Cambodia gunboat diplomacy - 16 May 1975

A week or so ago, I paid a flying visit to England and found myself in an ancient university town that I once knew very well indeed, in what they call the “dim past.”

A misleading phrase because when you visit after a very long interval a place you grew up in, the past is not dim at all but bright and very vivid. It is in the mind’s eye exactly as you left it, and you yourself lose your present identity and become the person you were when you finally said goodbye to it.

This was brought home to me with some embarrassment when I expected to say "Yes sir, No sir" to a gathering of the masters of colleges, but instead they tottered up to me and called me sir, and the master of my own old college turned out to be a young whippersnapper in his early 50s.

Well in other ways, as Duke Ellington used to say, there have been some changes made.

We used to wander around the old town at all hours of the daylight, but when midnight struck – and it struck about fifteen times from every neighbouring clock tower – if you found yourself in the rooms of some buddy from another college, you dashed at a breathless clip to your own college and next day you were on your tutor’s carpet, a frowsy, well-worn carpet, paying a fine and trying to give some plausible explanation for being out of college at the outrageous hour of midnight.

You could, of course, on the evil night in question sneak in by climbing over the college walls, which had been planted by some medieval sadist with lumps of broken glass. And in my day, if you were fetched by some fetching female from one of the women’s colleges and wanted to entertain her, you were allowed to have her in your own rooms, chaperoned by another girl, from 5 to 6.30, and a very thrilling concession it was to the old truths about the way of a man with a maid.

This time, I saw rock singers in tattered jeans all around the colleges and people with necklaces tickling their navels, arm in arm with – I swear – surviving sisters of Janis Joplin, also in jeans and raggy blouses, and otherwise, by the device of tossing coloured blankets and ponchos over their heads, giving striking impersonations of homeless Mexican peasants. I couldn’t guess what they were doing four thousand miles from home, but I was told that they were not rock singers, not peasants. They were home. They were undergraduates and, for all I know, they bed down in any college that’s handy, and the idea of a chaperone is about as unreal as Zsa Zsa Gabor appearing always in tow with a duenna.

Well that evening, my hostess, the wife of one of the grandees of the university, in fact the official lord and master, appeared holding in her hand what looked like a small transistor radio. She threw the "On" switch with her thumb and instead of hearing a recital of vespers or the bells of St Mary’s, the thing let fly with a scream like a police siren in the old Chicago gangster films. “All the girls”, she said demurely, "are buying them. They are pocket alarms meant to save any perambulating girl in Cambridge from a fate worse than death. And seven of them”, it came out, “have been assaulted to the point of rape in the past six months.” All I could say when I heard the ghastly story was that I was glad this outrage had not happened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard. If so, it would have been broadcast around the globe as yet another example of the typical violence of life in America.

Well you can imagine when I flew back here, I was at least relieved to think that the worst news that could confront me here was a stabbing in Brooklyn. Of course wads of columns on the humiliation of the United States after Cambodia and Vietnam climaxed, perhaps, by the news of the resignation of Dr Kissinger.

So the plane came down at 8.30 on Wednesday night and I travelled sleepily to my apartment, and by the time we got there it was 2.30 or 3 o’clock in the morning, body time. And there, on the mat outside the back door was the New York Post with the black and blazing headline, "US sinks three Cambodian ships". I thought for a moment it was a gag. I thought some wag in the building had been down to Broadway where they take blank pages of a newspaper and print up jokey, personal headlines like "Cooke will marry Raquel Welch". I saw a quote from old reliable Senator Goldwater, “Let’s show 'em they can’t fool around with us." I thought we were back in World War Two and the Battle of Singapore.

My shock was due to the lamentable fact that for the last day or two in London, I’d enjoyed what for me is the luxury of skipping all newspapers and news broadcasts. A lapse that does have its advantages. It has the advantage of making you want to go back to the beginning to find out who did what to whom and then to put the sort of questions a child puts, which too many reporters are too sophisticated to ask.

Why, I wondered, had the Cambodians seized an American merchant ship in the first place? An obvious question nobody had, apparently, bothered to answer. Why was Thailand so exercised? What was the ship carrying? Was it close to somebody’s shore or out in blue water? Why the gunboat diplomacy so soon? What had happened to the joint resolution of congress called the War Powers Resolution, which was passed by both houses in 1973, which compels the president to consult with Congress before letting American armed forces go on the warpath anywhere?

This was a move designed to stop any president doing what Johnson and Nixon had done – bombing North Vietnam, ordering the invasion (incursion as it was called) into Cambodia; doing what both presidents had done on what they called their own “executive authority”.

To be quite fair, I should remind you that the American Constitution says that Congress alone has the right to declare war and there has not in fact been any such declaration since June 1942 when Congress, on the president’s request, declared war against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. Since then, the presidents have … well, they’ve done it on their own, enjoying an orgy of executive authority which, by one of those swings of the pendulum very familiar in American history, the Congress is now determined to stop. Well let’s try and sort it all out as simply and clearly as possible for people like me who are bewildered by the whole business.

Early in the morning of Monday 12 May, an American merchant ship, unarmed, with 39 Americans aboard and carrying a cargo of about three-fifths commercial products and two-fifths light arms, uniforms, shoes and so on was sailing from Hong Kong to a port in Thailand. It was in the Gulf of Siam, 60 miles off the coast of Cambodia when it was fired on and then boarded by Cambodian naval forces, and they forced it to steam off for the Cambodian mainland.

President Ford then called together his National Security Council and told the State Department to get busy at once with Peking, to persuade the Cambodians to release the crew and the ship. China is the only big power known to have any influence on Cambodia, although apparently this negotiating effort failed.

The president alerted the Pacific fleet. He sent an aircraft carrier on its way to the Gulf of Siam and ordered 1100 marines to be flown into Thailand to an American base from which most of the sorties into Indochina had been flown in the last years of the Vietnam War.

The Prime Minister of Thailand said that unless they were got out by Thursday morning, he would take drastic action, though it’s hard to figure what that might be coming from a country which is still theoretically under American military protection.

Well, President Ford called the seizure an “act of piracy”. He said it was a merchant ship absolutely not engaged in espionage. He promptly called in the leaders of the Congress and, as the 1973 Act requires, consulted them. And on Wednesday evening the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which spent so many years of the Vietnamese War condemning the President’s war-making initiative, met and adopted a resolution declaring that the president had every constitutional right to order military action, which he accordingly did.

The American ship had by now stopped (for some reason) steaming for the mainland, but Cambodian patrol boats – originally gifts or loans from the United States, by the way – were headed for the ship, evidently to take the crew aboard and hold them hostage on the mainland. So American planes sank three of these patrol boats, seized the ship, rescued the crew, and American fighter bombers attacked a Cambodian airbase near the port where the Cambodians had originally intended to berth the ship.

Now when the president called the seizure an “act of piracy” few people, including the Congress, were disposed to argue with him. But there are two snags here. There’s something more than a legal nicety which might in the end persuade the United States to pay an indemnity, as it did recently when Ecuador seized American ships fishing in her territorial waters.

In maritime law (even the State Department was a little embarrassed to explain) there is no such thing as piracy against vessels flying a national flag. Such ships might claim a violation of international law. This American ship was under American registry. The other snag concerns the definition of the high seas. The first reports of the shocker said that the American ship was 60 miles off the coast of Cambodia. So it was. But it was also only eight miles from a group of small islands which Cambodia claims. South Vietnam has claimed them too, but now that South Vietnam and Cambodia are Communist bedmates, either would doubtless support the claim of the other.

So it seems the Cambodians can say that the American ship was sailing well inside the 12-mile limit of their territorial waters and, at the moment I am talking, we are waiting to see if the Cambodians will let their case simmer or somehow bring it to the boil.

If it all cools off, the interest and the long-run concern will shift – I think – to Thailand and its present rage against the United States. For Thailand – it’s the belief in Washington – is, if not the next domino, the next victim, marked out by its neighbours for intimidation, conquest, or, if you’re well disposed towards the conquering heroes of Vietnam, liberation. And that is a graver topic and another talk.

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