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. For this book, four decades later, he tells his story for the first time. ![]() At the time, the man at the center of what became known as the "Lewandowski Affair" remained shrouded in mystery, rebuffing reporters. 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.īut to the junior Polish diplomat behind the "ten points," Janusz Lewandowski-the lone communist ambassador in anti-communist Saigon-it was a squandered chance to stop the carnage, save uncounted lives, and dramatically alter history. 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 should his plane crash.īut the rendezvous between enemy diplomats doesn't 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. 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 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 US-backed regime in Saigon.īut 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. Yet, far from Southeast Asia's jungles and rice paddies, in this grey, frigid Central European city, a secret breakthrough for peace seems imminent. ![]() Outwardly, the bloodshed shows no sign of subsiding. Kennedy, took office -but few imagine that 52,000 Americans are still to die, along with millions of Vietnamese on both sides of the 17th Parallel. military personnel had been killed in Vietnam (and Laos) since January 1961, when his predecessor, John F. Johnson at his Texas ranch that 6,250 U.S. Early that morning, the Pentagon informs President Lyndon B. ![]() Five thousand miles away, the Vietnam War is raging, with the dead piling up and the escalating violence poisoning international affairs and American politics. December 6, 1966: a date which should live in diplomatic infamy.
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