During his summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, President Trump is staying a few miles from the notorious Vietnam War prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton” — in significantly plusher digs.
Trump and his White House entourage are quartered at the five-star J.W. Marriott Hanoi, which bills itself as “a world unto itself,” featuring seven on-site restaurants, a jazz club, a spa, and an indoor pool.
Sen. John McCain, who died last August aged 81, arrived in Hanoi in late 1967. He was to spend more than five years at the Hoa Lo Prison, dubbed the “Hanoi Hilton” by its inmates, a yellow, concrete-walled complex that was the site of unimaginable horrors.
The year after McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk was shot down, Donald Trump, then 22, avoided the Vietnam draft by receiving a medical deferment. He was granted four more because he was a student.
“I had been reduced to an animal during this period of beating and torture,” McCain, who would go on to represent Arizona as a six-term Republican senator and was the Republican presidential nominee in 2008, wrote in 1973 after his release.
“Some, who were pretty damned sadistic, seemed to get a big thrill out of the beatings. From that time on, it was one round of rough treatment followed by another. Sometimes, I got it three or four times a week. Sometimes, I’d be off the hook for a few weeks.”
McCain’s flight suit and parachute are on display at the memorial museum in the prison gatehouse, and the senator visited the camp site several times during his political career.
He encouraged Bill Clinton, who also avoided the Vietnam draft, to establish normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam in 1994. That set the stage for Clinton in 2000 to become the first U.S. president to visit the country since the war that cost the lives of more than 58,000 American troops.
Hanoi’s grim history returned to the American political spotlight in 2016 when Trump derided his service after the Navy veteran said the real estate mogul’s candidacy had motivated the “crazies” in the GOP. “He’s not a war hero,” Trump shot back. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
Those barbs cemented a tempestuous relationship with McCain and his family that continued even beyond the senator’s death. McCain allies were quick to point to a 1997 radio interview in which Trump referred to his managing to avoid sexually transmitted diseases as his “personal Vietnam.” He joked to Howard Stern: “I feel like a great and very brave soldier.”
In November 2017, almost five decades after his first draft deferment, Trump finally went to Vietnam, meeting with seven Vietnam War veterans at a Hyatt Regency hotel in Da Nang. It was his first trip to the country as president for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Economic Leaders’ Meeting.
Kim is staying at the Spanish-owned Melia Hotel, just 300 yards from the “Hanoi Hilton” museum. Neither the North Korean leader nor Trump is expected to visit the site.
