GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM

By JAMES WALSH

AS HE STEPPED INTO THE EAST ROOM of the White House, Bill Clinton looked like a platoon leader venturing into no-man's-land. He did it with his chin up, but quickly--and very carefully. In step behind the President were some of the Pentagon's current and former top officials, and guarding the onetime draft avoider's extremely vulnerable right flank was the operation's point man: Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, an ex-Navy pilot who had languished for more than five years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. "Today," said Clinton, "I am announcing the normalization of diplomatic relationships with Vietnam."

And that was it. More words followed from the President about his concern for completing the long, tortuous investigation into the fate of U.S. servicemen in the Vietnam War who are still listed as MIA, or missing in action. Even as he spoke, though, recognition of Hanoi was a reality. A foreign policy initiative that no White House incumbent since 1975 has felt safe enough or accommodating enough to hazard was now Clinton's fait accompli.

Would the move backfire? While many families of MIA combatants felt betrayed, the White House knew that the bulk of Americans would approve. The most recent Gallup poll on the issue found that in the past two years, support for recognition has risen from 48% to 61%, with just 27% now opposed. The number of MIA "discrepancy cases"--airmen shot down over North Vietnam and still unaccounted for--is down to just 55 by official count, and most people seemed resigned to the idea that the fortunes of war are bound to leave a few mysteries. A day after Clinton's announcement, Wayne Lancaster, 49, of Old Bridge, New Jersey, was gazing at Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, whose black granite slabs are incised with the names of more than 58,000 American dead. "A lot of people I served with lost their lives," Lancaster said, adding that he considers the time proper "to get on with normal relations. We did it with Germany and Japan, and it's time we start healing the wounds over Vietnam."

The time was ripe a year ago, when an interagency review unanimously advised recognition. But it was a congressional election year, and National Security Adviser Tony Lake, who handles the emotional MIA issue, vetoed the idea. On this go-round, still well before the 1996 presidential primaries, Lake signed on. Clinton simply checked a box on a decision memo and the deal was made. A senior Administration official says, "I don't have a sense that the President agonized over this."

McCain has pressed for normalization even though some veterans' lobbies have vilified him as "the Manchurian Candidate." The former POW voices an argument that is not widely understood in the U.S.: Vietnam today is valuable as a strategic counterbalance to China. Hanoi has just joined as a fully paid-up member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, a bloc of such countries as Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines that banded together in 1967 under the threat of Vietnam's conflagration and China-aided communist insurgencies. These neighbors, edgy of late about China's new military strength, see Vietnam as a keystone to regional stability. The U.S., while not wishing to antagonize Beijing, agrees.

Jesse Helms, chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, attacked Clinton's recognition of "an unrepentant communist dictatorship." Senate majority leader Bob Dole condemned the move as "a strategic, diplomatic and moral mistake." Yet while both men threatened to block funding for a U.S. embassy in Hanoi, neither cared to acknowledge that the machinery of recognition had been set in motion by George Bush--and that the U.S., together with every other country, continues to have formal relations with all sorts of governments it does not altogether like.

American business, which is solidly behind rapprochement, will not get much from it beyond what Clinton's lifting of the trade embargo achieved last year. The real fruits would come from giving Vietnam most-favored-nation trading status. Still, the Vietnamese seem eager to plow ahead. Said Deac Jones of Connell Bros. Co., a distributor of U.S. consumer goods in Vietnam: "The majority of people here are very pro-American. If you have the exact same brand product, a shampoo made in the U.S. and the Philippines, they will pay more for the U.S. one."

The real anguish remaining at the heart of this vexed relationship will never be easily washed away, of course. The fact that America lost a cause draped in the noblest rhetoric but fought on cynical and divisive terms produced a sense of lingering self-doubt that may never vanish. In a significant way, though, the principles for which the war was waged are ascendant today in Vietnam. The free-market spirit of Saigon is what counts, not the Marxist maunderings of some old men in Hanoi. The Vietnamese, who lost many more lives than Americans did along the streets, rivers and paddy fields of a singularly ugly encounter, have put the past behind them. Americans need do no less.

--Reported by Dean Fischer/Washington, Tim Larimer/Hanoi and Carey Zessiger/Ho Chi Minh City

With reporting by DEAN FISCHER/WASHINGTON, TIM LARIMER/HANOI AND CAREY ZESSIGER/ HO CHI MINH CITY