A Conclave of Connivers: Nixonian-Kissingerian Policy Toward Cambodia During the Vietnam War

Abstract

From 1969 to 1973, the United States under President Nixon waged a series of secret military maneuvers in Cambodia principally and ostensibly aimed at expediting America’s departure from Vietnam, thus finally bookending a very unpopular war that had divided America in half. Upon assuming the presidency and shedding Washington, D.C. of the Johnson establishment that had rendered policymaking in Southeast Asia stale and timid, the Nixon administration came to the expeditious conclusion that widening the Vietnam War into neighboring Cambodia, a neutral country that had avoided significant suffering in neighboring South Vietnam for much of the Second Indochina War, served as an integral component in the downshifting of American involvement in Vietnam. Little did the Nixon administration anticipate through its Cambodian Campaign the baneful insidiousness that would grip a milieu of policymaking cliques within the White House, the reignited domestic outcry across the United States, or how America’s military forays in Cambodia would herald an ensuing decade of civil war and widespread suffering in that country. This paper examines the backroom, behind-the-scenes, rhetorical wheeling and dealing carried out by the Nixon administration with a particular focus upon the political ideologies and motivations behind President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger’s incursions into Cambodia from 1969 to 1970. The Cambodian Campaign consequently castigated those who dissented from the pair’s Cambodian policy, deceived many in Congress, misinformed key officials in the Pentagon and State Department, and stupefied a nation with its sheer brazenness and insensibility.

Keywords: Nixon, Kissinger, Cambodia, Cambodian Incursion, Vietnamization, White House