Mcnamara Visits Vietnam 20 Years After War's End

HANOI, Vietnam - Twenty years after the end of a war he helped escalate and later called a terrible mistake, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara visited the former enemy capital today.

As rains from Typhoon Angela lashed Hanoi's Noi Bai airport, a commercial airliner carrying McNamara touched down just a few hundred yards from the patchwork of wartime bomb craters that still litters the final runway approach.

"We're here, obviously, for one reason - to see if Vietnam and the United States can draw lessons from what was a tragedy for both sides," McNamara told reporters at his hotel.

He came as part of a delegation from the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, which is asking Hanoi to collaborate in a high-level conference on the Vietnam War next year. The council hopes to bring together key decision-makers from both sides and exchange national archive documents.

McNamara, a council member, will join in presenting the conference proposal to the Vietnamese.

A meeting is tentatively planned with Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, architect of Vietnam's victories over France and the United States.

As secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, McNamara was an ardent public booster of U.S. support for South Vietnam against the Communist North.

He resigned in 1968 after becoming convinced that the war was unwinnable, but kept public silence until last spring, when he published his memoirs and acknowledged, "We were terribly wrong."

The Council on Foreign Relations said that it wants the conference to discuss why opportunities to prevent or shorten the war were missed, what mindsets shaped attitudes on the two sides, and how each side's military strategy was interpreted by the other.

Vietnam has joined U.S. experts in several academic discussions of wartime strategies. But it has shown no interest in publicizing doubts or disagreements among its leaders during the war, insisting that all Vietnamese were united in opposing the United States.

Vietnamese officials, more interested in future trade and investment, view war history as useful chiefly by contributing to the party's image of invincible leadership.