Word: phnom-penh
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Despite such daily scenes of horror, the besieged Cambodian capital of Phnom-Penh held out for another desperate week. The Khmer Rouge insurgents kept up their asphyxiating pressure on the city's Mekong River lifeline, thereby depriving the capital of crucial supplies and diverting large numbers of government troops from the city's defense. Sosthene Fernandez, the Vietnamese-Filipino commander in chief of government forces, stoutly insisted that "we can open the river," but the chief of naval operations, Admiral Vong Sarendy, conceded that the situation on the Mekong was "hopeless." Meanwhile, the capital's sole maintaining...
...Administration had no intention of sending U.S. troops back to Indochina. "All American forces have come home," he said. "They will not go back." But his strong pitch for more aid was based on two major worries. First, that a Khmer Rouge victory would lead to a bloodbath in Phnom-Penh. "The record shows in both Viet Nam and Cambodia," he said, "that Communist takeover of an area does not bring an end to violence but, on the contrary, subjects the innocents to new horrors." Secondly, Ford argued that a failure to supply more aid to Cambodia would harm America...
Like the countless other congressional missions to Indochina over the past decade, the most recent junket was a grueling, rapid plunge into the complexities of war and politics. There were mandatory visits with the heads of state, Nguyen Van Thieu in Saigon and Lon Nol in beleaguered Phnom-Penh. Congressmen William Chappell and John Murtha donned fatigues and trooped off to a Cambodian army post. After a tour of a huge refugee center set up in Phnom-Penh's unfinished Cambodiana Hotel, a shaken Millicent Fenwick, Republican Representative from New Jersey, said: "I can't believe this...
...part because of such encounters, some members of the delegation remained unalterably opposed to military aid for either Cambodia or South Viet Nam. In Phnom-Penh, New York Democratic Representative Bella Abzug, long a vocal opponent of U.S. involvement in Indochina, remarked: "I'm concerned about the humanitarian situation, the kids' bellies. The military situation was lost long ago." Minnesota Democrat Donald Fraser was more explicit: "In my judgment, the only thing we can do is help arrange for the orderly transfer of power to the [Khmer] insurgents...
...collapse of the Cambodian domino, as Kissinger implied, might well enhance the prospects for an eventual Communist victory in South Viet Nam. Still, Vietnamese Communists have been able to put enormous pressure on Saigon even with Phnom-Penh in Lon Nol's hands, and the fall of his government is not likely to make a crucial difference. Beyond that, there remain obstacles to the spread of Communist influence in Southeast Asia. Neighboring Thailand, presumably the next endangered domino, is well equipped to resist Vietnamese influence. Communist insurgents in the northeast have achieved little so far, and Thailand has sufficient...