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Janusz Lewandowski, 82, Polish Peace Envoy in Vietnam, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: September 2, 2013
The Vietnam War was raging with no end in sight in June 1966 when President Lyndon B. Johnson was told of a bold diplomatic peace offensive in the works called Operation Marigold. In comments caught on tape in the Oval Office, he called it “the most realistic, the most convincing, the most persuasive peace feeler I’ve had since I’ve been president.”
Courtesy of Janusz Lewandowski
Janusz Lewandowski in 1969 with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong of North Vietnam. He saw an early opening for peace talks in what the Americans called Operation Marigold.
The point man behind the effort was a 35-year-old Polish diplomat named Janusz Lewandowski (pronounced YAH-noosh lee-van-DOF-ski), who died on Aug. 13 in Warsaw at 82. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Lewandowski was sent to Vietnam with a green light to explore ways to negotiate peace.
He arrived in Saigon on April 10, 1966. Officially he was there as the Communist world’s representative on the International Control Commission — India and Canada were its other members — which had been set up to monitor cease-fire violations after Vietnam was divided into northern and southern entities with the defeat of French colonialists in 1954.
But his real business was in Hanoi, the Communist-held capital in the north. Nine days later, Mr. Lewandowski flew there on a rickety Boeing 307 Stratoliner, carrying Moscow’s blessing. The Soviet leader, Leonid I. Brezhnev, had signed off on the mission after conferring with the Polish foreign minister, Adam Rapacki; Mr. Brezhnev viewed Moscow’s involvement in the conflict, providing arms and aid to Hanoi, as an increasing distraction.
At first, North Vietnamese officials asserted the standard line that they were winning the war and would not compromise with their South Vietnamese adversaries or South Vietnam’s American backers. Then Mr. Lewandowski had a frank talk with Pham Van Dong, North Vietnam’s prime minister, and was startled to hear him say the Americans would be easier to defeat than the French.
“The Americans have great power,” Mr. Lewandowski responded, he recalled years later, and pointed out the obvious: the escalating American bombing campaign in North Vietnam.
Officials in Hanoi became receptive to his overture, confiding that they might consider negotiations. Could he play a role?
Mr. Lewandowski returned to Saigon, where he had a reputation as a moderate, well-connected Communist. Unexpectedly, South Vietnam’s foreign minister took him to meet with the country’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu.
Mr. Lewandowski was initially taken aback, questioning the propriety of meeting a head of state without instructions from home. But, warming to the task, he was struck by Mr. Thieu’s moderate stance. The president, too, suggested that Mr. Lewandowski might be a go-between for peace talks.
He soon made an important friend: Giovanni D’Orlandi, Italy’s emissary to South Vietnam. As James G. Hershberg wrote in an exhaustive account, “Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam” (2012), the two men played chess and talked about how Washington underestimated North Vietnamese nationalism.
“Gradually,” Mr. Hershberg wrote, “Lewandowski settled into his role as a unique, even exotic specimen on the Saigon diplomatic scene — a Communist ambassador, able to drop names from the Hanoi leadership and offer firsthand testimony from the other side of the ‘bamboo curtain’ dividing Vietnam, fluent in English (and ‘weak’ French) and socializing with a diverse mix.”
He quoted Mr. Lewandowski as saying, “They looked at me like I was from the moon.”
He was actually from Warsaw, born there on March 10, 1931. He earned a master’s degree from the Taras Shevchenko National University, joined a Communist youth organization and became a diplomat. His son, Krzysztof, said he had died of cancer.
Mr. Lewandowski returned to Hanoi in June 1966. North Vietnam, Mr. Dong told him, was now willing to make significant concessions. It might accept a neutral South Vietnam and maybe even the South’s existing government. It asked only for a schedule for American troops to leave, not for their immediate departure.
Mr. Lewandowski returned to Saigon. Ambassador D’Orlandi organized meetings at his residence, inviting the American ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, to meet with the young Polish diplomat. On his way there, the lanky Mr. Lodge crouched in the back of a private car to avoid detection.
Mr. Lewandowski made sure that American ideas reached Hanoi. One was Washington’s willingness to accept South Vietnamese neutrality. Another was linking an end to the bombing with an end to North Vietnamese infiltration of the South. The Johnson administration called the initiative Marigold, in its style of naming peace efforts after flowers.
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Janusz Lewandowski, 82, Polish Peace Envoy in Vietnam, Dies
Published: September 2, 2013
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Over the next several months, Johnson visited troops in Vietnam and urged them to “come home with that coonskin on the wall.” His private orders, however, were more moderate, placing emphasis on pacification efforts in South Vietnam and negotiations to end the conflict.
On Dec. 1, the North Vietnamese moved to test Washington’s expressions of peace, instructing Mr. Lewandowski to tell Mr. Lodge that if the Americans were truly serious, they should go to Warsaw and meet with North Vietnam’s ambassador to Poland.
W. Averell Harriman, the administration’s respected ambassador at large, recommended that he fly to Warsaw. Johnson agreed, saying, “By all means confirm in both places,” meaning Warsaw and Saigon.
The next day, Dec. 2, the United States stunned the North Vietnamese by bombing within five miles of Hanoi. North Vietnam termed the attacks “piratical” and “savage.” They had been planned three weeks earlier, and no official in authority who might have been aware of both the attack plans and the Warsaw meeting had stopped the bombing runs, according to Mr. Hershberg, a professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University.
How this happened has long been debated. In 1968, David Kraslow and Stuart H. Loory, reporters for The Los Angeles Times, wrote that simple incompetence was to blame. They quoted an unnamed official as saying: “Oh, my God. We lost control.”
Two days later, on Dec. 4, the United States again bombed Hanoi. Earlier that day, Vietcong guerrillas assaulted a South Vietnamese air base and an American military building in Saigon.
Still, North Vietnam followed through with the planned Dec. 6 meeting in Warsaw, sending a diplomat, Nguyen Dinh Phuong, to carry the proposals with him. His wife sewed the document in his vest, and a senior official ordered him to destroy it if his plane was about to crash, according to Mr. Hershberg’s account.
But the meeting never happened, apparently because of miscommunication. The American ambassador to Poland, John A. Gronouski, waited at the Polish Foreign Ministry for the North Vietnamese to arrive. Meanwhile, Mr. Phuong and Do Phat Quang, North Vietnam’s ambassador to Poland, waited in their embassy for Mr. Gronouski.
The Polish effort briefly hung in limbo, but American leaders correctly feared that another round of bombings scheduled for Dec. 13 and 14 would kill it. In his book “In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam” (1995), Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, said he and the under secretary of state, Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, had strongly urged that the bombings be postponed.
But Johnson had decided that Marigold “was a dry creek,” as he wrote in his 1971 memoir, “The Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963-1969.”
“The simple truth, I was convinced, was that the North Vietnamese were not ready to talk to us,” Johnson wrote. “The Poles had not only put the cart before the horse; when the time of reckoning came, they had no horse.”
The bombings went ahead, killing civilians in Hanoi. Mr. Lewandowski’s peace effort was dead. On the morning of the planned Warsaw meeting, Johnson was told that 6,250 American military personnel had died in Vietnam. In the years to come, 52,000 more would die, along with tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both civilians and combatants.
Mr. Lewandowski left Vietnam in May 1967. He was later appointed to Polish ambassadorships in Egypt and Greece. He retired in 1991 when the new non-Communist government did not offer him a diplomatic post.
His first marriage ended in divorce. In addition to his son, Krzysztof, he is survived by his wife, Wanda; his daughter, Joanna Lewandowski-Mironczyk; and a granddaughter.
Mr. Hershberg, whose 900-page book on the affair was based on documents, interviews and many hours of conversation with Mr. Lewandowski in a hotel bar in Warsaw, said in an interview that in the end the failed initiative might have hurt peace prospects by raising hopes only to dash them.
“It was worse than a nonevent,” he said, “in terms or reinforcing both sides’ belief in the bad faith of the other side.”
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