they are better or worse, stronger orweaker, with an outstretched hand or a clenched fist will decide the wholeshape of the 21st Century. So I hope this day will set them freetoo. Thank you.
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