Word: sihanouk
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Kissinger and other U.S. officials declared that Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk had "acquiesced" in the U.S. bombing raids and in fact "encouraged" U.S. intervention.* Shawcross calls that "questionable." Sihanouk himself, who was overthrown by General Lon Nol just two weeks before the U.S. invasion in 1970, told Shawcross that there was nothing he could have done about either the Vietnamese bases or the U.S bombing. But Sihanouk's doomed effort to keep Cambodia neutral, Shawcross believes, was the right policy in terms of Cambodia's own interests...
That was clearly shown, Shawcross writes, by the five years of destruction that followed Sihanouk's ouster, a destruction that Shawcross condemns as an excessive attempt to display U.S. strength in the area...
...short, was all but lost. In scattered areas of the country the fighting continued at a furious pace, most notably in Kompong Som (once Sihanoukville, named for Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk, who was hospitalized in New York City with fatigue from participating in the U.N. debate on Hanoi's takeover). In Kompong Som the two sides were fighting street to street and hand to hand for control of Cambodia's sole deep-water port, 136 miles southwest of Phnom-Penh (see map). Vicious fighting continued in the Mondolkiri forest as well, and at Siem Reap...
After his arrival in Manhattan, Sihanouk agreed to be interviewed by TIME Staff Writer James Wilde, who has known him since 1955. Wilde remembers Cambodia in the mid-1950s as a gentle, bucolic land of temple bells and gilded stupa spires gleaming in a green landscape. In those days, Sihanouk was known as something of a playboy who dabbled in songwriting, crooning, saxophone and accordion playing, moviemaking and women. On occasion, Wilde reported, "the Prince would hold press conferences in the open-air dance pavilion of his wedding-cake palace. Sometimes his daughter would execute classical Cambodian dances, and there...
Those were also the years when the volatile Sihanouk brilliantly maintained his balancing act of keeping Cambodia neutral. "He got the U.S. to build a four-lane highway, to the port of Kompong Som," recalls Wilde, "and when the monsoons washed parts of it away, he got the Russians to repair it. He delighted in inviting the diplomatic corps to help build irrigation projects. Every time he dug up a bit of earth at one of those ceremonies, the peasants would catch it, for he was sacred and so was everything he touched...