there is no greater bloodbath than that which is taking place presently and can only take place with our military assistance…Suppose we were asked to address either 75,000 or 100,000 of those Cambodians who may very well lose their lives or be maimed by our military assistance for the next 3-month period…and they said to you, “Why do I have to die?”…or “Why should my body be mangled?”—What would you tell them? That we are doing it in order to avoid a bloodbath?36
Abzug suggested that if the United States would only change its policy, it could likely work with the Khmer Rouge and “arrange for an orderly transfer of power.”37 Senator George McGovern (D.–S. Dak.), a leader of the antiwar movement, trusted nothing the U.S. government said about the Cambodian Communists. He expected the KR to form a government “run by some of the best-educated, most able intellectuals in Cambodia.”38 The editorial pages of the major newspapers and the congressional opposition were united in the view, in the words of a Washington Post editorial, that “the threatened ‘bloodbath’ is less ominous than a continuation of the current bloodletting.”39 Western journalists in Phnom Penh sang a song to the tune of “She Was Poor but She Was Honest”:
Oh will there be a dreadful bloodbath
When the Khmer Rouge come to town?
Aye, there’ll be a dreadful bloodbath
When the Khmer Rouge come to town.
Becker, the young Post reporter who had offered one of the earliest depictions of the Khmer Rouge, was pessimistic. She departed Cambodia ahead of the KR capture of Phnom Penh, as she did not want to be around for what she knew would come next. Besides fearing the worst for Cambodians and her colleagues who had disappeared, Becker also sensed the impossibility of generating outside interest in the story. This was a region whose problems the world was anxious to put behind it. She predicted that she would be unable to cover the ensuing horrors, and the outside world would do nothing to stop them. She was right on both counts.
Recognition
From Behind a Blindfold
Although most foreigners hoped for the best in advance of the fall of Phnom Penh, most of those with passports from non-Communist countries did not remain to test the new regime. Nearly all American and European journalists had left Phnom Penh by early April 1975. Twenty-six reporters had already gone missing.40 Most of the others had come to agree with Becker that something extremely ugly lay ahead. The U.S. embassy kept its evacuation plans secret until the morning that U.S. Marines secured a helicopter landing area in the outskirts of the capital. On April 12, in Operation Eagle Pull, diplomatic staff and most U.S. correspondents left aboard the U.S. helicopters. President Ford said that he had ordered the American departure with a “heavy heart.”
Not all the signs from Phnom Penh were grim. Prince Sihanouk, the titular leader of the KR coalition, had sent mixed signals all along. On the one hand, he had spoken confidently of the KR’s intention to establish a democratic state. On the other hand, he had cautioned that the KR would have little use for him: “They’ll spit me out like a cherry pit,” he once said.41 But in the immediate aftermath of the KR triumph, Sihanouk was less interested in prophesying than in gloating. “We did what they said we could never do,”he boasted. “We defeated the Americans.”42The day after the harrowing evacuation of Phnom Penh began, bewildered Western reporters led their stories by again posing the question that the Post’s Becker had posed a full year before, “Who are the Khmer Rouge?”
A few hundred brave, foolish, or unlucky foreigners stayed in Phnom Penh. On April 17 they heard the same unforgiving commands that jolted their Cambodian friends into flight. They did not believe KR claims that American B-52s were going to bomb the town, but they attempted to offer rational explanations for the exodus. The KR would be unable to feed the swollen population in the capital, and dispersal to the countryside would move the people closer to food sources. The dislocation would make it easier for the KR to distinguish allies of the old regime from ordinary Cambodians. Or maybe the KR leaders simply wanted their pick of housing in the capital. All assumed the evacuation would be temporary. Cambodians would surely return to their homes once the new Communist government felt secure.
Forbidden to move around the city, the remaining foreigners huddled at the French embassy, awaiting KR clearance to leave.43 The best early intelligence on the nature of the new KR regime consisted of mental snapshots that these reporters, aid workers, and diplomats had gathered before they were confined at the embassy. Most had seen the fearsome KR cadres driving trembling Cambodians out of town, but they had not witnessed killings. “There were no massacres committed in front of us,” recalls Schanberg, who was very nearly executed, along with his colleagues Rockoff and Swain, while snooping around a hospital on the day of the KR victory. “We did see these people from another planet.You had the feeling that if you did something they didn’t like they would shoot you. But we had no awareness of what was to come.”
On May 6 a final caravan of trucks carrying Schanberg and the last Western witnesses to KR rule left Cambodia. The evacuees peered out from behind their blindfolds on the stifling hot journey. The KR had been in charge less than three weeks, but the signs of what we would later understand to be the beginning of genocide were already apparent. All of Cambodia’s major towns had already been emptied of their inhabitants. The rice paddies, too, were deserted. The charred remains of cars lay gathered in heaps. Saffron-robed monks had been put to work in the fields. Decomposed bodies lay by the side of the road, shot or beaten to death. KR soldiers could be spotted with their heads bowed for their morning “thought sessions.”44 The overriding impression of those who drove through a country that had bustled with life just weeks before was that the Cambodian people had disappeared.
Once the final convoy of foreigners had been safely evacuated, the departed journalists published stark front-page accounts. They acknowledged that the situation unfolding was far more dire than they had expected. In a cover story for the New York Times, Schanberg wrote: “Everyone—Cambodians and foreigners alike—looked ahead with hopeful relief to the collapse of the city…All of us were wrong.… That view of the future of Cambodia—as a possibly flexible place even under Communism, where changes would not be extreme and ordinary folk would be left alone—turned out to be a myth.”45 Schanberg even quoted one unnamed Western official who had observed the merciless exodus and exclaimed, “They are crazy! This is pure and simple genocide. They will kill more people this way than if there had been hand-to-hand fighting in the city.”46 That same day the Washington Post carried an evacuation story that cited fears of “genocide by natural selection” in which “only the strong will survive the march.”47
Although Schanberg and others were clearly spooked by their chilling final experiences in Cambodia, they still did not believe that American intelligence would prove right about much. In the same article in which Schanberg admitted he had underestimated the KR’s repressiveness, he noted that official U.S. predictions had been misleading. The U.S. government had said the Communists were poorly trained, Schanberg noted, but the journalists had encountered a well-disciplined, healthy, organized force. The intelligence community had forecast the killing of “as many as 20,000 high officials and intellectuals.” But Schanberg’s limited exposure to the KR left him convinced that violence on that scale would not transpire. He wrote:
There have been unconfirmed reports of executions of senior military and civilian officials, and no one who witnessed the take-over doubts