Sideshow; Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. Very good/Good. Sigrid Estrada (author photograph). 467, [1] pages. Endpaper maps, Illustrations. Cast of Characters. A Short Chronology. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Ink name & date inside front flyleaf, some wear & small tears to DJ edges. William Hartley Hume Shawcross CVO (born 28 May 1946, in Sussex, England) is a British writer and commentator. Shawcross writes and lectures on issues of international policy, geopolitics, Southeast Asia and refugees, as well as the British royal family. He has written for a number of publications, including Time, Newsweek, International Herald Tribune, The Spectator, The Washington Post and Rolling Stone, in addition to writing numerous books. His books include studies of international topics: the Prague Spring, the Vietnam War, the Iranian Revolution, the Iraq War, foreign assistance, humanitarian intervention, and the United Nations. Two of them, Sideshow and The Quality of Mercy, were included on The New York Times Book Review's lists of the roughly 15 top books of the year for 1979 and 1984. After leaving Oxford, Shawcross worked as a journalist for The Sunday Times, and contributed to a book by its journalists on Watergate. In 1973, as a Congressional Fellow of the American Political Science Association, Shawcross worked in Washington, DC, on the staffs of Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Representative Les Aspin. Shawcross was Chairman of ARTICLE 19, the international centre on censorship, from 1986 to 1996. He was a Member of the Council of the Disasters Emergency Committee from 1997 to 2002, and a board member of the International Crisis Group from 1995 to 2005. Derived from a Kirkus review: In 1969, Richard Nixon ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia to destroy North Vietnamese sanctuaries in that formally neutral nation. A decade later, Nixon was a President driven from office and Cambodia a country devastated by civil war and occupied by the Vietnamese army. Shawcross, a former Indochina correspondent of the Sunday Times (London), vividly reconstructs—from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and published sources and interviews—the process that led to this dismal two-part denouement, for it was the secret bombing which necessitated the wiretaps and other illegalities that culminated in Watergate. Shawcross traces the troubled history of Cambodia from the glories of the Angkor kingdom through the establishment of a French protectorate to its independence under the unpredictable Sihanouk. The Cambodians managed to achieve a tenuous level of stability under the Prince, but Shawcross also takes note of internal political factions and mixed anti-monarchist opposition, though he discounts the strength of this opposition—until the bombing, that is. Sihanouk was powerless to prevent the Vietnamese from using Cambodian territory, but their presence was concentrated in a small border area. Placing the bombing in the context of American overkill, Shawcross argues that the attack—involving B-52 carpet-bombing of areas inhabited by Cambodian villagers—merely dispersed the Vietnamese and their Khmer Rouge allies deeper into the country. The U.S. escalation which followed the coup against Sihanouk progressively undermined Cambodian sovereignty, in Shawcross' view, and bred corruption by rapid militarization. The "sideshow" is what Cambodia came to be contemptuously called in Washington, where its destruction served not only U.S. aims in Vietnam, but the career interests of key Americans, of whom Kissinger looms the largest. Shawcross also chronicles the increasing extremism of the Khmer Rouge—he has monitored leaders' writings over the years—which issued in the repressive Communist regime. A penetrating study of Nixon-Kissinger rule and of its effects on one sad country, this is possibly the best treatment of the legacy of the Vietnam war in Indochina.