Swimming to Cambodia Read Online Free Page B

incident at Kent State happened around then as well, as Roland reminded me. He suggested I read up on it in a book called Sideshow, by William Shawcross, which I did, later. I remembered Kent State but I had just lumped it in with the Vietnam protest; I’d forgotten that it was a direct protest against the invasion of Cambodia. I also didn’t know that most U.S. National Guard troops were not allowed to have live ammunition in their guns, but in Ohio they were. Governor James Rhodes had called them out because the protesters were storming Kent’s ROTC building, and on a lovely May day fifteen people were shot, four innocent bystanders were killed. Roland told me that the American public was polled on its reaction to the incident and the majority of people said that the shooting was justified. This caused enormous dissension and one hundred thousand protesters marched on the White House. Haig massed troops in the basement of the White House thinking there was going to be a siege. According to Shawcross, Nixon got no sleep at all; he was up the entire night making phone calls. He made fifty calls, eight to Kissinger, seven to Haldeman, one to Norman Vincent Peale, one to Billy Graham. After one hour of sleep he got up and put on Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. I and, with his Cuban valet Manolo Sanchez, he went down to the Lincoln Memorial to talk to the protesters about surfing, football, how travel broadens the mind. In fact, Roland reports that one of the students said, “I hope it was because our President was tired, but when he asked me what college I was from
and I told him, he said, ”How’s your team doing this year?”
    Now colleagues and friends—actually, I don’t know if he had any friends —but colleagues of Kissinger wanted him to resign. And Kissinger said, “What if I resign and then the President has a heart attack? We’ll be left with Agnew. That’s the only reason I’m staying on. For national security.”
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    Because of all this, the Cooper-Church Amendment went through. This was an amendment meant to stop any ground support troops from going into a country where war had not officially been declared by the Senate or Congress. But, as Roland reminded me, we’re not living in a democracy. I had forgotten all about this: the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and can simply bypass Senate and Congress. Which is just what he did. Nixon kept saying, “Bomb, bomb, bomb,” and the bombs kept falling.
    The only thing that the protest accomplished was to frighten Nixon enough that he declared, “No more close ground support troops more than twenty-one miles over the border into Cambodia.” How they controlled that, I don’t know, whether the troops had odometers strapped to their legs or what. But twenty-one miles in they had to go right back out, or turn into pumpkins.
    During this time they sent Alexander Haig over to speak to Lon Nol because Lon Nol had been told that the American troops weren’t going to be in Cambodia anymore. Lon Nol, of course, saw in this the downfall of his country. It was very clear; the handwriting was on the wall. He turned to the window and wept.

    And Haig went back and reported this to the American government, that Lon Nol had cried in front of him. The American government was so upset that they sent over an official psychiatrist to examine Lon Nol for crying in public. He came back and reported that Lon Nol was an unstructured, vague individual. Not only that, but that he made astrological, occultist and folkloric references in his addresses to the nation. Can you imagine? “My fellow Americans, I am not going out for the next two weeks because my moon is in Gemini.”
    This freaked the Americans out, so they compiled a whole report on Lon Nol in which they detailed his weird rituals. One was to cut the skin of the troops to let in the spirit of Buddha. Another was to