James Hershberg's Marigold: The Lost Chance for Peace in Vietnam explores an early diplomatic initiative that sought to resolve the growing military conflict between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and the United States and its ally, the Republic of Vietnam. This initiative, code-named “Marigold” by the U.S. State Department, played out over a relatively short six months between June and December of 1966. It starred Italian and Polish diplomats serving as intermediaries between leaders in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The central figure of Hershberg's narrative (and one of his key informants) is Janusz Lewandowski, a junior Polish diplomat and member of the International Control Commission (ICC), the body established to oversee compliance with the Geneva Agreements. Marigold explores the tantalizing possibility that this complex array of diplomatic exchanges might have yielded a compromise between seemingly intractable opponents and thus averted the descent into the most brutal and destructive phases of the war. Hershberg's exhaustively researched account of this narrow timeframe (he scoured archives in the United States, Australia, Poland, Canada, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Italy, India, and Hungary, among other places) uncovers numerous moments at which an agreement might have come to fruition, and describes a sequence of alternating hope and frustration amongst all participants. At the same time, Hershberg's account reveals the hubris, ideological blinkers, and ruthless realpolitik of the American and DRV leadership that repeatedly got in the way of an agreement.

In examining “Marigold,” Hershberg explores a peace initiative that is far from unknown. American participants and diplomats, from President Johnson to Henry Cabot Lodge (the U.S. ambassador to Saigon) to Chester Cooper (a senior National Security Council official), all commented on it in their memoirs only to dismiss the idea that Marigold had been a legitimate opportunity for an agreement. These accounts argued that Hanoi was not serious about peace and that its involvement was a merely a ploy. They also suggested that Lewandowski was misrepresenting his status as an authorized go-between for Hanoi, or that the Polish diplomat was not accurately portraying Hanoi's actual negotiating position out of an overeagerness to promote an agreement. Hershberg's approach is to take the entire process more seriously, and his challenge then becomes to make a convincing argument that the peace effort actually had a real chance of succeeding. In fact, one might regard this as a work of counterfactual history, an episode of what might have been, and indeed, the author raises precisely this notion when he raises the question of what would have happened had this diplomatic initiative succeeded (p. 724).

Indeed, this is one of the author's framing questions, for at the heart of the book lies the key issue of whether the Marigold gambit offered a realistic prospect for an agreement to end the war before it reached its peak intensity and the loss of life that entailed on all sides. Based on his exhaustive reading of the archival material, as well as his interviews with Lewandowski and with Vietnamese closely involved in the diplomatic project, Hershberg offers a convincing argument that Marigold had in fact been a real opportunity for direct negotiations, if not necessarily for an agreement. While this requires a nuanced reading of the proposals and of DRV intentions, as well as American interests, it makes sense. In fact, the author points to a crucial moment in the entire process when it came tantalizingly close to at least enabling face-to-face discussions. An agreement had apparently been reached for U.S. and DRV diplomats to meet in Warsaw in early December 1966 to discuss the terms of a possible deal. Hershberg sketches a case of botched communication and stubborn pride that resulted in the envoys waiting for each other at two separate locations, each having understood that the other would come to their locale (pp. 297ff.). He speculates as to what might have transpired had this meeting actually occurred, and suggests that a deal might conceivably have emerged from such an occasion. While a tempting proposition, and indeed one critical to Hershberg's story, the previous 300 pages had already illustrated the vicissitudes of diplomatic encounters and the infinite number of ways in which plans and agreements could be and were easily derailed. While Hershberg is convincing in his argument that Marigold was the best prospect for a peace agreement before the later and lengthy Paris talks, how likely it was to have come to fruition is an entirely different proposition.

Even if one remains skeptical about the likelihood that Marigold might have led to a peace agreement, Hershberg's book is valuable for adding to our understanding of the complicated diplomatic and political calculations that swirled around the war in Vietnam. It demonstrates that each side was quite seriously exploring negotiations in the 1965–66 period when most accounts tend to gloss over such efforts and view the years leading up to the later Paris talks strictly in terms of growing military confrontation. Marigold also highlights the significant role of third parties in these diplomatic efforts, the Poles in particular, but also the Italians, who were critical in efforts to lure the enemy camps to the negotiating table. Indeed, the book's central figure, Janusz Lewandowski, is cast in a particularly heroic mode, no doubt a byproduct of his role as a key informant for the project. Lewandowski used his access as a member of the ICC and his personal connections to senior DRV leaders to promote the project, regularly traveling between the two parties and constantly struggling to fan the embers of hope when the process stalled repeatedly. Because of its focus on Lewandowski, Marigold offers unprecedented attention to the ICC, its members, and its internal dynamics, and shows that while the ICC itself was largely stymied in its efforts to deescalate the conflict, it was the mobility and credibility it provided Lewandowski that made his Marigold efforts possible.

In closing, I must comment on perhaps this work's biggest flaw, namely its massive size and extraordinary level of detail. One cannot dispute the author's encyclopedic knowledge of the inner workings of all that related to the Marigold project. He has amassed an enormous amount of information, ranging from the profound to the inane. Reading this work makes the reader a fly on the wall at endless rounds of conversations, discussions, debates, and arguments. This book essentially traces a period of less than one year over the course of more than seven hundred pages, supplemented by nearly eighty pages of footnotes. One cannot question Hershberg's intimate knowledge of the wide range of characters one encounters in this book. One can, however, question whether the degree of detail included here is really necessary. For some, this may be a rare opportunity to see the inner workings of the world of high-level diplomacy. For others, and I must include myself among them, the detail frequently obscures the larger issues. And yet, despite the excess of detail, the persistent reader will be rewarded with substantial insights about the diplomatic backstory of the expanding American war in Vietnam, and confronted with the tantalizing prospect that a larger war could conceivably have been avoided.