Biden, who largely sat out his generation’s defining conflict, could cement the U.S.-Vietnam alliance.
Joe Biden once explained his lack of interest in the Vietnam War protest movement — for many, the defining cause of his generation — with a simple answer.
“This trip is different,” said Thomas Vallely, a Marine veteran who has participated in planning Vietnam trips for nearly every president for decades and will be in Hanoi for this one. “This trip is changing the dynamic between the two countries into a strategic partnership. Historically, this is the biggest trip — this is the biggest trip of the presidents so far.”by a controversy over his draft deferments, was the first U.S.
“That’s Joe,” Valerie Biden Owens told biographer Jules Witcover. “He wasn’t the equivalent of a woman bra-burner.” That practical calculus was echoed during Biden’s first year as president, when he pulled U.S. troops out of Afghanistan not because he believed it was wrong for them to be there, but because he argued that the war had become ineffective.The 1972 messaging worked, as Biden narrowly upset a two-term Republican incumbent. “He’s a senator because of antiwar sentiment,” said Vallely, who has known Biden for decades and who is now a Southeast Asia expert at Harvard’s Kennedy School.
During his time in the Senate, Biden developed a close friendship with McCain, despite their different party orientations. But certain topics were off limits.They never talked about the death of Biden’s wife and daughter. And they never spoke of McCain’s imprisonment and torture in the Hanoi Hilton.
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