Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon, and the Destruction of Cambodia

by William Shawcross

Book Overview

In Sideshow, journalist Shawcross presents the first full-scale investigation of the secret and illegal war the United States fought with Cambodia from 1969 to 1973, paving the way for the Khmer Rouge... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0671641034
• ISBN13: 9780671641030
• Release Date: August 1987
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 515 Pages
• Weight: 1.60 lbs.

Customer Reviews

History to be reviewed over and over again

Shawcross gets into the minds of Kissinger and Nixon so well. His is a book to be read over and over again to see the working of the U.S. Government and how it can destroy a country. He talks about the 25 pound shark at the bottom of a swimming pool full of children -- and we understand how the USA's leaders destroyed a country. It is a lesson to be learned over and over again as we go about destroying other countries. This is one great read - worthy of the time it takes to understand it. A victory for the author over Mr. Kissinger.

The Madman Theory of War

Really bad decisions made by the Nixon administration toward Indochina and the Vietnam War are now fairly obvious. However, we must remember how difficult this type of investigation would have been back when Shawcross did his intensive research back in the late 70s. Here Shawcross builds a very hard-to-dismiss case against Nixon and Henry Kissinger, in terms of how their problematic military and diplomatic strategies at least indirectly led to the hideous destruction of Cambodia (in fact, one of Nixon's documented strategies was to make the Communists think he was a madman, assuming they'd get scared and give up). During the earlier years of the war, Cambodia was a relatively tranquil nation that was trying to remain neutral. But the country was being used as a hideout by North Vietnamese soldiers, leading to bombing by the Americans. Here Shawcross shows how Nixon and Kissinger made use of political trickery and overhyped threats to keep the bombing going to an extent that was far more destructive than necessary. As a bonus, this book also documents the wire-tapping paranoia and unconstitutional shenanigans in the Nixon White House. Shawcross is especially tough on Kissinger, finding that he disregarded the integrity and safety of Cambodia (which he had only ever visited for four hours), in favor of short-term political advantages and unyielding ideology. The relentless bombing destabilized Cambodian society, leading indirectly to the hideous genocide and societal destruction enacted by the Khmer Rouge a few years later. It is difficult to argue with Shawcross' heavily researched conclusions, and the hellish wholesale collapse of Cambodia (of a type never before seen in modern history) becomes all the more poignant as a result. Be sure to get an edition of this book from 1986 or after, in which Shawcross adds materials from the political firefight that the book ignited. Kissinger was obviously upset and went to great lengths, through articles written by his lackey Peter Rodman, to try and disprove Shawcross' assertions. If your copy of this book contains these articles, you'll be quite bemused by Rodman's evasive, dissembling, and downright condescending rebuttal attempts, which are easily shot down by Shawcross. This war of words in itself proves that Kissinger had, and always will have, a lot to answer for. [~doomsdayer520~]

A Ghastly Misuse of Superpower

Reading this together with accounts of the Laotian conflict, one realizes that the Vietnam War was in many senses a misnomer: the battle between communist insurgencies and American-sponsored nationalist forces spanned the entirety of Indochina; the Cambodian civil war providing the last (and easily the most tragic) chapter. Unlike Laos and Vietnam, however, blame for which can be apportioned largely to Kennedy and Johnson respectively, the prosecution of American policy in Cambodia was almost solely the concern of Richard Nixon and his dark eminence, Henry Kissinger. The story of Cambodia in the 1970s divides into two halves: In the space of several years the ineffectual pro-Western president, Lon Nol (having ousted the mercurial Prince Sianhouk) squandered millions of dollars of American military and economic aid, his regime caving in 1975 to the insurgent Khmer Rouge. Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge government proceeded (from 1975 to 1979) to institute a ghastly "cultural revolution" in which the cities were emptied, the middle classes liquidated in killing-fields concentration camps, the country thrown into famine and the entire society wound back to "Year Zero." The other "half" to the story of Cambodia is the American side, namely the story of the illegal (and botched) invasion of 1970 and subsequent covert bombing operations across the entirety Cambodia. Shawcross argues cogently that it was precisely because of the devastating bombing, and utter destruction of the peasant economy, that Pol Pot was able to marshal a powerbase capable of overthrowing Lon Nol's government. From there he argues that Kissinger bears partial (if indirect) responsibility for the consequences of the Khmer Rouge takeover, including the killing fields. Whether one can go that far is an issue that will tax historians and moralists for generations, but there can be no question that: (1) the B-52 raids failed in their stated objective of supporting Lon Nol; and (2) many in the West were blithely indifferent to the human suffering that the bombing brought. This book remains a compelling study of how not to use superpower.

Back to the future -- Rome, Cambodia, Iraq ...

While I've read this book many times over the years, my most recent reading struck me hard. The description of the May 8, 1970 meeting between Henry Kissinger and a number of his friends and personal advisors from Harvard did not seem especially interesting in past years, but jumped off the page this time around. Thomas Schelling told Kissinger that after the invasion of Cambodia the group no longer had faith in Henry or the Nixon administration's ability to conduct foreign policy, and would have nothing further to do with Kissinger. The group pointed out that the invasion could be "used by anyone else in the world as a precedent for invading another country, in order, for example, to clear out terrorists." Another section recounts Arthur Schlesinger Jr. quoting a historian's recollection of the Romans -- "There was no corner of the known world where some interest was not alleged to be in danger or under actual attack. If the interests were not Roman, they were of Rome's allies; and if Rome had no allies, the allies would be invented." Shawcross also notes that in 1964 the US condemned Britain for assaulting a Yemeni town used as a base by insurgents attacking Aden. Another chilling touch is the mention of Lincoln's reaction when he was advised that the President could invade a neighbor if necessary to repel invasion -- Lincoln replied, "Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you give him as much as you propose." Lincoln's famous speech given as a young man in the 1830s in which he remarked that all the armies of Europe could not forcibly take a drink of water from the Ohio River and therefore "... if this great nation is to ever die, it will be from suicide" rings more true than the words of today's politicians proclaiming the right to declare preemptive war. An excellent summary of the events that overtook Cambodia, "Sideshow" has much more to offer to us today as we try to figure out how we reached this turning point in our history and recall how badly things can go wrong whenever we deviate from the principles upon which our nation was founded.

Chronicle of War in Cambodia

This book is about the war in Cambodia that occurred during, and which was largely caused by, America's intervention in Vietnam. Hence the title "Sideshow," although as the book makes clear this was no minor conflict but rapidly turned into a large scale conflagration. This book should be read all those who saw the movie "The Killing Fields" as it fleshes out the US role in the development of that tragedy. Shawcross does this by documenting the actions of the CIA and the US military under the direction of the Nixon administration in setting the stage for that calamity by first overthrowing Prince Sihanouk and then intervening in Cambodia on a massive scale first through land invasion in April 1970 and continuing with a massive bombing campaign which did not cease even after Congress expressly prohibited it, but went on secretly on a wide scale. This policy created a chain reaction of events that propelled the Khmer Rouge from the margins of society to center stage as millions were disclocated from the land and agricultural production collapsed. Nixon's role in these events was the subject of one of the impeachment articles against him that was not passed by the House Judiciary Committee in 1974 although it received over a dozen votes in its favor.