You Don't Belong Here

by Elizabeth Becker

  When FitzGerald wrote the conclusion in 1971, the war still seemed endless. Instead of reaching a settlement at the Paris negotiations, as he had promised, Nixon had expanded the war into Cambodia.

  “In the first three years of Nixon’s administration fifteen thousand Americans were killed.…[South Vietnam] lost more men than they had lost in the three previous years… there were more civilian casualties than there had ever been before—that is, Laotians and Cambodians as well as Vietnamese.” FitzGerald asked in the book: “How is that possible?”

  HER PUBLISHER TOLD her she needed a title. FitzGerald went to her bookshelf and pulled out her copy of the I Ching, looking for inspiration.

  “What I did was to open a page of the Chinese Book of Changes at random and I found Fire in the Lake: the image of revolution and of coming of spring.”

  She had previously explained the fire in the lake symbol in a New York Book Review article.

  “That was it for me.”17

  She sent the final draft to an expert who finally gave her full-throated encouragement: “Let me say that I think you write beautifully, I love many of your very linguistic images, the book is full of valuable insights that I haven’t had the time to applaud in jotting down comments. I hope ‘Fire in the Lake’ will be read by many, especially in Washington.”

  That rare early praise would prove to be prescient of the book’s general reception.

  But before she sent the manuscript to the publisher, FitzGerald, like the rest of the country, was shocked by the publication in the New York Times of a three-year-old secret history of the war based on highly classified government documents. The first installment was published on June 13, 1971. The Nixon administration asked for an immediate halt to publication, saying it threatened national security. The New York Times refused and published two more days of the study, along with supporting documents, that laid bare decades of lies told to Congress and the public by successive American presidents, beginning with Harry S. Truman. The White House obtained an injunction against the newspaper to end further publication.

  The New York Times had to comply, but other newspapers, including the Washington Post, stood by the Times and began publishing parts of the Pentagon Papers themselves. The White House was furious and pushed the case to the Supreme Court. Arguments were heard a mere two weeks later, on June 26. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the newspapers, and the full report with supporting documents was printed.

  Two days before that decision, Daniel Ellsberg publicly admitted that he had leaked the secret history to the New York Times and surrendered to the FBI in Boston. FitzGerald’s old friend had been behind what became a pivotal event in the politics of Vietnam, strengthening the opposition by disclosing that officials knew there was little hope of winning the war.

  Ellsberg had helped write the secret report at the request of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Working on the study and watching the subsequent invasion of Cambodia helped convince Ellsberg that the American war was unwinnable and wrong. He and his wife, Patricia Marx, visited FitzGerald in Cambridge in 1970, where he told her of his change of heart and his despair over the war. But he didn’t say a word about the secret Pentagon Papers.

  At that point, Ellsberg still had hopes that Congress would force the Nixon administration to end the war. He had helped author memoranda for Kissinger on options to withdraw. Nixon and Kissinger rejected that advice. Eventually, Ellsberg decided to leak the Pentagon Papers. “In releasing the Pentagon Papers I acted in hope I still hold,” he wrote then, “that truths that changed me could help Americans free themselves and other victims from our longest war.”18

  Although she had no direct role in his release of the papers, as one of his first journalist friends to articulate the reasons why the United States should withdraw from Vietnam, Ellsberg said FitzGerald helped challenge his thinking over the years.

  The summer of 1971 became the summer of the Pentagon Papers.

  President Nixon was so upset by the release of the papers that, as a direct consequence, the White House set in motion schemes and methods, which eventually led to the Watergate crisis, forming a secret group called the plumbers that broke into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist to find dirt on him. The plumbers would later break into the Watergate offices of the Democratic National Committee.

  FitzGerald examined those thousands of pages, documenting the secret history of US involvement in Vietnam, to determine whether she needed to alter her own book. She did not.

  Finally, she handed in the completed manuscript in June 1971. After years of strain, doubt, and determination, her burden was lifted. She ended her life of isolation in Cambridge and moved back to New York. She also ended her romance with Lelchuk. He said their passions had cooled, but he would have continued on. She “felt bad about it.”

  Then she escaped to Paris. From there she flew to Saigon in September on a magazine assignment and asked her editor to send the edited manuscript to the Hotel Continental. She had missed Vietnam. She traveled with an interpreter who spoke excellent French and visited villages and provinces that had been off-limits in her much earlier stay. She was stunned by the level of destruction. “It broke my heart to see what had taken place.… The ugliness is stunning. The parts that were so beautiful in 1966 are now a wasteland of cast-off American equipment and barbed wire.”19

  While reporting on the new blight of Vietnam, FitzGerald began a wartime romance with Kevin Buckley, the Newsweek Saigon bureau chief and a man almost typecast to be her lover. Buckley had also been raised in New York City. They were both Ivy League: he graduated from Yale in 1962, the same year Frankie graduated from Radcliffe. They were a matched set: darkly handsome Kevin, sleek blond Frankie.

  To add to the aura, Buckley was one of the original members of the informal Yale Saigon Club begun by Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in 1968. All graduates of Yale—diplomats, aid workers, journalists, and clergymen—were welcome to these club dinner parties at the ambassador’s residence.20

  But like FitzGerald, Buckley’s background did not preclude him from writing critical pieces questioning the conduct of the United States in Vietnam. Buckley was working on a monthslong investigation of US military atrocities when he met FitzGerald in 1971.21

  The courtship began while she was traveling around South Vietnam. On a day when FitzGerald was expected back in Saigon, Buckley left her a short note at the front desk of the Continental Hotel; a clerk put the message in the cubbyhole with her room key.

  This was the same front desk where countless journalists looked forward to finding cables and messages waiting for them and where Catherine Leroy was given mail privileges to receive letters from home.

  Buckley’s note read:

  “Frankie—I have nothing to do this weekend. I want to see you and hear about lobsters and everything else from Nha Trang. Please phone or come by when you get back. If it’s this evening, come up for dinner if possible please.”22

  By the time she returned to New York to correct the proofs of her book, they were trading letters. In one letter she invited Kevin to the family home in Barbados, ending it abruptly saying:

  “Have just this moment had a call from Michael J. to say that I must finish the galleys tomorrow, not the 25th. So sadly, I must return to that immediately… I love you, Frankie.”23

  KATE WEBB’S RETURN to the war zone was a reprieve, an escape from the stultifying life in Pittsburg and the brutal betrayal of Bob Stockton. She arrived dressed with attitude, a woman starting again and rejecting any pity. Her hair was now fashionably long, grazing her shoulders. She wore an Yves Saint Laurent miniskirt and high-heel sandals that showed off her slender legs. Even her underwear was couture: Italian silk in purple and fuchsia, gifts from her sister, Rachel.24

  She landed at Phnom Penh’s Pochentong Airport in July 1970, nearly one year before FitzGerald returned to Saigon. Farmers were ploughing their rice paddies, and armies were preparing for battle. The graceful capital was largely untouche
d by war; barbed wire had yet to snake around the city as it did in Saigon. Heavy barricades were few. The Royal Palace stood sentry on the esplanade where the four arms of the Bassac and Mekong Rivers crossed on their way to the sea. Twisting spires of Buddhist temples punctuated the skyline, and flame trees shaded the boulevards. Food stands set up along the tiled city sidewalks sold her favorite sour plum soup. The handsome art deco Grand Market, built by the French between the World Wars, spread its protective arms over farmers and artisans selling their wares—the sarongs and silks Webb preferred.

  The French colonial veneer added the glamour Webb remembered from her reporting trip three years earlier when she had covered the visit of Jacqueline Kennedy. Now the city’s French quarter had become press headquarters.

  The Cambodian front of the Vietnam War was too dangerous, too new, and too unpredictable for full-time journalists to be resident in Phnom Penh. Instead, news organizations sent reporters living in Saigon, Singapore, or Hong Kong to Cambodia for one or two weeks and occasionally months. To ensure these correspondents and photographers had a bed and a place to work, many news organizations rented rooms and studios at the Hotel Royale on a permanent basis. Reporters nearly took over the hotel, the red-tiled grande dame of Phnom Penh, catty-corner from the Cathedral of Notre Dame. News organizations rented the hotel’s air-conditioned rooms, large studios, and bungalows to house a rotating staff of reporters. Webb moved in full-time.

  As a rare resident, Webb rented a two-bedroom garden bungalow shaded by flowering trees. It also boasted French-era plumbing and a creaking ceiling fan. The first thing she did was cut off her hair again—what she called her GI cut—and pull out her khaki pants and cotton shirts. The Yves Saint Laurent was saved for embassy occasions.

  The atmosphere at the Royale was a cross between a private club and a permanent crisis center. Walking up the broad steps of the genteel yellow stucco hotel into the cool entry, journalists loitered at the front desk waiting to see who had heard what news. In one direction were the duplex studios with wire service correspondents. Just off the lobby was the well-worn dark teak staircase to the rooms. Straight ahead was the swimming pool and beyond that Le Cyrène restaurant, all gathering spots for journalists at day’s end after stories were filed.

  White-jacketed waiters dragged ice blocks wrapped in coarse raffia rope across the lawn to Le Cyrène, where they chopped the ice into spears for beer and gin and tonics, the favored apéritifs of the journalists. At dinner, journalists ate well from a menu of fresh crayfish and lobster. At least once they ordered omlette norwegienne for dessert, just because baked Alaska seemed so out of place in a tropical war zone. Arguments spread across tables.

  The first reaction of many newly arrived journalists was that they had arrived in the pages “of a Graham Greene novel.”25

  France was still a cultural force in Cambodia, albeit a fading one. French was the country’s second language: English was rarely heard. Ordering morning coffee at Le Café de la Post, locals called out to la boyesse, the colonial term for a waitress derived from the English, who addressed waitstaff as boy, and altered to the feminine French form. French wives patronized tailors who could sew duplicates of ensembles pictured in pages torn from Paris Match. French cafés offered the equivalent of comfort foods: couscous, curry a l’anglaise, and spaghetti bolognaise—with a dash of marijuana if you knew the owner. The French left their mark in things large and small, designing Cambodian landmarks—the royal palace and the royal museum—and filling Cambodian government positions with French bureaucrats. Foreign-language newspapers, books, and magazines were in French, rarely English.

  War had come so quickly, without a buildup, that Cambodia was slow to accept the dangers and the need to mobilize as did the foreigners. Routine life in the city disguised the upheaval in the countryside. It was easy to be delusional.

  Unlike in Vietnam, the foreign reporters covered the Cambodian campaign of the Vietnam War face-to-face with Cambodians and without American intermediaries. The American diplomatic presence was small. There were no American troops fighting, no massive military infrastructure to navigate the war, and no crowds of contractors and hangers-on.

  In this atmosphere reporters fastened on to the absurd and the dark. The palindromic leader Lon Nol would ask for guidance from his favorite Buddhist monk and sprinkle “magic sand” around the city’s perimeter to ward off the enemy. Cambodian soldiers in Lon Nol’s army marched off to battle wearing scarves covered with prayers and sucking amulets of the Buddha. Prayers and drawings tattooed across their chests and arms were works of beauty meant to protect them from the evil enemy. Ominously, Lon Nol ordered the massacre of ethnic Vietnamese who had lived peacefully in the country for decades to delineate who he thought was the enemy. Reporters discovered corpses floating down the Mekong.

  The city was referred to in countless newspaper articles as a “charming Asian backwater” grown ugly by war. Its beauty had blossomed when Cambodia was the oasis of peace in Indochina, the only country officially declared neutral and shielded from the violence by the 1954 Geneva Accords. Cambodia was also the only country left undivided.

  Norodom Sihanouk, the elected Cambodian leader, considered neutrality the only chance for his country to survive the war being waged in neighboring Vietnam. That mattered little to the Eisenhower administration. To undermine that neutrality, the United States used its financial and military muscle to try to pull Sihanouk into war, conspiring with Cambodia’s neighbors and Cambodian dissidents. In 1958, Eisenhower signed a secret directive to “encourage individuals and groups in Cambodia who oppose dealing with the Communist bloc and who would serve to broaden the political base in Cambodia,” authorizing repeated “covert operations designed to assist in the achievement of US objectives in Southeast Asia.”26

  This Cold War mind-set, begun with legitimate fear after Joseph Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe, was outdated and did not apply so neatly to Southeast Asia.

  Sihanouk was aware of American designs. His country was in the geographic center of the larger Vietnam conflict. Thailand, its neighbor to the west, had opened its airfields to US fighter jets. Laos in the north was at war and part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. South Vietnam, the neighbor to the east, was the front line.

  Both sides saw Cambodia as a key to victory.

  China and the Soviet Union courted Sihanouk to prevent him from siding with the United States. In return, China promised to stay out of Cambodia’s internal politics, which meant providing no support for the overthrow of Sihanouk by the small Cambodian Communist Party known as the Khmer Rouge. The Chinese and North Vietnamese kept their word as long as the prince was in power.

  Sihanouk was less successful with the United States. He feared any military relationship with the US, especially after Washington approved the overthrow of Cambodia’s ally Ngo Dinh Diem. In response, Sihanouk renounced all US aid in 1963. The prince’s strategy worked as long as he could balance the unforgiving pressure from both sides, offering each concessions, allowing the Vietnamese communists of the North and the noncommunists in the South to use Cambodia’s border region to attack each other.

  Through the 1960s, as the American war escalated dramatically in Vietnam, Sihanouk became known as “the prince who walked the tightrope.” He was a recognized leader of the world nonaligned movement. His outsized personality, intelligence, charm, and humor made him welcome in international forums. Few other Asian leaders were as popular on the global scene. His prestige gave Cambodia an outsized voice.

  Maintaining political peace within Cambodia was tricky. Sihanouk had formidable advantages that blinded him to his weaknesses. A dazzling politician, Sihanouk had won every election since independence by skillfully outmaneuvering, buying off, and sometimes even executing his rivals. Even though he abdicated the throne to run for election, he remained a member of the royal family with all the prestige it implied as well as his status as the father of the independent nation. He was nearly revered in the country
side; he called the villagers “his people,” passing out gifts on regular forays to the provinces. However, he did little to improve the near-feudal conditions of much of rural Cambodia, a state of affairs his opponents would exploit.

  Dissent began to grow in the cities, where elites, intellectuals, and the business community were growing tired of the prince’s rule and its attendant corruption. Younger Cambodians, especially those educated overseas, chafed under Sihanouk’s old-fashioned autocratic rule and his need to be at the center of Cambodia, even starring and directing in his own movies. Some wanted a truly democratic government; others wanted modern development.

  Yet the majority appreciated the quality of life under Sihanouk. Education was prioritized. Racism was rejected. And the middle class was expanding. The arts flourished under Sihanouk’s patronage. He resisted the rampant development in countries like Thailand, where he felt the culture was disfigured and the poor no better off. Above all, Sihanouk was popular because he kept Cambodia at peace while its neighbors were engulfed in war.

  The turning point came in 1968 when the United States’ pledge to find peace only led to more war.

  When Kate Webb covered Mrs. Kennedy’s visit in 1967, few reporters realized Sihanouk was attempting to smooth US-Cambodian relations as the Vietnam War took another deadly leap, putting his country at greater risk.

  Once President Johnson began peace negotiations with North Vietnam in 1968, Sihanouk had hoped that the war could be ended before it was too late. If a peace accord had been signed then, the political tension inside Cambodia would have relaxed, and the Khmer Rouge would have remained insignificant.

  But the peace efforts failed, in part because Nixon had a different plan to end the war and it did not include continuing Johnson’s initiative. Instead, Nixon opened secret discussions between Henry Kissinger, his national security adviser, and Le Duc Tho, a top North Vietnamese official. Those were the only talks that mattered. Kissinger probed for North Vietnam’s breaking point and even suggested Nixon was prone to “madman” behavior and might order a nuclear attack if they didn’t accept American conditions for peace.