Blowback - S5 Episode 4 - "Mad Men"

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

Nixon and Kissinger put Cambodia on the menu.Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

But we cannot lose this war, having started that proposition, what do you have to do. For once, we've got to use the maximum color of this country against this shit-ass little country to win the war, to win the war, to win the war, to win the war. Let's sign. Speak about this lunch sign. Speak about this lush sign. Welcome to Blowback. I'm Brendan James.

I'm Noah Colwyn. And this is Season 5, Episode 4, Mad Men. Last time, we tore through the 1960s, watching the United States double, triple, quadruple down. in Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson bowed out in disgrace as Republican candidate Richard Nixon, with the help of Henry Kissinger, sabotaged the president's peace talks with the Vietnamese on the eve of the U.S. election in 1968. In Cambodia, Prince Sianuk has finally lost control of his Cold War balancing act,

and his new right-wing prime minister, the superstitious and deranged general, Lanin, is on the rise. The sanctuaries for Viet Cong guerrillas, who had long ago slipped into Cambodia when things got too hot in Vietnam, are now in the crosshairs of La Nalle and his corrupt military, and the American president-elect Richard M. Nixon. Cambodia, which has managed to stay neutral for almost a decade of war in India-China is now on the menu. If Richard Nixon had any mandate after winning the 1968 election, it was to end the Vietnam War. A majority of Americans now believed that it had been a mistake to get involved in the first place. morale among American soldiers had plummeted, and an anti-war GI movement among the troops was growing. Like Eisenhower taking over for Truman during the Korean War, a Republican president was again tasked with cleaning up a Democratic war. I'm not going to end up like Lyndon Johnson, Nixon declared to an aide.

Hold up in the White House, afraid to show my face on the street. I'm going to stop that war. Fast. I mean it. I don't need that. So I'm warning everybody. Everybody. Could be myself, could be anybody.

Grib's got 20 years just for saying hello to some fucker who was sneaking behind his back selling junk. I don't need that. Ain't going to happen to me. You understand? Uh-huh. I don't need this heat. You understand that?

Uh-huh. But if Nixon was going to end the war, he was going to do it on his terms, his way. And that meant a complete overhaul of the structure of the government. that he would soon command. Ivy League liberals at the CIA, corrupt boozehounds at the Johnson White House,

and ineffectual nerds at the State Department, Nixon wanted all their turf and their power for himself. Though Nixon was a masterful D.C. operator, having climbed the party ladder through the Red Scare, the culture wars, and now the Vietnam War, deep down, he had nothing but contempt for the Washington elite. Back when he was a young student at a Quaker liberal arts college in Southern California, writes his biographer Rick Perlstein,

Richard divided the student body into two groups, Franklin's and Orthogonians. The student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, writes Pearlstein. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Richard had decided to organize the outcasts, according to Pearlstein. Nixon's new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manor born, the commuter students like him, the ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow.

Decades later, in 1969, now having ascended to the seat of ultimate power, Nixon could not shake this outlook. If anything, it had only deepened. He was now the Orthogonian-in-Chief, and his imperial court would have to be cleared of Franklin influence. Henry A. Kissinger, who had once earlier called Nixon the most dangerous man running for president, he would be the blunt instrument with which Nixon carved out this turf for himself.

Nixon's own pet Franklin. The Harvard professor had proved his loyalty and his own love for the cloak and dagger in the run-up to the election, when Kissinger had leaked info from Paris peace talks to the Republicans' campaign. But it was not access to information that made Kissinger so appealing to Nixon, writes historian Robert K. Brigham. It was in equal measures Kissinger's understanding of power. Nixon believed that he needed Kissinger to shape a.

and implement his broad foreign policy designs and his willingness to make difficult decisions in the face of public pressure." Kissinger was thus made National Security Advisor. He would transform the office. Having won both approval and unique authority from Nixon, Kissinger got the president-elect to agree to reforms that would make him and his National Security Council all-powerful.

The change has turned a minor bureaucracy into a vast, secretive, agenda-setting conduit of information and policy with no equal in the White House. Kissinger insisted that all national security decisions be routed through a series of committees directed by his office, writes historian Carolyn Woods-Eisenberg. National Security Advisors had been powerful figures before, but none possessed the far-reaching supervisory powers that Kissinger claimed for himself in the name of the president, end quote. Kissinger now controlled secret committees supervising everything from arms control to general Vietnam War policy. Most important of all of these was the so-called 40 committee, which

according to journalist William Shawcross, quote, was to plan all foreign covert intelligence activities, such as the prolonged and successful campaign to destroy President Salvador Allende of chilling. In his own role as a manager, Kissinger's concept of office life caused tensions on his staff, writes Shawcross. He didn't operate by a fixed schedule, and he belittled his subordinates with, quote, cruel and sarcastic insults. But Kissinger was still very popular with some important constituencies, the liberal establishment, the press, the Franklins. Many of America's educated elite, academics, reporters, columnists, they saw Kissinger as one of their own, even a civilizing influence on Nixon.

Speaking in early 69 to a small delegation of visiting peace-promoting Quakers, Kissinger told them, quote, give us six months. If we haven't ended the war, then, you can come back and tear down the fence. I think what impresses me the most about Kissinger, however, is his stamina. It is absolutely incredible. There is no one in the world, not in history, not now, not in the future, who can outwork or outlast Henry Kissinger in negotiation.

That's why he's a great negotiator. If Kissinger was the instrument, then what was Nixon's music? What new approach would this duo bring to bear in the war over Indochina? Nixon had an answer. Madman theory. The phrase comes from a conversation between the president and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman. The two men were walking along the beach in Key Biscayne, Florida. Bob Haldeman records in his memoir.

I call it the madman theory, Bob, the president said. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I've reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We'll just slip the word to them. For God's sake, you know, Nixon is obsessed about communism. We can't restrain him when he's angry, and he has his hand on the nuclear button. And Ho Chi Min himself will be in Paris in two days, begging for peace. Nixon pointed to Truman and Eisenhower's implicit nuclear threats during the Korean War, which he identified as the key factor that caused China to back down. But as Seymour Hirsch points out in his book on Kissinger and Nixon,

The Price of Power, quote, Eisenhower's threat had been made at a time when the United States had a virtual monopoly on nuclear weapons, end quote. With the Soviets rivaling the U.S. in nuclear capacity and China working hard to catch up, that was no longer the case. So, in lieu of a nuclear attack, another threat would be needed. One floated by many warhawks throughout 1968, including Richard Nixon. This option was to instead end the Vietnam War by expanding it. Rather than make peace, journalist Philip Short wonders if Nixon's real objective had been, quote, to spread the war to Cambodia in order to divert attention from the withdrawal of U.S. troops from

Vietnam. Certainly, it worked out that way, end quote. One American general agreed and would later describe Cambodia as a carcass, thrown to distract the wolves. On his first day in office, Nixon asked his generals about plans to, quote-unquote, quarantine Cambodia, to cut off the all-important Ho Chi-Men Trail passing through its territory. The Joint Chiefs were only too happy to comply. Just as Nixon was preparing to expand the Vietnam War into Cambodia, in another theater of the Cold War, the White House, was making very different moves.

Between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, the White House pursued detente, the stabilization of relations, cooling down the Cold War a notch or two. Kissinger and Nixon were not Ronald Reagan types who preached anti-communism as an absolutist crusade. They were believers in grand chessboards. The two men sought to craft a new global order, with the United States first among equals. At a February lunch with Soviet ambassador Anatoly de Brinnan, writes Eisenberg, Kissinger dangled potential talks over arms reduction, known as salt, if Moscow could draw down its support to North Vietnam.

But, writes Eisenberg, the Soviet ambassador was remarkably consistent in his communications. The Soviet Union could not, under any circumstances, cut off to North Vietnam. Their influence with Hanoi was limited in any case, and meaningful change would only come when the Vietnamese people were freed from foreign intervention." Kissinger probably knew better than to argue these points. It was, in fact, Beijing, not Moscow, that was taking the lead in organizing opposition not only in Vietnam, but in Cambodia as well, with their friend Prince Sionuk and warming relations with the Khmer Rouge. But there, in a stroke of either madness or genius, sprung an idea.

Disappointed with Moscow's failure to influence North Vietnam, writes Lawrence, Nixon embraced a far more radical possibility, inducing the Chinese government to press Hanoi for peace. Not only would a friendly Beijing help defang communism in Southeast Asia, It would leave the Soviet Union more isolated than ever before. To some, the concept appeared absurd. Quote, in 1969 and 1970, Chinese newspapers were in full-scale vitriol against American escalations in Vietnam, and the quote-unquote secret bombing of Cambodia,

writes historian Rebecca Carl. Quote, editorial after editorial, called for, quote, the people of the whole world to unite, to defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their, lackeys. Mao wrote in May 1970 for the People's Daily, quote, Nixon's fascist atrocities have enkindled the raging flames of the revolutionary mass movement in the United States. But whatever the rhetoric, by now Beijing was far more hostile to its fellow communist neighbor than the United States of America. The testy exchanges of the late 1960s, what with the Soviets

branding Beijing as ultra-left wackos, and the Chinese accusing the Soviets of social imperialism, had since turned into a ruthless competition for global leadership of the third world, and, by now, flared up into an actual border war. In March 1969, writes Carl, after many minor incidents and wars of words, outright hostilities broke out at the Ussuri River, the boundary between Soviet Siberia and Chinese, Manchuria, end quote. Whether the Chinese instigated the events or were provoked is the subject of heated historical debate. By August, it looked as if war might break out, though Jeremy Friedman writes that the Soviets never seriously considered it. In late 1969, Washington and Beijing

began to talk. The communiques were beyond secret. Neither the U.S. State Department nor China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs were kept informed, though Pakistani President Yaya Khan served as a useful go-between. The U.S., writes historian Michael Lawrence, would offer concessions on the status of Taiwan and other matters of concern to Beijing in return for Chinese support in ending the Vietnam war on American terms. End quote. The American signals to China were far from delicate, right, Sy Hirsch. China was barraged with hints, messages, and clues from Washington

attesting to Nixon's desire to change relationships, end quote. And as they had done with the Soviet Union, Nixon and Kissinger sent messages to China through back channels, careful to hide what they were doing from the State Department and Congress. Nixon wanted a surprise

for the maximum political boost to his re-election chances. The most critical cog in the Kissinger machine was his deputy, Colonel Alexander Haig. A West Point man, writes Shawcross, Haig's attitude to Indochina was that of a narrow soldier. He considered Kissinger was often too soft on the enemy, end quote. He was quite in favor of the Cambodia campaign.

Haig was the guy who pushed the goddamn thing, one former NSC official told Hirsch. Colonel Haig, who would receive a promotion to Brigadier General later in the year, was a cold warrior in the mold of a young Richard Nixon. He had served on General Douglas MacArthur's staff in Korea, planned special ops against Cuba in the early 1960s, and finally saw combat as an officer in Vietnam, later in the decade.

Quote, none of the NSC members, writes Hirsch, in scores of interviews many years later, was quite sure how Haig did it, but within months he had managed to become indispensable to Henry Kissinger, end quote. One ex-staffer of the National Security Council said, when Henry had to wear a white tie and tails for his first White House dinner,

it was Haig who went to Henry's house and helped him dress, end quote. And when Henry needed to get the bombing of Cambodia on track, he relied on Haig to get the idea in front of the president. One key Air Force commander told Hirsch, Kissinger was still wringing his hands and seeking moral support to be sure that we could do it and do it without having it in the papers. Nixon loved the idea,

despite opposition from both his Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, and his Secretary of State, William Wright. Rogers. In bombing Cambodia, the president believed he had found an operation to win the war, and, as Kissinger insisted, he would keep it a tight secret. The Pentagon's computers demanded, for purposes of logistics, a complete record of hours flown, fuel expended, ordinance dropped, and spare parts procured, writes Shawcross. In response to Nixon's demands for total and unassailable secrecy, The military devised an ingenious system, known as dual reporting.

Hirsch has the story, quote, The B-52 pilots would be briefed en masse before their mission on targets that were in South Vietnam. That is, the cover targets. After the normal briefing, some crews would be taken aside and told that shortly before their bombing run, they would receive special instructions from a ground radar station inside, south Vietnam. The radar sites would in effect take over the flying of the B-52s for the final moments, guiding them to their real targets over Cambodia and computing the precise moment to drop the bombs. After the mission, all the pilots and crews would

return to their home base and debrief the missions as if they had been over South Vietnam. Their successes and failure would then be routinely reported in the Pentagon's Secret Command and control system as having been in South Vietnam. The radar men on the ground knew Cambodia was being bombed, but none of them reported that fact until the Watergate investigations of 1973. End quote. In fact, one radar man later testified, a dedicated furnace had been set up in Saigon to burn any relevant documents.

Quote, every piece of paper, including the scratch paper, the paper that one of our computers might have done some figuring on, every piece of scrap paper was gathered up. If reporters were to ask about any bombing of Cambodia, spokesmen were to say that they were regularly bombing missions along the Cambodian border in South Vietnam, but to never confirm or deny any such actions. No relevant congressional committees were notified,

nor were desk officers in Saigon, according to Shawcross. Quote, a few sympathetic lawmakers were informed, but they kept quiet. The plans to bomb Cambodia in secret, and to cover it up if leaked, were now in place. Prince Sianuk, the leader of the nation about to be bombed, was not consulted, though Nixon and Kissinger would later claim that he was. According to Philip Short, quote, Sianuk chose not to protest, not because he agreed with the bombings, but because at a time when his priority was to mend relations with America,

All the alternatives were worse. The Air Force officers further down the food chain who were tasked with carrying out these orders, some of them had reservations. One major Hal Knight asked a commanding officer about the bizarre, even dangerous secrecy. Well, Knight was told, the purpose is to hide these raids. Well, who from? asked Knight.

The answer? Well, I guess the Foreign Relations Committee. On March 15th, Nixon gave the Joint Chiefs the thumbs up to proceed with the operation to bomb the so-called fish hook, a corner of Cambodia jutting into southern Vietnam. The plan was now codenamed Breakfast. On March 17th, General Earl Wheeler, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, cabled his commander of Vietnam operations. Quote, strike on communist headquarters is approved.

Shawcross describes the scene on the ground. Twenty times that night, the ground controllers, sitting in their air-conditioned hutsches in South Vietnam, cans of Coke, or seven up by their elbows, called out, hack. 60 long strings of bombs spread through the dark and fell to the earth faster than the speed of sound each plane load dropped into an area or box

about half a mile wide by two miles long and as each bomb fell it threw up a fountain of earth trees and bodies until the air above the targets was thick with dust and debris and the ground itself dashed with explosions and fire.

The next day, writes Hirsch, quote, Kissinger was talking with the deputy when Haig broke in and handed Kissinger a cable. Kissinger smiled. The first raids on Cambodia had gone without a hitch, and the crew members, in their initial debriefings, reported 73 secondary explosions, some as much as five times the normal intensity.

Viet Cong headquarters, with its presumably vast stores of munitions must have been hit. But just as some of Nixon's own advisors had predicted, the operation did not work. The all-powerful Viet Cong HQ was not destroyed because it was simply nowhere to be found. Instead, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters had simply moved deeper into Cambodia.

A problem which the Cambodian army faces is that the Viet Cong-occupy villages are pursued by South Vietnamese and by Americans, and so incidents become frequent. Students are instructed in how to defend their country. All young people in Cambodia join the Royal Cambodian Young Socialists. Some train as soldiers,

others, especially the women, learn civil defense and first aid. Are you afraid at all that you may one day be involved in defending your country, in fighting? No, I don't afraid, sir. I will try all my best to protect my country. After the bombing, a group of American special forces already deployed on classified search and destroy missions were called up.

These men, codenamed the Daniel Boone teams, had orders to go into the fish hook and pick up any communist survivor for a debriefing. A member of the Daniel Boone's later said, quote, we were told that if there was anybody still alive out there, they would be so stunned that all we would have to do was walk over and lead him by the arm to the helicopter. Instead, as one Boone soldier put it, it was the Americans who were slaughtered by communist fighters upon arriving. The bombing had been, quote,

the same as taking a beehive the size of a basketball and poking it with a stick. they were mad. A helicopter managed to interrupt the firefight and pick up the surviving special forces. Another squad was ordered to replace them, but they refused the order, saying, by one account, fuck you.

According to Hirsch, quote, there is no evidence that the Pentagon informed the White House of the slaughter of the intelligence team in the jungles of Cambodia, and neither Kissinger nor Nixon mentions the deaths in his memoirs. But that first impression of success from Operation Breakfast had wedded Nixon's and Kissinger's appetite for more.

The breakfast bombings of March 1969 were the template for the meals that followed over the next 14 months. They were expanded into Operation Menu, lunch, snack, dinner, supper, dessert. In fact, Henry Kissinger designed the menu himself. He selected the targets. I'm not here to say that I enjoyed or approved Henry Kissinger going along with wiretapping of many of his closest associates, including me. I think it was a mistake. Having said that, I did not hold this against Kissinger fundamentally, because I did share his view that the leaks were serious. I do not agree with people who do leak.

Despite Nixon's and Kissinger's obsessive secrecy, their operations, their operations, sprung a leak early on. Two months after breakfast, a May 9th story in the New York Times told of B-52 bombing raids on several Viet Cong and North Vietnamese supply dumps and base camps in Cambodia. In response, Nixon, with Kissinger's support, had the FBI place wiretaps on suspect government officials, journalists, and, as time went on, other perceived threats to Nixon's and Kissinger's power. These springtime 1969 wiretaps were what would lead bit by bit

all the way to a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. According to J. Edgar Hoover, Kissinger's response to the leaks had been direct. We will destroy whoever did this. In the previous administration, We Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace. The bombing of Cambodia was just one piece of Nixon's new strategy.

Its counterpart, also launched in March 1969, was called Vietnamization. Quote, under this rubric, writes Eisenberg, tens of thousands of U.S. troops were brought home in successive increments. accompanied by efforts to expand, equip, and train the South Vietnamese military so that it might function independently. Nixon knew that he had to placate Americans' desire for a drawdown of troops in Vietnam. After peaking at $540,000 in the spring of 1969, Nixon reduced U.S. troop levels to $475,000 by the end of that year,

and to 335,000 a year later. Reducing soldiers also meant that Nixon was free to reform the draft, switching to a random lottery system. According to Lawrence, quote, the switch, along with sharply declining needs for troops in the early 70s, largely eliminated the draft as a source of discontent. Yet as the summer turned to fall and Operation Menu rolled on, The American anti-war movement, increasingly young and increasingly student-driven, picked up steam.

A national protest on October 15th, the largest ever at the time, and called the moratorium to end the war in Vietnam, particularly got under Nixon's skin. In Washington, D.C., Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., led a silent procession of 30,000 people. A Manhattan protest from Wall Street to Bryant Park drew 50,000. Demonstrations took place all over the country from Pittsburgh to Little Rock. Quote, at Whittier College, writes Eisenberg, the president's alma mater, the wife of the school's acting president lit an Olympic-style lamp designed to burn until all the American troops came home. On November 3, 1969, Nixon delivered his reply,

to the moratorium and the peacenics, in a televised address to the country, only 12 days before a second protest was scheduled to take place. In San Francisco, a few weeks ago, I saw demonstrators carrying signs, reading, lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home. Well, one of the strengths of our free society is that any American has a right to reach that conclusion and to advocate that point of view. But as President of the United States, I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this nation to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view

and who try to impose it on the nation by mounting demonstrations in the street. Nixon's address was a hit with the general public. Polls showed that majorities 70 to 80 percent strong supported the plan presented by Nixon in his speech. Whatever sophisticated critics might say, writes Eisenberg, quote, Millions of Americans had appreciated what they saw as the president's moral gravity and his calm assurance that there really was a plan to get the country out of the war. Look behind you.

See the thousands marching today. No! Out! No! Out! No! Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! ...over 100,000 tons of bombs

were dropped during operations breakfast, lunch, and so on. While conservative estimates placed the number of Cambodian dead in the thousands, others place it in the tens of thousands. And it was only the beginning. Cambodia, writes Philip Short. was being sucked into a conflict it had done everything to avoid. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger

had evidently planned to break into Cambodia from day one. Operation Menu had loosened the handle, but the key that would unlock the door was the military coup against Prince Sionuk in 1970. By now, the prince had hand. handed his government to the far right. The mystic general, Law Knaul, served as prime minister with zero intention

to carry out the prince's promised social programs. Quote, Sianuk tried to create a welfare state without the money or the political support required, writes journalist Elizabeth Becker. Quote, he had turned to the rightists to administer his socialist agenda, end quote. This was not a winning formula, as Lawn Knoll and his cronies intentionally mucked up Sihannuk's domestic programs,

Cambodia's economy revealed the dysfunction. As Thailand boomed with business and U.S. war-related aid, Cambodia stood still, its economy growing at less than 5% each year. To the country's small business community, the elite, and the middle class of Phnom Penh, this was considered a travesty. They, too, would be key players in the 19th. 1970 coup, end quote. Lonnell's sabotage even verged on paradox.

Despite his anti-communism, in these years there was an odd collaboration between the Vietnamese guerrillas and Cambodia's military. Lonnall's forces profited from selling weapons to the communist that came in from the port city of Sianukville, courtesy of the People's Republic of China. But however good the graft was, Cambodia's right-wingers in government and the military never stopped planning for the day when they would drive the Vietnamese out for good.

Sianuk, who had bet on a communist victory in Vietnam only a few years before, had since lost his nerve and opened back up to the United States. With the Americans escalating the war next door and his own military seething at his neutrality, Zianuk scurried to establish some kind of new equal. equilibrium. Quote, at Ho Chi Minh's funeral in 1969, Sienok apparently asked Hanoi's leaders to try to restrict

their use of his country. The Viet Cong are entrenched inside Cambodia, and Sienok sees this as a real threat. Already they occupy some parts of our lands, and they do not want to withdraw. Our soldiers, our army, you know, try to push them out. but we are not strong enough to, you know, push them out. Sianuk was, of course, not the only prince in Cambodia. There was a certain amount of attention forming around his rival, Prince Sirik Matak. Whereas Sianuk had styled himself as an independent nationalist,

Matak was a known friend of the Americans. He hated international communism and the Vietnamese and his cousin's tolerance of them both. A profile compiled by the Defense Intelligence Agency in Washington noted that Matak, quote, was cooperative with the U.S. officials during the 1950s. Now in the 1970s, writes Shawcross, CIA officials had ready access to him and his entourage. Ex-CIA agent Frank Snepp, in a tell-all book that got him sued by the agency, writes that the Americans had determined that if Cianuk could be replaced by Lawnall, He would welcome the U.S. with open arms, and we would accomplish everything, end quote.

The palace coup now coming into view certainly had all the hallmarks of American approval, if not direct American support, reports Becker. Another CIA agent and longtime Indochina hand, Drew Sawin, alleged that his bosses in Langley told him to kill a possible meeting with Sianuk right when it may have cooled things down. and kept him on the throne. Whether it was participation or observation, ex-agent SNP states that there were links between Law Nall and the Defense Intelligence Agency in Saigon. The deputy of General Creighton Abrams later confirmed that U.S. commanders were informed, several days beforehand,

that a coup was being planned. Quote, a further channel used by the agency, add Shawcross, was the Indonesian embassy in Phnom Penh. This was a two-way street. The Indonesians were giving tactical advice to Lonnell and reporting to the agency his plans. One of Lonnall's ministers later put it bluntly. Quote, we all just knew that the U.S. would help us.

There had been many stories of CIA approaches and offers before then. In other words, it was the worst possible time for Sianuk to take a vacation. March 8th, with the prince out of the country on holiday, Lonnall and his cronies engineer a series of anti-Vietnamese riots in the capital. These are meant to pressure the Soviets and the Chinese to drive the Viet Cong out of hiding in Cambodia. Sienuk in Paris condemns the riots. Chalkross reports that he, quote,

cabled his mother to say that he was canceling his trip to Moscow and Beijing and returning home at once to prevent his country from becoming a second Laos. But for some reason, he decides not to go home. La Nalle makes the next move, quote, he issues an ultimatum that the Vietnamese troops must leave the country in 72 hours. It's a ludicrous demand, one that could only be made by a man who had a tenuous grasp on reality, writes Shawcross, or a man who had promises of external support. March 12th, the CIA receives a report entitled, Indications of possible coup in Phnom Penh. March 13th, Sienuk, after much hesitation, leaves Paris as planned for Moscow. It is an uncharacteristic misjudgment, writes short, of the kind that politicians make

after too many years in power. Both the Russians and the Chinese want the prince to return home without delay. He does not listen. In Phnom Penh, a fortune teller shows up with a message from a long-dead king that Sianuk is about to fall. CIA man Frank Snepp adds that, quote, we exacerbate the crisis by throwing up misinformation. He says the agency tells Sianook's mother to deny the coup's existence and urge him not to return home. The queen, perhaps unconvinced, carries out a ritual to look for bad

omens, reports Becker. She draws a sacred sword. Ominously, she finds the sword stained black. Not long after midnight on March 19th, Prince Matak pays a visit to Launal. Flanked by his own army detail, the usurper prince recommends that the general team up with him. them in overthrowing Sienuk. They had been friends since their school days, short rights, and had worked together in the right-wing renovation party during the struggle against the French in the late 1940s. One advisor to Sienuk, an expatriate Frenchman, thinks that Matak is using Launal as a fascist scarecrow to frighten the left-wing opposition.

And so La Nal and Prince Matak joined forces. They unleash the army in the capital and order Parliament to recognize the end of Sianuk's reign. Communication with the outside world is shut off for over 24 hours, Becker reports, and a handful of officials are placed under house arrest, as well as some members of the royal family, including the queen. The black sword had been correct after all. Sienuk heard news of the coup on the radio, en route to Moscow's airport. The Soviets, perhaps annoyed that he had not listened to their initial advice, perhaps sick of their guest in general, wished him luck and hurried him onto the plane. As all this unfolded, a bizarre incident occurred in the Gulf of Thailand.

The USS Columbia Eagle came to a standstill. The ship had been carrying napalm to Thailand, which would then be used by the Americans in Vietnam. In protest of the war, two crew members of the Eagle had mutinied. They gained control of the ship and evacuated most of the crew. They then set sail for asylum in what they thought was neutral Cambodia. But by now, the coup was in motion, and the two mutineers would end up arrested and imprisoned by the Lon Nol regime. Thus, on March 18, 1970,

Prince of the Aram Sianuk was no longer the chief of state of Cambodia. And just like that, despite the participation of an actual prince, quote, one of the world's oldest continuous monarchies was abolished. There were promises to end the corrupt,

free-willing politics of Sianuk with an efficient, clean, modern government, writes Becker. This was welcomed by the middle class, though probably not the mass of peasants. Within the first month of the coup, violence began to spread. Police and soldiers opened fire on crowds, all of whom were labeled Viet Cong.

Responding to events from Beijing, Sionuk delivered a fiery speech in protest, but behind closed doors, he was in a daze. He wasn't ready to give up leadership of Cambodia, but to get power back, he would have to marshal an insurgency, something he had never done. In fact, he had spent his years in power crushing those who did. When Sianuk arrived in Peking, he learned the news of his overthrow from his friends, the Chinese leaders. They urged the prince to stay in exile in China and to form a coalition with the communists against L'Nol and his American backers. After huddling with the Chinese and North Vietnamese leaders in Beijing,

Sianuk agreed to swallow his distaste for the North Vietnamese, stay in China, and accept leadership of the Cambodian communists he had bitterly fought, as a figurehead, of course. So emerged the F-U-N-K, funk, short for National United Front, of Campocia,

the name given to the guerrilla army that would liberate the motherland, made up, for the moment, mostly of Viet Cong. A few years later, NBC News, spoke to Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa about his perception of the lead-up to the coup in Cambodia. Well, apparently, Prince Noradam Sienok, who was the chief of state of Cambodia,

had been cooperating with the United States, and with his tacit understanding that we were bombing Cambodia. But the coup took place, and Prince Sionok was ousted. I suppose this is the reference to the diplomatic situation at the time. Was that important? Well, it must have been important to the administration in that, and obviously I think they were planning to go to invade Cambodia. They wanted to make the bombing runs, and and so they just made the decision to follow this channel. The new government in Phnom Penh tore down physically and symbolically

the image of Prince Noradam Sianuk. Cambodia's High Court of Justice tried Sianuk in absentia and found him guilty of high treason, reports Elizabeth Becker, specifically for, quote-unquote, illegally granting Vietnamese communist troops permission to occupy Cambodian territory, to use the Sianukville Seaport for aid shipments and to establish bases on commerce soil. Sianuk was condemned to death.

No one mentioned Lon Nal's active role in these agreements with the Vietnamese communists. End quote. Here Sianuk speaks to an interviewer after the coup. Did you ever feel you were an accomplice? Accomplice or used by the communists. No, no, no, no. you know, I was conscious that communism was not good, but, you know, I had to be realistic. A republic without a revolution, without being drawn into the Vietnam War, seemed too good to be true, writes Becker.

As a matter of fact, the coup was the beginning not only of the American invasion of Cambodia, but the Khmer's own Civil War. Kissinger's key deputy, Al Haig, prepared to apply the Nixon doctrine in Cambodia. He rolled out a military mission in Phnom Penh, complete with an intelligence hub and an attache. The key contribution would be air power. American B-52s would rain fire from the sky, clearing the way for Lon Nal's troops to take back the country from the guerrilla armies. There was, of course, the other, less public side of the Nixon doctrine.

Quote, the money was not authorized nor appropriated by Congress, reports Shawcross. To avoid having to go before a hostile legislature for funds before the congressional elections in November, Nixon diverted funds from other military assistance programs by, quote-unquote, presidential determination. largely, in fact, from South Korea. General Westmoreland tried to warn his boss that the Vietnamese sanctuaries could not really be cleaned up, as within a month the monsoon would make the area impassable.

Nixon was unimpressed and threatened to withdraw resources from Europe if they were needed in Indochina. Let's go blow the hell out of him, he shouted, while the chiefs, Laird, and Kissinger sat mute with embarrassment. and concern. But ultimately, success in Cambodia was not really the point, at least not in and of itself. Nixon and Kissinger, after all, were using it as a tool to further Vietnamization, to turn an American war back into a proxy battle.

Unnamed officials told the New York Times that Cambodia was being used as a laboratory, as American combat units were withdrawn from the Vietnam War. Kisinger saw in Cambodia the local rivalries, La Nall's derangement, and the potential of a Khmer Rouge insurgency. When one special forces colonel took a State Department position in the Far East office, he was told by Kissinger, quote, Don't think of victory. Just keep it alive.

Of course, to keep the campaign alive, many people would have to die. After Lon Nahl's takeover, the U.S. simultaneously pumped his government chock full of military aid and cleared the way for the South Vietnamese and anti-communist Khmeres that had been waiting to take the fight to Cambodia.

Word was getting out that the U.S. government had gotten into bed with quite an unsavory character in the form of Law-Nall. At the start, the White House knew virtually nothing about him. A political cartoon from the time shows Kissinger telling Nixon that, quote, All we know about Law-N-L is that his name spelled backwards makes Law-N-L. But Washington could only plead ignorance for so long.

And Law-N-Nall's, quote, grandiose plan to quickly create an army of 400,000, writes Eisenberg was a scheme so unrealistic that it alarmed the American official. As President Nixon continued mulling his options for widening the war in Cambodia, he prepared for a televised address from Hawaii on April 20th with a different message. He planned to pleasantly surprise the country. I am therefore tonight announcing plans for the withdrawal of an additional 150,000 American troops to be completed during the spring of next year. While in Honolulu to meet the Apollo 13 astronauts, Nixon took a briefing from Navy Admiral

Jack McCain, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific. McCain was also known in the Pentagon as the Big Red Arrow Man. Here's Shawcross on why. McCain, whose son John was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, was a person. to play an important part in the story of Cambodia. He is a tiny, sprightly man with a straightforward view of the world. His military briefings were legendary. He would talk very excitedly for 45 minutes on a subject that might be dealt with in 10 and illustrate a doom-laden message with lurid maps of Southeast Asia. Extended from the bright red belly of China were gigantic red arrows or claws

reaching all over that part of the free world for which McCain felt responsible. Sometimes his sermons on the Chai Com, or Chinese communist threat, were so energetic, his cries of woe so violent, his passionate pleas for aid so draining, that at the end of a briefing, he would drop into his chair, ask for questions, and fall fast asleep. McCain's briefing impressed Nixon. He told the president the North Vietnamese were preparing to take over all of Cambodia. Two days after Nixon's big Vietnam speech, his advisors, led by Kissinger, gathered to discuss how many thousands of troops would be needed for a quote-unquote cross-border operation into Cambodia.

Nixon's other two most senior advisers, Defense Secretary Laird and Secretary of State Rogers, grudgingly approved the operation, but also insisted that no U.S. troops were to be involved, contrary to the wishes of South Vietnam's generals. Nixon rejected Laird's and Rogers' suggestions, and he cut Pentagon Chief Laird out of the decision-making early on. Nixon was restless, like his generals.

He thought it was time to go, quote, for all the marbles. As he put it to Kissinger, quote, The Liberals are waiting to see Nixon let Cambodia go down the drain just the way Eisenhower let Cuba go down the drain. Good evening, my fellow Americans. Ten days ago, in my report to the nation on Vietnam, I announced the decision to withdraw an additional 150,000 Americans, from Vietnam over the next year.

Just 10 days after his last peace-heavy address, Nixon took to the television once again to announce what, in his words, was not an air and ground invasion of Cambodia from South Vietnam. This is not an invasion of Cambodia. The areas in which these attacks will be launched are completely occupied in control by North Vietnam. as all this came to pass, Major Hal Knight continued to burn the true records of Operation

Menu. The next time the major's name came up, a few years down the line, it would be in headlines surrounding the Watergate affair. The entry point for the American B-52s was over the aforementioned. fish hook, while Saigon's divisions rolled into Cambodia from the south. 30,000 U.S. troops were mobilized for the operation. Once the soldiers were on the ground in the fish hook, they moved quickly. But they found no evidence of the legendary communist headquarters. This all-powerful, mythical, infamous HQ, of course, had been the rationale for the invasion.

Nixon complained to Kissinger that the army had to, quote, get off its fat butt and find abandoned supplies, something, anything that they could use to claim an American victory. The Wire Agency United Press International ran a report on the destruction of a border area of Snuall, filed a week after the invasion began. It provides an example of what was to become daily reality in Cambodia. tanks today smashed through the smoldering ruins of this rubber plantation town leveled by massive airstrikes. There, crews looted what remained. The North Vietnamese defenders had fled their

freshly dug holes. All that remained were the bodies of at least seven persons, four of them Cambodian civilians. One of the victims was a horribly maimed little girl who lay with three other dead in an open area near a cluster of shops that had been leveled. by the heavy fire. We had no choice, said the cigar-smoking Colonel Grail, Brookshire. We had to take it. This was a hub of North Vietnamese activity. Brookshire's men plowed their tanks through a children's playground, bordered by empty

fighting holes. As they passed the leveled shops, the GIs helped themselves to beer, cases of soft drinks, mirrors, suitcases, clocks, and even a motorcycle they strapped onto. a tank. One shed standing after the airstrikes was set of fire after tankers looted it of small items, including cases of flashlight batteries. At one shop, a GI spotted a display of sunglasses. Hey man, yelled another. Grab them shades. The associated press, which had also been at Snuall, decided to censor the details of the looting from its version of the story. After beating off a surprise night attack by the Viet Cong,

troops of the American First Cavalry Division make adorn reconnaissance. They found four of the enemy dead and several wounded. The attack took place near Tainin close to the Cambodian border. From the outset of the invasion, Washington officials declared the bombs would fall on areas controlled by the enemy. But some Americans on the ground witness, a very different picture. Eisenberg relates the story

of three U.S. newspaper reporters, Richard Dudman, Elizabeth Pond, and Michael Morrow, who had been arrested in Cambodia and turned over to the North Vietnamese on suspicion of being CIA agents. Quote, for much of the time they were on the move,

taking flight from helicopters, tactical aircraft in B-52s. Fortunately, Mike Morrow spoke Vietnamese and was able to communicate with three of the communist guards. Confronting a common peril, the Americans in their captors became tightly bonded. On several occasions, the Vietnamese risked their own lives to save their prisoners. The need to keep moving from place to place had the incidental effect of allowing the reporters to form a far more complex picture of developments in the border regions

than was available to other members of the press. They saw that large numbers of Cambodians were, in fact, living there. They watched as Cambodian families took to the road to escape the bombing, often accompanied by northern Vietnamese or Viet Cong fighters. No Viet Cong headquarters was destroyed. The insurgents simply moved their operations further into the heart of Cambodia. Refugees would soon follow them, either join them. joining up with the communists and Khmer Rouge, or taking shelter in Phnom Penh.

The mission, at least as it had been sold by Nixon on television, was a failure. But the U.S. had become partners with a new Cold War subcontractor, La Nalle. The president, Kisanger said, is determined to keep an anti-communist government alive in Phnom Penh. This is the battlefield in Laos. These are government troops supported and financed by the United States, fighting and losing ground to communist troops, many of them from North Vietnam. Fighting in remote mountains in an obscure corner of Asia, it looks and sounds familiar.

Nixon's invasion of Cambodia appeared to break through much of the United States' denial about the war, in Indochina. The idea that America had naively stumbled into a quagmire. The discovery of the secret war in Laos within a year only deepened the perception that the United States was simply out of control, turning Vietnam into only one of many wars spreading outward, bombs obliterating entire societies, a true embodiment of Nixon's madman theory. Thousands had protested during LBJ, millions more would take to the streets after Nixon's Cambodian invasion. With no end in sight, what had been a growing counterculture against the war exploded into a nationwide fervor.

Quote, over the next few weeks, more than four million college students took part in demonstrating against the war, writes Mark Lawrence. The potential for chaos became clear on May 8th, when pro-war construction workers beat up anti-war demonstrators in New York City. It was something I'd never seen before and never seen since, one anti-war activist said of the mood in New York. On May 4th, at Kent State University in Ohio, where Sienook had once spoken 10 years earlier,

National Guard units fired on student protesters, killing four and wounding many others. Strike! Strike! And all of a sudden I heard the shooting. And then I saw people drop into the ground, and then I fell to the ground also, because I couldn't walk anymore. Four days later, at the University of New Mexico, National Guardsmen used their bayonets on protesters and journalists, wounding over a dozen. But when undercover agents in the crowd called in uniform police to make arrests,

for public drinking, it turned to violence. And the following week, at Jackson State University, a historically black college, two more students were killed by shotgun blasts from police, with 11 more wounded. There was screaming and cries of terror mingled with the noise of sustained gunfire as the students struggled en masse to get through the glass and double doors. A few students were trampled. Others, struck by buckshot or bullets, fell only to be dragged inside or left moaning in the grass. Exhausted and often alcohol fogged, writes Lawrence.

Nixon lashed back furiously at his critics. Quote, desperate to crack down, he approved a proposal to allow federal agents to spy on anti-war activists by opening mail, carrying out burglaries, and conducting electronic surveillance. In these efforts, Nixon could draw on his predecessors. The Vietnam War was not the only thing he had inherited. President Johnson had already ordered both the FBI and the CIA, against its jurisdiction, to set up domestic spying and sabotage campaigns, chaos at the agency, and co-intel pro at the Bureau.

At one session, quote, Nixon asserted that hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans, mostly under 30, are determined to destroy our society, reaching out for the support, ideological and otherwise, of foreign powers. Drawn up from all of this was the Houston Plan, named after a White House aide for internal security. The plan called for everything, from wiretapping to domestic spying, to setting up camps for anti-Whorpe. war dissidents. It was ultimately scrapped, however, after objections from J. Edgar Hoover, who perhaps did not care for the powers it was giving his rival intelligence czars. But as Shawcross notes, quote, intelligence agencies had been undertaking most of these activities for years before 1970 without presidential authorization. End quote. In these heady days, Walter Hickle, Secretary of the Interior, warned Nixon that,

quote, youth in its protest must be heard. He was fired. In a surreal move, Nixon showed up at 5 a.m. at the Lincoln Memorial one night to talk to students holding a vigil. Quote, the episode makes more sense

when one learns that, Per Kissinger himself, Nixon was at that moment on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Tony Lake and I and Bill Watts, who were three people who resigned from the staff in protest of the invasion, did not make a public declaration of our position and did not call a press conference simply because we thought that would so irreparably damage Kissinger inside the administration. And we thought the administration was so awful, so bad, that to destroy or to damage Kissinger would, would hurt the country, to weaken him.

We thought that, ironically, Kissinger was our last best hope. The White House was losing support not only from the public, but from its own government. Everybody knew who the architect of the Cambodia policy was. As the war spread through Cambodia, Henry Kissinger's control over policy was underwritten, right, Shawcross. 250 foreign service officers of the State Department signed a petition of protest. Most of Kissinger's office was opposed to the policy. Four resigned after the incursion.

Outside of the White House, Kissinger's Harvard crowd demanded that he resign, and many on campus turned their noses up in protest the next time Henry came around. Perhaps the spiciest resignation came from William Watts, staff secretary for the National Security Council. According to Seymour Hirsch and Watts' own account, I said to Henry, I'm refusing my assignment, I am leaving. And then Kissinger said something that I will never forget. He said, your views represent the cowardice of the eastern establishment.

I just came up out of my chair swinging. I was so damn mad and missed him. He ran behind his desk and said, I'm only kidding. I said, well, you don't kid about something like this and just stormed out of the room. Suddenly Alexander Haig came flying out of Henry's office and came back into the situation room.

Haig said, You've had an order from your commander-in-chief. You can't refuse. I looked at him, and I said, fuck you, Al. I just have. Congress, meanwhile, lurched into motion to stop any further incursions. As a throat clearing, in June it repealed the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution,

which had provided the initial falsified reasons to enter Indochina under Lyndon Johnson. Soon, the Senate moved on to the Cooper Church Amendment, which would cut off any funding for U.S. operations in Cambodia and withdraw U.S. troops from all of Indochina by 1970. At first, the White House appeared worried about congressional opposition to the invasion and played down the issue. But the amendment died in the House, with Nixon threatening to veto it for good measure. By the end of 1970, it passed as part of a bill, but was so watered down that it did not

prohibit much by way of bombing. Its prescriptions on the ground troops were as irrelevant as the ground troops had already come and gone. The White House and the Pentagon, unclenched and almost bragging, announced a new wave of strikes. Secretary of State, William Rogers declared, why we should have any restrictions on the use of that air power to protect American lives, I don't know. His boss, the president, wanted, quote-unquote, limitless freedom for the bombing squads. The Nixonites got their wish. By the end of the summer, reports Shawcross, much of Cambodia was a free fire zone for U.S. aircraft. Pilots had far more liberty than in Vietnam to bomb any target

they wanted. Eight weeks after the coup, reports short, Law Nall made a radio broadcast announcing the start of a kileastic religious war against the Vietnamese communists. They were, quote, the enemies of Buddha. All Vietnamese, communist or not, must leave the country and return home.

The pogroms had only been the beginning. A mass killing of ethnic Vietnamese was detailed in a two-part April story in the Washington Post, which included the discovery of 1,000 rope-bound corpses in the Mekong River. Meanwhile, President Wynvantu,

Lon Nal's counterpart in South Vietnam, was not making a good impression with his ground troops that had accompanied the Americans. South Vietnamese soldiers, quote, plunged into Cambodia raping, looting, burning, and retaliation for the murder of Vietnamese in Cambodia the month before, reports Shawcross. They behaved as if they were a conquering,

hostile nation, rather than helping a new ally. Every Cambodian was a Viet Cong and a target." This was in stark contrast to the Vietnamese communists. However many local Cambodians may have resented their presence, quote, the VC had been exemplary guests, leaving payment for anything they took and going to enormous lengths to avoid offending against Khmer customs. La Nall South Vietnamese allies were bandits, raping Khmer women, stealing cattle, pillaging homes. The result was a recruiting opportunity made in heaven for the Khmer Rouge. Before long, tens of thousands of villagers voted with their feet, swelling the population under communist control, and sending their sons to join the Resistance Army. In the months after the invasion, Phnom Penh,

swelled with hundreds of thousands of refugees. In no time at all, the city would be bursting with two to three million. Several times its pre-war population. In the aftermath of the invasion, Salasar watched from a secret base in the northeast. He saw half of Cambodia fall under the control of the resistance, Not his own Khmer Rouge, not yet, but of the Vietnamese guerrillas doing most of the fighting. It was at this time, in 1970, that Tsar changed his name, not for the first time and not for the last. But it would be the name that history would remember.

Paul Pot. Thank you.