Blowback - S5 Episode 3 - "Listen to the Thunder"

Episode Date: December 27, 2024

Sihanouk struggles to keep Cambodia out of LBJ's war in Vietnam.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

In the autumn of 1965, Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger visited the American Front in Vietnam. By now, Kissinger was a semi-official advisor to the Johnson administration, and well-informed about the struggles of the U.S. mission. In his memoirs, Kissinger writes that, after arriving, quote, I soon realized we had involved ourselves in a war which we knew neither how to win nor how to conclude, end quote. Over three weeks in October 1965, writes historian Robert K. Brigham, quote, Kissinger met with several senior U.S. military leaders, including General William Westmoreland, who assured him the war was going well, end quote.

Everywhere Kissinger went, U.S. leaders told him the same. optimistic story. Give the war a year, maybe 18 months. Afterward, in his official report to the U.S. Ambassador, Kissinger expressed his skepticism, but maintained the correctness of America's goals in Vietnam. But Kissinger also kept private diaries during his trip. They went much further than what he said on the record. In these, Kissinger called the Army reports useless, quote, eyewash, end quote, and described firsthand the bureaucratic incompetence of the American mission. Kissinger returned to Vietnam in 1966 to find the situation had gotten even worse. Briefed by a Pentagon analyst, Daniel Ellsberg, Kissinger learned that the South Vietnamese

were useless as a fighting force. Neither side in the war had achieved enough to claim victory or lost enough to admit defeat. But at the same time, during his trips, Kissinger became intoxicated by the wartime capital, Saigon. He could not ignore the historical stakes, the intrigue, the opportunity. Henry Kissinger, after all, had risen to prominence as a theoretician of the balance of power.

He began to see the Vietnam War as one grand puzzle to be solved. and who better to solve it. This was years before Kissinger's own rise to power. There was no chance yet of him solving the Vietnam puzzle, but it was on his mind. On the last night of his 1965 visit to Vietnam, Kissinger went clubbing with embassy staffers in Saigon

to the noise of artillery shells exploding in the distance. Calling it an absurd situation, Kissinger confided in his diary, quote, If I were a dictator here, I would not know where to begin. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James. I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 5, Episode 3, Listen to the Thunder. Last time, we toured French into China, a collection of kingdoms in Southeast Asia that formed the crown jewel of France's empire.

While Ho Chi Minh led his forces against the French in Vietnam, over in Cambodia, the young king Sianuk maneuvered between the French authorities and increasingly restless nationalists at home. After the Vietnamese victory at Dienbun, Nguyenfu, the Geneva Conference of 1954 picked winners and losers. Vietnam was split in two, with a popular communist government in the north and an American-backed military government in the south. But what lies ahead? How and why Did the United States keep escalating things in Indochina? When war breaks out, how can Cambodia avoid being sucked into this violence? Can Sianuk pull off another diplomatic magic trick?

And what about his communist rivals, driven into the jungles by state repression, and whom the king has scornfully nicknamed the Khmer Rouge? You know the sound of thunder, don't you, Mrs. Garrett? Of course. Can you imagine that sound if I ask you to? I can, Mr. Jacob. Your husband and me had this talk. And I told him to head home to avoid a dark result.

But I didn't say it in thunder. Ma'am. Listen to the thunder. to the thunder. In the thunder. In the early afternoon, March 2nd, 1955, Cambodian radio broadcast a pre-recorded statement from King Sianuk

that left listeners dumbstruck, including American embassy officials. Sianuk was abdicating the throne. The abdication of a king in favor of his son is a rare event in any dynasty, but in Cambodia, Prince Sianuk, who succeeded his grandfather, has transferred the crown to his father, King Sotomay. it. The prince will now be more able to play a part in the political life of the country. Facing nationalists on the right and socialists on the left, Sianuk realized he could

rule more effectively as a politician than a king. And so he abdicated the throne and created his own political party, the Sancombe. It was a masterstroke. Quote, to conservative Cambodians, he was still the god king, right scholars, Grant Evans, Kelvin Raleigh. To radical Cambodians, he was the Democrat who had won independence and given up the throne. After turning Cambodia into a kingdom without a king, Sianuk left his country's politics on autopilot. Cambodia, writes Shawcross, quote, remained a feudal kingdom in which various barons, warlords, and landowners ruled in their own fiefdoms, paying Sianuk varying

tributes and recognition. Sianuk's political organization, the Sankoum, was little more than a loose coalition of powerful families and cliques of different ideologies, which remained subservient to Sianuk. The prince, he was back to being a prince, did make some attempts to improve and modernize his country. While this period is remembered as the golden age by some, one young person whom we talked to in Cambodia had always been told that.

quote, everything was perfect, historian Michael Vickery writes that the rise of an urban middle class inevitably exacerbated problems in the deeply antiquated agricultural economy of the countryside. Cianu created a contradictory, if not irrational, political society for people, reports Becker. The prince claimed Cambodia was a democracy, but he ruled it as a medieval monarch, not as a politician. Peasants voted for his party because he was a god king and charismatic medieval ruler. Sienuk's socialism was an updated version of a royal welfare system. He used a pseudo-Marxist vocabulary to condemn capitalism when he was really condemning

modernity, to promote socialism when he meant nobles oblige, and in foreign affairs, he spoke as an anti-American ruler, promoting stronger ties with his communist neighbors, when, at the same time, he boasted that he was the most effective anti-communist in the world." End quote. Accompanying all of this was a so-called cult of personality equaled to anything in the communist world. The prince was not just the father of the nation, but also its composer, filmmaker, and dramatist. By the mid-1960s, adds author Philip Short, Cianook's photograph was on every page of every Cambodian newspaper accompanied by articles of nauseating

servility. Initially, the Americans had been impressed with Sionuk. But a few months after Geneva, the prince made it clear he was not going to fit into their plans for Southeast Asia. At the Bandung Conference of Asian African States in Indonesia, he publicly affirmed his commitment to a neutral position in the Cold War. He also met with Chinese Prime Minister Joe and Lai. beginning a decades-long friendship.

Soon, the Americans insisted that Sianuk join SETO, the new Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, basically a NATO for Asia, and Sianuk refused. The American response, quote, was not pursued subtly, writes reporter William Shawcross. American-affiliated governments surrounding Cambodia

began to nibble at its flanks. Quote, after Sianuk attacked Sido, his army suddenly had to cope with a number of incidents on the Thai border. The South Vietnamese Air Force began to violate Cambodian airspace. Cambodian fishing boats were harassed when both the Ties and Vietnamese closed their Cambodian frontiers and supply convoys up the Mekong, the country's main artery, were stopped in South Vietnam. End quote. But Sianuk's success in keeping power, as well as his almost braggard, Cold War neutralism, left some with a sour taste.

No less than Alan Dulles, director of the CIA, felt this way. Dulles met with Cambodia's leader in September 1956, finding the prince, quote, overconfident of his ability of dealing with communist subversive tactics. Another high-ranking American had also by now registered his dissatisfaction with the prince, vice president Richard Nixon. who visited Cambodia a few years earlier, and recalled that he found Sihonuk vain and flighty,

and he appeared to me to be totally unrealistic about the problems his country faced, end quote. The prince, however, may have been more realistic than most about the fragility of Geneva's House of Cards in Indochina. In 1954, the Geneva Conference decided that fate. In a compromised decision, the conference divided Vietnam into two parts. In the north, it conceded beat Min-Communist control. In the South, it provided for free elections, for a free people who rejected communism.

If Phnom Penh could see the coming collapse of the Geneva settlement, Hanoi was already waiting through the wreckage. Up until about 1960, write Evans and Rowley, quote, the leadership in Hanoi had looked to peaceful methods of reunification with the South, but they were spurned by the government in Saigon. The initial problem following the French defeat in Vietnam, or the August Revolution, as it was called in the North, was not how to reclaim the South, but simply how to feed the people.

Traditionally, writes historian Mark Lawrence, northern Vietnam had relied on food from the more productive South to make up for local shortfalls. But after the Geneva Agreement, the government in Saigon blocked economic exchange between the two zones. And famine soon loomed in the north. Making things worse was the flight of the middle classes

and the loss of the skills that they took with them. Industrial activity ground almost to a standstill, notes Lawrence. So Hanoi, quote, attempted to reassure segments of the population that had often backed to the French, landowners, the urban middle class, and the Catholics, by proclaiming its respect for private property and religious freedom, end quote. Now this more moderate line clashed with the most radical campaign of Vietnam's Communist Party, a major land reform policy to abolish landlordism and to give

productive land to the masses. Despite the violence that this entailed, which caused around one million mostly middle class and Catholic people to leave for the South, the land reformed in the North was successful in its general aim. Ordinary people now owned about the same amount of productive land as one another. All of this meant that, far from adopting a militant stance toward the South, the Communist North was much more focused on getting its own house in order. But as the 1950s wore on, more leaders in Hanoi began to feel that their problems could only be solved by confronting the aggressive U.S.-backed government in Saigon. What then was going on in the South?

In one sense, chaos. Quote, armed religious groups dominated the Mekong Delta, writes Lawrence, and a crime syndicate controlled much of Saigon, and the French army, whose forces had all moved south after Gen. Neva, continued to wield considerable power. But in another sense, things were going to plan, because all of this suited the United States just fine. As a young Senator Kennedy of Massachusetts would say in 1956, quote, Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the free world in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the

arch, the finger in the dike, end quote. And so Vietnam's fate was too important to be left to Vietnam. After all, most could foresee that nationwide elections required by the Geneva Conference would reunite the North and South in a communist victory. No less than President Eisenhower later wrote that, quote, possibly 80 percent of the population would have voted for Ho Chi Minh. And so, against the arrangements of Geneva, the U.S. forged Saigon into an aggressive and militant anti-communist police state. At its head was No Din Ziem, usually pronounced in English as Diem, a right-wing nationalist who opposed both the foreign rule of France and the godless socialism of the Vietnamese revolutionaries. In partnership with the West,

whom he more than occasionally frustrated, Diem would attack his countrymen to the north, rig his own government's elections, and, in so doing, sabotage the plan for uniting Vietnam. Quote, the Eisenhower administration was determined to avoid a vote. The Diem government bluntly rebuffed Hanoi's requests that North and South discussed procedures for the elections. The reality of the situation was by now evident to Washington, Saigon, and increasingly, Hanoi. Beijing lay in the cut. China was eager to avoid a major conflict with the United States, but it was also optimistic that Vietnam would be a thorn in the American side.

Moscow, even more conflict-diverse than China, quietly mourned the Geneva settlement. In the White House, there was a different atmosphere. In the summer of 1957, in the state dining room, President Eisenhower raised a glass to Diem, calling him, quote, an example for people everywhere who hate tyranny and love freedom. Meanwhile, writes Lawrence, quote, over the next few years, the South Vietnamese army and police arrested some 25,000 suspected subversives and sent them to detention camps, where many were tortured and executed. These efforts devastated the communist movement in South Vietnam, end quote. But still, the communist North did nothing.

Quote, Hanoi clung to its policy of pursuing reunification through peaceful means and discouraged its southern comrades from fighting back against Deem's repression. What the future holds for Russia and China, no one knows. But millions of people everywhere are waiting to see and to learn who in the communist world is truly number one. The dragon or the bear. At this time, a split was occurring not only between North and South Vietnam, but for those paying attention between the two largest communist powers in the world. Hanoi's reluctance to confront the South

conveniently jive with a policy Nikita Khrushchev had recently declared from Moscow. Peaceful coexistence. In a world with nuclear weapons, and one where socialism was in many places making serious gains, writes Jeremy Friedman, Khrushchev dispensed with the traditional Leninist notion that war between capitalism and socialism was ultimately inevitable. This did not mean that the USSR would withdraw from the world.

Soviet aid to developing countries would, in fact, triple by 1961. But the difference was that Soviet foreign policy was now less about backing up revolutionaries and more about helping states. Doctrineer Marxist or otherwise develop their economies towards socialism. Khrushchev's new policy created tensions with the relatively young

People's Republic of China. Beijing was not a member of the nuclear club like America and the Soviet Union. It had just bloodied itself in Korea, and China's leaders saw no reason to concede peaceful coexistence to the Imperial West. privately, writes Friedman, Beijing assessed that the Soviet Union was sacrificing revolution

in the third world for stability in Europe. The late 1950s saw the beginning of what is known as the Sino-Soviet split. The two communist powers were still perceived as moving in lockstep by the West, and China was still receiving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Soviet aid. But a series of Chinese moves over Taiwan and the Korean War had revealed cracks in the relationship. Over the next decade, Vietnam revealed still more. This growing rift between the USSR and China will be a major factor in the wars to come over Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia.

During a trip to Hanoi in 1956, Soviet envoy Anastas Mikoyan nodded in approval at the North's commitment to peaceful coexistence, but a more militant set of leaders in Hanoi were gaining influence, chiefly the soon-to-be new general secretary, Le Duan. After all, Diem's crackdowns against peasants and left-wingers had only increased, and, thanks to both Saigon and Washington, plans for nationwide elections were dead and buried. Hanoi further loosened the reins in December, writes Lawrence, authorizing Southern to establish secret bases in remote areas and to assassinate South Vietnamese officials. Greater cooperation with forces in the South gave birth to what is known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

a network of routes trickling down from Hanoi to provide equipment, aid, and soon manpower to their comrades fighting in the South. Elections had been nixed. Unification had been sabotaged. And so, by the Cambodian border in December of 1960, a crew of northern cadres, southern communists, and even non-communist anti-Diam forces founded the National Liberation Front, soon to be dubbed by its enemies as the Viet Cong. Within a year, Vietnam would explode into full-scale war. But the first Cold War crisis in Indochina would not come from Vietnam, but from Laos. The governments of Laos had always struggled to control the populations living in the country's swaths of rugged mountains.

What's more, at this time, Laos was a majority-minority country. Over half of the population was made up of national minorities, rather than the Lao people. All this meant that Laos had a peculiar and delicate politics. The only games in town were the royal... loyal to the ruling dynasty that Geneva left in place, and the communists' revolutionary spillover from Vietnam. After Geneva, Cambodia found its balance, while Vietnam began to splinter. What had happened in Laos?

A fragile coalition government, which excluded the communists, fell victim to a right-wing takeover backed by the Americans. Why? Well, the U.S. wasn't simply fighting to avoid a communist Laos. It was fighting to avoid even a neutral Laos. During its first five years inside the country, writes scholar Alfred McCoy, the CIA maneuvered to keep both communists and neutralists out of power, using blatant bribes and electoral manipulations.

End quote. Eisenhower had briefed incoming President Kennedy that Laos was, quote, the key to the entire area of Southeast Asia. So in 1962, as things verged on civil war, the United States pumped money and material to the right-wingers, while Moscow and Hanoi funneled their own support to the left-wing group known as the Path at Lao. That summer, Kennedy met with Khrushchev to attempt to put a cork in the chaos.

A new Geneva settlement ordered hands-off Laos, but no one really took it seriously. Before long, the Americans noticed that Vietnamese guerrillas were slipping into the country, taking cover from the escalating civil war in Vietnam. Washington's solution to war was more of it. In the early 1960s, the White House went beyond mere subversion and began its own secret war in Laos. The U.S. recruited militiamen from national minorities, such as the Hmong and Thai people.

and unleashed an air campaign that would last a decade and destroy hundreds of thousands of lives. In Cambodia, Sianuk was proving that his neutrality in the Cold War didn't make him any less of an anti-communist at home. His government barred known leftists from teaching, a campaign in which Saloth Tsar's brother was arrested, according to Elizabeth Becker.

The government broke up strikes by electricians, water, and tobacco workers, and Sianuk derisively named the small but growing communist movement in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge. Either despite or because of Sionuk's heavy hand, Cambodia's left wing was nowhere near as bold as in Laos or Vietnam. Nor was it backed by foreign powers. The Soviets, through an ambassador, turned down the Khmer Communists' appeal for financial support, while Beijing had yet to pump its own aid into the region.

During this holding pattern, one could find future leaders of the Khmer Rouge refining their ideas about revolution, socialism, and the future of Cambodia. The best example may be the thesis paper of Mr. Q. Sampan, written in 1959 at the Sorbonne, where he'd be, won a scholarship, and it's a thorough study of his country's economy and its exploitation. Though Sampan described Cambodia's cities as parasitic and recommended rejecting all-American aid, William Chaucross finds that the 28-year-old Khmer Rouge's thesis was essentially moderate. Quote, he did not recommend severing all ties and developing a siege economy.

Rents should be reduced, money-lending suppressed. peasants must be encouraged to form cooperatives, but he wrote none of the proposed changes would be imposed by force. The next year, back in his home country, Sampan was riding his bike one day when, according to Elizabeth Becker, ten men stopped him, dragged him off his bicycle, and beat him up. They photographed him and circulated the pictures around Phnom Penheng. The future Khmer Rouge Prime Minister was held without charge. in jail for two months. This was the state of the Khmer People's Revolutionary Party in the

early 1960s, whose first party Congress kicked off in an empty rail car. At the very moment that he was jailing demonstrators and breaking strikes, Prince Sihannuk's foreign policy became more supportive of the global communist bloc. From Sianuk's perspective, Becker, South Vietnam's President Diem was proving to be an enemy, encouraging small border conflicts with Cambodia, which Sianuk saw as part of the American design to embroil Cambodia in the building war climate in South Vietnam. Sianuk shaped his anti-imperialist stance and lashed out against American attempts to dominate the world, even though he continued to accept American aid to finance his military and balance his budget.

The new leader of North Vietnam in 1960, Le Dwan, was initially encouraged by the Kennedy-Kushchev summit over Laos. He appears to have hoped the deal would convince U.S. leaders to negotiate a similar arrangement for Vietnam, writes Lawrence. But things went the opposite way. Hot off not only the Laos conference, but the Bay of Pigs, and unwilling to look weak, John F. Kennedy committed to escalation in Vietnam. But Kennedy drew the line at combat troops. Like his approach to Cuba,

Kennedy was hoping to steer a middle course in Vietnam. That middle course, dubbed Project Beef Up, doubled U.S. military aid in Vietnam, and tripled the presence of so-called advisors, creating a sprawling American colony in Saigon. quote, Kennedy also approved use of defolience, herbicides, and napalm against communist fighters and secretly permitted U.S. advisors to take a more active role in the fighting, writes Lawrence. Using helicopters and armored vehicles supplied by Washington, South Vietnamese forces beat back

attacks by the Viet Cong with new vigor, end quote. Diem's government partnered with U.S. military brass to execute the so-called Strategic Hamlets program, a vast campaign of forced resettlement for the peasants in South Vietnam. As the program ground on, tens of thousands of rural Vietnamese were forced to destroy their ancestral villages at gunpoint, only to move into shoddy new homes, surrounded by barbed wire. However brutal, all of this appeared to produce gains for South Vietnam, and therefore U.S. policy. But neither the Americans nor Saigon had realized how effective the Ho Chi Minh Trail had already become.

The communists shook the Americans from their delusions in January 1963, near the village of Abbaq, where the Viet Cong, armed with intelligence about an impending attack, perforated U.S. helicopters, and smashed South Vietnamese units. Abbaq was exactly what the communists needed, writes author Neil Sheen. to infuse the building of a Viet Cong army with the patriotic emotion they'd aroused and poured into the creation of the original Viet Minh.

Eventually, Diem's brother was caught opening secret channels with the North to reach a deal and cut out the meddling Kennedy White House. For its part, Hanoi had so far avoided calling for D.M.'s overthrow. None of this was lost on the rest of the world, including Vietnam's former colleague,

colonizer, France, whose president, Charles de Gaul, joined the USSR in calling for negotiations to end the war. The Americans cooked up a solution to handle both the brothers in Saigon and this ominous talk of peace. The regime of South Vietnam's president, Nago D.M. comes to an end in a wave of violence. A few days before the army revolt, these last pictures showed a man who seemed to have no premonition of the horrible death he was. In early November, 1963, the U.S. supported a military coup in which President Diem once dubbed

The Miracle Man in Vietnam by Life magazine, was unceremoniously shot at point-blank range and dumped into an unmarked grave. The well-laid army plot began quietly during siesta time. News of the successful coup brought wild celebrations. Perhaps the grim trajectory of the war in Vietnam explains Kennedy's decision in October of 1963 to initiate secret withdrawals of U.S. troops from the country at year's end. But 20 days after the CIA-backed Winta killed Diem, John Kennedy, lay dead in the back of a Lincoln Continental in Dealey Plaza.

Prince Sianuk had never much cared for D.M. But no one was more disgusted and alarmed by his assassination than Sianuk. He became, perhaps rightfully, more paranoid than ever. Quote, throughout the 60s, Cianook's autocracy became increasingly unpredictable, writes Shawcross. And a trickle of young men and women, both on the right and the left, retired to Paris, or faded into the forests to join either Sonokten's Khmer Nationalists or the few communists who had remained after 1954.

Cambodian politics were turned into a strange sort of merry-go-round. Quote, at first the prince favored to the right and persecuted the left, say Evans and Rowley. Then, in 1963, when Sionuk thought that the right was growing strong, he turned to the left. And then in 1966, just when the left, appeared to be consolidating its position, Sionuk dropped it to reinstate the right once more. At one point, Sionuk personally backed several left-wingers for parliament, including Q Sampan.

But problems kept coming. Student riots kicked up in the northwest, based on local grievances inflamed further by police brutality until young people were burning pictures of the beloved prince. This shocked Sionuk, no doubt, but the uprisings also caught the communists by surprise. They hadn't organized any of it, but they would still pay the price. The government released a, quote, list of known enemies,

including many leaders of the Khmer Rouge and their fellow travelers. They all figured it was time to get out of Dodge. Salath Saar, a student in Paris only a few years earlier, had just recently been elected secretary of the party. He fled Phnom Penh, as soon as. the list was published. More than one escaping communist made their trip in the trunk of a car. Saar was soon followed by Yang Sari, who would one day become the Khmer Rouge's Minister of Foreign Affairs,

and also Sonsen, who would become Minister of Defense. They trudged through jungles to a Viet Cong base in southern Vietnam. Here, the porous border would allow the Khmer Rouge to regroup and train in guerrilla warfare. At 238 in the forward cabin of Air Force One, a necessary ceremony. I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully action. I will faith in the United States. Office of President of the United States. Like Harry Truman in Korea before him, Lyndon Johnson did not want to balloon the Vietnam War

into a showdown with China or a nuclear crisis. But like Barack Obama in Afghanistan after him, Johnson felt that covert operations and air superiority could secure him a victory at low cost. But LBJ was still skeptical. Quote, there is surely no parallel in modern history, writes historian Gareth Porter, to the 13 separate attempts by the National Security bureaucracy

over a 14-month period to get Johnson to authorize the use of military force against North Vietnam. And throughout this time, as Young puts it, Hanoi leaders, quote, actively sought openings for a negotiated settlement. This included accepting an indefinite separation of North and South Vietnam, provided that the U.S. withdraw its forces. But, quote, there was no response from the United States. Instead, American covert operations reached their zenith in the summer of 64. Take the best military men you have, though, just tell them, and I have, I've been watching

listening to these stories for 30 years for the Armed Services Committee, and we're always sure with an attack, and a day of two, we're not so damn sure, and then a day of two more, we're sure it wasn't, didn't happen at all. On August 2nd, American and South Vietnamese forces conducted raids on islands off a gulf in northern Vietnam, called Tonkin. On that day, August 2nd, the captain of a U.S. destroyer reported that he had been fired on by a North Vietnamese patrol boats. Lyndon Johnson put down a red line.

The U.S. would respond to any further attacks. In two days later, that is exactly what the 7th Fleet reported. But those reports of a subsequent attack, a crossing of the red line, on August 4th, they were considered in real time to be unreliable and erroneous, especially by one Pentagon analyst who was on his first day at the job, named Daniel Ellsberg. Only days after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, secret tapes recorded at the White House at the time reveal that President Johnson himself doubted that any attack had occurred. And I just say that you want to be sure before you tell me that we were fired upon,

that we were fired upon, because you just came in a few weeks ago and said that damn they're launching an attack on us, they're firing on us. And we got through all the firing, which concluded maybe they hadn't fired at all. In the years since, figures ranging from Secretary of Defense McNamara to Vietnamese General von Wenzep to the captain of the Maddox himself agreed that no Vietnamese attack occurred on August. 4th. But, as Ellsberg puts it, that was not how things were moving in Washington that Tuesday afternoon. The president's men had met to select targets in the north and to work on the

precise wording of the long-contemplated congressional resolution. A resolution would avoid the problem Harry Truman faced when he went to war in Korea without soliciting prior congressional approval, and it was certainly preferable to a declaration of war, provided one could have been passed, especially in an election year. On August 5th, the Gulf of Tonkin resolution was put before Congress, after LBJ had briefed some of the relevant congressmen behind closed doors. The bill passed. The story announced to the world was that, for the first time since World War II,

U.S. Navy ships were being fired on by an enemy in, quote-unquote, peace time. My fellow Americans, as president and commander-in-chief, it is my duty to the American people to report that renewed hostile actions against United States ships on the high seas and the Gulf of Tonkin have today required me to order the military forces of the United States to take action and reply. The events at Tonkin and the spin that surrounded them completely flipped the question of Vietnam in the minds of the American public, writes Lewis Harris, founder of the Harris Poll, quote, the plurality that had opposed carrying the war to North Vietnam overnight became

came a two-to-one majority in support of all-out involvement, end quote. To Hanoi, the American escalations to exploit the confusion and spectacle of Tonkin was obvious. A few days after the passage of the Tonkin resolution, North Vietnamese premier Fam Van Dong, meeting with a Canadian intermediary, told him to tell the United States that North Vietnam was, quote, extremely angry. and would fight a war if it came. To other leaders of the world, an Americanization of the war was obvious and preventable.

French President Charles de Gaulle, in fact, criticized Johnson and repeated the call for a neutral Vietnam, as had Pope Paul the Sixth. But United Nations leader You Thant was told straight up that no peace moves would be made until after the American election. Back in Cambodia, as more Khmer communists fled Sianuk's repression, General Secretary Salath Saar and his comrades convinced their Vietnamese hosts to let them have their own separate base, known as Office 100. of the Khmerz, reports journalist Philip Short, could also be seen in these early meetings,

where they privately endorsed, quote, armed violence against Sianuk's government. And this was not the party line of their hosts. Quote, Hanoi's policy through the period was to cooperate with Sianuk, according to Shawcross, and the Vietnamese communists gave very little aid to their Cambodian comrades, end quote. Perhaps that is why another term written down in these early meetings of, the Khmer Rouge, with self-reliance. In the jungles along the Cambodia-Vietnam border, the moderate socialism of Q. Sampan's thesis evaporated.

The ideology fermenting in the forests presented itself as orthodox Marxism-Leninism, but under the surface, something different was going on. The Khmer Rouge borrowed much for Maoism, but took its emphasis on revolutionary consciousness, mind over matter to a new extreme. For example, China, Russia, and Vietnam had all faced the same puzzle, how to pilot a working-class revolution in a land that was populated mostly by peasant farmers.

But increasingly, the Khmer Rouge seemed to deny a role for the working class altogether. The Cambodian Party's inability to penetrate the country's nascent proletariat, right short, was to have far-reaching consequences. By 1965, they had decided that the factories had been infiltrated and the workers transformed into enemy agents. From then on, factory workers were systematically refused admission to the party. End quote. This tendency raised eyebrows among the more orthodox Vietnamese.

Still, at this stage, the Khmer guerrillas were attached at the hip to the Viet Cong. They had no one else to count on. The foreign ministries of the more conservative Soviet Union, as well as the increasingly radical People's Republic of China, continued to recognize and praise the government of everyone's favorite monarch, Prince Noradim Sianuk. By 1964, the prince had decided the North Vietnamese were going to win the war. Quote, Sianuk distrusted and disliked his Vietnamese. neighbors, right Shawcross. He recognized, however, the power of Hanoi, end quote. And despite his status as Mr. Neutral, Cianuk's country was, as Elizabeth Becker puts it, riveted to the war.

Cianook began looking the other way as Viet Cong units used parts of eastern Cambodia as temporary sanctuaries. The U.S. blockade of Vietnam also forced communists to find new supply routes, notes Shah-cross. At China's urging, Panompin sent supplies up to the Viet Cong encampments from the port city of Sianukville. Now that he had placed his bet on a northern victory, Sianuk broke off relations with Saigon.

The fate of Vietnam, he said, appears to me to be sealed. Some Americans were already in agreement with the prince. In the words of a senior advisor to Lyndon Johnson in early 1965, things were coming apart in South Vietnam. On Christmas Eve, just before the new year began, NLF guerrillas, Viet Cong, had blown up two Americans and dozens of South Vietnamese soldiers. And then, in early February, NLF forces attacked a helicopter base in the Central Highlands, killing seven and destroying 10 aircraft outright.

In March, the next U.S. escalation came in the form of a bombing campaign. Operation Rolling Thunder. South Vietnam's generals claimed, on paper, to have ten times the communist manpower. That had long been discredited. So the Americans ramped up their own presence. In summer of 65, Johnson announced his plans to send 50, 50,000 more troops. The number of U.S. soldiers rose to 125,000. By the end of November, it rose to 200,000, with more approved to come, thanks to the widening of the draft back home.

But Hanoi had mobilized hundreds of thousands of its own, and thousands of Chinese non-combat troops began arriving in North Vietnam in the late summer. Despite the free hand given by the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, despite rolling thunder. Despite cooperation from Saigon, the war refused to go America's way. Having run on a grand vision of social progress and economic prosperity, LBJ's commitment to Vietnam had already begun to crack up his political coalition. Only months after his landslide re-election, the first major peace protests in the U.S. broke out over opposition to rolling thunder. While the majority of Americans still voiced support for the Vietnam War, campus activists of the group Students for a Democratic Society

organized the largest ever anti-war demonstration in Washington, D.C., drawing a crowd of 20,000 people. And with American involvement in Vietnam, only deepening in 1966, campus shutdowns appeared more and more, from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin, a new front in Linden's war. LBJ was not the only one trying to keep his coalition intact. When Cambodia's parliamentary elections rolled around in 1966, Sienuk chose not to pick the winners this time. It may be, writes Philip Short,

that after 10 years of hand-picked parliaments, which constantly failed his expectations, He wanted a change, and, in the absence of any better method, determined to let the dice fall where they may. If so, the results were not what he had hoped for, end quote. The Parliament lurched the right. In October, it chose a prime minister in enigmatic right-wing general, Lon Nall. A devout Buddhist, bordering on a mystic,

Lon Nall was by all accounts as deranged as he was ruthless. In true Khmer style, writes short, his home, a rambling estate on the road to the airport, was always full of relatives and hangers-on. He encouraged his troops to call him Black Papa to underline that he was a dark-skinned Khmer without foreign blood. He was openly racist against Cambodia's ethnic minorities and hated the Vietnamese in particular. He was erratic and superstitious, and Prince Sienuk had good reason to personally fear the man. A few years earlier, as defense minister, Lonnell met with the U.S.

military mission. He said he regretted his prince's anti-American stance and made it clear that, quote, there is a point beyond which the military will refuse to support the chief of state, end quote. This was the prince's new prime minister. From this point on, Sienuk began to withdraw from day-to-day leadership. His court took on a dreamlike state. The prince took refuge in amateur filmmaking, right short. He wrote, directed, and starred in a series of maudlin romances with his wife Monique as the leading lady,

and sundry members of the government, including the chief of staff and supporting roles. This fever dream was interrupted the next year when a massive peasant uprising broke out in the northwest province of Badenbaum. People had apparently had enough of Lawnal's forces seizing their rice. Elizabeth Becker reports, In the early morning of April 2, 1967, two soldiers collecting rice were murdered.

Cambodia's armed communist revolt had begun. Shawcross writes, quote, Sianuk ordered Lawnal to liquidate the rioters. The deed was done bloodily. villages were raised and peasants were clubbed to death. Hundreds fled to the maquis, the resistance, forever embittered, end quote. The remaining socialists in Sienuk's government, including Q Sampan, disappeared. For years, they were believed dead.

It wasn't just domestic politics that were getting hairy. Quote, even more dangerous for Cambodia's political stability was the slow derailment of the prince's neutrality policy, right short. He writes, this is not entirely Sionuk's fault. It is hard to maintain a balance between East and West when the intelligence service of one side keeps trying to assassinate you for fear you might get too close to the other.

In 66, Prince Sionuk had had enough of U.S. shenanigans in his neighborhood. He renounced all U.S. aid, saying, Look what happens when you put your trust in the free world. I'm an X-C-I-Kirm. with blood up to my armpits. Not personally, I never killed myself, but I managed wars that killed a lot of people. That was the voice in a BBC documentary

of John Stockwell, a former CIA base chief in Vietnam. In 1967, the war in Vietnam was going no better and by many measures worse than it had the year before. The post-DM leadership in Saigon was hardly inspiring. Quote, the government and its allies manipulated the Constitution writing process

to assure that only staunch anti-communists could hold office, writes Lawrence. And then they rigged the elections held in September 1967. Despite widespread fraud, quote, the government's candidate for president, Nguyen Van Tew, won, with just 35 percent of the popular vote. As U.S. troop levels began to flatline or reduce, America relied even further on darker methods of prosecuting the war in Vietnam. The CIA-led Phoenix program was formally set up in 1967. This was a wide-reaching covert program using U.S. and mercenary forces to, quote-unquote, neutralize support for the enemy among the civilian population.

Neutralize meant to kill, capture, or make defect. quote, central to Phoenix, writes journalist Douglas Valentine, is the fact that it targeted civilians, not soldiers. South Vietnamese civilians, whose names appeared on blacklists, could be kidnapped, tortured, detained for two years without trial, or even murdered, simply on the word of an anonymous informer. At its height, Phoenix managers imposed quotas of 1,800 neutralizations per month. VCI, Viet Cong infrastructure, that is civilians, were brutally murdered along with their families or neighbors as a means of terrorizing the neighboring population into a state of submission, Valentine writes. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, made to look

as if they had been committed by the enemy, end quote. And the Phoenix program spread with the war itself across the border into Cambodia. Quote, a CIA commissioned project was charged with the mission of organizing cross-border counterintelligence operations to find out who within the Cambodian government was helping the NVA and VC infiltrate and attack Special Forces, Recon Teams, and Agent Nets. One day, Fifth Special Forces Captain John McCarthy was sitting beside his principal agent, a Cambodian working for the operation in the front seat of a car

parked on a street in Tainin. A suspected double agent, the Cambodian was a member of the Camerre Saray, a dissident Cambodian political party created by the CIA to overthrow Prince Sionuk. Without warning,

McCarthy turned and put a bullet in between his informant's eyes. End quote. From a BBC. documentary about the Phoenix program. When they tortured me, the Americans stood on one side and talked to my torturers. They used electric shock. When they turned it from one to eight, we were still conscious, but felt pain.

When they used nine, we became unconscious. Then they used a pair of pincers to pull my nails out and in, one nail at a time. I thought my fingers were going to drop off. In just three years, U.S. military spending had risen from 54. billion to 84 billion, reaching 9.4% of American GDP, a post-Korean War peak that has never been matched. This was good business for Boeing and Lockheed Martin, but it wasn't working for everyone back home. In August 1967, notes Marilyn Young, a 10% surcharge on individual and corporate taxes ended the illusion that the economy could painlessly supply both guns and butter.

Although Johnson had passed his great society in the Civil Rights Act and by now the Voting Rights Act, his administration was consumed by the war and, increasingly, the backlash to it. Massive protests against the war continued, and new tactics like burning draft cards or targeting recruiters and war-friendly corporations such as Dow Chemical also became more common. In the South Vietnamese village of Teinin, we spoke to one, Mr. Na, about what he remembers from this period of the American war. The time when Americans bombed this place was during Operation Junction City in the late 60s. They sprayed chemical defoliants in the Teanen forest.

The chemicals destroy people's bodies. My nieces, who are in Saigon, their father used to serve in the revolution. and their mother as well. Their two daughters were hit with the chemicals. Now they are in their 30s or 40s, but only can roll around. In the early morning of January 31st, now maybe 40 years. In the early morning of January 31st, 1968,

Vietnam surged into action. Then came the TED Offensive. In more than 100 cities and towns, shock assaults by Viet Congom Sapper Commandos were followed by wave after wave of supporting troops. Support at home for the war fell from 50 to 33%. With our hopes and the world's hopes for peace and the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or our day of my time. to any personal partisan causes. In late March, after a meeting with his most senior advisors,

President Johnson announced he was not seeking re-election. I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. A week later, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. All over America, black ghettos. exploded in rage and grief. Robert Kennedy spoke. For those of you who are

Iraq, and I attempted to deal with hatred and distrust. And I can also feel in my own heart. Same kind of feeling. Less than three months later, the anti-war Democratic candidate, Bobby Kennedy, was also assassinated. Members of the Youth International Party, yippies, they called themselves, converged on Chicago.

They said they were there to protest the war, poverty, racism, and other social ills. Some of them were also determined to provoke a confrontation, to draw attention from the convention to the streets. That August, at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was selected as the party's nominee, while protesters were assaulted by police outside the hall. Mayor Richard Daly vowed to keep it peaceful, even if it took force to keep the peace. He was backed by 12,000 police, 5,000 National Guardsmen, 7,500 regular army troops. Something else had happened back in March. In the village of Sondmi, near the south-central coast of South Vietnam, U.S. forces

carried out a massacre of over 500 South Vietnamese civilians. Mistakingly referred to as the Mili Massacre in the American Press, the killings took place across several hamlets in Somi Village. American infantry killed men, women, and children, raped women and children, and shoveled the dead bodies into ditches or left them dead in the mud on the road. There was an attempt to stop the massacre, or in any case, rescue civilians from it by the American officer Hugh Thompson Jr., whose crew ushered victims, some of whom were pretending to be dead, into his helicopter to escape.

The U.S. military and its government would cover up the Sondmi massacre. The American public and the world would not learn of the true events there until one year later. But the so-called Mili Massacre was simply one piece of a larger picture. Journalist Nick Ters, writes, of Operation Speedy Express, a program carried out by the Army's 9th Infantry Division in the Mekong Delta. A self-described grunt who participated in Speedy Express wrote a confidential letter to William Westmoreland, then Army Chief of Staff, saying that the 9th Division's atrocities in the campaign amounted to, quote, a mili each month for over a year.

Westmoreland personally took action to quash an investigation into the large-scale atrocities described in the soldier's letter. Quote, a secret Pentagon investigation into Speedy Express remained classified for decades before I found it, buried in the National Archives. The military estimated that as many as 7,000 civilians were killed. during the operation, end quote. A mili each month. As the Americans beat back the Tet offensive,

Prince Sihanook's earlier prescience on Vietnam gave way to short-sighted pragmatism. He appears to have been more impressed by the casualties the communists sustained than by the political impact in the U.S., right sure. Shawcross. With perhaps more than a little prodding from his new right-wing prime minister, Lon Nal, Sianuk completely reversed his bet on Hanoi and said he would be open to reprashment with America

so long as they recognize Cambodia's borders. Because by now, it was not only the communists who romped across Cambodia's borders as they pleased, report Shawcross, quote, the Americans conducted secret forays as well. In Vietnam, U.S. Special Forces and the CIA recruited mercenaries called civilian irregular defense groups from the mountain tribes people and from the Cambodians who had lived in the Mekong Delta. They were under the command of special forces. The U.S. was also working with the nationalist Sun Yuk Tan.

This was officially denied, but in fact, whenever Tan wished to visit the mercenary camps spaced along the Cambodian border, he was flown there. in an American helicopter. Meanwhile, the Vietnamese were dealing with one of the many shocks from the deepening Sino-Soviet split. What had begun as a comradly dispute between the USSR and China over different paths to socialism had degenerate it into border clashes and troop mobilizations.

In the early 60s, Hanoi had been much closer with Beijing. The North Vietnamese had found more in common with the militant revolutionary Maoists than with Khrushchev's peaceful coexistence talk. But by the end of the decade, especially under the new leadership of Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kasegan, the USSR had proved more supportive of North Vietnam than anyone had expected. It supplied far more aid than anyone else, including the Chinese. Now the Vietnamese were catching flak from their Chinese allies who insisted the Vietnamese snub Moscow. Party leader Deng Xiaoping even threatened to withdraw Chinese support from Vietnam,

writes Jeremy Friedman. Coupled with this was the advice, almost a demand, to reject peace negotiations with Washington. Quote, the North Vietnamese in turn became ever more doubtful of the wisdom of the Chinese approach, especially because of their doubts of whose interests it was meant to serve. The time was, in fact, ripe for negotiations. That autumn, President Johnson's advisors prepared for peace talks with the communists to take place in Paris. But along came a spider.

Quote, of all the men running, Richard Nixon is the most dangerous to have it. president. This is what Henry Kissinger is reported to have said before the 1968 Republican convention. He knew of what he spoke, writes historian Greg Grandin. Kissinger had been responsible for digging up the quote-unquote shit files on Nixon for his candidate Nelson Rockefeller. And as Kissinger had put it to someone else, Nixon, quote, doesn't deserve the right to rule. But sometime in September of that year, Kissinger sobered up. With his candidate out, he realized that his path to power lay with Team Nixon. He contrived a plan.

Since he was by now, working as a consultant to the State Department, Kissinger called Nixon's team to let them know about the new peace talks going on in Paris. Discussions about a possible end to the war were picking up steam, far quicker than any before. Kissinger told the Nixon people that he was headed to Paris and he offered to pass them information on the negotiation's progress

behind Johnson's back. Richard Nixon had long-favored escalation in Vietnam. William Chaucross scans the calendar. Quote, in 1954, he had advocated sending American troops and bombers to help the French. In 1962, he had incurred. encouraged Kennedy to step up the bombing. In 1964, he had advised that the enemy be pursued into Laos and North Vietnam.

In August 66, he had demanded that half a million American men be sent to Saigon. Just as Dean Rusk claimed that the war kept a billion Chinese armed with nuclear weapons at bay, so Nixon campaigned in New Hampshire in February 1968 on the grounds that the Vietnam effort was the quote, cork in the bottle of Chinese expansion in Asia. Now, with delicate peace talks underway and the offer from Henry Kissinger to spy on them, Nixon saw his chance to grip that cork,

sabotage the Democrats, and win the White House all in one. After all, peace in Vietnam before the election would only hurt Nixon and help the Democrats. His campaign sent a message to South Vietnam and its new president, too. Hold on. Don't give in. Your real friends are coming. Meanwhile, Team Nixon received secret intel from Kissinger on the progress of the Paris peace talks, and he warned them of the possibility of a bombing halt before Election Day. But the key connection was D.C. socialite Anna Chenow.

Sheenault was the Chinese-born widow of a World War II aviation hero. She was a Diane of the anti-communist China lobby. She was a former ally of Chiang Kai Shek, and one-time friend of John F. Kennedy. And by 1968, she was the chairwoman of Republican women for Nixon. Sheenault served as the hotline between the Republicans and South Vietnam's president, Nguyen Van Tew. Nixon campaign chairman John Mitchell was calling her daily in the lead-up to Election Day. And Nixon himself had been in touch with Shanoe early on.

Quote, according to her personal calendar, writes journalist Shane O'Sullivan. Shano introduced South Vietnam's ambassador to Nixon's people two weeks after Nixon announced his candidacy in New Hampshire. Now, both Shano and Kissinger were feeding what they were told in person back to Nixon's intelligence. No less than President 2 told Cheneau himself, quote, I would much prefer to have the peace talks after your election. And Nixon couldn't have agreed more. Anna Cheneau was asked years later by the journalist Anthony Summers if her follow-up meetings with the White House were part of cutting a deal with President 2.

Cheneau nodded. Quote, they worked out this deal to win the campaign. Power over powers all reasons. The plan unfolded like an intricate dance, albeit one with millions of lives at stake. According to Marilyn Young, President Chu would deliberately mislead Johnson into believing all was well. In conversations with Vietnamese politicians, overphones he knew to be tapped by the CIA, President Hugh expressed his readiness to participate in the Paris talks. While for his part, Nixon magnanimously refrained from comment on

Johnson's peace efforts, except to express hope for their progress. Theodore White, in his chronicle The Making of the President, writes that a little over a week before the 1968 election, quote, American negotiators in Paris had worked out a clean understanding with the enemy. On Halloween, 1968, Lyndon Johnson publicly announced the Paris negotiations and the bombing halt. The public reception to the peace developments was rapturous, writes white. And among the media, all concluded that peace was near. Could such a breakthrough put Democrat Hubert Humphrey over the edge?

On November 1st, two spoiled the party. Speaking before the South Vietnamese National Assembly, two said that he was opposed to the peace talks unfolding in Paris. the Nixon-Schnoe conspiracy had won. Henry Kissinger had helped elect a man who had surreptitiously promised the South Vietnamese junta a better deal than they would get from the Democrats,

writes journalist Christopher Hitchens. Quote, this meant in the words of a later Nixon slogan, Four more years. Four more years of an unwinnable, undeclared, and murderous war, which was to spread, end quote. And those four more years spelled the end for neutral Cambodia.