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Among those who harbored a simmering distrust of Kerry was John McCain, who had been tortured as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. The Arizonan had campaigned for Ray Shamie, Kerry's Republican opponent in 1984, denouncing the Democrat for joining the veterans who tossed medals and ribbons over the Capitol barricade in 1971.
In the spring of 1991, McCain found himself seated across from Kerry inside a cramped military jet on a fact finding mission to the Middle East. In the Senate, the two men had circled each other warily. But now, strapped into uncomfortable seats with an interminableflight before them and only a flimsy table between them, they had no place to go. They made small talk about airplanes and baseball with Senator John Glenn, the Democrat from Ohio, until he fell asleep.
From there, "it kind of segued into John and I talking about Vietnam," McCain recalled. Deep into the night, as the plane drone over the Alantic, Kerry and McCain revisited the defining experience of their lives. Kerry said, "I asked a lot of questions about him, and he of me, and we talked about how he felt about his war, and my war."
In the ensuing weeks and months, McCain and Kerry individually, and then together, concluded that the unresolved divisions of the Vietnam War were causing too much national anguish and that it was time to put the war to rest. Over the course of the next four years, as pair worked toward reestablishing relations weith Vietnam, thus closing out a painful chapter in American history, Kerry earned the "unbounded respect and admiration" of McCain. "You get to know people and you make decisions about them," McCain says now. "I found him to be the genuine article."
In the terms of politics, "there weren't going to be any winners" in resolving the Vietnam issue, noted Ted Kennedy. "It was deeply a part of Kerry's soul: rooted in his own service over there."
In the summer of 1991, Newsweek magazine and other mainstream news organizations published a photograph that later became known as the "three amigos" picture, purportedly showing three U.S. pilots alive and in captivity in Southeast Asia. The photo, it turned out, was a crude scam; the three men were Russian farmers, whose photo had been published in a magazine. But for weeks that summer, the POW-MIA myth gained renewed vigor.
Kerry's advisor's to stay away from the controversy, that it was a no win cause, a "tar baby." But Kerry persisted, assuming the chairmanship of the newly formed Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, which was granted one-year lease on life to investigate and determine the truth.
Kerry originally wanted his newfound friend McCain to serve as Republican co-chair. But McCain was a hot potatoein a POW-MIA community wedded to the theory that hundreds, if not thousands, of Americans were still trapped inside Southeast Asia prisons. Extremists in the movement branded McCain brainwashed "Manchurian candidate" because of his refusal to adopt their theories. "Things were said about him that I find.......beyond cruel," said Kerry. At the hearings where McCain's anger at his critics flared, Kerry would reach over and place his hand on McCain's arm to calm him down. "I remain grateful to him for doing that," McCain said.
Kerry's Republican co-chair was, instead, a navy veteran allied with MIA-POW activists, Robert Smith of New Hampshire. Smith worried aloud that Kerry's hearings might turn out to be "more about substance. It's a lousy way to get to the heart of things."
In August, Kerry left on his firs fact finding mission to Southeast Asia, telling reporters at a press conference that he considered this voyage a final step in his military service, a "last mission. This is a responsibility as a former soldier and somebody who served in Vietnam."
On this and future trips to the region , Kerry brought with him a powerful incentive for Vietnamese officials to cooperate: The possibilty of renewed trade and diplomatic relations with with the United States. Already, Kerry was lobbying the Bush administration to lift the trade embargo against the country.
"If you want to quickly begin to provide yourself better access to information, by God the best thing you can do is get everyone you can into that country and be able to have an exchange not only in goods but in information," he said during a press conference in Bangkok, before heading on to Hanoi.
During his week long trip, Kerry secured a commitment from Vietnamese official to allow U.S. investigative teams to use their own helicopters and to visit remote sites on short notice. The vice chairman of the People's Committee of Ho Chi Minh City held Kerry's hand, in a gesture of friendship, and pleaded that the economic embargo made no sense.
Upon his return, Kerry expressed doubts that any Americans were being held in goverment prisons. "I think the likelihood that a government is formally holding somebody is obviously tiny," he said. "But it is possible that somebody fell into the hands of bandits or uncontrolled entities in the jungle areas that are out of reach of government? That's possible."
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