United States Senate Select Committee On POW/MIA Affairs - Legacy

Legacy

Normalization of relations with Vietnam did not happen right away after the committee concluded. Delay occurred in early 1993 because of Vietnam's refusal to "go the last mile" and the Bush administration's desire to dump the problem on the incoming Clinton administration. Further delays resulted from issues related to Cambodia and avoidance due to the 1994 congressional elections. But in 1995, President Clinton announced normalized diplomatic relations with Vietnam, with McCain and Kerry both very visible as supporters of the decision.

Committee vice-chairman Smith seemed to back away from the committee's findings within months of their being issued, appearing in April 1993 on Larry King Live with POW/MIA activist Bill Hendon, stressing his partial dissent from the majority report and touting new evidence of North Vietnam having held back prisoners in 1973, and then in the Senate in September 1993, saying he had "very compelling" new evidence of live prisoners. He also asked the Justice Department to investigate ten federal officials for perjury and other crimes in conjunction with a cover-up of POW/MIA investigations, In what he dubbed "Operation Clean Sweep", Smith said the targeted officials had a "mind-set to debunk". Kerry and McCain both denounced Smith's actions, with McCain saying "In my dealings with these people, it is clear that mistakes may have been made in a very complex set of issues. But at no time was there any indication that they were giving anything but their most dedicated efforts. I frankly don't feel it's appropriate to publicly make these charges without public substantiation." Defense Secretary Les Aspin said the charges were unwarranted.

In 1994, journalist Sydney Schanberg, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in the 1970s for his New York Times reporting in Cambodia, wrote a long article for Penthouse magazine in which he said the committee had been dominated by a faction led by Kerry that "wanted to appear to be probing the prisoner issue energetically, but in fact, they never rocked official Washington's boat, nor did they lay open the 20 years of secrecy and untruths." Schanberg stated that key committee staff had had too close a relationship with the Department of Defense, and that while other committee investigators were able to get evidence of men left behind into the full body of the report, the report's conclusions "were watered down and muddied to the point of meaninglessness." Kerry denied that the committee had engaged in any cover-up. Schanberg would return to the subject during Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign in a series of articles for The Village Voice; he claimed that Kerry had shredded documents, suppressed testimony, and sanitized findings during his time as chairman of the committee. Kerry denied these allegations and responded overall by saying, "In the end, I think what we can take pride in is that we put together the most significant, most thorough, most exhaustive accounting for missing and former P.O.W.'s in the history of human warfare."

The 2004 documentary Missing, Presumed Dead: The Search for America's POWs, narrated by Ed Asner, included a number of segments showing the committee in hearings and criticism of the committee's actions. It includes one scene where a former Korean War POW is giving testimony in hearings and, in not atypical congressional practice, only one senator, Smith, was present. The witness asked, "Where are all the other senators?" and an embarrassed Kerry eventually rushed in. While the documentary repeats previous allegations about McCain's behavior as a POW, in his own interview in it Smith simply states, "John McCain, and John Kerry, both were not pursuing this with the same approach that I was."

All three of the main figures on the committee would run for president. Smith ran a brief campaign for the 2000 race; in his announcement speech, he said, "Our nation's POWs and MIAs sacrificed their own freedom to protect our freedom and were never heard from again. Their ultimate fate is still unknown. I have traveled to every corner of the world on behalf of the POW/MIA families searching for answers — trying to end their uncertainty. I have had to bang on the doors of our own Government to open up intelligence files. Never again will these families have to beg our government and foreign governments for answers about their loved ones. Never again." Smith's candidacy failed to gain traction, and he switched parties twice during 1999 before dropping out and endorsing Republican George W. Bush. Four years later, again a Republican, Smith would break party lines and endorse Kerry during the latter's 2004 presidential campaign. During that campaign Kerry's role in the committee was greatly overshadowed by his Vietnam Veterans Against the War participation during the war and by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack against him during the campaign. McCain would run in both 2000 and 2008; during the infamous South Carolina primary in 2000, allegations that he had abandoned POW/MIAs were part of the smear campaign against him.