Cambodia: A Message for the U.S.

Charles de Gaulle arrived in Cambodia last week, touching off a paroxysm of pageantry and adulation that might have humbled a lesser man. As his plane landed, royal guards in gold-threaded tunics and pantaloons stood at the ready with rolls of ceremonial straw matting, in case the exalted visitor decided to sit down on the tarmac.

Mauve silk umbrellas were hoisted over the heads of General and Madame de Gaulle, while 200 dusky, nubile Cambodian maidens scattered jasmine petals from beaten-silver bowls in their path. The entire Cambodian jet air force—four null — flew past to take De Gaulle’s salute.

Personal Attention. Host Prince Norodom Sihanouk had long been on record as considering De Gaulle and Mao Tse-tung the two greatest men in the world; thus, since Mao had never made the scene, De Gaulle was clearly Cambodia’s all-time guest. Ever since De Gaulle invited himself, Sihanouk had been beside himself with preparations, personally presiding over every detail.

Nothing but the Queen Mother’s own Khemarin Palace would do to house the De Gaulles, he decided, and set to work redecorating it. Furniture was imported from France and upholstered in shimmering Cambodian silk. So that “everything would be perfect,” boasted the Prince, he had even replanted the gardens and flown in a maitre d’hótel and a chambermaid from Paris’ Hotel Crillon.

Sihanouk needed all the prestige he could extract from touching the hem of De Gaulle’s khaki tunic. In the green-and-gold Throne Pavilion, Sihanouk made the two-star French brigadier general an Honorary Supreme General of the Royal Khmer Armed Forces. Under a great moon at the ancient temple of Angkor Wat, Sihanouk recreated the festival of the coronation of a Khmer king. Everywhere, in his toasts and speeches, the Prince was all praise, reminding De Gaulle of “your prestige, your wiseness, your clairvoyance, your sense of equity.”

Series of Tableaux. De Gaulle’s gracious reply came in the huge Olympic Stadium in Pnompenh. After 1,000 monks had chanted prayers for him, and 100,000 well-drilled Cambodians dressed in reds, whites, blues and greens had staged a kind of half-time football series of tableaux forming the words Vive la France with French and Cambodian flags and Vive De Gaulle with placards, the general took the rostrum. Bordering as it does on Viet Nam, Cambodia was a good place to amplify a message meant for the U.S.

For De Gaulle, the message was unusually blunt, if characteristically unhelpful. U.S. intervention in Viet Nam, he said, had rekindled war in Southeast Asia, and threatened world war. What America should do is withdraw from the battlefield now with honor, “an act of renouncing,” he said, that would not “injure [the U.S.’s] pride, interfere with its ideals, or prejudice its interests.” After all, France did the same thing in Algeria, he pointed out —but failed to mention that the Algerian war involved no alien aggression like Hanoi’s. The U.S. would be all the more advised to quit Viet Nam, he argued, because neither side will ever be able to win a military victory. The only solution, De Gaulle insisted, is the neutralization of all Southeast Asia, guaranteed by the U.S., Russia, Red China, Britain and, of course, France. But alas, “such an outcome is not at all ripe today, assuming that it may ever be.” The reason: the U.S. will not contemplate withdrawing its forces in Viet Nam before a “political solution” is arranged. Therefore, he concluded, France cannot think of proposing any help or mediation toward a settlement, since ‘”no mediation will offer a prospect of success.”

Cambodia seemed a long way to go to offer that advice.