Negotiating While Fighting: Peace Initiatives, British Policy and the Vietnam War
FCO
US government really adheres to these 10 points, it may confirm them directly by the US ambassador in Warsaw to the North Vietnamese ambassador in Warsaw.‘
b.
December 1966 Warsaw Meeting
That led to the scheduling of a meeting that was supposed to take place in Warsaw on December 6 1966, a date that should live in diplomatic infamy, because the meeting should have happened—and the book shows could have happened—but did not. That is where the dispute would take place, because, for the first time in more than five months, the Americans bombed Hanoi on December 2 and 4, on the eve of the scheduled meeting. The whole initiative went into limbo for a week. The Poles warned, ‗Don‘t bomb again.‘ The book goes into the story of how Lyndon Johnson actually overruled his senior national security advisers, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and Nicholas Katzenbach, the acting Secretary of State, because Dean Rusk was off in the Far East and even the National Security Advisor Walt Rostow—and refused to suspend the US bombing of Hanoi. Instead, they bombed Hanoi again on December 13 and 14. At that point, the Poles relayed the North Vietnamese wishes, ‗Okay; this is all off; it is suspended.‘ Johnson made a last-ditch effort to save the initiative by barring all bombing of Hanoi within 10 miles of the city centre, beginning on December 15. The Poles actually made a goodfaith effort to talk Hanoi into resuscitating the initiative and begin direct talks, but on New Year‘s Eve 1966 the Poles came back and said, ‗No, this is finished.‘ By then the Americans had basically told the Poles, ‗This is your fault. You stalled.‘ The Poles were absolutely furious because they believed that Johnson and Washington had ruined a real chance for peace by bombing Hanoi. The Poles started a campaign of leaking first to the Pope and to UN Secretary U Thant. They also leaked to the French. When the Americans got wind of this, they started counter-leaking, and a month later this emerged in the world press and, in Le Monde, became ‗l‘affaire Lewandowski‘.. The codename Marigold would be revealed only a year later, but all on the basis of essentially press leaks and investigative journalists. The only prior book on this subject was by two Los Angeles Times journalists, using off-the-record and background interviews published in 1968, called The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam. Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam is the book they could not write because they could not gain access to classified documents.
5.
Legacy
The Marigold story has sunk into history essentially as an unresolved dispute. To anti-war critics of the Johnson Administration this was a bungled or botched chance for peace. It contributed to the widening of Lyndon Johnson‘s so-called ‗credibility gap‘ on the war, whereas the Johnson Administration insisted just as strongly there was no missed opportunity; it was probably a Polish scam. There was no real evidence that the Poles were even authorised by North Vietnamese to set up a direct meeting. It is quite interesting that the leaking and counter-leaking produced different versions of the affair, which again sunk into history as an unresolved dispute.
V.
Sources
The American side of this story became available partly through the so-called ‗Pentagon Papers‘ in the 1970s and 1980s. These were not part of the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, most famously, to the New York Times in 1971; they were the so-called diplomatic volumes which he held back because he did not want to be accused of endangering wartime diplomacy. They
9 May 2012
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