Unsuccessful Advocacy Efforts during the 1970s

While precise figures are impossible to determine, scholars estimate that when the last American helicopters left Saigon in April 1975, 30,000–50,000 Amerasians remained in Vietnam.²⁰ This sizable number of American offspring vividly demonstrates that the intimate ties between the US and South Vietnamese, which were almost always asymmetrical and violent, far outlasted the collapse of the RVN. Amerasians faced considerable hardship, especially after 1975. As Mary Kim DeMonaco argues, Vietnamese Amerasians suffered from a “triple stigma.”²¹ First, Amerasians were fatherless in a highly patriarchal society. The consequences of fatherlessness were profound: “because nationality, race, and personal identity derive from the father in Vietnamese society,” many Vietnamese Amerasians lived incredibly difficult lives as social outcasts derogatorily called bui doi, “children of dust.”²² Second, a long-standing Vietnamese prejudice against mixed-race peoples – coupled with the fact that many Amerasians were easily identified – meant many Vietnamese also viewed Amerasians as my lai (a pejorative term for half-Vietnamese, half-American).²³ Finally, the fact that these fatherless, mixed-race children were the offspring of Americans meant that they were also the “living legacy” of the enemy in what the victorious Vietnamese called the American War.²⁴ Thus Amerasians and their families suffered social chastisement and discrimination resulting from a combination of official policy, long-held customs, and recent geopolitics.

Amerasians undoubtedly occupied a very difficult position in the SRV and were derided by the government in Hanoi; although some were abandoned, however, many Amerasians grew up with their maternal family units intact.²⁵ Thus, despite media outlets’ tendency to depict Amerasians as “orphans,” many had firmly established family ties, even as they endured considerable adversity. More than an incidental oversight, Jodi Kim demonstrates the extent to which the erasure of birth mothers and the depiction of Asian children as orphans are “enabling fictions” that “obscure the material reasons why so many children in regions throughout the world – particularly those facing a US military or missionary presence – are socially orphaned or made available for adoption in the first place.”²⁶ Like dividing the larger post-1975 migrations from the war itself, the myth of orphaned Amerasians allowed US officials to sidestep uncomfortable realities about US policy causing humanitarian crises rather than simply responding to them.

The United States initially rejected the idea that it had any obligations to Amerasians. During the long tenure of American military presence in Asia, US officials actively discouraged marriages between American GIs and Asian women, and most Amerasian children were born outside of wedlock.²⁷ Even though they were the children of American fathers, Amerasians did not receive US citizenship. Historian Sabrina Thomas notes that the bestowing of citizenship to those born outside of the territorial United States “was and is an intentionally gendered process,” as “illegitimate children born abroad to US mothers and foreign fathers” automatically receive US citizenship, while the illegitimate children of American fathers and foreign mothers do not.²⁸ Amerasians thus suffered from an odd paradox; nearly everyone agreed that they were the children of Americans, but US law prohibited them from enjoying any of the rights that status might bestow. Because both Hanoi and Washington rejected responsibility for Vietnamese Amerasians, Thomas argues this cohort was “effectively stateless.”²⁹

Efforts to bring Vietnamese Amerasians to the United States during the late 1970s foundered. These initiatives proved unsuccessful, in large part, because advocates based their argument on the premise that Amerasians should receive American citizenship and therefore tried to challenge existing legal practices. This approach ran into a minefield of obstacles. US law, strongly supported by the Department of Defense, mandated that “no individual in the military service will be required or requested to admit paternity” of illegitimate children fathered abroad.³⁰ Furthermore, because of fears of communist reprisals, most South Vietnamese mothers destroyed any evidence which might have substantiated specific paternity claims.³¹ Amerasians, therefore, could not immigrate to the United States through family reunification preference categories and instead had to apply under the lowest preference class, “other qualified immigrants.”³² Because the number of applicants far outpaced the number of available spaces in the late 1970s, as the overland and oceanic migrations reached their peak, it was nearly impossible for Amerasians to travel to the United States.

Some criticized US migration policies – which brought large numbers of Vietnamese, Laotians, and Cambodians to the US while effectively barring those with American fathers – as having a backward prioritization. The Carter administration, however, refused to support any legislation regarding Amerasians, arguing that such efforts would place an onerous burden on an already overstretched Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and prohibitively expand the high and constantly growing costs of Indochinese resettlement.³³ Given Carter’s initial disinclination to address what contemporaries called the “Indochinese refugee crisis,” even as the conditions drew repeated comparisons to the Holocaust, it is unsurprising that the administration did not award Amerasians, a group with virtually no publicity, a high priority.

The US government also responded with silence to another, far more numerous group of individuals inside Vietnam: reeducation camp prisoners.³⁴ Reeducation camp detainees drew little external attention immediately after the fall of Saigon. The reasons for this are multifaceted. At the most basic level, reliable information was scarce.³⁵ The professional journalists who provided on-the-ground reporting in other Asian countries like South Korea were simply absent from the SRV as Hanoi expulsed all but a few foreign correspondents, a trend that was even more pronounced in neighboring Cambodia.³⁶ This lack of information suited many Americans, who after 1975 were eager to focus their attention elsewhere. For the few who remained interested and invested in the region, the genocide in Cambodia and the life and death stakes faced by oceanic and overland migrants made what little was known of reeducation camps seem mild by comparison. Finally, it is likely that Hanoi’s promise of a maximum three-year sentence seemed reasonable to many who expected US government warnings of a large scale “bloodbath” to come true. The existence of reeducation camps and the lives of those detained therein thus remained underreported, overshadowed, and unable to inspire the sympathy necessary for external intervention.³⁷

There were, however, noteworthy exceptions. By the 1970s, Amnesty International (AI) was probably the best-known human rights NGO in the world. AI officials regularly documented what they viewed as human rights violations occurring in the SRV’s reeducation camps.³⁸ In its 1977 International Report, AI devoted seven pages to the SRV and argued “the most important issue remained the large-scale detention in ‘re-education’ camps of civilian and military personnel of the former Saigon administration.”³⁹ Amnesty reported that “some observers” estimated the reeducation camp population to be 200,000 at the end of 1976, while in February 1977 Vietnamese officials put the figure at 50,000.⁴⁰

This discrepancy between the SRV’s official figures and estimates from outside sources persisted throughout the camps’ existence. Part of the problem stemmed from the fact that Hanoi refused to publish the reeducation camp prisoners’ names and often moved inmates, which made accurate record keeping difficult. Moreover, broadly speaking, the camps had two different populations: those the SRV interned immediately in 1975 or 1976, including high-ranking officials of the Republic of Vietnam, and those Hanoi imprisoned in the late 1970s or 1980s. This second category included a broad range of individuals such as political dissidents and criminals. Rather than steadily declining, then, the total reeducation camp population remained in flux. More importantly, Hanoi refused – and of this writing still refuses – to declassify the relevant records, which has rendered all external figures best-guess estimates. As the AI report conceded, “little is known … about most of these camps.”⁴¹

Most of AI’s 1977 report focused on individuals the organization dubbed as prisoners of conscience (POC).⁴² AI’s mandate maintained very strict requirements for POC status. To qualify, one must “have not advocated or used violence” and “been imprisoned for political reasons.”⁴³ This definition limited Amnesty’s advocacy on behalf of reeducation camp prisoners, as many of those still detained in 1977 – and the majority of those who served the longest terms – were high-ranking ARVN members who had, by definition, “advocated” and “used” violence. Thus, while AI remained the primary NGO documenting issue throughout the late 1970s, many of the reeducation camp detainees fell outside of the organization’s purview.⁴⁴

As the 1970s drew to a close, information about the camps modestly increased from two sources, which painted disparate pictures of what was occurring in the SRV. Hanoi permitted “several Western newsmen and church representatives” to visit “one or two of the camps,” and these observers suggested that conditions in the camps were “adequate.”⁴⁵ One visitor even went as far as to suggest that the camp she toured in 1979 “looked as though it could have been a small tropical resort.”⁴⁶ Most Hanoi-approved observers suggested that while not desirable, reeducation was the lesser of two evils, as it seemed “to have headed off a wave of vengeance and served as an effective tradeoff avoiding the bloodbath that was predicted.”⁴⁷ Others argued that because human rights were “viewed differently” in Vietnam, Western definitions were not an appropriate measure of Hanoi’s progress.⁴⁸ AI’s commitment to impartiality and its self-avowed “non-political” nature prohibited it from lobbying government officials to accept or act on its report. Thus, despite AI’s prominence by the late 1970s, the individuals and organizations who were sympathetic to the SRV were much more vocal.

While the number of foreign observers who could provide accounts of Hanoi’s reeducation camps increased in 1978, so too did refugee testimonies. The sharp increase in the numbers of oceanic migrants offered an alternative perspective and provided “a very different view of Vietnamese life.”⁴⁹ Many cited “the potential threat of being sent off to a NEZ [New Economic Zone] or reeducation camp” as the reason for their decision to flee.⁵⁰ The differences between outside observers’ accounts (with AI as the sole exception) and refugee descriptions foreshadowed a much larger debate: were those exiting the SRV refugees fleeing persecution or migrants choosing to leave “adequate” conditions?

For the most part, this question went unasked during the late 1970s. The sheer size of the oceanic exodus, widespread recognition of Hanoi’s complicity in the forced migration of its ethnic-Chinese population, and frequent comparisons to the Holocaust made questions about refugee status moot. There were some, however, who sought to document why so many Vietnamese chose to abandon the land of their ancestors and chance an extraordinarily dangerous journey to escape. In February 1979, what began as a “study group” on human rights issues among politically active women in Northern California became Humanitas International, a “non-political, non-partisan, non-profit corporation,” aimed at “educating the public to human rights violations.”⁵¹ Humanitas consciously sought to differentiate itself from other groups like the powerful Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees by focusing on “the roots of the problem” – that is, “to learn what is causing the people to flee.”⁵² Humanitas’ two most important members were President Joan Baez and Vice President Ginetta Sagan. Baez was an activist, an internationally known folk singer, and future member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Sagan, meanwhile, was a prominent leader in the budding US human rights movement. Both women had been working together for over a decade to advance the cause of human rights, a mission that became Sagan’s life’s work.

Wielding an unusual combination of fund-raising ability, organizational prowess, and experience working in the field of human rights, Sagan and Baez made an impressive pair as the leadership of Humanitas International. Three months after its founding in 1979, Humanitas sponsored a full-page “Open Letter” to the SRV in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other papers. The letter lambasted Hanoi for its reeducation camp policy and asserted that the camps were “overflowing” and that “people disappear and never return.”⁵³ The letter, based on interviews Sagan conducted with refugees, suggested that detainees were “fed a starvation diet of stale rice, forced to squat bound wrist to ankle” and were “used as human mine detectors, clearing live mine fields with their hands and feet.”⁵⁴ The surge in oceanic and overland departures in the months immediately following the Open Letter, however – the worst months, numerically speaking, of the migration – overshadowed any potential impact the publication might have had.

After the Open Letter, Baez and Sagan began pursuing different paths. Baez and Humanitas as an organization, despite their original intentions, shifted the preponderant amount of their attention to advocating on behalf of overland and oceanic migrants, likely viewing the life and death stakes on the high seas and the Thai-Cambodian border as far more urgent than a study of internal SRV conditions. Although never exercising a voice as influential as the CCIR, Baez exerted a great deal of personal effort to help convince Carter to send the Seventh Fleet to help rescue oceanic migrants in peril.⁵⁵ She also personally visited refugee camps in Thailand, always with news cameras in tow, which raised funds and awareness for Cambodian survivors.⁵⁶ Thus, in many ways, Baez pursued the channels that let her use her greatest asset, her celebrity, to focus popular and policy makers’ attention on those fleeing Indochina. Sagan, meanwhile, continued to work toward their original goal of creating a report on internal SRV conditions and, to that end, used her transnational connections and language skills to conduct interviews with former reeducation camp prisoners in the United States and Europe.

The attempts by nongovernmental advocates to mobilize the US bureaucracy into action on behalf of Amerasians and reeducation camp detainees during the late 1970s mostly failed, insofar as these efforts did not lead to major policy changes. These unsuccessful efforts, however, reveal some of the enduring dynamics between nonstate advocates and their allies in the US government. Overwhelmingly, nonexecutive actors were women advocating on platforms of family reunification and the observance of human rights, while the elected officials whose support they needed were men. Each occupant of the White House between 1975 and 1995 was male. While women were not completely excluded from Congress, their representation throughout the 1980s was paltry. The 96th Congress, which convened from 1979 to 1981, had one female senator and sixteen representatives, which made women’s representation on Capitol Hill a dismal 3 percent.⁵⁷ This status quo dominated throughout the decade: the 100th Congress (1987–1989) had two female senators and twenty-three representatives, bringing women’s representation up to 4.7 percent.⁵⁸ Sagan’s personal experiences reveal a great deal about how these dynamics functioned in practice.

After surviving imprisonment and torture during World War II, Sagan immigrated to the United States and became a leading figure in the nascent American human rights movement. She founded Amnesty International’s West Coast branch in 1968, and under her leadership AIUSA’s West Coast presence grew precipitously. From 1970 to 1976, the number of “local chapters” of AIUSA expanded from two to over one hundred.⁵⁹ This expansion, Barbara Keys explains, “was powered in large part by its West Coast branch, which by 1974 claimed more than half of the country’s members.”⁶⁰ Sagan’s contemporaries credited her efforts, which reached as far south as Houston and at least as far east as Detroit, with this success.⁶¹ As one of her fellow activists and future West Coast Director of AI recalled, “she really is the one who got Amnesty International off the ground in this country.”⁶² Sagan’s recruitment of well-known celebrities, “instinctive media savvy,” and her “successful direct mail operation” led to the West Coach branch’s stunning success.⁶³

While Sagan’s innovative recruitment methods mattered, so did gender politics. As Key notes, the gender divide among AIUSA’s leadership played out regionally: “men predominated in New York; in California women ran the show.”⁶⁴ Allies like San Francisco philanthropist Sally Lilienthal and Baez helped dramatically with Sagan’s successful recruitment and fund-raising efforts.⁶⁵ As a homemaker and mother of three, moreover, Sagan began the West Coast chapter of AIUSA in 1968 in the space she had: her home. Like the League of Wives, then, AIUSA’s West Coast chapter began under the leadership of a highly motivated housewife who recruited like-minded women to meet and organize in domestic spaces. The Sagan family home in Atherton quickly became, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a kind of nerve center for efforts to improve the lot of political prisoners everywhere.”⁶⁶ Even after the West Coast branch had enough resources to establish a formal office, Sagan’s household, especially her massive marble-topped kitchen table, continued to serve as a “satellite office” and epicenter of activism.⁶⁷

Ginetta Sagan, like Sybil Stockdale before her and Khuc Minh Tho after her, was therefore quite literally what Lisa McGirr has called a “‘kitchen-table’ activist.”⁶⁸ In her Suburban Warriors, McGirr demonstrates the women in the conservative movement organized from their homes and, when necessary, went door to door to gain support for their cause. “‘Kitchen-table’ activists,” McGirr persuasively argues, “have fundamentally shaped the course of American politics.”⁶⁹ As evidenced by Stockdale, Sagan, and Tho’s activism, they have also influenced US foreign relations.

In addition to occupying spaces and roles typically designated as “female” in American society (wife, mother, housewife) and collaborating with fellow women, Sagan also possessed physical characteristics and personal traits that accented her femininity. Sagan’s contemporaries often drew attention to the contrast between her height (she was just under five feet tall) and the magnitude of her accomplishments. Sagan’s biography on the Women’s International Center website, for example, suggests: “Yes, she may be diminutive in stature, but she is a Giant.”⁷⁰ In a society where cultural productions almost always depict men as taller than their female counterparts, it is likely that Sagan was often the shortest person in the room. To add to the femininity American society inscribed on women of Sagan’s height, she also harbored many of the qualities that the American public celebrated and expected from women: cheerfulness and selflessness. Those who knew Sagan described her as an “ebullient, feisty, smiling woman,”⁷¹ a “laughing, lifting person,”⁷² “with the spirit and energy of a hummingbird,”⁷³ a “woman with a sunlight smile”⁷⁴ who stayed “relentlessly cheerful,”⁷⁵ even when diagnosed with cancer later in life.⁷⁶ As Sagan aged, reports regularly described her as a “bubbling grandmother” or as having a “grandmotherly appearance.”⁷⁷ Philip L. Geyelin, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, characterized Sagan as one of those “high-minded, hardheaded people who refuse to give up hope,” someone who “is tough-minded as she is compassionate, bright-spirited and witty.”⁷⁸ Finally, throughout her years as an activist, Sagan was known “universally by only her first name,” a trend that continues to characterize female politicians and celebrities in the twenty-first century.⁷⁹

While Sagan championed the universal and the human, it is clear that her contemporaries and the few scholars that have written about her have understood her through a gendered lens. Keys describes Sagan as someone who “might have stepped out of the pages of Betty Friedan’s 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique: a college-educated suburban housewife and mother, in search of greater meaning in life.”⁸⁰ Historians have shown how women, from the founding of the republic to the present day – as “revolutionary mothers,” “social housekeepers,” or “‘kitchen-table’ activists” – have mobilized their identities as women and mothers to claim moral authority inside and outside of the home. Ginetta Sagan did not verbalize this tradition; rather, she consistently championed the universal and the human, perspectives that were foundational to human rights advocacy during the period. Nevertheless, Sagan clearly benefitted from long-standing precedents that predisposed Americans to see women, especially mothers, as a moral force.

And morality in US foreign policy, especially with regard to the SRV, was direly needed in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. As Christian Appy and others have noted, the US military was so destructive, US officials so deceptive, the US public so disgusted that “the Vietnam War compelled millions of citizens to question the once widely held faith that their country is the greatest force for good in the world, that it always acts to advance democracy and human rights, that it is superior in both its power and its virtue.”⁸¹ In 1971, almost 60 percent of Americans “concluded that the war in Vietnam was not just a mistake, but immoral.”⁸² While not all US policy makers shared this conviction, the palpable disillusionment among the American public was something that elected officials could not ignore. “The convergence of discourse between humanitarianism and human rights,” Jana Lipman observes, “provided a small window” for redefinition.⁸³ As US officials attempted to chart a course forward after 1975, especially with regard to US-SRV relations, an emphasis on humanitarian issues championed by women seeking reunification with their loved ones and the observance of human rights was, relatively speaking, a safe way to proceed. Just as women like Ginetta Sagan and Khuc Minh Tho needed the power of the US government to compel Hanoi to release reeducation camp detainees and permit them to travel to the United States, American officials also benefitted from the moral authority these women bestowed upon US policy. While the relative need between female nonstate actors and male officials was always asymmetrical, the mutual benefit these relationships afforded helps explain the close personal ties that developed among nonexecutive actors.

The Politics of Information and Images, 1980–1982

That US officials would come to frame the full accounting campaign and migration programs for South Vietnamese as humanitarian family-reunification efforts was not inevitable. In the early 1980s, nonstate actors solidified and personified these connections, which US policy makers ultimately echoed and infused with real power. Two important shifts in what human rights scholar Kenneth Cmiel calls the “politics of information” regarding POW/MIAs took place before Reagan officially took office.⁸⁴ In 1977, Carter prioritized resuming formal diplomatic relations without preconditions, and therefore was initially willing to accept reasonable rather than demand full accounting. Once the domestic and international contexts shifted, however, a small group within the administration formed the Inter-Agency Group on POW/MIA Affairs (IAG) in March 1980. The IAG, which included policy makers from the NSC, Department of Defense, Department of State, and Joint Chiefs of Staff, became “the focal point of US policy formulation on the POW/MIA issue” in the 1980s.

Among the IAG’s earliest members was Ann Mills Griffiths, the sister of a missing American soldier and the civilian head of the National League of Families. Griffiths, Michael Allen observes, “seldom discussed her missing brother in sentimental terms and never alluded to her family life, knowing that as a divorced mother of three she did not fit the mold of the waiting POW wife that Stockdale popularized a decade earlier.”⁸⁵ While Griffiths did not explicitly mobilize her status as a woman and mother to underwrite her advocacy, it is likely that American officials and society nevertheless imbued her with a special sort of moral status deriving from these identities, as they did with Ginetta Sagan. Griffith’s membership on the IAG, moreover, provided her with access to US policy makers and to classified information.⁸⁶ Because the IAG gave Griffiths a literal seat at the table, the League occupied a unique position to directly influence official policy.

The “politics of information” regarding POW/MIAs also changed in more fundamental ways. By December 18, 1978, the total number of American POW/MIAs from the Vietnam War had dwindled to 224.⁸⁷ Two years later, however, US officials began to include those previously listed as KIA/BRN – killed in action/body not recovered – to the total number of “unaccounted” for in Southeast Asia. This change meant that, by 1980, the US government regarded all Americans previously listed as POW, MIA, and KIA/BNR as belonging to the same category, a change that brought the total number of “POW/MIAs” to 2,500 – a more than 1,000 percent increase.⁸⁸ The momentum to fuse these previously distinct categories grew from a realization that wartime distinctions were no longer relevant, as “by 1980 status review boards had concluded that all but a handful of MIAs must be presumed dead.”⁸⁹ While intended to reinforce the reality that nearly all of the 2,500 Americans whose names remained on the lists were deceased, the classification change had the exact opposite effect, just as the IAG had hoped.

While it was unlikely that officials could provide a “full accounting” for the original 224 POW/MIAs, some of whom were pilots whose planes had exploded over the Pacific, the idea that one could locate the remains of all 2,500 was nothing short of fantasy. In stark contrast, the common vernacular used to refer to these men – “the prisoners” or “the missing” – implied that they could and should be found. Many activists took the logic one step further and argued that surely, of 2,500 men, at least a handful had to be alive. In the politics of information, then, misinformation could be just as important as legitimate data; the widely accepted and oft-repeated perception that 2,500 Americans remained missing from the Vietnam War far outweighed the reality that only 224 Americans warranted such a classification in December 1980.

In the longer view of US military history in the twentieth century, however, even the 2,500 number was historically low. The fact that American soldiers remained unaccounted for at the end of the Vietnam War was not unusual. The combination of cross-oceanic transit, powerful explosives, and dense terrain left the US government unable to account for the whereabouts of between 2,800 and 3,300 Americans after World War I; 86,500 after World War II; and, 8,000 at the end of the Korean War.⁹⁰ In the larger context of twentieth-century American warfare, then, what is most remarkable about the unaccounted for who served in the Vietnam War is that the longest conflict left the fewest number of Americans missing.⁹¹

Throughout 1982, the importance of POW/MIA accounting continued to grow. In January, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia, joined the IAG.⁹² With Armitage on board, the “group’s nucleus” of Griffiths, Armitage, and Richard Childress (NSC Director of Political Affairs) coalesced.⁹³ In February, Armitage traveled to Hanoi, even as formal ties between the two governments remained suspended, to meet with Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach. At the meeting, Thach “agreed to accelerate their cooperation” and reaffirmed his willingness to meet regularly with his American counterparts in “quarterly technical meetings in Hanoi.”⁹⁴

The incongruity between Reagan’s belligerent Cold War rhetoric and the reality of US officials in Hanoi collaborating with SRV officials proved dissonant enough to warrant official comment.⁹⁵ A “USG Vietnam/Kampuchea Policy: Talking Points” memorandum, for example, explained that “despite the absence of diplomatic relations with the SRV we do discuss with the Vietnamese humanitarian issues such as the Orderly Departure Program and accounting for Americans missing in action in the Vietnam War.”⁹⁶ Framing the repatriation of POW/MIA remains and migration programs as “humanitarian” endeavors distinguished these concerns from “political” questions.

American officials applied the same logic to Amerasians. A shift in “image politics” precipitated a series of congressional hearings on the status of Amerasians beginning in mid-1981. Photographs of Amerasians began to appear in popular news outlets like the New York Times, and images of light-eyed, curly-haired, freckle-faced Amerasians pulled on Americans’ heartstrings. Additionally, approximately 15,000 Amerasians were the sons and daughters of African Americans. Many stereotypical phenotypes like skin color, height, and hair texture led Americans to conclude that Black Amerasians were also “obvious” heirs of the US presence in Vietnam.⁹⁷

This compelling “visual evidence” slowly began to supersede legal questions of citizenship in the public and policy makers’ minds.⁹⁸ In late 1981, a group of Vietnam veterans traveled to Hanoi with a Times reporter and their highly- publicized exposé featured, among other things, the revelation that “swarms of begging half-American children” lived on the streets in Ho Chi Minh City.⁹⁹ Despite the Department of Defense’s refusal to require former US servicemen take paternity tests, photographs of Amerasians served as compelling visual “proof” of their American parentage. Visual evidence, however, remained problematic as it reinforced long-held stereotypes that assumed Asians were foreigners, not Americans.¹⁰⁰ Nevertheless, nongovernmental advocates used photographs of Amerasians to make an emotionally poignant argument that the United States owed Amerasians a significant and personal responsibility, a stance that built on Ford’s assertion of a “profound moral obligation.”

The Reagan administration evidently let it be known that it would react to legislation supporting Amerasians’ resettlement differently than Carter. As Ted Kennedy put it, although “the voluntary agencies have presented” the issue to Congress throughout the 1970s, “we have not had the kind of support from past administrations … to really express true humanitarian concern.”¹⁰¹ Kennedy’s expression of appreciation for Reagan’s approach reveals some of the unlikely alliances that formed the basis of what would soon become a strong bipartisan consensus in favor of family reunification migration programs.

The House Subcommittee on Immigration, Refugees, and International Law began consideration of the Amerasian Immigration Act (AIA) in the summer of 1982.¹⁰² In an indication of future trends, both Vietnam War veterans and those with no military experience worked together to offer policies regarding US-SRV relations, with veterans playing visible leadership roles. One of the AIA’s cosponsors, for example, was Jeremiah “Jerry” Denton (R-AL). Denton, a navy pilot, was shot down and captured by DRV troops in July of 1965 and held as a prisoner of war for eight years. During that time his wife, Jane, became an activist and leader in the League of Wives while caring for the couple’s seven children.¹⁰³ In 1982, the former POW turned Senator argued that there was something inherently wrong with the fact that Amerasians have “American blood,” yet when they apply for admission to the United States, “they are not classified as sons or daughters of US citizens.”¹⁰⁴ As Carl Levin (D-MI), another cosponsor, put it, the US was “partly liable” for Amerasians’ suffering and “should meet its responsibility by providing the opportunity for a better future.”¹⁰⁵ Stewart B. McKinney (R-CT), the bill’s final cosponsor, suggested Amerasians were a “very real humanitarian issue” and argued the world “immigration” was inappropriate because “these are American children.”¹⁰⁶ Rather than challenge the law dictating that Amerasians were not US citizens, however, in 1981 policy makers sought to offer Amerasians a path to resettlement that bypassed existing regulations.

Reagan signed the Amerasian Immigration Act on October 22, 1982. During the accompanying ceremony, he suggested the AIA “comes to grips with a problem that I think should touch every American’s heart,” and, echoing Ford’s speech seven years earlier, argued that Americans had “a moral responsibility that we can’t ignore” to assist Amerasians.¹⁰⁷ As Allison Varzally notes, “Reagan’s support for the act and advocacy of Amerasians reflected a highly selective embrace of refugees in the 1980s consistent with his conservative ideas of family, opposition to Communism, and rebranding of the Vietnam War.”¹⁰⁸ The administration also found another cause that served these purposes: reeducation detainees.

While Reagan’s geopolitics predisposed his administration to look favorably on calls to assist reeducation camp detainees, nongovernmental advocates also played a vital role in solidifying the links between reeducation camp detainees, human rights, and family reunification. Although AI headquarters in London had published reports on the SRV’s reeducation camps since 1977, the organization consistently prohibited its American sections (AIUSA) from adopting Vietnamese prisoners of conscience.¹⁰⁹ Not only did AI ban AIUSA members from adopting Vietnamese POCs; it encouraged its other branches to write to Hanoi “preferably in FRENCH.”¹¹⁰ Most Americans seemed to agree with the assumption implicit in AI’s directions; after years of devastating warfare, the United States had no moral authority with which to criticize Hanoi.

Ginetta Sagan fundamentally disagreed with this policy. “The American people may be sick of the word Vietnam,” she conceded, “but the human rights movement” should be as “devoted to securing the freedom of the present prisoners in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia as they were to securing the release of the prisoners of conscience of the [Nguyen Van] Thieu regime.”¹¹¹ Although she certainly had her critics, Sagan’s personal experiences gave her a unique moral authority and political cover. Just as Nixon’s anticommunism made it possible for him to go to Beijing and Moscow, Sagan’s status as a former political prisoner – as someone who survived the things most American advocates only read about – meant that while some disapproved of her SRV-focused activism, she still maintained her status as a “Giant” in the human rights community, including occupying a leadership role in AIUSA.¹¹²

In March 1981, Sagan began her own organization, the Aurora Foundation, to advocate for those outside of Amnesty’s mandate. The organization’s name invoked Sagan’s dramatic memory of what she thought would be her last night alive. Her captors forced her to write her own execution notice and, that evening, while in an Italian jail cell, admiring the starlit sky, she remembered thinking, “I shall never see another aurora [dawn].”¹¹³ While the Aurora Foundation’s bylaws describe the Foundation’s goals as “improvement throughout the world in the observance of human rights” and “in particular, to educate the public … about the existence of unlawful repression and torture, wherever occurring, in violation of those rights,” the organization focused almost exclusively on the SRV for its first few years.¹¹⁴ Sagan had multiple reasons to focus so much time and energy on the SRV. Most notably, the attention addressed what she argued was an inexcusable silence in the American human rights movement. Sagan also had more personal connections to the issue. Although the copious records she left only offer traces of insight, it is clear that Sagan lost at least one ally, who was also perhaps a friend, an individual she described as a “former co-worker of H[uman]. Rights” to “the jails of Hanoi.”¹¹⁵

From its founding, the Aurora Foundation aimed to provide a comprehensive study of the SRV’s reeducation camps. Sagan’s personal experiences and her work with Amnesty International solidified her belief in the value of firsthand accounts over official explanations. She remained convinced, therefore, that a major study based on refugee testimony would provide a much more reliable and realistic picture than descriptions of reeducation camps offered by Hanoi-approved visitors. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, she interviewed hundreds of former reeducation camp detainees in the United States and in France. By March 1982, she noted “the Vietnam Project has turned out to be larger and more involved than originally anticipated” but resolved to “have the report ready” as soon as possible.¹¹⁶

In the meantime, the Foundation issued a brief press release on April 30, 1982, detailing its preliminary findings. “Tens of thousands of political prisoners, whose numbers include members of the pre-1975 South Vietnamese government and armed forces as well as civilians from all professions and religious persuasions,” the release explained, “are detained under inhumane conditions in a vast network” of camps.¹¹⁷ “These prisoners,” the report lamented, “have never been charged with a crime nor tried in a court of law, have no legal safeguards to protect them from physical and psychological abuse by their guards.” The report then went on to list four such cases of abuse: “(1) beating of prisoners to death for infractions of camp rules or for ‘attempted escape’; (2) shackling of prisoners in underground ‘tiger cages’; (3) confinement in ‘CONNEX’ boxes (small metal freight containers which become suffocating hot when exposed to the sun); and (4) being kept on a starvation diet.”¹¹⁸ By 1982, Amnesty International’s headquarters in London and, thanks to Sagan’s leadership, Humanitas and the Aurora Foundation all condemned Hanoi’s reeducation camp policy, which these NGOs viewed as violating the detainees’ human rights.

General knowledge about the camps’ existence was widespread enough that US broadcaster Mike Wallace raised the issue in an interview with SRV Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach. In a May edition of “60 Minutes,” Wallace painted a bleak picture of human rights conditions in the SRV, noting, “foreign residents here in Hanoi describe Vietnam as one of the most thoroughly authoritarian of police states. Its citizens are under constant surveillance, tens of thousands of them, in what are called labor re-education camps, gulags.”¹¹⁹ Citing Amnesty International’s report on the camps, Wallace asked Thach why “tens of thousands of Vietnamese continue to be detained in your labor re-education camps, without charge, many of them, without trial, many of them, and for years and years.” Their subsequent exchange is worth quoting:

When Thach repeated his offer later in the summer, the US gave a brief, official response at the ASEAN Minister’s meeting in Singapore. American policy makers “welcome[d]” Thach’s remarks and conceded that many detainees were “in reeducation camps…because of their special ties to the United States.” These “special ties” underwrote migration programs that created loopholes and exceptions to American law to eventually provide for the detainees’ resettlement in the United States.

Just as the US response reaffirmed the ongoing ties between Americans and South Vietnamese, the American reaction to Thach’s argument also conveyed the hostility with which US policy continued to treat Hanoi. “We are working with the UNHCR to determine if the Vietnamese are in fact prepared to release persons from reeducation camps for resettlement abroad,” US officials noted, adding: “If the Vietnamese are serious about the offer to release political prisoners they can begin facilitating interviews by UNHCR representatives in Vietnam with the inmates of the so-called re-education camps. To our knowledge, such interviews have never been permitted.”¹²¹

Rather than “sign an agreement” with Hanoi as Thach suggested in the interview, then, the US responded that the ODP was the best way to facilitate the migration of former reeducation camp detainees.¹²² The ODP began in 1979 as a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) multilateral initiative to offer would-be “boat people” a safe, legal alternative to clandestine flight.¹²³ Using the preexisting ODP would not only obviate the need for a bilateral agreement with Hanoi but also give the US the ability to screen incoming migrants. Thach’s all-or-nothing offer likely raised red flags in light of the recent “Mariel Boat Crisis,” which taught US officials to insist on screening individuals rather than issue blanket admission to a large group.¹²⁴

Because both American and UN law defined a refugee as one “outside” their country of nationality, however, the ODP created an uncomfortable paradox.¹²⁵ While the program aimed to circumvent the myriad of dangers oceanic migrants faced, it involved the migration of those still within their home country. UNHCR officials obviated these legal concerns mostly by ignoring them and emphasizing the program’s “humanitarian” and “family reunification” purposes. For American officials, the Refugee Act permitted the president to make exceptions to the law’s definition of refugees for cases deemed of “special humanitarian concern.”

While widely recognized as codifying a human rights-based defection of refugees, this clause of the Refugee Act also legally coupled the language of humanitarianism and human rights. Conditions like those in the SRV, especially Hanoi’s incarceration of former RVN leaders in reeducation camps, were precisely the circumstances that legislators envisioned when they created the “special humanitarian concern” loophole. Testimony from AI representatives about individuals imprisoned in their country of origin formed the backdrop for congressional deliberations, and when debating the “special humanitarian concern” provision, Congress “emphasized humanitarian considerations, placing the plight of refugees and the pattern of human rights violations in the country of origin as the first factors to be weighed.”¹²⁶ Accordingly, the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton administrations used the “special humanitarian concern” provision to admit large numbers of Vietnamese, including Amerasians and former reeducation camp detainees, traveling directly from Vietnam to the United States as refugees.¹²⁷

Beginning in October 1981, an average of 330 Vietnamese arrived in the United States through the ODP each month.¹²⁸ This early group of ODP arrivals included Khuc Minh Tho’s youngest daughter, Nguyen Thi Minh Phuong, who, by 1981, was twenty years old. The last time the mother and daughter had lived in the same country, Phuong was eleven.¹²⁹ This near-decade-long separation personifies the trauma and loss that the South Vietnamese people endured on a much larger scale in the years after the RVN’s collapse.

Although Washington and Hanoi failed to create a separate program for former detainees in 1982 and for many years thereafter, Thach’s offer sparked hope among the United States’ growing Vietnamese communities. Many began to organize and lobby their representatives to accept Thach’s offer, including Tho.¹³⁰ Just as Sagan founded the West Coast chapter of AIUSA at her kitchen table and the League of Wives began as casual gatherings, “get-togethers … around kitchen tables,” Tho began working on behalf of reeducation detainees by organizing in her living room in Falls Church, Virginia. Like the POW wives, Tho and her associates were initially very reluctant to speak publicly for fear that Hanoi would retaliate against their loved ones.¹³¹ Unlike the overwhelmingly white, upper-middle-class wives of American pilots who began meeting in the 1960s, however, the reeducation camp detainees’ wives, sisters, and sweethearts did not possess any of the clout that Sybil Stockdale and POW wives commanded. As Tho recalled, they had “no power, no money, nothing.”¹³²

Despite these disadvantages, however, Tho had many assets. Her experience working for the RVN government and many connections to the South Vietnamese military gave her political clout among her fellow South Vietnamese and first-hand knowledge of the bureaucratic workings of government. The experience also exposed her to US officials. While working in Manila, for instance, she met Shepard (Shep) Lowman, a US diplomat who was married to a Vietnamese woman. Lowman was the man whose call to Leo Cherne prompted the creation of the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees. Hiep Lowman also happened to be a former coworker of Tho’s, someone she described as a “close friend,” and Tho used her connection with the Lowmans to ask Shep to do what he could on behalf of reeducation camp detainees. While Tho’s actions in the late 1970s and early 1980s were not yet as influential or coordinated as Sagan’s organizing efforts, the Families of Vietnamese Political Prisoners Association, under Tho’s leadership, soon became one of the most influential Vietnamese American NGOs in the country.

Solidifying an Expanded American Approach, 1983–1984

During Reagan’s first two years in the White House, nongovernmental organizations helped lay the groundwork for the administration to adopt more assertive stances regarding POW/MIAs, Amerasians, and reeducation detainees. Without official backing, however, none of the causes would have become embedded in US policy. In 1983 and 1984, the administration adopted and elevated growing efforts to seek the full accounting of missing Americans and provide for the migration of Amerasians and reeducation camp prisoners to the United States.

In January of 1983, Reagan gave the keynote address at a meeting of the National League of POW/MIA Families. The president’s decision to deliver his remarks in person, after turning down the same invitation three years earlier, symbolized the larger shift in governmental priorities. If the League’s members had high hopes as they sat in anticipation for the president’s address, Reagan did not disappoint. “The government bureaucracy now understands,” he explained, that “the return of all POWs, the fullest possible accounting for the still missing, and the repatriation of the remains of those who died serving our nation … are the highest national priority.”¹³³

The speech marked a point of departure in several key respects. While, especially thanks to Griffith’s seat on the IAG, the League already enjoyed a privileged place in policy-making circles, after Reagan’s highly publicized commitment to the issue, the POW/MIA campaign “enjoyed more money, media coverage, and political influence” than it had before or since.¹³⁴ Additionally, Reagan’s inclusion of “return of live POWs” in his official remarks signaled the first time a post-1975 US president publicly endorsed the myth that the SRV continued to hold live prisoners.¹³⁵ While the League perpetuated this belief for years, Reagan legitimized the claim and heightened expectations for the return of live Americans.¹³⁶ Although satisfying for POW/MIA families in the short term, Reagan’s soaring rhetoric and implicit promises raised hopes without any evidence to support those inflated expectations. In the long run, the gap between the president’s promises and what the US government could actually deliver sowed bitterness and led, inevitably, to disappointment.

Reagan’s bold and unequivocal rhetoric served the president’s immediate political purposes, however, by shifting the burden of responsibility for POW/MIA accounting to Hanoi. As the League put it after Reagan’s remarks, “The problem now is in Hanoi, not in Washington.”¹³⁷ That is, after the League obtained the commitment it had long desired from the US government, the next step in facilitating a full accounting was to garner SRV cooperation. One close League ally who was no doubt heartened to see the transformation in US policy was Senator Bob Dole (R-KA). Dole, a decorated World War II veteran, drew on his own wartime experiences by making “veterans and the disabled” high priorities during his long tenure in Congress. This predisposition, combined with his close relationship with his “strong, independent mother,” made him a natural ally for Stockdale and other POW and MIA wives during the early 1970s.¹³⁸ As a legislator who had consistently proven himself to be an advocate for POW/MIA families, it was with some satisfaction that, after Reagan’s address, Dole observed in a speech before the Vietnam Veterans of America that the biggest obstacle to POW/MIA accounting was no longer the US government. Rather, “the attitude of the Vietnamese Government is the single most important factor in resolving the fate of our POW/MIAs,” he argued.¹³⁹ American policy makers could make all the promises they wanted, but unless the SRV permitted US officials to search for missing American servicemen in Vietnam, there would be no accounting whatsoever.

After Reagan’s 1983 speech, POW/MIA accounting solidified its position as the single most visible and politically sensitive issue in US-Vietnamese relations. POW/MIAs featured most prominently in American rhetoric and had a broad base of public support in the United States that the Amerasian and reeducation camp issues never enjoyed. Even if POW/MIA accounting achieved unmatched support and popularity in US domestic politics, the administration put full accounting and migration programs on equal footing insofar as it framed each as a “humanitarian” issue that the former adversaries had to resolve before they could address “political” questions.

Three months after Reagan’s defining POW/MIA speech, on the eighth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Sagan released her Violations of Human Rights in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, April 30, 1975–April 30, 1983. While the fifty-five-page report had short sections on the “Repression of Ethnic Chinese” and “Religious Persecution,” Sagan and her coauthor Stephen Denney devoted the overwhelming majority of the report to “Reeducation – North and South.” The three appendixes that accompanied the main text were also entirely devoted to documenting reeducation camps and detainees. Sagan’s long tenure with Amnesty International was evident not only in the report’s methodology and structure, but also in its policy recommendations, or lack thereof. Like AI, the Aurora Foundation did not endorse any specific policies. The closest thing was Sagan’s call for a “major effort to mobilize public opinion and break the silence surrounding conditions in the reeducation camps” in the text’s acknowledgments.¹⁴⁰

Sagan’s report still received significant attention in policy-making circles, however. Elliot Abrams, the Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, wrote Sagan in May and described her report as “a striking addition to the understanding of events there.”¹⁴¹ He wrote again less than a month later. “I want to write again to tell you how important I think this report is,” he explained. “It has been getting wide distribution, and is really a landmark: no one will ever again be able to claim that he did not know.”¹⁴² Congressmen, State Department officials, and others also wrote Sagan to thank her for the report,¹⁴³ and Sagan personally sent additional copies to the UN Secretary General and to the White House.¹⁴⁴ Senator Ted Kennedy’s response to Sagan’s report is typical of the letters she received: “Your study will be of great assistance in calling attention to this problem,” he wrote. “Thank you for sending it to me. I will be certain to put it to good use.”¹⁴⁵ That Abrams and Kennedy were both grateful for Sagan’s report and eager to enact policies that addressed the issue demonstrates the different motivates underwriting US migration programs for South Vietnamese. While some were eager to continue fighting the Vietnam War in memory, others sought to charter a course forward and attempt to make amends for the profound failures of US policies. That both groups could find common cause in concern for reeducation camp detainees helps explain why the related migration programs enjoyed bipartisan support.

That Violation of Human Rights in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam appeared on April 30, 1983, was no coincidence. The Aurora Foundation, like Amnesty International and others before it, used the anniversary of communist military victory – a moment that naturally renewed the world’s interest in Vietnam – to help gain the greatest possible publicity for its reports. What Sagan could not have anticipated, however, is that the month before her report’s long-established release date, Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a speech before the National Association of Evangelicals.¹⁴⁶ Also in March 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as “Star Wars,” which soured US-Soviet relations considerably.¹⁴⁷

At precisely the same moment that the administration took its reinvigoration of the Cold War to new levels, Sagan’s report added evidence to the president’s claims about the evils of communism. The report provided the best-yet available evidence from an American source that Hanoi, a Soviet ally, was systematically violating its citizens’ human rights. The NSC’s response to Sagan’s publication, for example, noted, “although the State Department’s annual human rights report on Vietnam underscores our official abhorrence of the situation in Vietnam, private efforts such as yours are critical in focusing national and international attention on the issue.”¹⁴⁸

While Sagan’s publication helped infuse urgency into the reeducation camp issue, the failure of the Amerasian Immigration Act created similar momentum for a new policy to address Vietnamese Amerasians. Although the AIA constituted a “legal breakthrough” as it “represented the United States’ first public recognition of its moral responsibility to those children who had been fathered by Americans abroad,” the law’s legacy, especially in regard to Vietnamese Amerasians, is one of fatal shortcomings.¹⁴⁹ Most importantly, the AIA provided for the admission of only Amerasians and made no provisions for their mothers or siblings to accompany them.¹⁵⁰ This requirement, which codified Americans’ tendency to erase Asian mothers and depict all Amerasians as orphans, made a mockery of the law’s stated humanitarian purpose by, in many cases, requiring family separation rather than facilitating family reunification.¹⁵¹ This contradiction proved so profound that many of the voluntary agencies which lobbied for Amerasian legislation, some for decades, “threatened to withdraw their services if Amerasians were deliberately removed from their Vietnamese families.”¹⁵²

Especially for Vietnamese Amerasians, the AIA remained flawed in two additional respects. First, the lack of diplomatic relations between Washington and Hanoi made the copious paperwork necessary for the AIA “almost impossible” to complete.¹⁵³ Second, the AIA defined Amerasians as immigrants instead of refugees, which meant those who emigrated through the program were not eligible for any of the much more comprehensive benefits or services that the US government offered to refugees.¹⁵⁴ Thus, by 1985, only four Vietnamese Amerasians came to the United States through the AIA.¹⁵⁵ While a few traveled through the ODP, the logjam did not satisfy Amerasian advocates or SRV leaders, who viewed Amerasians as an undesirable population and American responsibility.

Because the United States continued to blame the SRV – particularly Hanoi’s refusal to withdraw its troops from Cambodia – for the lack of diplomatic relations between the two states, the AIA provided another means through which Reagan could criticize the SRV’s unwillingness to cooperate on humanitarian issues. The extreme failure of the AIA to bring any tangible results for Vietnamese Amerasians, however, forced the administration to come up with an alternative. For both Amerasians and reeducation camp prisoners, US policy makers turned to the Orderly Departure Program.

In October 1983, Congressmen Stephen Solarz, a longtime advocate for expansive refugee admissions, gave a speech before the United Nations General Assembly that foreshadowed future administration policy. Solarz, a Democrat, applauded the Reagan administration’s ongoing admission of oceanic and overland refugees and also commended the UNHCR’s role in facilitating the Orderly Departure Program. Without specifically mentioning the abysmal failure of the Amerasian Immigration Act, the congressman noted that the ODP “made it possible for Asian-American children and their immediate families to leave Vietnam and come to the US” and explained that the United States looks “forward to expansion of this program.”¹⁵⁶ He also expressed his “hope” that the UNHCR could arrange for the ODP to facilitate the resettlement of former reeducation camp detainees. In explaining US support for the “matter of the greatest humanitarian urgency,” Solarz emphasized that an ODP subprogram for reeducation camp prisoners would provide former detainees with “their freedom” and “a chance to rejoin their families.”¹⁵⁷

US and SRV officials also had a private meeting in Geneva to discuss these concerns. During the discussions, US officials provided their Vietnamese counterparts with “a list of almost 2,000 special humanitarian cases, including names of political prisoners and their families and requested their immediate release.”¹⁵⁸ “We have made absolutely clear to Vietnam,” Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, explained, “both directly and through the UNHCR, that the United States is prepared to receive past and present ‘re-education camp’ political prisoners, as well as more Asian-Americans and a continuing large number of family reunification cases” through the ODP.¹⁵⁹

In early 1984, the United States also made the value and priority it assigned to POW/MIA accounting “absolutely clear” as well. In February the IAG “nucleus” of Armitage, Childress, and Griffiths traveled to Hanoi with State Department officials to have face-to-face discussions with Vietnamese leaders. The meeting marked “the highest level delegation to visit Vietnam since the end of the war,” which, as Childress explained to his hosts, arrived “in good will to achieve a breakthrough.”¹⁶⁰ Childress also hand delivered a letter to Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach from Secretary of State George P. Shultz, which praised Hanoi’s “private assurances that this is a humanitarian issue to be resolved apart from political differences.”¹⁶¹ The letter also explained that “resolution of this issue will improve the atmosphere between our two countries, and could provide a basis of trust for future reference by both our governments.”¹⁶²

The tone of Childress’s official remarks in Hanoi, however, bordered on threatening. “The world is watching us,” he reminded SRV leaders. After commenting on Hanoi’s shrewd use of American public opinion during the Vietnam War, Childress warned that “American public opinion is clearly demanding answers and it is sometimes ugly towards Vietnam.” “They view with great hostility,” he further explained, “any attempt to use it [the POW/MIA issue] for political purposes or avoidance of government-to-government cooperation” because the issue, “in their eyes,” is “one of basic humanity.” Switching from stick to carrot, Childress argued, “should we achieve a government-government breakthrough, a dramatic shift in opinion concerning Vietnam could occur. … It is in both your short-and long-term national interest to seize this historic opportunity.” One can only imagine the SRV officials’ reaction as an American lectured them about Vietnamese national interest less than a decade after the last US helicopter left Saigon. The combative US approach to POW/MIA accounting, especially during the 1980s, demonstrates the ways American hubris and hostility persisted into US-Vietnamese relations after 1975. Officials in Hanoi clearly understood the stakes Washington attached to POW/MIA accounting and soon thereafter attempted to minimize and “solve” the issue before it became as unruly as Childress warned.

The nature and context of this February 1984 meeting set a variety of important precedents. Moving forward, the United States demanded that Hanoi divide “humanitarian” issues – concerns imbued with human rights rhetoric that strategically prioritized Americans and South Vietnamese with familial ties to the United States – from “political” considerations. At the same time, American policy makers made it clear that failure to resolve the humanitarian concerns would have severe political consequences. As Barbara Keys and others have argued, although “the human rights idea” purported to be universal and “offered a sense of purity and transcendence of politics,” human rights rhetoric “was at heart a political language.”¹⁶³ US policy makers turned POW/MIA accounting into an especially politicized dialect of humanitarian rhetoric. In the years that followed, the US made increasingly audacious demands on SRV leaders.

At the same time, US officials faced consistent charges at home that they were not doing enough. Accusations that American officials were partaking in a government conspiracy to conceal the existence of live Americans in Indochina had already begun and only grew throughout the 1980s.¹⁶⁴ While US policy makers certainly fanned the flames of the domestic POW/MIA lobby and used that lobby’s existence as a pretense to make extraordinary demands in meetings with their SRV counterparts, American officials also never controlled POW/MIA advocates.

If the pace of POW/MIA accounting remained unsatisfactory to many Americans, the status of US-Vietnamese negotiations regarding reeducation camp detainees also gave little reason for optimism. In May of 1984, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong repeated Thach’s offer to release reeducation detainees. During an interview with Newsweek, he explained that the Vietnamese “are quite prepared to allow all of those left in the camps to leave tomorrow for the US, but the US government has rejected that suggestion.”¹⁶⁵ The reality was more complicated than this summary. Although the United States had yet to publicly accept the SRV offer, Washington also had not declined the invitation. Rather, US officials were working behind the scenes to help lay the foundations for a migration program.¹⁶⁶ The question, increasingly, was not if the US would provide for the migration of reeducation camp detainees but how.

Nevertheless, after the SRV’s renewed offer in May 1984, nonstate actors like Ginetta Sagan and the United States Committee for Refugees (USCR) called for the administration to take action.¹⁶⁷ Nongovernmental advocates also found allies in Congress. In a letter dated August 10, for instance, ten legislators explained to Reagan that many reeducation camp detainees “worked for the United States’ programs in Vietnam” and were individuals “left behind in the evacuation … or who stayed behind to save their families.”¹⁶⁸ “In some sense,” the congressmen continued, “for the Vietnamese who have spent the last nine years in communist prisons, the war has never ended.”¹⁶⁹ This statement was true for both the detainees themselves and for their families, as Khuc Minh Tho’s story so vividly demonstrates.

In September 1984, Secretary of State George P. Shultz formally announced two initiatives on behalf of reeducation camp detainees and Amerasians. He described both groups as “pressing refugee problems in Southeast Asia.”¹⁷⁰ Using the “refugee” label in this instance conformed to popular tendencies to apply the term without precision (reeducation camp prisoners and Amerasians remained in their country of nationality and therefore did not meet the legal definition of “refugee”). More importantly, suggesting that these groups warranted refugee status implied that government in Hanoi was violating its citizens’ human rights to such an extent that it qualified reeducation camp detainees and Amerasians as having a “well-founded fear of being persecuted.”

“The United States will accept for admission all Asian-American children and their qualifying family members presently in Vietnam – hopefully over the next three years,” Shultz explained. “Because of their undisputed ties to our country,” he continued, “these children and family members are of particular humanitarian concern to the United States.” Shultz used similarly careful wording to describe the administration’s plans for a reeducation detainee resettlement program. He proclaimed Washington’s intention to create a “separate and distinct program” within the ODP for former detainees and their families. The Secretary of State also characterized detainees and “their qualifying family members” as “of particular humanitarian concern” to the United States and explained that within the 50,000 East Asian refugee camp, the president earmarked 10,000 slots for them.¹⁷¹

Shultz’s language adhered to the Refugee Act of 1980’s loophole clause and, by earmarking Amerasians and reeducation camp detainees as of “particular humanitarian concern,” made them eligible for refugee status under US law. While Shultz had emotional and legal incentives to frame Amerasians and reeducation camp prisoners as populations of “special humanitarian concern,” this approach also echoed the language used by nongovernmental actors like Sagan. This framing gave the administration political cover, as it explained the seeming incongruity between the administration’s reinvigoration of the Cold War during its first term and its expansion of ongoing dialogue with Hanoi. While cooperation with a Soviet ally could normally open the door for criticism, labeling Amerasians and reeducation camp prisoners as refugees permitted Reagan to celebrate US generosity and support other combative policy measures like the economic embargo. Like US rhetoric on POW/MIA accounting, then, framing migration programs as family-reunification based humanitarian initiatives permitted the administration to score propaganda points in the short term. In the long run, however, negotiating and implementing bilateral and multilateral policies undercut the administration’s combative motivations and, ultimately, contributed to the normalization of US-Vietnamese relations.

Conclusion

In the late 1970s, American policy makers clashed about how to approach the government in Hanoi and whether the United States had ongoing commitments to the South Vietnamese people. By 1980, US policy coalesced and, for all of Reagan’s criticisms of his predecessor, his administration perpetuated three important pillars of Carter’s policy. In the 1980s, the United States sustained an international effort to economically isolate Vietnam, maintained that US-Vietnamese normalization was impossible while Vietnamese troops occupied Cambodia, and continued to admit large numbers of those who fled Indochina by land and sea. In addition to continuing these previous approaches, the Reagan administration also expanded the US-SRV dialogue by awarding POW/MIA accounting and the migration of reeducation camp detainees and Amerasians a prominent place on the US agenda vis-à-vis the SRV.

That the migration of Amerasians and reeducation camp prisoners and the full accounting of POW/MIAs came to occupy a place of prominence on the American policy agenda in 1983–1984 was not a coincidence. Each of these long-standing causes experienced a shift in the politics of information and images that created new momentum for their adoption. The increase in the number of American servicemen listed as POW/MIA suggested that the problem was much larger than previously suspected, and Ann Mills Griffiths’s presence on the Interagency POW/MIA Task Force helped ensure that the issue would receive a more favorable hearing from US policy makers. Additionally, the appearance of photographs of light-eyed, freckle-faced and tall, dark-skinned Amerasians confronted Americans with powerful visual “evidence” that the United States owed Vietnamese Amerasians a special obligation. Finally, Ginetta Sagan’s 1983 report, a substantive publication based on first-hand accounts, provided what many policy makers characterized as definitive evidence that Hanoi’s reeducation policy constituted a gross violation of the detainees’ human rights. While these data and images were undoubtedly powerful, it is highly unlikely that they, on their own, would have brought about any meaningful changes.

Official backing remained crucial, and the White House was eager to receive precisely the type of information that NGOs were providing in the early 1980s. Given the widespread criticism of US conduct during the Vietnam War, Reagan’s rebranding of the conflict as a “noble cause” should have been a tough sell. Charges that Hanoi continued to detain American prisoners of war and used their remains as diplomatic bargaining chips, oppressed innocent children for no other reason than their mixed parentage, and incarcerated former South Vietnamese soldiers and civilians in camps that violated their human rights, however, all supported Reagan’s charges of American beneficence and Vietnamese perfidy. These concerns also bolstered the president’s claims about the evils of communism and his efforts to reinvigorate the Cold War more broadly. The NGOs that lobbied on behalf of these groups did not see their missions as confirming or denying any specific geopolitical vision, however. Rather, each group sought a combination of human rights, family reunification, and closure. The NGOs that tirelessly advocated for POW/MIAs, Amerasians, and reeducation camp detainees and the Reagan administration, then, adopted the same causes for decidedly different reasons.

Besides serving the administration’s larger agenda, each of these concerns had another common feature: they required Vietnamese compliance and therefore US-Vietnamese cooperation. Efforts to turn US promises into reality initiated a sharp increase in US-Vietnamese contact and collaboration in the second half of the 1980s, a change which reflected a larger reorientation in the administration’s relations with communist countries. Because the implementation of policies to address humanitarian causes created personal, institutional, and governmental links, these programs facilitated normalization between Washington and Hanoi.

1985–1986: Hanoi Rebuffs American Demands

In late February 1985, a US delegation departed for a trip to Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. The meetings that took place in Hanoi foreshadowed the tone and nature of US-SRV cooperation throughout the mid-1980s. First, US policy makers discussed South Vietnamese migration and POW/MIA accounting together and framed these causes as humanitarian concerns.⁶ American policy makers insisted that Hanoi separate humanitarian issues, as defined by the United States, from political concerns. At the very same time, US officials made it abundantly clear that failure to cooperate on humanitarian concerns would have severe political consequences.

As they had the preceding year, in 1985 Washington and Hanoi agreed on the desirability of Amerasian migration but disagreed about the means. US officials argued that the best way to facilitate Amerasian emigration was to create a special subprogram through the preexisting Orderly Departure Program (ODP). Hanoi, on the other hand, argued that Amerasians were a bilateral concern that did not fit within the multilateral ODP and flatly rejected the American claim that Amerasians deserved refugee status.⁷

Questions about national responsibility and culpability, much more than the legal definition of refugee, defined Hanoi’s stance. “These are not refugees. These are your children,” Vietnamese Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thach explained in 1985, “I would welcome anyone to come and take them away.”⁸ In other words, Thach wanted the Americans to follow the French example. France began evacuating Eurasian children as early as 1947 and, at the end of the First Indochina War in 1954, significantly expanded the program and provided Eurasians with a path to French citizenship.⁹ Because Paris “enacted a policy of national paternal responsibility,” Hanoi likely expected American leaders to do the same.¹⁰ From the SRV’s perspective, then, it was absurd to suggest that Amerasians warranted refugee status because of Hanoi’s actions when real responsibility for the Amerasians’ suffering rested with the United States.

Larger clashes over the ODP exacerbated disagreements about refugee status. SRV leaders repeatedly expressed their displeasure with a growing bottleneck in the American processing queue. By April 1985 there was a logjam of 17,000 individuals who had been interviewed but were still waiting to hear whether or not they were approved for resettlement in the US.¹¹ This backlog stemmed from a particularly inefficient American screening process. While other nations who maintained diplomatic relations with the SRV housed official staffs in embassies and consular offices for ODP processing, the United States did not have this option. Rather, the closest American officials, who were stationed in Bangkok, had to rely on UNHCR representatives to act as intermediaries, which only added another step to an already cumbersome bureaucratic process. The backlog prompted Hanoi to submit a formal complaint in April 1985.¹² Given the inefficiency of the American program, it is likely that SRV leaders viewed the US insistence on Amerasian emigration through the ODP as both inappropriate and ineffective; if the United States could not keep up with the regular ODP caseload, how could it possibly handle tens of thousands of additional applicants?

While Washington and Hanoi agreed on Amerasian migration in principle if not yet in policy, vast disagreements separated the two sides regarding current and former reeducation camp prisoners. SRV officials claimed that 16,000 people remained incarcerated in 1985, although NGO estimates remained much higher.¹³ Two years later, for instance, an Aurora Foundation publication argued a “conservative” estimate of the reeducation camp population was “at least 25,000.”¹⁴ When in Hanoi in February 1985, American officials registered their desire for an migration program specifically for former detainees and their families.¹⁵ Thach responded by noting “he was not optimistic about any movement at the present time,” and did not think Hanoi could move forward on the issue “without normalization.” Moreover, the SRV leader expressed fear that Washington “could officially organize these people as a counterrevolutionary force.”¹⁶

SRV officials repeated this concern throughout the 1980s. The claim that former reeducation camp prisoners, who suffered years of harsh physical labor and barely subsistence diets, could lead a successful military campaign against the largest standing army in Southeast Asia pushed the boundaries of the imagination. If Vietnamese leaders could express concern about former reeducation camp prisoners leading a US-backed military campaign with a straight face, minute meetings reveal that Americans “laughed out loud” at the idea.¹⁷ While they had very little chance of succeeding, however, there were “counterrevolutionary” groups that attempted to topple the government in Hanoi, including organizations founded by members of the Vietnamese diaspora in the United States. The most well-known of these was the National United Front for the Liberation of Vietnam, or, as it was known, “the Front.”¹⁸ This and other organizations unsuccessfully sought aid and support from the US government throughout the late 1980s.¹⁹ There was therefore just enough plausibility behind Hanoi’s claim to permit SRV leaders to use the counterrevolutionary rationale as justification for refusing to work with the United States.²⁰ While talks on reeducation detainees stalled, there was reason for cautious optimism regarding collaboration on Amerasians and POW/MIAs. The cause of missing American servicemen, which was already the most widely recognized and championed issue among the American public, surged even more in the middle of the decade.

In the summer of 1985, Americans’ belief in the possibility of the return of live prisoners of war – what H. Bruce Franklin calls “the POW myth” –became a national obsession. The April 1985 release of Rambo: First Blood Part II, in particular, made the rescue of live POWs seem not only possible but something that the US government could achieve quite easily if it tried. In the film, John Rambo, a Vietnam War veteran played by Sylvester Stallone of Rocky fame, returns to Vietnam and quickly finds a camp holding live American POWs. When he reports this to his superiors, however, he is ordered to stand down. Instead, Rambo elects to single-handedly free “his” men from the prison, cutting down everyone in his path and threatening his superior to find the rest of the POWs “or I’ll find you.”²¹ As Edwin Martini explains, the film was a “shameless propagandizing of the POW/MIA myth” that, if ticket sales are any indication, told Americans a story they were eager to hear.²² Rambo, Martini observes, “became a new reference point in American culture” and set off a wave of “‘Rambomania’ in the summer of 1985.”²³

That Rambo fell on such receptive ears in the mid-1980s demonstrates the extent to which the US military, reconfigured as an All-Volunteer Force since 1973, had been resurrected in the American mind.²⁴ Films like Rambo and Top Gun, Andrew Bacevich demonstrates, “depicted soldiers, military life, and war itself in ways that would have been either unthinkable or unmarketable in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam War.”²⁵ If films like Top Gun glamorized the military and helped recast soldiers as heroes, Rambo suggested that Americans had erred in chastising Vietnam War veterans when the real blame rested with Vietnamese communists and unaccountable US government officials.

Families of the missing were not the only ones buying what Rambo was selling. Six weeks after the film opened, Reagan, a former Hollywood star and avid movie watcher, declared “Boy, I saw Rambo last night. Now I know what to do next time this happens.”²⁶ While Reagan’s quip came “ostensibly as a microphone test” before a national address, the context of his comment mattered little when all of the major newspapers ran it the next day.²⁷ Until 1985, the most explicit a White House spokesperson had ever been about the possibility of the return of live POWs was Reagan’s 1983 “highest national priority” speech, which, by including the phrase “the return of all POWs” as one of multiple aims, suggested the return of live American prisoners might be a possibility. In October 1985, at the height of Rambomania, National Security Advisor Robert C. McFarlane walked through the door Reagan had opened by asserting, “there have to be live Americans there.”²⁸ Statements like these gave hope to POW/MIA families but also created impossible expectations by contradicting the reality, which US officials acknowledged as early as December 1975, that “no Americans are still being held as prisoners in Indochina” and “a total accounting … is not now, and never will be, possible.”²⁹

Leaders in Hanoi, it seems, could not help but notice the epidemic of Rambomania infecting Americans in the summer of 1985. Although clearly building off previous meetings, especially the auspicious discussions that took place in February and March 1985, on July 1 Hanoi presented Washington with a Two-Year Work Plan to “structure general milestones and identify additional requirements needed to achieve resolution within two years.”³⁰ The depth and breadth of Rambomania in American society likely made the ability to put a two-year expiration date on POW/MIA accounting appealing to SRV leaders. Americans, in turn, were encouraged by a perceived breakthrough in Hanoi’s willingness to cooperate. In November, SRV officials permitted their American counterparts to conduct an excavation for MIA remains on Vietnamese soil. These efforts yielded the return of thirty-eight American remains in 1985 and thirteen more in 1986.³¹ The fact that US government officials conducted excavations for missing US servicemen at all is remarkable. The fact that such operations took place in the absence of formal diplomatic ties demonstrates the extent to which humanitarian issues – as defined by the United States – became the basis of, and helped lay the groundwork for, official US-SRV relations.

American officials met with SRV leaders again in Hanoi in August to discuss the Two-Year Plan. US participants described the meeting as “relaxed and cooperative … better by a wide margin than any prior US-Vietnamese discussion on the subject.”³² Richard Childress, the head NSC official dealing with POW/MIA negotiations and a longtime member of the POW/MIA Interagency Group (IAG) speculated that the two-year “timetable is based upon their [Hanoi’s] geostrategic calculations concerning a Cambodian settlement, their political assessment that President Reagan could ‘pull off’ normalization as a conservative (Nixon precedent with China) and their assessment that further delay is decreasing rather than increasing their leverage in the United States.”³³ Although encouraged, then, US policy makers were also suspicious of Hanoi’s proposal and wanted to “prevent it from publicly appearing to be a joint plan” in order to maintain “political flexibility in the future” should the Vietnamese announce prematurely “that the issue has been solved.”³⁴

Although American officials focused their attention on populations within Vietnam’s borders, the eyes of Southeast Asia remained fixed on the lingering populations in first asylum camps and those who continued to flee Vietnam by boat. In 1986, 154,000 migrants remained in first asylum camps, and an additional 250,000 congregated on the Thai-Cambodian border.³⁵ Contemporaries referred to these groups as “long-stayer” populations. Long-stayers are more accurately understood as what Yen Le Espiritu calls “protracted refugees,” individuals who existed for years “on the margins of sovereign space” in “prison-like camps, encircled by barbed wire and armed military guards.”³⁶ From burying loved ones in a foreign, hostile land to rearing young children who knew no other life than one lived inside a refugee camp, the South Vietnamese (and others) continued to pay an inordinately high cost for the US/RVN defeat in the Vietnam War.

As hundreds of thousands of migrants forged ahead with their lives while their legal status and future resettlement prospects remained in limbo, clashes between the governments in Hanoi and Washington continued to worsen the prospects Vietnamese migrants faced. In December 1985, Hanoi announced it was suspending American ODP interviews, citing disagreements over the nature of the Amerasian program and the growing backlog, which by then rested at 22,000.³⁷ This decision removed the only legal means through which migrants might safely leave the SRV for the United States. Predictably, the number of oceanic migrants increased the following year.³⁸

At the same time, the world witnessed a significant about-face in US Cold War policy. After campaigning in 1980 on a belligerent platform of anticommunism and getting reelected in 1984 after drastically expanding the defense budget and branding the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” Reagan shocked the world by participating face-to-face negotiations with the new leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, in November 1985. The discussions included “American concern for divided families,” among other topics.³⁹ This abrupt willingness to negotiate with a nation the president had previously lambasted as a communist foe quickly, to borrow a phrase from the administration’s economic philosophy, trickled down into other aspects of US policy, including US-SRV relations. The implied hierarchy in this language is important and, from the administration’s perspective, accurate. Reagan devoted a great deal of personal time and attention to negotiating with Gorbachev in the second half of the 1980s. The president made no such personal overtures toward Vietnam. As the White House focused on Moscow, nonexecutive actors, especially legislators who had served in the Vietnam War, filled the vacuum and provide personal, visible leadership on US-SRV normalization.

In the wake of larger reorientations in American policy, US officials responded to the stalemate over Amerasian migration with more imaginative proposals that facilitated heightened cooperation. By late 1986, US policy makers abandoned their insistence that Amerasians travel through an ODP subprogram and instead offered to negotiate a separate bilateral agreement, which set the stage for rapid improvement. Vietnamese Minister of State Vo Dong Giang “reacted very positively” to the proposal, noting the offer “represented a substantial departure from previous procedures and represented a genuine effort … to get the program going again.” US officials’ willingness to meet Hanoi’s demands, Giang noted contentedly, amounted to an implicit American recognition that Amerasians were “also a legacy of war and US responsibility.”⁴⁰

By the fall of 1986, then, Washington and Hanoi were cooperating in multiple areas as dictated by the SRV’s willingness, or lack thereof, to respond to US proposals. Likely because Hanoi recognized that POW/MIA accounting posed a significant potential threat to US-Vietnamese normalization (especially in light of Rambomania in the summer of 1985), SRV negotiators proposed a Two-Year Plan to limit the issue’s potential impact and attempt to rein in the unwieldy, emotional cause. Furthermore, American officials bent to Hanoi’s terms on Amerasians, finally agreeing to negotiate a bilateral agreement. Yet, because Hanoi insisted “present circumstances [are] not appropriate for discussion of reeducation camp prisoners,” the two sides did not make any progress on that issue, regardless of repeated American attempts.⁴¹ As Hanoi dug in its heels, Vietnamese American NGOs rose to ensure that US officials did not forget or rescind their commitment to reeducation camp prisoners, even while the issue remained at a diplomatic impasse.

Nonexecutive Advocacy and the Rise of the FVPPA

Policy makers’ failure to win Hanoi’s cooperation on the migration of reeducation detainees did not stop nongovernmental advocates from lobbying for the cause. The Aurora Foundation and its 1983 publication, Violations of Human Rights in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, April 30, 1975–April 30, 1983, was crucial to creating the momentum and political cover that led to the reeducation detainees’ inclusion in Secretary of State Shultz’s 1984 announcement. Even after Violations’ publication, Aurora and its founder, Ginetta Sagan, worked tirelessly to document human rights violations in the SRV, with a focus on the reeducation camp system. In fact, Sagan set out to conduct additional interviews and publish a new edition of Violations almost immediately.⁴² Her previous and ongoing work found receptive ears in the Reagan administration. An April 1985 State Department report entitled, “Vietnam: Under Two Regimes,” for example, cites Violations multiple times.⁴³

On December 10, 1986, the thirty-eighth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Reagan gave a speech to highlight the document’s continued importance. The White House invited Sagan to attend the ceremony and the president spoke about her at length:

That one of the most important figures in the American human rights movement argued that Hanoi violated its citizens’ human rights proved incredibly useful to Reagan’s efforts to rebrand the Vietnam War as a “noble cause.” The administration’s official commitment to securing the detainees’ release and resettlement, however, was just as useful to Sagan, who could not hope to extract concessions from Hanoi without sustained commitment from the US government. Although Sagan and the administration adopted the same cause for decidedly different reasons, each aided the other. While we often frame nongovernmental human rights advocacy and official US diplomacy as oppositional forces, Sagan’s activism demonstrates the extent to which nonstate human rights advocates and government officials could work in tandem, even when motivated by different impulses.

If Sagan framed her advocacy on behalf of reeducation detainees as a human rights imperative, Khuc Minh Tho and the FVPPA emphasized, above all else, family reunification. Explaining the Association’s name, Tho said, “we put the family first, the Family of Vietnamese Political Prisoner[s] … family first.”⁴⁵ Framing the organization in ways that highlighted familial relationships, moreover, gave the FVPPA an emotionally poignant way to sell its cause that did not need any translation. This emphasis helped to transcend any potential cultural barriers that separated newly arrived South Vietnamese refugees and the American officials whose support the FVPPA needed to achieve its goals.

Shultz’s 1984 call for the creation of a special ODP subprogram for reeducation camp detainees marked a key turning point for the FVPPA. Although South Vietnamese women had been meeting in Tho’s living room since 1977, the month after Shultz’s statement the Association received official non-profit corporation status and increased its lobbying efforts dramatically. On September 15, four days after Shultz’s announcement, Tho wrote identical letters to the White House and State Department expressing her gratitude and offering the FVPPA’s services: “With our capability, our devotion and our tract [sic] record,” she explained, “our association endeavors to be a clearing house for the political prisoners and their family members … to ensure family reunification.”⁴⁶ The FVPPA certainly made good on this promise, as American policy makers would soon attest.

Shultz and Reagan’s responses to the FVPPA’s September 15 letter demonstrate the limits – but also the potential – of the Association’s power in 1984. Shultz responded in four days and emphasized the objectives the State Department and the FVPPA shared. “I can assure you,” he promised, “that this government is ready to do its part for those who have suffered so much for their support of the cause of freedom in Vietnam.”⁴⁷ That Tho received such a fast and positive response demonstrated both the Department’s enduring commitment to the admissions of South Vietnamese stemming from the Ford administration and the position of key FVPPA allies, like Shep Lowman, in the agency. The Association’s return letter from the White House, however, inspired far less optimism. It took a month for the administration to respond and the Office of Public Liaison incorrectly addressed the letter to “Mr. Tho.”⁴⁸ While beginning to make connections and solidify itself as an important lobbying force, then, the FVPPA remained far from demanding the attention the White House consistently awarded to the League of POW/MIA Families.

The Association recognized that it was not operating in a cultural vacuum. The prevalence of the POW myth and Rambomania proved incredibly useful to the FVPPA’s members, who had irrefutable proof that their loved ones, who were former American allies, were being held against their will in Vietnam. “We share the same pain and sufferings as the wives and children of American POWs,” the FVPPA informed Secretary of State Shultz in September 1985. “In a sense, our husbands and fathers are POWs too.”⁴⁹ When writing to Congressmen Gerald B. H. Solomon, Chairman of the POW/MIA Task Force, Tho introduced the organization by explaining, “We are … the Vietnamese version of The National League of Families of POWs in more modest proportions.”⁵⁰ As she put it in an August 1986 letter to Reagan, “We understand America’s concern for her MIA’s; we think it important to speak out for our husbands, brothers, and sons as well. Please do not forget them!”⁵¹ POW/MIA rhetoric, which was both culturally powerful and a significant basis of US policy, helped the FVPPA consolidate official backing by speaking to American officials in a language they understood.

Discussing their family members, incarcerated ARVN troops, on par with American POWs also provided a means for FVPPA members to insist the Republic of Vietnam have a place in understandings of the Vietnam War in the United States. Espiritu has shown how “commemorating the lives and deaths of ARVN officers simultaneously mourns another death: that of the nation of the Republic of Vietnam.”⁵² The FVPPA’s ongoing advocacy served the same function. South Vietnamese reeducation camp detainees “are POWs in the truest sense,” Tho argued. “The United States can in good conscience close the books on the war only when all of the American POWs will be released – and the Vietnamese POWs also.”⁵³ At the same time that the dominant trends in the United States depicted the Vietnam War as “an American tragedy that had badly wounded and divided the nation,” the FVPPA insisted that the South Vietnamese people in general and ARVN servicemen in particular not be relegated to the historical footnotes.⁵⁴ There was perhaps no more powerful way to recenter South Vietnam and ARVN troops than by comparing them directly with missing American servicemen.

Amerasian advocates also appropriated POW/MIA rhetoric. As Jana K. Lipman argues, when no American POWs returned from Vietnam, “US politicians and the media transferred ‘homecoming’ from POW/MIAs onto Vietnamese Americans.”⁵⁵ Lipman demonstrates that Amerasians and POW/MIAs became “linguistically coupled” in popular imagination as “journalists and men and women writing letters to the editor to local newspapers also reframed Amerasians alternatively as ‘veterans,’ ‘prisoners of war,’ and ‘missing in action.’”⁵⁶ Thus, when US officials linked these issues as “humanitarian” concerns, they were both echoing and catalyzing tendencies that began in different segments of the American public.

In 1985 and 1986, while official efforts to secure the release and resettlement of reeducation detainees failed, FVPPA’s efforts to secure US policy makers’ commitment to the cause succeeded. The Association developed and maintained close relationships with key US officials in Congress, the White House, and the State Department.⁵⁷ One striking example of this is the FVPPA’s rapport with Robert F. Funseth, Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Refugee Affairs. Before she met Robert Funseth, however, Tho had met his wife, Marilyn, by chance. Although Tho devoted every spare moment she had to FVPPA’s activities, she retained her day job working for the Department of Human Services (DHS) in Arlington, Virginia, out of financial necessity. Marilyn volunteered at the DHS, where the two women crossed paths from time to time, and Tho recalled that Marilyn occasionally “came to my office to talk to me.”⁵⁸ When she sat down to meet Robert Funseth for the first time, then, Tho was immediately struck by the picture of Marilyn on his desk. Tho did not know Marilyn’s last name was Funseth and, with the realization that she was Robert’s wife, Tho suspected that Funseth knew “everything about me already.”⁵⁹ Tho and the Funseths went on to form an incredibly close, collaborative working relationship that lasted for the better part of a decade.

In October 1984, Funseth met with SRV officials in Geneva at a UNHCR meeting and thereafter served as the primary American negotiator on the reeducation issue throughout the 1980s. The contacts the FVPPA developed with Funseth and his staff proved to be mutually beneficial. As Tho explained, especially in the Association’s early days, Funseth’s office “continuously kept us appraised” of “information that would not have been otherwise available to us.”⁶⁰ The FVPPA also returned the favor. Because the SRV had to approve individual applications for exit permits under the ODP, the only way former reeducation camp detainees could depart is if their names appeared on both the American and Vietnamese lists. This requirement gave Hanoi a considerable amount of power, which it wielded not only by suspending ODP interviews in December 1985 but also by refusing to publish the reeducation detainees’ names. In theory, Hanoi’s policy should have tied American policy makers’ hands by leaving them unable to advocate on the behalf of specific individuals. The FVPPA filled this information gap, however, because it earned the trust of South Vietnamese families. In 1985 alone, when there were only 150 total FVPPA members, the Association received approximately “5,000 dossiers requesting their intervention on behalf of prisoners” and would receive “three to four times” more by 1991.⁶¹ The Association regularly met with Funseth and his team to exchange information, often on Saturdays, an arrangement which gave the Senior Deputy Assistant Secretary, in Tho’s words, “more time to work with us.”⁶²

The FVPPA thus established itself as a vital link in the release and resettlement process. By dedicating large amounts of their time, employing their language skills, tapping their vast transnational network, and developing their legal knowledge, FVPPA members provided US officials with constantly updated lists of current and former detainees and also sent out regular bilingual newsletters informing Vietnamese families about the many procedures and constantly changing paperwork required for migration.⁶³ Just as the Citizens Commission on Indochinese Refugees and the Aurora Foundation played central roles in the politics of information, so too did the FVPPA.

The Association’s activism also adds another layer of depth to historians’ understanding of the Vietnamese American community in the 1980s. Although often depicted as uncompromisingly anticommunist, critical refugee studies scholars have shown that Vietnamese Americans held more nuanced views than is often suspected.⁶⁴ Anticommunism, Vo Dang argues, functioned in diasporic communities not just as a political ideology but as a “cultural praxis,” a means to “remember South Vietnam and the war/refugee dead, to connect with each other through (imagined) ties to a South Vietnam no longer there, and to inscribe their presence into spaces they inhibit.”⁶⁵ Refugee identity, as Phuong Tan Nguyen explains, was crucial to this larger process:

Thus, even though anticommunism existed in South Vietnam during the war, anticommunism among diasporic communities in the United States involved a “remaking of South Vietnamese anticommunism” to fit new circumstances.⁶⁷ This reimagining took on a much more militant edge in the 1980s through groups like the Front, whose members dreamed “of reclaiming their lost homeland,” an attractive prospect which recast “the rescued” refugees as “the rescuers.”⁶⁸ Although the US government did not endorse or fund the Front or similar entities, the increased militancy among diasporic communities occurred alongside a broader militarization in the United States, including the white power movement, which was intimately tied to disillusionment with the US government in the wake of the Vietnam War.⁶⁹

Although the Reagan administration did not support the Front, then, domestic developments and the administration’s foreign policies created an ideal environment for them to prosper. “Only in the context of neoconservatives and the increasing US dependence on secret counterrevolutionary guerillas to fight the Cold War can we more fully understand the meteoric rise of the resistance movement in Little Saigon,” Nguyen explains.⁷⁰ As some South Vietnamese dreamed of liberating their homeland by force, this militancy reverberated in the wider community, where any variation from the anticommunist line, especially support for Hanoi or US-SRV talks, was often met with violence.

The FVPPA and its cause stand as notable exceptions. The Association did not take a formal stand on US-Vietnamese relations until official ties appeared imminent in the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the fact that the migration of former detainees required Hanoi’s cooperation was unavoidable. The urgency at the heart of family separation, where every day apart was another day family members could never get back, stood at odds with the general position of unequivocal opposition to closer ties between Washington and Hanoi. As one Vietnamese woman interviewed by the Los Angeles Times explained in the mid-1980s, “Of course we don’t want to see the US government and the Vietnam government have a better relationship at all. But the priority now is the prisoners. They have to get out of the camps now, after 10 years. … I think, as Vietnamese people, we are the same everywhere in the United States – waiting for something to happen for the prisoners very fast. We are waiting for our friends and relatives to join us here, before it is too late.”⁷¹ Efforts to secure the prisoners’ release and migration, a quest that touched the hearts of so many South Vietnamese, required at least implicit acceptance of US-SRV collaboration, which was, in almost all other circumstances, viewed as anathema. While the FVPPA’s voluminous records do not contain a written description of this position, the issue is moot insofar as actions speak far louder than words.⁷² By successfully lobbying for reeducation camp prisoners’ release, the FVPPA championed an issue that required cooperation between officials in Washington and Hanoi.

While it never achieved the cultural omnipresence that the League enjoyed, the FVPPA and its cause earned the ardent attention of US policy makers by 1987. As proof, one needs only to look at the guest list for the FVPPA’s First Annual Reception on Capitol Hill in April 1987. Robert Funseth, Senators Bob Dole and Ted Kennedy, and Representative Stephen J. Solarz attended and gave supportive speeches to an audience of more than three hundred congressmen, State Department officials, administrative representatives, and Vietnamese Americans. “It isn’t often you find Senator Dole and I together speaking alike in support of issues,” Kennedy quipped, “but this is certainly one that brings all Americans together.”⁷³ “All of us Americans put a very strong emphasis on families,” the prominent senator from Massachusetts continued, recognizing and echoing the FVPPA’s emphasis on family reunification, adding that familial ties are the “bedrock of our strength.”⁷⁴ Dole, who had spent more than a decade advocating on behalf of POW/MIA wives and family members, suggested that US officials owed South Vietnamese families a similar debt: “We have a responsibility,” the Senate Majority Leader argued, “whether they’re in reeducation camps, or are POWs, or MIAs. It is a responsibility we share and one that we will not forget.”⁷⁵

Dole and Kennedy backed their words with action. The very next day, they cosponsored a resolution, along with Senator Claiborne Pell (D-RI). Pell, who had supported parole programs for South Vietnamese in the late 1970s, was, by 1987, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The resolution called on the SRV to not only release the prisoners but also “expedite all family reunification cases still outstanding.”⁷⁶ When introducing the resolution, Kennedy noted that he intended for the measure “to focus renewed attention on one of the utmost urgent humanitarian issues in the aftermath of the Vietnam War – the continued plight of political prisoners in Vietnam and the problem of family reunification.”⁷⁷ As Dole argued, it “is totally nonpolitical; certainly, in our political terms in the senate, it is totally nonpartisan. All Senators ought to support it.”⁷⁸ And they did; the Senate passed S. Con. Res. 205 unanimously.⁷⁹

Like many of Congress’ efforts to set human rights standards for the appropriation of foreign aid in the early 1970s, this resolution was nonbinding and largely of symbolic importance. Yet, also like those earlier human rights resolutions, S. Con. Res 205 eventually became institutionalized in US policy and demonstrated Congress’s determination to shape the nation’s diplomacy in the last quarter of the twentieth century. The Senators’ conflation of the language of family, human rights and humanitarian rhetoric, and refugee policy drew on decades of precedent and also reflected a unique, post-1975 US approach to Vietnam. The three Senators themselves, moreover, with their deep ties to refugee issues and the Holocaust, on the one hand, and military service, on the other, personified the type of legislators and alliances between members of Congress that underwrote Capital Hill’s robust role in US-SRV normalization.

1987: Progress on Humanitarian Issues

Hanoi increasingly coveted normalization in the late 1980s for both internal and international reasons. In July 1986, Le Duan, who had been the major architect behind Hanoi’s war with the United States, died.⁸⁰ Le Duan’s death cleared the way for the ascension of a younger, more reconciliatory generation of leaders to power in late 1986.⁸¹ At the Sixth Party Congress that December, key members of the old guard retired in the wake of a call for “‘new thinking,’” or doi moi in both economic matters and foreign affairs.⁸² These changes clearly echoed the shifts then occurring in the Soviet Union, where Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika policies were liberalizing Moscow’s economy and foreign policy. The Soviet leader met with Reagan in a series of widely publicized summits that culminated in the two heads of state signing the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in December 1987.

This major thawing of the Cold War had profound ramifications for internal SRV politics and US-SRV dynamics. As Phuong Tran Nguyen explains, “the Hanoi government, now led by reformer Nguyen Van Linh – the Vietnamese Gorbachev – declared the revolution over and ushered in Doi Moi, the socialist world’s version of the New Deal, introducing free-market reforms to save the communist state.”⁸³ Seeking to end its intentional isolation and deescalate the Third Indochina War, leaders in Hanoi and Beijing held secret bilateral talks in 1990 that culminated in the resumption of full bilateral relations the following year.⁸⁴ Likewise, especially as the decade wore on, the SRV sought an improved relationship with the United States to end the American embargo and, especially, to begin a direly needed flow of investment from international bodies like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, which would not lend to the SRV without American approval.⁸⁵

These internal, regional, and international trends fueled Hanoi’s increased willingness to cooperate. The Reagan administration also proved receptive to SRV overtures, at least for a time, and the tone and nature of US-Vietnamese relations changed noticeably in 1987. In February, the president appointed General John Vessey Jr., a former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had served in World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as a “personal emissary” to Vietnam.⁸⁶ Like the growing visibility of veterans in Congress, this appointment owed a great deal to Reagan’s insistence that the Vietnam War had been a “noble cause” and his wider celebration of the American soldier and US military.

Washington and Hanoi continued to collaborate throughout the spring. In May, both governments expedited the migration of a by then very well-known Amerasian, Le Van Minh. Western audiences became aware of Minh’s existence when a striking photo of the “fair skinned crippled Vietnamese boy” crawling on all fours and “begging for money on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City” appeared in Newsweek in December 1985.⁸⁷ That following fall a student government committee at Huntington High School in New York adopted Minh as a class project and by November 1986 “successfully collected 27,000 signatures in support of Minh’s emigration.”⁸⁸ The students then appealed to their local congressman and Huntington High alumni, Robert Mrazek (D-NY). After attending Huntington and graduating from Cornell University in 1967, Mrazek joined the US Navy. He was honorably discharged after a training accident at Officer’s Candidate School left him disabled. Although only in the military for a brief time, Mrazek’s hospitalization brought him face to face “with badly wounded Marines who had been evacuated from Vietnam,” a visceral experience that confronted the twenty-three-year-old with “the human cost of the war in Vietnam,” leaving him “deeply disheartened.”⁸⁹ Mrazek added congressional muscle to the students’ advocacy on behalf of Minh, as did Senator John McCain.

Of all of the Americans held as prisoners of war during the Vietnam War, McCain became among the most well-known, thanks to his decades of service in the Senate and 2008 presidential campaign. On October 26, 1967, while completing a bombing mission in North Vietnam, DRV troops shot down McCain’s aircraft. Although he survived the crash, he was severely injured and, due to lack of proper medical treatment, never fully recovered. The challenges McCain endured went far beyond the physical, however; his six years as POW included torture and years in solitary confinement. As a newly elected Senator in 1987 (who had been serving in the House since 1982), McCain seized upon his status as a senator, a veteran, and a former POW to exercise a leadership voice in US-SRV normalization.

In addition to traveling to Hanoi with Mrazek in May 1987 to personally escort Minh to the United States, McCain repeatedly advocated for migration programs for Amerasians and former reeducation camp prisoners.⁹⁰ In a 2009 interview, for example, Tho recalled a very close relationship between the FVPPA and the Senator from Arizona. “We [were] always with him, always,” Tho remembered with a palpable fondness in her voice. “I can always go to Senator McCain, anytime,” she explained, adding that their encounters were “not formal” or forced. “I can wear anything, casual,” she elaborated.⁹¹ Although one might have expected McCain’s time as a POW to harden his heart with hatred toward Vietnam, Tho suggested that their visceral wartime experiences created a powerful, if largely unspoken, bond between them. As a POW, Tho reasoned, “he [was] separate[d] from the family [sic], from his own children, when I talk to him, he get right away how we feel.” The profound connection of their experiences created instantaneous mutual understanding, Tho implied: “I look at his face, and he know.” McCain’s broader history of advocacy, in addition to his trip to Hanoi with Mzarek in May 1987 to escort Minh to the United States, demonstrate the variety of forms that legislative activism, especially that of Vietnam War veterans, could take in the US-SRV normalization process.

While Minh’s resettlement tangibly illustrated increased US-SRV cooperation, a statement Secretary of State Shultz gave at a June ASEAN Post Ministerial Conference in Singapore sent the opposite message. Shultz argued it was “imperative” for Hanoi to end its “occupation” of Cambodia and suggested that “the continued isolation of Vietnam” was “essential.”⁹² “That isolation is a result of its [Vietnam’s] own policies,” Shulz reprimanded, concluding, “without a change in those policies, her people will continue to pay a heavy price.”⁹³ The Cambodian people also paid a heavy price, as providing covert aid to the Khmer Rouge in exile – despite the fact that Congress had prohibited such aid – continued to be a cornerstone of the US policy.⁹⁴ In this way, then, the tensions in the US modus operandi from the late Carter administration continued a decade later; the United States publicly chastised Hanoi and celebrated the US-led effort to isolate the SRV, all the while demanding that Hanoi cooperate with the US on issues American policy makers deemed humanitarian.

The same month that Shultz gave this belligerent speech in Singapore, Reagan famously gave a powerful address at the Berlin Wall. The president, always attuned to “stagecraft as much as statecraft,” insisted on delivering his remarks in East Berlin and rallied his right-wing supporters at home when he thundered “Mr. Gorbachev – Tear down this wall!”⁹⁵ The Secretary of State’s confrontational remarks thus aligned with what was by 1987 clearly the administration’s larger approach: talk tough to maintain appearances and credibility, all the while negotiating with communist countries. While the overall messages were similar, the fact that Reagan traveled to Berlin but not Singapore is revealing. US-Soviet relations were a much higher priority than US-Vietnamese ties. In these circumstances, nonexecutive actors dictated the scope and pace of US normalization policies, with the White House intervening at key moments.

Perhaps in response to uncompromising American rhetoric, SRV leaders announced the resumption of American ODP interviews in mid-July.⁹⁶ As part of the program’s reopening, Washington and Hanoi agreed to new procedures. Thereafter, the American ODP employed the same methods as nations that maintained diplomatic relations with the SRV: “US Consular and Immigration officers” could henceforth go “directly to Ho Chi Minh City to conduct interviews in person.”⁹⁷ This change made the American ODP much more efficient, as UNHCR officials no longer needed to act as intermediaries for US officials stationed in Bangkok. Both Minh’s emigration and the July 16 announcement were clear SRV efforts to court American favor and demonstrated that the two nations were taking real, albeit small, steps toward normalization, despite Shultz’s comments in Singapore.⁹⁸

It is within this context of compromise and political goodwill that Vessey made his first trip to the SRV in late July 1987. Before his departure, the desirability and goals of the general’s mission sparked a great deal of discussion in Congress. There was very little debate. Every senator who had the floor on July 28, 1987 – including McCain, Dole, Rudy Boschwitz, Dennis DeConcini (D-AZ), Alan Cranston (D-CA), Mark Hatfield (R-OR), and others – spoke favorably about Vessey’s imminent departure and agreed on the scope of his mission, arguing that he should seek Hanoi’s cooperation on POW/MIA accounting, the ODP, emigration of Amerasians, and release and resettlement of reeducation detainees.⁹⁹ As had become common practice, US officials supported this four-part definition of humanitarian and insisted Hanoi address each issue apart from political concerns.

Although US-Vietnamese negotiations on the fate of current and former reeducation detainees remained at an impasse, and, indeed, perhaps because of this stalemate, the Senators took pains to emphasize the importance they attached to the issue. Pell, for example, mentioned the FVPPA by name and described Hanoi’s reeducation policy as a “black mark on the image that Vietnam seeks to present to the rest of the world.”¹⁰⁰ When Hatfield, who publicly opposed the Vietnam War as early as 1965, spoke, he emphasized the torment of family separation and the moral imperative of family reunification to justify his support: “Hundreds of brave families in this country – whose husbands and fathers, whose sons and brothers remain unaccounted for – live everyday in the nightmare of the unknown. For the hundreds of thousands of brave men, women and children in Vietnamese reeducation camps and in refugee camps … the nightmare is not the unknown but the known.”¹⁰¹ Although never occupying as central of a place in the American memory of the war as United States servicemen, Amerasians, reeducation camp detainees, and Indochinese migration issues more broadly inspired a level of congressional consensus usually unheard of for a Vietnam related topic.

Vessey’s mission marked a significant milestone in US-Vietnamese relations.¹⁰² The general was the highest-ranking US official to visit Vietnamese soil in over a decade and he brought a letter from Reagan.¹⁰³ During this initial delegation, Hanoi emphasized “humanitarian reciprocity” and secured a commitment from the general that the US government would permit NGOs to send limited medical supplies to Vietnam.¹⁰⁴ Vessey and Thach also signed “an agreement calling for the resumption of US-Vietnamese cooperation on searching for MIAs.”¹⁰⁵ In the year and a half following Vessey’s mission – the last eighteen months of Reagan’s presidency – Hanoi repatriated the remains of seventy Americans, more than three times the amount in Reagan’s entire first term.¹⁰⁶ In addition to progress on POW/MIA accounting, the United States also “got a commitment from Thach to move forward on the Amerasian issue, with an early technical meeting on that subject.”¹⁰⁷

Additional progress quickly followed on the heels of Vessey’s visit. On August 17, the SRV announced that it would “release, or reduce the detention terms of persons in prisons or in reeducation camps.”¹⁰⁸ The following month, Hanoi released 480 prisoners who were “military and civilian personnel of the toppled South Vietnamese regime.”¹⁰⁹ The FVPPA wrote to its contacts in Congress and the State Department that the release, was “‘too late, too little,’ particularly in view of the tens of thousands who remained incarcerated.”¹¹⁰ Others agreed, and legislators immediately passed another resolution calling for greater action.¹¹¹

While the modest release did not receive widespread attention throughout the American press, the announcement sparked interest in areas of the country with high Vietnamese populations. The San Jose Mercury News, for example, ran a series of articles on the subject. One explained, “When the Vietnam War ended, most of the world just wanted to forget,” and only a select few labored to keep the reeducation camp issue before the public eye.¹¹² “At the forefront of the effort to free the prisoners,” the article continued, “are people such as human rights activist Ginetta Sagan” and “Khuc Minh Tho.”¹¹³ The article included comments given by US government officials on the importance of both women’s work. “She does very careful research,” Lawrence Kerr, a Vietnam specialist at the State Department said of Sagan. “I don’t know anyone in the government who knows more on the issue than she does.”¹¹⁴ “Tho’s group,” the article went on, “keeps case records on individual reeducation camp prisoners and their immediate relatives. Tho gets her information in letters from Vietnam as well as from released prisoners and the Vietnamese grapevine – which one State Department official said generally supplies better information than the US government.”¹¹⁵ Because the “Vietnamese grapevine” ran both ways, the FVPPA especially played a crucial role by acting as a conduit of information between the American government and the Vietnamese American community. By providing tireless advocacy, quality information, and amassing valuable transnational networks, both the Aurora Foundation and the FVPPA played central roles in creating the awareness and momentum behind US advocacy on behalf of reeducation camp detainees.

Both organizations were also aware of the other. Although the West Coast–based Aurora Foundation and East Coast-based FVPPA operated on opposite sides of the country and utilized mostly distinct transnational networks in the pre-internet era, the records of both NGOs contain evidence of their correspondence and mutual assistance. In the spring of 1986, for example, the FVPPA hosted Sagan while she was in Washington, and Sagan made a personal donation to the Association on at least two occasions.¹¹⁶ Moreover, the two organizations exchanged information, with the FVPPA sending Sagan their annual newsletter and assisting the Aurora Foundation in verifying their lists of former and current reeducation detainees, and Sagan sending the FVPPA her organization’s publications.¹¹⁷ Although it would be an exaggeration to describe them as close partners, they were, at the very least, allies who used their comparative advantages – human rights training and networks and the Vietnamese grapevine, respectively – to advocate on behalf of reeducation camp detainees.

After the modest September 1987 release, the FVPPA hosted a fundraising dinner in November. More than 250 guests attended, including officials from Congress, the State Department, and Vietnam War veterans.¹¹⁸ The previous month, the Association sent a compilation of “Proposals to Expedite the Resettlement of Former Vietnamese Political Prisoners” to many of its friends in the US government, and during his keynote address, Funseth responded directly to each of the FVPPA’s proposals.¹¹⁹ He vowed that he would continue his “steadfast efforts” on behalf of current and former reeducation detainees until they succeeded.¹²⁰ He assured his audience that Congress would appropriate any and all funds necessary for this purpose and that US policy makers would entertain the idea of creating a separate bilateral program with Hanoi, if necessary.

Three years after its official incorporation, the FVPPA clearly had the ears of key US policy makers. Not only did those in the State Department and Congress listen when the Association offered proposals; officials met with the Association’s board on multiple occasions and with general membership at events like the November 1987 fundraiser to discuss the Association’s ideas.¹²¹ Despite the increase in the FVPPA’s visibility and prestige, however, US-SRV negotiations on the subject stalled. When Funseth met with SRV leaders in December 1987, Hanoi said that it would allow former reeducation camp prisoners to emigrate through the ODP but refused to establish a separate program particularly for that purpose. In reality, little changed.¹²²

As negotiations on reeducation camp prisoners remained deadlocked, the United States and SRV achieved a breakthrough on Amerasian migration. In September, the two sides reached a “Resettlement Accord,” that, although only an “agreement in principle” and not legally binding, laid the foundation for future policy.¹²³ Washington and Hanoi pledged, first, to regard the Amerasian issue as a bilateral concern. While Amerasians would emigrate through a subprogram of the ODP, Washington and Hanoi would negotiate the terms of that migration separately. This convoluted balance allowed both US policy makers, who had insisted that reeducation detainees should travel through the multilateral ODP, and SRV leaders, who repeatedly expressed their interest in a separate bilateral program, to save face. Second, negotiators agreed that American officials could be “stationed directly in Vietnam to conduct preliminary face-to-face interviews,” an expansion of the already agreed-upon presence of US officials in Ho Chi Minh City to conduct exit interviews for the ODP.¹²⁴

The third point of consensus involved similar acrobatics to permit American and Vietnamese negotiators to compromise without having appeared to capitulate. On the one hand, they agreed that Amerasians “must be given nonrefugee status,” a clear American concession to Hanoi’s position.¹²⁵ While the Amerasians would travel under immigrant visas, however, they would still be eligible for refugee benefits once they arrived in the United States. US policy makers thus accommodated Hanoi while at the same time ensuring that Amerasians had access to the more robust assistance afforded to refugees once they entered US territory.¹²⁶ The negotiators also agreed, fourth, that “family unity must be preserved.” Agreement on this principle aimed to improve the much-maligned 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act, which did not permit Vietnamese mothers to travel with their Amerasian children. This provision also corrected, at least from a policy standpoint, the erroneous perception that all Amerasians were orphans. Finally, the two sides committed to “the need to expedite Amerasian processing” and the first new interviews began the following month.¹²⁷

While the Resettlement Accord represented a strong commitment to principles for a future program, American officials needed to adjust US laws to implement the agreement. In August, Representative Mrazek, who had been the key congressional actor behind Le Van Minh’s emigration, and Thomas Ridge (R-PA), an army veteran who earned the Bronze Star while fighting in the Vietnam War, introduced legislation that would eventually be known as the Amerasian Homecoming Act (AHA).¹²⁸ Eight Senators, including John McCain and Claiborne Pell, introduced an identical bill to the Senate. Seven out of the eight Senate cosponsors were veterans, with service spanning from World War II to the wars in Korea and Vietnam.¹²⁹ As Americans regained pride in their military and veneration for their troops throughout the 1980s, veterans in Congress cashed in on this new political capital to exercise a leadership role in the normalization process.

Because the bill aspired to obviate legal obstacles and make it easier for Amerasians and their close family members to emigrate, the Reagan administration and especially the Immigration and Naturalization Service worried about the high potential for fraud, and the bill languished in committee.¹³⁰ However, Mrazek found a way around the problem by attaching the legislation to a 1,194-page appropriations bill. Reagan thus had no choice but to sign the Amerasian Homecoming Act into law in December 1987.¹³¹ This congressional willingness to march out of step with the administration on issues pertaining to US-Vietnamese relations was a harbinger of things to come.

The 1987 Amerasian Homecoming Act (AHA) was a dramatic improvement over the 1982 Amerasian Immigration Act. The AHA appropriated $5 million for the emigration of Amerasians and their close family members over the next two years.¹³² True to the Resettlement Accord, the AHA “created a new Amerasian immigrant visa category for the ODP” that provided both legal immigrant status and entitlement to refugee benefits.¹³³ The bill permitted all Amerasians fathered by Americans “born between January 1, 1962 and January 1, 1976” and their close family members to resettle in the United States.¹³⁴ As Lipman explains, the “burden of proof” diminished considerably under the AHA, which permitted “informal documents” and “physical appearance” to constitute “sufficient evidence” for exit visas.¹³⁵ Washington and Hanoi codified the principles agreed to in September 1987 in a formal bilateral agreement on March 21, 1988. By July, American officials interviewed 14,000 Amerasians and their close family members under the new program.¹³⁶

Although the US and SRV made tangible progress with regards to those populations “of special humanitarian concern” within Vietnam’s borders, concerns for those who had fled SRV sovereignty did not abate. In fact, as progress on POW/MIA, Amerasians, and reeducation camp prisoners improved (to varying degrees) after 1987, the rate of oceanic and overland departures surged. The SRV’s suspension of the ODP from January 1986 to July 1987 also removed, at the very same time, the only legal means of emigrating from Vietnam to the United States. Many migrants took matters into their own hands, and the numbers arriving in Thailand and Hong Kong rose dramatically.¹³⁷ In March 1987 alone, the number of new arrivals was 300 percent more than the entire preceding year.¹³⁸

The refugee consultation process for the fiscal year 1988, as required by the Refugee Act of 1980, was thus especially contentious. In late September 1987, the Senate Judiciary Committee wrote to Reagan about the administration’s proposal. While the Committee ultimately concurred with the allocation of 29,500 slots (out of a 72,500 total ceiling) for refugees from Southeast Asia, the Committee requested that “only half” of the numbers be utilized “before further mid-year consultations” and attached a number of “recommendations and requirements.”¹³⁹ Most importantly, the Committee lamented the lack of “new initiatives” to “deal with the continuing flow of Southeast Asian refugees – especially voluntary repatriation and local settlement.”¹⁴⁰

The Committee’s willingness to entertain repatriation, or return to Vietnam, marked a major departure from previous American policy. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, US policy makers argued that conditions in the SRV made repatriation an unviable alternative to resettlement abroad and therefore emphasized resettlement over other potential responses.¹⁴¹ Article 33 of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees states that “no Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee” to the territory from which he was fleeing from persecution.¹⁴² The principle of nonrefoulment was thus a key pillar of international refugee law during this era. If a migrant was not a genuine refugee, however, then there were no legal prohibitions against repatriation. In asking the administration to consider supporting repatriation, the Judiciary Committee was therefore challenging the administration to reevaluate its opinion of internal SRV conditions and the legal status of Vietnamese migrants.

Many legislators quickly rose to condemn the Judiciary Committee’s position. Sixteen senators wrote to Reagan to rearticulate the US position against repatriation.¹⁴³ The Senate sent Reagan an even stronger message when it passed the Hatfield Amendment on October 7, 1987. The Amendment made a three-year commitment to Indochinese refugees by establishing an admissions “floor” of 28,000 for fiscal year 1988–1990, a directive that mandated continued resettlement opportunities.¹⁴⁴ Those who supported the measure, known formally as the Indochinese Refugee Resettlement and Protection Act of 1987, suggested that “the continued occupation of Cambodia by Vietnam and the instability of the governments of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos” made the possibility of “safe repatriation … negligible for the foreseeable future.”¹⁴⁵ The strong disagreement among US senators regarding the desirability and possibility of repatriation foreshadowed what would become open rifts over the topic in the years ahead.

While condemning repatriation involved criticizing Hanoi, the Hatfield Amendment also conceded American responsibility to assist the South Vietnamese. “Because of our past military and political involvement in the region,” the amendment argued, “the United States has a continued, special responsibility to the persons who have fled and continue to flee the countries of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.”¹⁴⁶ That the bill passed by a 66–33 vote demonstrates the longevity of Ford’s original argument about a “profound moral obligation” to the South Vietnamese and the continuing persuasiveness of the claim that those fleeing Vietnam deserved refugee status.¹⁴⁷ As Boschwitz put it in his statement in support of the act, “We have a special relationship and historic responsibility toward Southeast Asian refugees. Many of them are perhaps refugees even because of our actions.”¹⁴⁸

1988: The Limits of Cooperation

In 1988, the number of Vietnamese who fled their country by boat spiked notably. As Sara Davies explains, “if 1987 marked the beginning of the second major increase in the number of Vietnamese boat people … then 1988 marked the year when panic set in.”¹⁴⁹ By February, Thailand began a push-back policy, reminiscent of its actions during the apex of the oceanic departures during the late 1970s.¹⁵⁰ That same month, Roger Winter, the president of the US Committee for Refugees, testified before Congress about a major “failure … of the United States to lead the world community.”¹⁵¹ Other powerful NGOs like the American Jewish Committee and Indochina Action Resource Center made similar statements.¹⁵² In another echo from the Carter years, these initial calls for heightened awareness and international leadership went unheeded for over a year. In the midst of the lack of an adequate response to the growing oceanic departures, the United States and SRV continued to take small steps throughout 1988 to address the fate of current and former reeducation camp detainees. In February, Vice Minister Phan Quang announced the release of “6,406 people held in jail and reeducation camps, including 1,014 officers and supporters of the former South Vietnamese government arrested in 1975.”¹⁵³

While the release numbers were a vast improvement over the previous year, the difference between physical release from a reeducation camp and the ability to resettle in the United States remained vast. Logistical, bureaucratic, financial, and legal obstacles made the transition from the former to the latter a time-consuming, difficult undertaking. The FVPPA therefore barely took time to celebrate the announcement before writing its friends in Congress to request “a resolution for an expeditious processing of all released prisoners for resettlement in the US,” similar to the “program for Amerasian children.”¹⁵⁴ Tho expressed a keen sense of gratitude for US policy makers’ efforts on behalf of the prisoners, especially given that her second husband “was among the group most recently released.”¹⁵⁵ Tho’s enthusiasm, however, was tempered by the reality that release was only half of the FVPPA’s mission. As she put it, “the ultimate goal of our Association will not be reached until all prisoners are released and reunited with their families either in the United States or in other countries.”¹⁵⁶

FVPPA allies in the State Department and Congress soon made similar appeals. Boschwitz wrote to Reagan, urging him to “take advantage of this ‘glasnost sentiment,’” adding “perhaps we could give them [former reeducation detainees] a blanket humanitarian parole or provide some other avenue to bring them and their families here as soon as possible.”¹⁵⁷ Kennedy and Pell also wrote to Shultz to explain that “the families of these men are relieved … but they are concerned that no special initiatives are being made to expedite their movement from Vietnam.”¹⁵⁸ Just as the sacrifice and suffering of American military families served to justify the high priority US officials awarded to POW/MIA accounting, US policy makers also used the pains of Vietnamese family separation to justify calls for action on the reeducation camp issue.¹⁵⁹ “We believe now is the time,” Kennedy and Pell continued, “for you to renew the offer that you made four years ago – to make clear in whatever appropriate manner that the former reeducation camp prisoners should be assisted in coming to the US with their families through the ODP program. You may be assured that we are prepared to assist in this humanitarian task in any way possible.”¹⁶⁰ The Senate Foreign Relations Committee also wrote Shultz in May to make the same point, adding that “budgetary constraints … should have no bearing on our readiness to receive these prisoners for whose release we have been pressing for so many years.”¹⁶¹

These letters reveal Capitol Hill’s determination to see its input incorporated into US normalization policy. Moreover, these letters were not merely private missives from one branch of government to the other; each of the letters excerpted herein also appeared in the FVPPA’s Special Issue Newsletter of 1988, which the Association distributed to a wide array of US government officials, other NGOs, and South Vietnamese families in the United States and abroad.¹⁶² While the inclusion of the legislators’ letters illustrated the close ties between these nonexecutive actors, the publication of letters authored by high-ranking US officials on key committees also made it clear that if the US government failed to implement policies to assist detainees, Congress would not be to blame. Like nonbinding resolutions, then, published letters functioned as both carrot and stick for the administration. If the White House made a robust commitment to reeducation detainees, it could be assured of congressional support and the political cover that high-ranking legislators, especially Vietnam War veterans, could provide. If, on the other hand, the White House failed to act, it would be obvious to any attentive observer that it was indeed the Oval Office, and not Capitol Hill, hindering progress on the issue.

Congressmen also attempted to play a leadership role in the normalization process by proposing structural changes to US-Vietnamese relations. In March 1988, John McCain and Thomas Ridge proposed the creation of interest sections.¹⁶³ As an article in Indochina Issues explained, McCain “dramatically announced the interest sections proposal to a press conference on the fifteenth anniversary of his release from harsh imprisonment as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.” Interest sections, McCain clarified, were a “seldom-used diplomatic device” that would be an “informal” way to “help regularize communications and develop mutual confidence in addressing bilateral issues,” though he emphasized that “such arrangements fall short of diplomatic relations.”¹⁶⁴ The proposal received strong support from both houses of Congress.¹⁶⁵ Hanoi also “quickly endorsed the plan” and announced that it planned to withdraw fifty thousand of its troops from Cambodia by December 1988, a move clearly intended to show “flexibility on the other major hurdle to normalization with the United States … and signaling its determination to end Vietnam’s international isolation.”¹⁶⁶

US policy makers took notice. In May 1988, Reagan approved a National Security Study Directive (NSDD) for US policy toward Indochina.¹⁶⁷ “In light of recent developments that could potentially affect United States interests in the region,” a White House memorandum explained, the NSDD would provide an opportunity to review US policy with “all three Indochinese states, with particular focus on the Cambodian policy.”¹⁶⁸ The review also included an examination of “the current status of our efforts to achieve POW/MIA accounting and other humanitarian objectives (political prisoners, Amerasians, Orderly Departure Program [ODP]).”¹⁶⁹

US-SRV negotiations on the release and resettlement of reeducation camp detainees also turned a corner in July 1988. Although they had been discussing the issue for years, it was not until 1988 that Washington and Hanoi had bilateral talks earmarked solely for this topic. Funseth met with Vice Foreign Minister Tran Quang Co for what a joint-press release called “two days of frank, friendly and constructive talks.”¹⁷⁰ Like early US-Vietnamese talks on Amerasian migration, initial bilateral negotiations led to a modest agreement in principle. Both sides “reaffirmed” their willingness to send and receive “released reeducation centre detainees who were closely associated with the United States or its allies.”¹⁷¹

In addition to a mutual commitment to the detainees’ migration, the most significant obstacle the July 1988 meeting resolved was the SRV concern about former detainees launching military campaigns against Hanoi. Although there was never any real threat of the US mobilizing former detainees as a counterrevolutionary force, consistent SRV repetition of this concern had made it a genuine obstacle, as thereafter Hanoi had to demonstrate it took appropriate measures to prevent this outcome. While US negotiators repeatedly refuted the claim, Funseth made as many promises as US law allowed. In addition to addressing what had been at least a major rhetorical obstacle, the joint-press release declared that the two sides “discussed ways and means to expedite the processing of applications” but “agreed that additional exchanges of views would be required.”¹⁷²

Progress on the Amerasian, reeducation camp prisoner, POW/MIA, and ODP issues beginning in 1987, coupled with Hanoi’s withdrawal of 50,000 troops from Cambodia, fueled the optimism of those who hoped for the resumption of formal US-Vietnamese relations. Expanded cooperation also prompted serious discussion about the proposed interest sections, which led to congressional hearings in late July 1988. During the hearings, Gaston J. Sigur, the Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs denounced the proposal. “Our support for efforts to end the Cambodian conflict,” Sigur explained, rested upon “our active adherence to the diplomatic and economic isolation of Vietnam as a way of driving home to Hanoi the costs of its Cambodian policies and the need to contribute to ending that conflict.”¹⁷³ Sigur also rejected the idea that interest sections “would facilitate the resolution” of migration issues by “increasing communication and cooperation between the United States and Vietnam.”¹⁷⁴ It is in this context that Sigur claimed, “The United States has more contact with the Vietnamese on operational and policy levels than any other Western nation, including those which maintain diplomatic relations.”¹⁷⁵ While the White House, State Department, and Department of Defense opposed interest sections, many prominent Republicans in Congress still supported the move.¹⁷⁶ Clearly, the Republicans in Congress and the Republican in the White House had strong disagreements about the best way forward for US-Vietnamese relations.

Furthermore, to anyone paying close enough attention, Sigur offered Congress a self-defeating argument. He criticized interest sections by arguing, simultaneously, that they would defeat American efforts to completely isolate Hanoi and that interest sections were superfluous because Washington and Hanoi already had extensive ties. The distinctions US policy makers drew between “humanitarian” and “political” issues were nebulous at best, and the frequent contact and cooperation between Hanoi and Washington on humanitarian issues advanced the political relationship by establishing institutional, personal, and operational ties.¹⁷⁷ Whether or not American officials were willing to admit it, progress on humanitarian questions was normalizing US-Vietnamese relations, even as official talks remained suspended.

Sigur might have offered such a contradictory argument because he wanted to obscure the real reason for the administration’s caution: opposition from the National League of POW/MIA Families.¹⁷⁸ While some activists supported Vessey’s mission and applauded the upswing in the return of remains, others viewed these same developments as a failure. For those who believed the POW myth, securing the remains of an American servicemen decades after they went missing constituted not a near-miraculous feat or an opportunity for closure but “a death sentence.”¹⁷⁹ To make matters more complicated, there was also a “Rambo faction” in Congress led by Jesse Helms (R-NC) and Bob Smith (R-NH), who argued SRV leaders were swindling American officials too eager to move on from the Vietnam War.¹⁸⁰ Allen suggests that Reagan’s “political instincts … made it impossible for him to confront the League,” and thus “over his last two years in office,” the president’s “stance toward Vietnam vacillated” as the administration tried to “show progress on the MIA issue without further alienating MIA activists.”¹⁸¹

If Sigur’s testimony satisfied the League, it seemed tone-deaf to SRV leaders. Hanoi immediately protested, arguing that despite its increased cooperation on humanitarian issues, “the US State Department obviously advocates a continuation of its hostile policy vis-à-vis Vietnam,” an approach SRV leaders suggested “obstructs a settlement of humanitarian questions.”¹⁸² In response, Hanoi suspended its cooperation with the United States on POW/MIA accounting and creating a migration program for former reeducation camp detainees. When explaining the decision in a letter to Vessey, Thach cited Sigur’s testimony directly, noting his remarks “caused indignation of the Vietnamese people and created obstructions to the implementation of the agreement between you and myself.”¹⁸³ Hanoi’s decisions prompted McCain and Ridge to withdraw their support for interest sections, and the proposal died without implementation.¹⁸⁴

Just as there were tangible limits to the extent of US-Vietnamese cooperation, there were also meaningful qualifications on the influence that the FVPPA could wield. As the Soviet Union liberalized its emigration policies in late 1988, the US refugee bureaucracy was suddenly overwhelmed with requests for entry. Although American officials had been advocating for these changes for over a decade, the number of admissions slots earmarked for the Soviet Union was not high enough to handle the influx.¹⁸⁵ US officials had allocated a large percentage of the annual refugee quota to the ODP in hopes that Hanoi would understand the move “as a sign of our continued willingness both to negotiate and to resettle.” Hanoi’s suspension of talks undercut US hopes, however. American officials thus proposed reallocating some of the numbers from Southeast Asia to satisfy the exigent needs of Soviet émigrés.¹⁸⁶ Although the FVPPA protested the measure on pragmatic levels and on principle, the administration moved forward with the reallocation for FY 1989.¹⁸⁷

At the same time, oceanic migrants fled the SRV at accelerated rates. The number that reached nations of first asylum in 1988 almost doubled 1987 arrivals, and the increase in departures “was accompanied by alarming incidences … of violence, including pushbacks, deaths, rape, and abduction.”¹⁸⁸ While new arrivals spiked, the long-stayer population remained over 145,000.¹⁸⁹ Despite all of the progress of the preceding years, the status of first asylum in Southeast Asia, the possibility of providing a full accounting of POW/MIAs, and the migration of former reeducation camp detainees all remained in doubt as George H. W. Bush began preparing to occupy the Oval Office.

Conclusion

Throughout the 1980s, issues that American policy makers labeled as humanitarian became the basis for ongoing US-SRV relations. US officials from both parties supported and furthered efforts to secure a full accounting of missing American servicemen and enacted migration programs for South Vietnamese. Because these concerns required SRV cooperation, Hanoi was able to mostly frustrate US initiatives in 1985 and 1986 by suspending ODP interviews and refusing to release or allow the migration of reeducation camp detainees. Despite Hanoi’s unwillingness to alter its policies regarding reeducation camp detainees, the FVPPA expanded its lobbying and networking efforts dramatically. While official talks on the subject remained frozen, the Association solidified its position as a formidable, if focused, political force.

In 1987, political winds shifted US-SRV relations. After rapidly escalating the Cold War during his first term, Reagan deescalated the conflict with a series of highly publicized summits in his second, a change which helped accelerate closer US-Vietnamese ties. For reasons beyond direct American control, SRV policy makers once again deeply coveted normalization with the United States and other nations, a shift that played into Washington’s hands. US leaders demanded that the two sides address humanitarian issues, as defined by the United States, before discussing political questions. Hanoi reinstated ODP interviewing and permitted US officials to be stationed in Ho Chi Minh City. By the end of the decade, American officials were conducting extensive excavation operations in Vietnam in their search for POW/MIAs, the United States had signed a bilateral agreement with Hanoi on Amerasian processing, and both governments had issued a joint-resolution regarding reeducation camp detainees. At several key moments, negotiators in Washington and Hanoi permitted their counterparts to save face in order to reach migration program goals.

While US policy makers maintained that these advancements were in the pursuit of humanitarian ends and therefore should not be confused with political relations, we should not take them at their word. Though there was still clearly a sizeable gap between full normalization and the status of US-Vietnamese relations during the late 1980s, the personal relationships between American and Vietnamese officials and the concomitant bureaucratic connections that developed in pursuit of humanitarian programs laid the groundwork for more formal ties.

Hanoi’s willingness to collaborate had its limits, however. As SRV leaders’ decision to terminate cooperation with the United States in August 1988 demonstrates, the Vietnamese rejected Americans’ insistence that the two sides could collaborate on humanitarian issues while remaining stark political adversaries. The high number of oceanic migrant departures continued throughout 1988, moreover, which strained American ties with the nations of first asylum throughout Southeast Asia. These developments also put pressure on US refugee admission spaces and financial resources at the very same time American policy makers became increasingly keen to admit those emigrating from the Soviet Union. As former vice president George Bush prepared for his term as Commander in Chief, then, he had reason to be both optimistic and deeply concerned about the status of US relations with Vietnam. What is clear, however, is that despite the general perception that US-SRV relations remained frozen during the 1980s, the scope and frequency of the ties between the two nations increased considerably from 1980 to 1988.