Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hershberg, James G. (James Gordon), 1960-

Mairgold : the lost chance for peace in Vietnam / James G. Hershberg.

p. cm. — (Cold War International History Project series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Peace. 2. Vietnam War, 1961–1975—Diplomatic history. 3. United States—Foreign relations—1963–1969. I. Title. II. Series: Cold War International History Project series. DS559.7.H48 2011

959.704'31—dc23

2011034990

E-book ISBN: 978-0-8047-8388-0

Marigold

THE LOST CHANCE FOR PEACE IN VIETNAM

JAMES G. HERSHBERG

Woodrow Wilson Center Press

Washington, D.C.

Stanford University Press

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For Annie, Gabriel, and Vera Hershberg

and for my parents, Arline and David Hershberg

Contents

Cover

Copyright

Maps and Photographs

Introduction

A Note on Names and Terminology

Abbreviations Used in the Text

Acknowledgments

A Note on Sources

Notes

Selected Bibliography

About the Author

Index

Maps and Photographs

Maps

1 Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War

2 Saigon circa 1966–67

3 Warsaw, December 1966

4 Hanoi, December 1966

Photographs

Janusz Lewandowski: A Very Serious Fellow

The Saigon Peace Plotters

The Action in Warsaw—and Hanoi

The Washington Policymakers

Looking Back

Introduction

Who Murdered Marigold?

Warsaw, December 6, 1966: a date that should live in diplomatic infamy. Five thousand miles away, the Vietnam War is raging, with the dead piling up and the escalating violence poisoning international affairs and American politics. Early that morning, the Pentagon informs President Lyndon B. Johnson at his Texas ranch that 6,250 U.S. military personnel have been killed in Vietnam (and Laos) since January 1961, when his predecessor, John F. Kennedy, took office¹—but few imagine that 52,000 more Americans are still to die, along with millions of Vietnamese on both sides of the 17th Parallel. Outwardly, the bloodshed shows no sign of subsiding.

Yet, far from Southeast Asia’s jungles and rice paddies, in this gray, frigid Central European city, a secret breakthrough for peace seems imminent. The United States and North Vietnam lack diplomatic relations and, relying on combat to resolve their clashing visions, appear stuck in a Catch-22 that precludes direct negotiations: Hanoi insists that it will not talk until Washington stops the bombing it began in early 1965, and Washington maintains just as stubbornly that it will not halt the raids until assured that Hanoi will pay a reasonable price, such as curbing its support for the Communist insurgency fighting to topple the U.S.backed regime in Saigon.

But on that cloudy Tuesday, after months of furtive machinations by Polish and Italian intermediaries (with the Soviets lurking in the shadows), Washington and Hanoi have agreed that their ambassadors to Poland will meet to confirm a ten-point outline of a settlement, or at least a basis for direct talks. John A. Gronouski and Do Phat Quang are but a short stroll apart on the western banks of the Vistula River, the American huddling with Poland’s foreign minister at his office, the North Vietnamese waiting at his embassy with a special emissary who has flown all the way from Hanoi to deliver guidance for the unprecedented encounter—a document so sensitive that his wife sewed it into his vest, and a senior North Vietnamese official ordered him to destroy it before dying if his plane crashed.

Yet the rendezvous between enemy diplomats does not occur that day . . . or the next . . . or the next, until, a week later, the whole business collapsed in a welter of mutual recriminations, hidden at first, but soon to explode into a scandal that would attract global headlines and widen President Johnson’s credibility gap—and then vanish into history, unresolved, concealed by the thick fogs of war, diplomacy, and Cold War secrecy. To LBJ, it was all shadows and mirrors, a dry creek, because the simple truth was that Hanoi was not ready to talk; his surrogates, from Dean Rusk to Walt Rostow to William Bundy to Averell Harriman to Robert McNamara to Henry Cabot Lodge, loyally parroted the party line (despite private doubts in some cases) that it was all a phony, a Polish scam or sham or fraud or shell-game—or even a KGB disinformation plot.

But to the junior Polish diplomat behind the ten points, Janusz Lewandowski—the lone Communist ambassador in anticommunist Saigon—it was a squandered chance to stop the carnage, save uncounted lives, and dramatically alter history. At the time, the man at the center of what became known as the Lewandowski Affair remained shrouded in mystery, rebuffing reporters. For this book, four decades later, he has told his story for the first time. Sitting in a smoke-filled café in Warsaw, he recalled being pleased when Washington and Hanoi met in Paris and concluded the 1973 accords ending the war (or at least direct U.S. military involvement), but I thought, my God, we could have done it better and seven years ago, you know, better because the solution also would be better for the United States than this havoc which happened.

Do you really believe the war could have been ended six or seven years earlier? I asked.

Yes, he replied. That was my feeling. And it still is.

Was Lewandowski right? Could America have escaped its disastrous involvement in Vietnam years earlier, and at far less cost, than it actually did? Was a real chance for peace tragically squandered? Or was LBJ right, that the simple truth was that no opportunity was missed? Was its failure predestined; accidental; or death by murder, as a key participant (an American ally, no less) privately fumed, blaming Washington for its ill-timed bombing of Hanoi? What really happened? What went wrong?

Seeking answers to these haunting questions, this book explores one of the last great mysteries of the war that Henry Kissinger has retrospectively termed the defining experience of the second half of the twentieth century and the black hole of American historical memory²—the clandestine peace initiative, bearing the U.S. code name Marigold, that in late 1966 sought to end the fighting, or at least open direct talks, between Washington and Hanoi. For some tantalizing days that December, this initiative seemed on the verge of success, but ultimately it failed and the war dragged on and even grew bloodier. The Marigold episode—which became an international scandal when it seeped into public view in early 1967, and was the focus of a brief yet intense war of leaks—sank into history as an unresolved controversy. Antiwar critics claimed that LBJ had botched (or, worse, deliberately sabotaged) a breakthrough for peace by bombing Hanoi on the eve of a planned historic secret encounter between American and North Vietnamese representatives in Warsaw. Conversely, the president and his top aides angrily insisted that there was no missed opportunity, that Poland (the key mediator) likely never had the authority to arrange direct talks, and that Hanoi was not ready to negotiate. The conventional wisdom echoes this view, presuming that the combatants were then far too dug in and committed to chasing a military victory or advantage to enter into serious negotiations.

This book challenges this conventional wisdom. It establishes that Warsaw was, in fact, authorized by Hanoi to open direct contacts with Washington, and that North Vietnam’s leaders did commit themselves to entering direct talks. It reveals LBJ’s personal role in bombing Hanoi, at a pivotal moment, disregarding the pleas of both the Poles and his own senior aides. It argues not only that Marigold, far from a nonevent, was truly a missed opportunity but also that the initiative’s failure tilted Hanoi against negotiations and set it on the path toward the Tet Offensive in early 1968.

The book’s historical implications are thus immense. It contends that Washington (and LBJ) could have entered into talks with Hanoi in late 1966 rather than in 1968, and in far more auspicious circumstances. Marigold might thus not only have considerably shortened the war (or at least the massive U.S. military involvement in it), but also drastically altered American political history, for LBJ’s failure to open talks with Hanoi fostered the rise of an antiwar challenge that led him to abandon his quest for reelection. If his decisions (and contingent events) had varied only slightly, the book shows, the subsequent trajectory of events could have looked very different. (I conclude with a counterfactual analysis of what might have occurred if Marigold had succeeded.)

Beyond Marigold, the book offers a unique perspective on a crucial year during the Vietnam War, through the eyes of Janusz Lewandowski, a Polish Communist diplomat in South Vietnam (which no Communist country recognized) from April 1966 to May 1967, who dealt at top levels with Americans and both South and North Vietnamese, from William Westmoreland, Henry Cabot Lodge, and Nguyen Van Thieu to Ho Chi Minh, Pham Van Dong, and Vo Nguyen Giap. It presents Lewandowski’s untold story on the basis of dozens of hours of tape-recorded interviews and thousands of declassified Polish szyfrogramy and other documents. (The perspective of Marigold’s other driving force, Giovanni D’Orlandi, Italy’s passionate ambassador in Saigon, is likewise evoked in deeply personal terms, from his intimate diary as well as his secret telegramma.)

When recounting the Vietnam War, historians often rush past the period between 1965 (when Washington spiked its military role) and 1968 (when the Tet Offensive forced LBJ to seek an exit), summing it up with a single word: escalation. Yet, as this book shows, this period bulged with fascinating events vital to understanding the conflict’s later course and eventual outcome. Readers familiar with the war will encounter well-known U.S. officials (LBJ, Rusk, McNamara, the Bundys, Rostow, et al.), albeit often in unfamiliar situations, but lesser-known figures also seize the stage, ranging from the Polish and Italian envoys in Saigon and their foreign ministers in Warsaw and Rome to LBJ’s own man in Poland, as do Soviet and Chinese leaders (Brezhnev, Kosygin, Gromyko, Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, et al.) and, most important of all, the secretive North Vietnamese. It is a tapestry of the international history of the Vietnam War that no one at the time, no matter how exalted his vantage point (as LBJ titled his memoirs), could have fathomed—or that prior accounts have constructed.

More broadly, this book explores once-obscure contours of the wider Cold War at a crucial juncture with the help of long-inaccessible Communist and other non-U.S. sources, including archives from and interviews in more than fifteen countries—Vietnam, Poland, Italy, England, Canada, Russia, China, Australia, India, Hungary, Albania, the Netherlands, and others. Moreover, this tangled tale of covert Vietnam diplomacy coincided with another mysterious, momentous story: the sharpening Sino-Soviet schism, as Moscow and Beijing entered an even more acrimonious phase of their confrontation. (For Americans who lived through the war, the fresh evidence of intracommunist mistrust, and even enmity, bears little resemblance to the simplistic Cold War rhetoric then often purveyed by politicians and some government officials implying a coordinated Communist menace.)

Even as this book provides fly-on-the-wall glimpses of this Sino-Soviet rivalry—when, for instance, at a cocktail party in Hanoi at the height of the war, a Chinese military attaché challenged a Soviet counterpart to a fistfight—it also goes behind the public protestations of solidarity within both the Warsaw Pact and NATO to reveal hidden tensions (between Soviets and Poles, among the Poles themselves, between Washington and allies such as Ottawa and London), and even instances of cooperation and commiseration across the Iron Curtain. In so doing, it exemplifies a recent trend toward pericentrism in Cold War history, transcending a Washington-centric (or even U.S.- and Soviet-dominated) narrative to integrate more fully the motives and behavior of other important actors, which did not merely march in lockstep with and follow the orders of their superpower patrons.

How was Marigold transformed from an ultrasecret international diplomatic effort into a headline-grabbing global public scandal? This book presents a unique case study of national security leaking, still a perennial feature of Washington policymaking. By using both declassified files from various governments and reporters’ private notes, it shows how U.S., Polish, and other officials competitively disclosed contradictory accounts of the failed peace bid (to the pope, the United Nations secretary-general, and other governments as well as to selected reporters) as they attempted to manipulate public and international opinion—and how the disputed tale became entangled with the internal politics of the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times, among other publications. This war of leaks brings into the mix some of the era’s emblematic figures: Robert F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Bill Moyers, Norman Cousins, William Fulbright, U Thant, Harrison Salisbury, Wilfred Burchett, and others.

This book also examines how Marigold has remained a matter of contested history, that argument without end. From official perspectives emerging in the memoirs of LBJ and his associates (and in the declassified record in the Pentagon Papers’ negotiating volumes, which were not leaked to the New York Times by Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 but emerged only gradually), to later accounts by historians, the meaning of the tale—a missed chance for peace, or much ado about nothing, or very little?—has been hotly disputed, with more than a few analysts throwing up their hands in exasperation at Marigold’s confusion and convolution. Though not pretending to be the endlessly elusive last word (which hardly exists on any complex event), this book does resolve mysteries than have lain for decades at the core of this tantalizing affair.

Unfortunately, the story of Marigold holds more than historical interest. The end of the Cold War, in whose name Washington waged the Vietnam War, hardly ended the United States’ foreign military interventions or its involvement in crises that threaten to flare into war. From Serbia to Iraq to Afghanistan, from Iran to North Korea, from Cuba to China to Libya and beyond, the United States has continued to confront the challenge of comprehending and communicating with its actual or potential adversaries across cultural, linguistic, and ideological gulfs—with distinctly mixed results. Probing deeply into how the Johnson administration grappled with a tempting yet uncertain peace overture, trying to balance the hope of escaping a painful military predicament with entrenched skepticism and incomprehension toward the North Vietnamese enemy (and its Polish and Soviet backers), this book offers a case study pertinent to such issues as war termination, communication between belligerents, third-party mediation, signaling, and coercive diplomacy.

At the book’s heart, however, is the dramatic story—part mystery, part thriller, and ultimately Shakespearean tragedy with a few dashes of farce tossed in—of a few men who tried against long odds to change history for the better, and who in late 1966, at the height of the Vietnam War, came closer to succeeding than has previously been realized. No episode in our history, I believe, will baffle our posterity more than the Indochina war, the historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote in 1971, as the fighting still ground on. Many, perhaps most, Americans already find it incredible that we ever considered our national interest so vitally engaged in Vietnam as to justify the death of 50,000 Americans and God knows how many Vietnamese in the longest war Americans have ever fought.³ The drama of Marigold’s rise, fall, and disputed memory recounted in this book helps to explain how that conflict expanded, unnecessarily, far beyond any conceivable intrinsic importance in the global Cold War that dominated world affairs and American politics and foreign policy for nearly half a century after World War II.

But telling this tale requires first setting the stage and introducing the dramatis personae—and exhuming the buried tale of what happened in Washington, Warsaw, and Hanoi (among other locales) during LBJ’s thirty-seven-day bombing pause that began on Christmas Eve 1965.

A Note on Names and Terminology

In the text, the names of Vietnamese persons and locations have been rendered in common English usage, and the country name Vietnam has been standardized for consistency—rather than Viet Nam or Viet-Nam—except in titles of books and the like. (The same has been done with the name Lewandowski, which was occasionally rendered as Lewandowsky.) Street and other locations in Saigon and Warsaw are given as they were at the time of the Vietnam War and the Cold War, in the 1960s, although they have in many cases changed since then along with shifts in the prevailing politics (in opposite directions, as it happens, toward Communism in one case, away from it in the other). Finally, in a few cases, to avoid distracting the reader, a variant spelling of a name in a quotation or the like has been made consistent with the predominant spelling.

One noteworthy exception is 135 Duong Pasteur—the address of the secret three-way Marigold gatherings at the Italian Embassy in downtown Saigon. This address was already rare in 1966 for having retained its colonial name (Rue Pasteur) a dozen years after the end of French rule. After North Vietnamese tanks crashed through the gates of the presidential palace a few blocks away in 1975, the triumphant Communist authorities marked the new era by avidly renaming landmarks (Independence Palace now became Reunification Palace), streets (the nearby U.S. Embassy building now found itself on an avenue named after Le Duan, the Vietnamese Communist Party leader), and of course the city itself (renamed to honor Ho Chi Minh). But they evidently respected the renowned French scientist and his apolitical struggle against disease, and Duong Pasteur remains to this day.

Abbreviations Used in the Text

Prologue

Mission Impossible? Operation Lumbago and LBJ’s Thirty-Seven-Day Bombing Pause, December 1965-January 1966

You are behaving like bandits. But if you really want peace, then we are ready to help you!

—Władysław Gomułka to Averell Harriman, Warsaw, December 30, 1965

Why must the Americans go sticking [their] nose in others’ business? The American government has sent their military forces here and now they must stop the invasion. . . . The Americans must piss off! . . . We don’t want to become the victors; we just want the Americans to piss off! Goodbye! Gút bai!

—Ho Chi Minh to Jerzy Michałowski, Hanoi, January 6, 1966

God damn those Chinese!

—Michałowski, on returning to Warsaw, mid-January 1966

The president does not want to be treated like a fool.

—Norman Cousins to a Polish UN diplomat, conveying the White House’s reaction to Polish arguments to prolong the bombing pause, January 30, 1966

On a cold night in the Cold War, in the depths of a Warsaw winter, a phone rings after midnight. One clerk calls another—their names need not detain us; they are bit characters in our story, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the ensuing intrigues—what matters is that, at 1:40 a.m. on December 29, 1965, a U.S. Embassy officer awakens a Polish functionary on a very important and urgent matter.¹ Their talk concerns a hot war in jungles and rice paddies half a world away. When he first took office, Vietnam had been a mere foreign policy migraine for Lyndon Baines Johnson. Anxious to block Communist gains yet pursue an ambitious domestic agenda (and secure election in his own right), he had kept the crisis on a back burner, despite upping military advisers by 10,000, to 25,000, in the year after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. But by late 1965, he could not mask that America was now in a major ground war, with nearly 200,000 troops engaged and more en route. Despite his efforts to downplay the intervention’s scale and gravity, and the usual rallying around the flag, a vocal, growing minority dissented. Vietnam, formerly a Cold War backwater, had vaulted atop the global agenda, and now some feared that it could shatter the superpower détente that had seemed to emerge in the final year of JFK’s abbreviated presidency, or even be the Sarajevo that sparked a nuclear World War III.

The nocturnal call alerts the Poles to a surprise aerial invasion from the west. This time it is not the Luftwaffe, as it was twenty-six years before, still living memory for many Varsovians, but a single U.S. plane bearing a special presidential emissary—W. Averell Harriman, the grizzled seventy-four-year-old statesman and former financier known as the Crocodile for his habit of erupting from seeming slumber at meetings to snap off a speaker’s limb. As World War II ended, Harriman had served as Franklin Roosevelt’s envoy to Joseph Stalin; then, as the Cold War set in, he had been Harry Truman’s commerce secretary; later, he had been elected New York State’s Democratic governor when Dwight Eisenhower took the White House; still later, he had been a State Department aide to JFK; and now he was serving as LBJ’s roving ambassador at large and self-styled oracle on the Communist world (to the annoyance of his nominal boss, Secretary of State Dean Rusk). His journey to Warsaw, one of a barrage of diplomatic forays in an LBJ peace offensive, aims to open talks with North Vietnam—or to rally public support for a sharp escalation in the coming year once Hanoi, as expected, rejected them.

When the midlevel apparatchik in the Polish Foreign Ministry’s Department III—all right, I will mention their names for the record—when Mieczyslaw Sieradzki groggily lifted the receiver, the voice he heard belonged to chargé d’affaires Albert W. Bud Sherer. Even as they spoke, Harriman’s Boeing 707 left Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. Having received a flash telegram from Foggy Bottom alerting him to the impending visit, Sherer told Sieradzki that Harriman wished to see Foreign Minister Adam Rapacki to explain Washington’s latest peace terms; Rusk hoped the new U.S. ambassador, John A. Gronouski, could join them, but he was in Poznan attending a trade fair. Urgently requesting landing rights, Sherer supplied technical details about the flight and its anticipated arrival later Wednesday morning.

As Harriman sped over the Atlantic—to stop in Frankfurt, if needed, to await clearance to land at Warsaw’s Okęcie Airport—the rude awakenings continued. Sherer phoned Gronouski at 2 a.m. to summon him back to the capital; and Sieradzki rousted a deputy foreign minister, Józef Winiewicz, who reacted guardedly—it would be tough to consult the highest authority, given the late hour and absence of key figures on end-of-year vacations. Besides, as Sieradzki told Sherer, the talks’ concrete aim seemed vague and their overly spectacular nature could attract publicity that might hurt the cause.

But Sherer persisted and, using Washington’s guidance, elaborated on the request’s background. In the absence of a major provocation, he explained, LBJ had privately resolved to indefinitely extend a brief Christmas pause in the bombing, whose unconditional halt Hanoi and the entire Communist world angrily demanded: If the [North] Vietnamese side makes a serious contribution on behalf of peace, this will have a favorable effect on the future course of events. The U.S. government relays this message to the Polish government while being aware of its uneasiness and interest regarding the Vietnamese issue and expresses hope that the [Polish] government will make use of it as it sees fit. Analogous messages were being passed to Budapest and Moscow, Sherer added, implicitly prodding the Poles not to be left out of the action. He vowed that Washington would not publicize Harriman’s trip and would do its best to limit the inevitable press notice.

Sherer’s words had the desired effect. A Polish military counterintelligence officer awoke Foreign Ministry director-general Jerzy Michałowski, who in turn disturbed Rapacki and the man really in charge, Communist Party boss Wladyslaw Gomulka, who decided to grant permission. Passing the news down the food chain, Winiewicz told Sieradzki that the responsible authorities had decided, given Sherer’s clarifications, to let Harriman come. (Michałowski cabled Poland’s ambassador in Hanoi: We believed that our refusal could be exploited by the Americans in a predictable way.²) While it was still hours before sunrise, Sieradzki called back Sherer, who thanked him profusely; the paperwork was hastily completed. Harriman landed at 10:30 a.m., still the wee hours by his watch. After a shower and shave at the embassy, he raced to the Foreign Ministry.

Intense conversations would fill the rest of Harriman’s day, evening, and next morning, first with Rapacki and then Gomulka, whom he had met in Stalin’s Moscow. They inspired Warsaw, despite its firm support for Hanoi and harsh criticism of U.S. aggression, to send an emissary on a secret odyssey through the discordant Communist world, via the USSR and China, to carry Washington’s proposals to the North Vietnamese; he even, Communist archives reveal, strongly urged them to enter talks.

These exchanges foreshadowed a year of intense hidden maneuvering between Washington and Warsaw, and between Warsaw and Hanoi—with Moscow, Beijing, and other capitals lurking in the background—over peace in Vietnam.

LBJ and Vietnam: That Bitch of a War

Before plunging headfirst into the Vietnamese muck, Lyndon Johnson gingerly extended his toes. Having inherited a political, economic, and limited military commitment from JFK in November 1963, he at first hoped that the new Saigon junta that had ousted Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother in a United States-backed coup three weeks before Dallas would clean up the mess by establishing a popular, effective, and legitimate government and waging the anticommunist fight in earnest, letting the Americans remain in the background. Instead, the faction-ridden South Vietnamese military seemed more intent on staging coups, grasping for power and its spoils, than on fighting the guerrillas or setting up a rational state. The prognosis for preserving a noncommunist authority, which most U.S. officials judged a Cold War imperative, looked increasingly grim. In May 1964, after yet another Saigon shakeup, LBJ vented his doubts to his national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy:

I just stayed awake last night thinking of this thing, and the more that I think of it I don’t know what in the hell, it looks like to me that we’re getting into another Korea. It just worries the hell out of me. I don’t see what we can ever hope to get out of there with once we’re committed. I believe the Chinese Communists are coming into it. I don’t think that we can fight them 10,000 miles away from home and ever get anywhere in that area. I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out. And it’s just the biggest damn mess that I ever saw.

Mentioning a military aide with kids being deployed to Southeast Asia, he wondered, What in the hell am I ordering them out there for? What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me? What is Laos worth to me? What is it worth to this country? He mused presciently: It’s damn easy to get into a war, but . . . it’s going to be awful hard to ever extricate yourself if you get in.³

LBJ could hand-wring to Bundy or his old Senate crony Richard Russell, the conservative Georgia Democrat, but ultimately, he always reverted to Cold War orthodoxy, the antiappeasement axioms of Munich and the domino theory, and his innate terror—instilled during a hardscrabble Texas youth—of seeming soft or unmanly. All these entrenched factors dictated standing firm: Of course, he told Bundy, the ex-Harvard dean, if you start running from the Communists, they may just chase you right into your own kitchen. (If you let a bully come into your front yard one day, he said on another occasion, the next day he’ll be up on your porch, and the day after that he’ll rape your wife in your own bed.⁴)

Still, Johnson put off the tough decisions until after he defeated Barry Gold-water in November 1964; during the campaign, a quick air strike against North Vietnam in reply to alleged torpedo attacks against U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf in August served the dual purpose of showing measured toughness to voters and securing an open-ended congressional resolution endorsing the use of force. Even then, the Pentagon Papers later revealed, secret planning and covert operations were building momentum for deeper involvement. By winter, LBJ’s top advisers had judged that without sterner actions, the present course was headed for disastrous defeat—the weak, inept, divided Saigon regime would crumble and the Communists would waltz in, handing Hanoi and its Chinese and Soviet patrons a dangerous triumph. In a famous fork in the road memo in January 1965, Bundy and LBJ’s defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara, argued that the only alternative to failure was to use our military power in the Far East and to force a change of Communist policy.⁵

It was the moment of reckoning LBJ dreaded. I knew from the start that I was bound to be crucified either way I moved, he said after returning to Texas to lick his wounds. If I left the woman I really loved—the Great Society—in order to get involved with that bitch of a war on the other side of the world, then I would lose everything at home. All my programs. All my hopes to feed the hungry and shelter the homeless. All my dreams to provide education and medical care to the browns and the blacks and the lame and the poor. But if I left that war and let the Communists take over South Vietnam, then I would be seen as a coward and my nation would be seen as an appeaser and we would both find it impossible to accomplish anything for anybody anywhere on the entire globe.

Recalling political shifts during previous wars, Johnson feared that right-wingers would exploit the Vietnam crisis to derail his domestic agenda. And he distrusted generals who need battles and bombs and bullets in order to be heroic and see everything in military terms. Yes, he insisted, I could see it coming. And I didn’t like the smell of it. Above all, the squabbling in Saigon sapped his confidence in the ally for which he was to send American boys to risk their lives to defend:

Yet everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing exactly what Chamberlain did in World War II. I’d be giving a big fat reward to aggression. And I knew that if we let Communist aggression succeed in taking over South Vietnam, there would follow in this country an endless national debate—a mean and destructive debate—that would shatter my Presidency, kill my administration, and damage our democracy. I knew that Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had lost their effectiveness from the day that the Communists took over in China. I believed that the loss of China had played a large role in the rise of Joe McCarthy. And I knew that all these problems, taken together, were chickenshit compared with what might happen if we lost Vietnam.

For this time there would be Robert Kennedy out in front leading the fight against me, telling everyone that I had betrayed John Kennedy’s commitment to South Vietnam. That I had let a democracy fall into the hands of the Communists. That I was a coward. An unmanly man. A man without a spine. Oh, I could see it coming all right. Every night when I fell asleep I would see myself tied to the ground in the middle of a long, open space. In the distance, I could hear the voices of thousands of people. They were all shouting at me and running toward me: Coward! Traitor! Weakling! They kept coming closer. They began throwing stones. At exactly that moment I would generally wake up, . . . terribly shaken. But there was more. You see, I was sure as any man could be that once we showed how weak we were, Moscow and Peking would move in a flash to exploit our weakness. They might move independently or they might move together. But move they would—whether through nuclear blackmail, through subversion, with regular armed forces or in some other manner. As nearly as anyone can be certain of anything. I knew they couldn’t resist the opportunity to expand their control over the vacuum of power we would leave behind us. And so would begin World War III. So you see, I was bound to be crucified either way I moved.⁶

Persuaded—or, in his self-pitying nightmares, trapped—Johnson opted to spike the U.S. role. In February came a suitable provocation: A Viet Cong attack on a barracks in Pleiku in South Vietnam’s central highlands killed eight Americans and wounded more than a hundred, and coincided with a Bundy inspection tour, adding an emotional tint to his advice to hit back hard. Retaliatory strikes against the North (Flaming Dart) soon became an ongoing campaign (Rolling Thunder) of what Washington termed sustained reprisal raids—misleadingly, because they aimed as much to stiffen Saigon as to punish Hanoi for backing the Southern insurgency or to impede infiltration. Marines waded ashore in March to guard an airbase near Danang, and in July LBJ announced that he would raise the number of troops from 75,000 to 125,000 (actually nearly twice that, though he did not say so openly); the mission thus crept from protecting U.S. installations to search-and-destroy operations to wipe out the elusive Viet Cong (the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, or the National Liberation Front, NLF, also commonly known as the Viet Cong).⁷

Washington felt weak on the ground and sensed only stubbornness from Hanoi, so diplomacy took a back seat to building up strength, retaking Communist-held territory, and bolstering Saigon—yet LBJ felt compelled to nod at least occasionally toward peace.

Washington and Hanoi

Communicating with Hanoi was hardly simple, however; the two sides had never established diplomatic relations. For a fleeting moment, prospects for friendly ties had seemed bright. During World War II, operatives of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the postwar Central Intelligence Agency) and Ho Chi Minh’s forces had collaborated against the Japanese, who seized direct control over Indochina from France in March 1945. The Viet Minh (Ho’s national independence movement) helped rescue downed U.S. pilots, and the mutual warmth seemed in sync with Roosevelt’s sympathy for granting Indochina independence after the war—the French had milked it for a century, he scorned—much as Washington had pledged self-rule for its own colony, the Philippines, once the Japanese were expelled.⁸

But FDR died in April, and Truman gave less priority to ending colonialism than building up postwar France, especially given strains with Moscow and the power vacuum on the continent left by Germany’s defeat. On September 2, 1945,agents of the Office of Strategic Services sat on the dais as Ho proclaimed the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (quoting the Declaration of Independence), but Washington ignored his appeals for recognition and after vacillating backed French efforts to reassert control. Once Franco–Viet Minh fighting broke out in late 1946, U.S. aides debated Ho’s ultimate aims; some, stressing his ties to international Communism, urged full support for France’s bid to crush the revolt; others saw colonial rule as doomed and emphasized Ho’s nationalism, envisioning a potential Asian Tito able to keep his land from Kremlin sway despite ideological affinity. Squeamish about embracing the old order, Washington urged Paris to grant the Vietnamese real autonomy (much as it advised The Hague to accept Sukarno’s victory in the Dutch East Indies).

But by 1950, fears of a Communist tide overflowing East Asia swept such nuances aside—Mao Zedong’s victory in China’s civil war and forging of an alliance with Stalin, Ho’s now open entrenchment in the Sino-Soviet camp, and North Korea’s crossing of the 38th Parallel convinced U.S. policymakers to lump Indochina into the broad eastern front of the now global Cold War. Washington still gave lip service to eventual Vietnamese independence, but it now rendered Paris all-out political, economic, and military aid, short only of sending forces (which were otherwise occupied in Korea and also rushing to Western Europe, where a Soviet thrust was widely anticipated).⁹

Despite the U.S. help, the French faced defeat by early 1954, and the impending collapse of their besieged Dien Bien Phu garrison forced Eisenhower to grapple with the question he hoped never to face: Would Washington intervene directly to prevent a Communist takeover? With U.S. strategy geared to stemming Communist advances, a key Cold War ally in disarray and begging for help, a diplomatic showdown looming in Geneva, and politicians clamoring to confront the Red Menace, many Americans said yes; Pentagon planners even drew up Operation Vulture to use tactical nuclear weapons to obliterate the Communists in the jungle surrounding Dien Bien Phu.¹⁰

But Ike, having extricated troops from one Asian meat-grinder and fearing another once the flag was committed, said no.¹¹ Secretary of State John Foster Dulles grumpily managed the distasteful consequences; the French crumbled, and in July 1954, the Geneva Conference divided Vietnam at the 17th Parallel. In the North, the Communists set up the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) as a functioning state; and the noncommunists established the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the South. The Geneva Accords, a Cold War landmark, were signed by foreign ministers from both camps—Moscow’s Vyacheslav Molotov and London’s Anthony Eden, the cochairs; France and the DRV; and, in a dashing debut, China’s Zhou Enlai. Washington stood ostentatiously aloof—Dulles famously shunned a handshake with Zhou—and refused to sign the accord. Instead, it focused on bolstering the RVN and drawing a new line to quarantine the contagion; hoping to replicate NATO, it herded its allies into a Southeast Asian Treaty Organization and vowed to stem further Communist expansion in the region (see map 1).

Map 1. Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

Source: Tour 365, Winter 1968.

In theory, the 17th Parallel was a temporary demarcation to separate rival armies pending national elections within two years to unify the country; in reality, Washington supplanted Paris as the outside power propping up Saigon, and had helped Ngo Dinh Diem—a Catholic in a mostly Buddhist country—consolidate control over sects and Viet Minh sympathizers. Eisenhower encouraged Diem to ignore Geneva’s provision for elections, ostensibly because Communist strictures in the North precluded fair balloting, but also, he admitted in his memoirs, because Ho would have won 80 percent of the votes.¹²

As Washington tightened its embrace of Diem—hailing him as a Southeast Asian amalgam of George Washington and Winston Churchill—U.S.-DRV relations settled into a deep freeze; the acrimony sharpened during Ike’s second term with crises over Laos and the onset of a Communist armed struggle in the RVN.¹³ Kennedy kept the policy of boosting Saigon (increasing U.S. military advisers to 15,000 from 1,000) and shunning Hanoi, with one notable exception. In July 1962, a second Geneva Conference agreed to form a neutral coalition government in Laos, a rare moment of Cold War comity. (Nikita Khrushchev and JFK were willing to defuse the issue despite rifts over Berlin, Cuba, Congo, and other hot spots.) Unlike the earlier Geneva gathering, this time Washington participated fully; Kennedy named Harriman his chief negotiator. Unlike Dulles, the Guv had no qualms about fraternizing with Commies—he prided himself on being able to deal with them, enjoying the bracing mixture of chummy gossip and trash talk—and gained Kennedy’s permission to see DRV foreign minister Ung Van Khiem privately even though Saigon would be infuriated if it found out. To elude reporters, he ducked through a back alley near the train station to reach the hotel where a Burmese diplomat hosted the talk. To break the ice, he harked back to the cooperation against Japan and asked after Ho’s health. Khiem said his people fondly recalled Roosevelt and rued Truman’s swinging behind the French; had he emulated FDR, much suffering could have been avoided.

After that promising start, the talk went downhill. Harriman warned Khiem against violating Lao neutrality, and they clashed over South Vietnam. Harriman insisted that the United States was merely helping a sovereign nation defend itself against outside interference; to his visible annoyance, Khiem called the conflict a popular struggle against foreign aggression and blamed Washington for violating the 1954 pact.¹⁴

There was no follow-up, no talk of setting up a communications channel, no further clarification of mutual perspectives or aims or probing a possible compromise deal. The furtive meeting turned out to be the only direct contact between high-ranking U.S. and North Vietnamese figures between the DRV’s founding and the Paris talks nearly twenty-three years later. Let us never negotiate out of fear, JFK had said at his inauguration. But let us never fear to negotiate. In this case, however, he had no desire to risk Republican or South Vietnamese wrath by opening an ongoing dialogue with Hanoi.

Had the Geneva Laos accord worked, it might have enhanced Harriman’s stature and prospects for extending the neutrality model to Vietnam or opening contacts with Ho—who voiced readiness to negotiate with ‘any’ South Vietnamese regime that was ‘willing to sit down with us at the same table and talk.’ ¹⁵ But it did not. Washington soon charged that Hanoi was consistently violating the pact (and had never intended to take it seriously), wrecking any slim chance that might have existed to consider the neutral solution that, most famously, France’s Charles de Gaulle advocated.¹⁶ The reflexive U.S. aversion to dealing with the North surfaced during the run-up to the November 1963 coup in Saigon. Besides the other grudges that JFK’s aides nursed against Diem’s regime—repression of Buddhists, corruption, resistance to reforms, diffidence in fighting Communists—they were alarmed by rumors that Ngo Dinh Nhu, his volatile brother, was secretly flirting with Hanoi.

To play footsy with Ho, Nhu allegedly conspired with a locally based Polish diplomat who periodically traveled to Hanoi to meet with DRV leaders: Mieczyslaw Maneli, Warsaw’s ambassador to the International Control Commission (ICC). His presence was a unique Cold War anomaly: All Communist governments, including Poland, scorned South Vietnam as a U.S. puppet, and maintained embassies in Hanoi, not Saigon. So what was this senior Communist doing in South Vietnam’s capital, and what was the ICC?

The 1954 Geneva Conference had created the ICC—formally, the International Commission for Supervision and Control—to monitor the Indochina pact, which set limits on military activities by both rival Vietnamese factions and foreign powers. In a delicate balancing act, the conference named as members Poland, Canada, and neutral India as chair—in the spirit of an earlier group (Switzerland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Sweden) that made up the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission overseeing the Korean armistice.

Washington never had much use for the ICC, which was supposed to observe the 1956 balloting, and its scant regard dwindled as the group proved unable to function effectively. This Commission was considerably better than the one arranged for Korea, in that no member had an automatic veto, a State Department aide recalled, but in practice, India’s spinelessness, combined with the absence of real sanctions against North Vietnam’s refusal to allow the Commission to travel freely, made it a paper tiger.¹⁷ Nor did U.S. officials particularly appreciate Ottawa’s performance; to watching Americans, the historian Robert Bothwell has written of this period, Canadians on the commission failed to act forcefully enough in combating Polish wiles.¹⁸ Citing the North’s limits on the ICC to back Diem’s refusal to stage national elections, the Americans proposed that the UN monitor them, but Hanoi rejected this idea as too pro-West.

By the late 1950s, the Geneva pact was effectively dead, but no one wanted to pull the plug on the ICC. It kept staff in Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and Hanoi, but based commissioners and most personnel in Saigon, where logistics were easier. Because it was rarely able to reach unanimity except on minor procedural matters, it sank into a stalemate. Its meetings routinely degenerated into tabulating accusations from the warring sides and futile, if at times heated, squabbling. Occasionally, India voted with Canada or Poland, allowing a majority to slap one wrist or the other—for example, Washington’s for topping Geneva limits by sending more than 1,000 military advisers to the South or (in an unusual 1962 majority report) Hanoi’s for aiding the Communist uprising there. But New Delhi carefully rationed its alignments, alternately irking both Ottawa and Warsaw.¹⁹ One reporter, calling the ICC’s staff the loneliest men in Vietnam, observed that both Saigon and Hanoi tend to regard the International Control Commission with some embarrassment, but neither party apparently wants the commission to wind up its affairs.²⁰

Amid rising tension between Kennedy and Diem, rumors that Nhu was using Maneli to dally with Hanoi evoked the prospect, abhorrent to Washington, of the two Vietnams plotting to move the South toward neutralism. They helped convince JFK’s aides—including his new ambassador in Saigon, Henry Cabot Lodge, a senior Republican—that Diem must go. The gossip, spread by Nhu himself, was overblown, Polish sources now confirm: Maneli spoke to both sides but was not mediating and even got into hot water with Warsaw when his name appeared in the press.²¹ (Of course, the Americans would have been lucky if Diem had cut a neutralist deal with Hanoi and requested them to leave, but that was not how it looked at the time.) The Maneli intrigue made no progress toward peace, yet it served as a reminder that the ICC delegates, though unable to fulfill their nominal mandate, might still serve as critical communications links.

The need for such channels remained cogent, because LBJ had inherited an aversion to dealing directly with Ho Chi Minh—as Washington tended to personify the DRV leadership. Now in his midseventies, Ho had in fact mostly relinquished day-to-day decisionmaking to others, especially Le Duan, the powerful first secretary of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP; Lao Dong), and a militant Southerner who strongly backed the armed battle to unify the country—yet a figure unknown to most Americans.²² In any case, U.S. officials believed, there was nothing to negotiate: Hanoi had no right to meddle in South Vietnam and thus should mind its own business. If it did not, it would suffer the consequences.

To transmit this blunt message, the inert ICC came in handy. In June and in mid-August 1964, after being briefed by U.S. aides, Canadian commissioner J. Blair Seaborn visited Hanoi, carrying a big stick (an implicit threat of force) and a hazy carrot (vague promises of economic aid should it desist). The formulation avoided the word ultimatum, but the DRV got the message. Courteously receiving Seaborn, Premier Pham Van Dong nonetheless insisted on a full U.S. pullout from South Vietnam before any settlement (e.g., neutralization); and on his second visit, Dong, angry after Tonkin Gulf, declared that Hanoi could not be cowed by aggression, rejected the de facto ultimatum, and forecast a Communist victory. As Washington expected, the rebuff set up a military showdown. Ottawa concluded sourly that it had been used to threaten Hanoi rather than seek nego tiations (Seaborn felt queasy being Lodge’s messenger boy). Seeing the whole exercise as futile, the Canadians flirted with ditching the ICC altogether, but in the end they gritted their teeth and awaited a more auspicious moment to reenter the diplomatic hurly-burly.²³ That autumn and winter, Washington also signaled a lack of interest in direct talks with Hanoi by responding diffidently to word from UN secretary-general U Thant that Ho had indicated he would approve face-to-face talks with the Americans. (We will return to this murky episode, which exploded into a public row, poisoning relations between LBJ and the Burmese statesman.²⁴)

In early 1965, as hostilities intensified, diplomacy took a back seat. Repeatedly, Ottawa asked whether Seaborn might aid in communicating with Hanoi, but Washington said no thanks.²⁵ Johnson’s decisions to bomb the DRV and send more troops to the South alarmed U.K. prime minister Harold Wilson, who tried frantically to resuscitate the dormant Geneva process—to curb the violence, assure London a seat at the table, and dampen discontent in his own Labour Party. Moscow briefly seemed interested in reprising its cochair role, but Beijing and Hanoi shot the idea down and the effort collapsed. On April 7, LBJ publicly called for unconditional discussions with North Vietnam, but the next day, in a speech to the DRV’s National Assembly, Dong insisted that Washington first stop the bombing and accept Four Points at the core of any settlement:

1. Recognition of the basic national rights of the Vietnamese people—peace, independence, sovereignty, unity, and territorial integrity, which required the United States to withdraw all its forces from South Vietnam and cease all acts of war on North Vietnam.

2. Respecting the military provisions of the 1954 Geneva Accords, intended to ensure the country’s neutrality as a prelude to unification, including, inter alia, tight restrictions on the presence of foreign military personnel which the United States had long since surpassed.

3. The internal affairs of South Vietnam must be settled by the South Vietnamese people themselves in accordance with the program of the NFLSV [National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam, or National Liberation Front], without any foreign interference.

4. Vietnam’s peaceful reunification should be settled by the Vietnamese people in both zones, without any foreign interference.²⁶

Point three was the rub, because it implied scrapping South Vietnam’s existing regime and substituting a coalition which the NLF—Hanoi’s marionette, Washington felt—would dominate. Before talks, LBJ felt it essential to prop up Saigon, and in July 1965 he redoubled the U.S. troop commitment. Still, probing continued. In May, Johnson authorized a five-day bombing halt (Mayflower) that Hanoi predictably ignored. That summer, quiet soundings transpired in Paris between a DRV diplomat, Mai Van Bo, and a retired yet authorized American official, Edmund Guillon; these intriguing XYZ talks covered key topics (e.g., what would actually happen if Washington accepted the Four Points), but Hanoi broke them off for unclear reasons.²⁷

In the fall, as the violence intensified, LBJ came under mounting pressure to make—or at least seem to be making—a more strenuous bid for peace.

Parsing the Pause

What moved LBJ to OK an extended bombing pause in December 1965—the first real breather to explore diplomacy after nearly a year of escalation—despite acute private doubts that it would yield any progress and fear that Hanoi would see it as an admission of weakness? The influences on him merged issues, personalities, and arguments that would resurface repeatedly during the Marigold peace initiative, so it is worth pausing, so to speak, to disentangle them.

The heart of the matter, of course, remained the war itself, and to Washington it was not going so well. The Americanization of the conflict had accelerated, yet not only had Ho failed to blink (à la Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis), but the Communists seemed to fight harder than ever. By autumn, top officials lamented the slow progress, and military commanders elongated earlier optimistic timetables, seeking more resources with no promise of ultimate success—a sobering picture, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, William P. Bundy (McGeorge’s brother), later recalled.²⁸ In mid-November, the picture sobered up even more. In savage battles in the Ia Drang Valley, their first major clashes with the main units of the People’s Army of Vietnam, U.S. forces on a search-and-destroy mission lost several hundred dead, pushing the year’s toll near 2,000. Victory claims rang hollow; those Americans who had expected to cow the enemy with superior technology and firepower recoiled at this bloody show of tenacity and skill.

Yet, for most U.S. civilian and military figures running the war, the evidence of a tougher enemy just underlined the need to roll up their sleeves and get on with the job, send in more troops and weaponry, and keep at it until Hanoi caved. Amid louder grumbles about Vietnam at home and abroad, however, they worried about sustaining support for what they now realized was likely to be a prolonged, painful struggle. Americans still backed the war, polls said, overwhelmingly preferring escalation to withdrawal, yet a march on the Pentagon in early November dramatized dissenters’ intensity, even if their numbers were modest. McNamara watched in horror as the Quaker activist Norman Morrison set himself afire not 40 feet away from my window; another protester immolated himself a week later.²⁹ LBJ rapped critics as unpatriotic or even Communist dupes, but his aides warned that support on Vietnam might wane, especially with rising costs projected and midterm elections nearing. On Capitol Hill, Senate Majority leader Mike Mansfield and Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair J. William Fulbright urged a bombing pause to test Hanoi before stepping up military action.

All that autumn, as concern about the war spread, LBJ secretly mulled a lengthy bombing break around the Christmas–New Year’s holidays to convince skeptics that he really wanted peace and to either open talks on acceptable terms or else get even more serious about prosecuting the war. As he vacillated and Rusk also wavered on the fence, internal battle lines congealed. The debate pitted advocates of a long pause—led by McGeorge Bundy (if only to set the table for later escalation), McNamara (fast losing faith in the bombing), and Undersecretary of State George W. Ball (the house maverick), seconded by White House aides like Jack Valenti and Bill Moyers—against hawkish military figures and advisers (Clark Clifford, Abe Fortas, and Lodge, whom LBJ had sent back to Saigon for a second term as ambassador in August). The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the commander of U.S. forces in Vietnam, General William C. Westmoreland, decried anything beyond a token