LETTERS: MCCAIN LOSES MERIT WITH VIETNAM VISIT

To the editor:

The more I read of U.S. Sen. John McCain's public pronouncements, the gladder I am that he withdrew from contention for the presidency. The man is far too immature for the job. Please do not consider this to be a ringing endorsement for any of his rivals for the job. All, except Ralph Nader, disgust me. In my view, McCain acquired merit by giving unshirted hell to the two Virginia leaders of the so-called Christian Right and by his advocacy of trying to reduce fat-cat money as a factor in national election campaigns. But this has since been overbalanced by his opportunism during the primaries and his unashamed racism and bad sportsmanship toward his former captors in Vietnam.

McCain's reservations about the primitive superstitions which pass for policy at Bob Jones University, expressed only after the South Carolina GOP primary, and his admission that he had swallowed his reservations to suck up to the South Carolinians in order that they might vote for him make one wonder what nasty policies (vis-a-vis African Americans) he himself might promote as president were he to feel that to do so would be politically expedient.

As person like McCain who presumes to a public office and uses the term "gook," obtusely wondering all the while just why everyone else's jaws are dropping three inches, can hardly be relied upon to render equal service to Asian Americans. Am I wrong?

On a recent visit to Vietnam supposedly meant to heal old wounds, McCain opined that "the wrong guys" won the war. I suppose that with his comic-book mind he expected the government of Vietnam, a Vietnam reunified in spite of his best efforts, to resign upon hearing this and Nguyen Cao Ky to be recalled from his have in the United States to resume his former role in running that country, all of it this time.

McCain alluded to Vietnam's having lost "millions of their best people who left by boat, thousands by execution and hundreds of thousands who went to re-education camps" as though those were unexpected phenomena now that the civil war had reached a conclusion. Reunified Vietnam would have been naive in the extreme to have not at least verified that the many functionaries of, and collaborators with, the defeated regime who couldn't find a helicopter skid to hang onto would not pose a threat to their nation.

Whatever befell McCain befell him while he was in the act of dropping bombs on the capital of a nation which did not pose the remotest threat to the United States. At the time, maybe he felt he had no choice in the matter. I can live with that. It is when he became an apologist for what the U.S. government chose to do in Vietnam that he lost his status as an innocent pawn and became an active participant.

DONN S. MILLER

Tamms, Ill.