Volume 26, Number 11 · June 28, 1979
The Crime of Cambodia
By Stanley Hoffmann
Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia
by William Shawcross
Simon & Schuster, 467 pp., $13.95
'Cambodia was not a mistake; it was a crime.' This is what William Shawcross demonstrates in his careful, detailed, and incisive book. Sideshow is both masterly and horrifying. It lays bare the fallacies and the shame of the Vietnam war with so much evidence and force that recent attempts at rewriting this tragic story in order to vindicate American policy appear as ludicrous as the policy itself. For those who, ever since the debacle of 1975, keep worrying that American diplomacy's resolve, will, or position in the world will be permanently impaired by the motto, 'No more Vietnams,' Shawcross's account of the pointless destruction of Cambodia should be compulsory reading. All those who, somehow, believe that the sufferings inflicted on the Cambodian people, first by the Pol Pot regime, and now by the Vietnamese, retrospectively justify America's attempt to save Phnom Penh from the Reds must read this book, for it presents hard and irrefutable documentary evidence showing that the monsters who decimated the Cambodian people were brought to power by Washington's policies.
Review, 2396 words
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