Word: sideshows
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
What eventually became Sideshow was really Willie Shawcross, obsessed with two cultures he knew little about, sifting through thousands of pages of documents, looking for something but not knowing what he would find. He started with the people in the American embassy in Phnom Penh, amazed by the "unanimity with which they spoke" and with what they saw as "callous disregard" for human lives. Somebody in Washington was watching the CIA reports that showed North Vietnamese troops hiding in sanctuaries on the Cambodian side of the border. Somebody decided that the best way to flush the North Vietnamese...
Willie Shawcross is not the chain-smoking, scrappy-looking reporter you'd imagine as Sideshow's author. Shawcross, tall, quiet, soft-spoken, strikes one as a British academic, looking for the fact that may reveal the truth, but not aiming to promote himself...
...shrugs off any glorification of his approach, or his mastery of the Woodstein technique. "Investigative reporting is a stupid term," he says definitively. "Decent reporting is by definition investigative." For Shawcross, Sideshow was an extension of his earlier days on the Times' insight team...
...essentially British Shawcross adopted the United States, and his experience with Sideshow hardened an already-suspicious nature. Disturbed by President Carter's recent call for increased CIA activities, he declared that the Freedom of Information Act--the lifeblood of his work--must be broadened. Angered by the Supreme Court's decision to keep Kissinger's memoirs under wraps in the sacred tombs of the Library of Congress, he hopes that other people will do for the rest of Kissinger's work what he did for Cambodia...