Negotiating While Fighting: Peace Initiatives, British Policy and the Vietnam War
FCO
and probably should, have brought the two sides to direct talks. I am also completely convinced, as someone who has a lot of sympathy for LBJ that he did bungle it and bears the primary responsibility for the failure of Marigold. I also think that Jim‘s argument that this unnecessary collapse of Marigold made things worse is true, but whether this halt in fighting could then have led to a permanent peace is debatable. I would go even further to say that it is highly doubtful. One thing to remember is that all the detail in his magnificent book and the talk Jim just gave us is just to get to the point of talks; it is not in the shape of a permanent settlement. Neither side was close to reaching its breaking point by the time Marigold became a serious issue. Were they then prepared to throw away at the conference table what they felt could still be won on the battlefield? I would like to read a portion of the book‘s epilogue. First, I want to read a very short passage by Jim and then a quote from Lewandowski himself. Jim says, ‗If the hawks in Hanoi and Washington still dreamed of victory, both sides had to abandon illusions that they could achieve in Paris what they had failed to win on the battlefield, Lewandowski implored, otherwise ―they will simply end up where they started with this difference: a lot more dead young soldiers.‖‘ Was either side closer to reaching its breaking point at the conference table, closer to giving up what it still thought it could probably achieve on the battlefield? Certainly not the North Vietnamese, for whom the bitter memory of the 1954 Geneva conference, where they were betrayed by the Soviets and Chinese and should have had a reunified Vietnam, was still very fresh. It was definitely not the case for the Johnson Administration. In 1966, the Johnson Administration was nowhere close to the position it would reach in 1968. If we look at the post-Tet considerations of the Johnson Administration, some, including initially President Johnson, were not willing to throw in the towel even after that offensive. It was only when LBJ turned to the Wise Men and got a request from Westmoreland for another 250,000 troops approximately, and then after Eugene McCarthy‘s primary challenge in New Hampshire and Robert Kennedy entered the race, that he started to reconsider. In 1966, Johnson was not even close to reaching that breaking point. The South Vietnamese were nowhere close to reaching that breaking point either. We often overlook the South Vietnamese. They did not have a veto on potential US-North Vietnamese talks but they certainly had a lot of power to scuttle or severely complicate any negotiations. They wielded almost an effective veto before the United States was absolutely determined to get out. They would clearly not have been pleased with any talks that would have allowed, through negotiations, the National Liberation Front, the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese, or whoever, to have some say in the political fate of South Vietnam. Let us assume for a minute that Marigold did bring the war to a pause and brought the two sides into direct negotiations in Paris, or wherever. What would they have bargained over? Would they have conceded anything? Jim ends his book with a counter-factual analysis, but I would say we do not need that to get the answer to that question, because we know what happened from 1968 to 1973 and when there was a pause in the fighting. There was a halt to Rolling Thunder bombing, and direct talks began between the United States and the North Vietnamese at different venues and through different avenues for the next five years. This was a period when the United States was desperate to get out of Vietnam; it was not in 1966. Even when the US was desperate to get out of Vietnam, though not under any circumstances, it still took five years of negotiations and the majority of the war‘s casualties. Most of the deaths happened after 1968, so it took five years and the majority of the war‘s casualties even after the taboo of direct talks was broken to end the war. Then of course, the war lasted for another two years until North Vietnam finally did reunify the country under communist rule. I would say the real lost chance for peace came before February/March 1965 when the bombing of North Vietnam began, before the continual bombing under Rolling Thunder began on March 2
9 May 2012
18