Spokesperson of Vietnam's Ministry of Foreign Affairs Le Thi Thu Hang on August 27 stated that Vietnam would send the most profound condolences to family of Senator John McCain and US Congress.
Vietnam's Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh writes in a condolence book near a portrait of U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) about his death at the U.S. embassy in Hanoi, Vietnam August 27, 2018. Photo: REUTERS
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“We honor the efforts of Senator McCain in building and developing US-Vietnam ties during the past decades”, said Hang.
On the same day, Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and Chairwoman of National Assembly Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan sent messages of condolence to the family of Senator McCain and leaders of the US Senate.
Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Pham Binh Minh also sent a message of condolence to the Senator’s family, and wrote in a condolence book at the US Embassy in Hanoi on Monday.
Senator John Sidney McCain III, who began laying the groundwork for normalization of relations between the US and Vietnam, died at 4:28 pm on August 25, 2018 at his home in Arizona.
During his political career, Senator McCain worked in collaboration with John Kerry, a fellow Vietnam vet turned politician whose wartime service and subsequent political career took a very different direction, to begin laying the groundwork for normalization of relations between the US and Vietnam.
Normalization has been so successful that there’s been barely any controversy over it since it happened in a way that can obscure what a potentially dicey move this was at the time and it stands as perhaps McCain’s clearest enduring legacy in American politics.
As Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, McCain advocated strongly a boost of the Vietnam-US relationship.
