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"Operation Total Victory 42," as it was labeled, was launched against the Parrot's Beak during the night of April 28. American and South Vietnamese forces pushed forward into the Fishhook area at 7:30 a.m. Saigon time on May 1. The same day Nixon visited the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon and—on the spur of the moment—ordered what he had long been considering, an incursion into all other base areas. Twelve enemy base areas were attacked in the first three weeks.
Without our incursion, the Communists would have taken over Cambodia years earlier. The bizarre argument has indeed been made, with a glaring lack of substantiation, that the cruelty of the Khmer Rouge in victory was the product of five years of American and Cambodian efforts to resist them. No one can accept this as an adequate explanation for the murderous Khmer Rouge. Sihanouk does not believe this; they were men he had kicked out of Cambodia in 1967 as a menace to his country. He told me in April 1979 that the Khmer Rouge leaders were "always killers."
Nixon set a June 30 cutoff date for the Cambodian incursion. Eventually, 32,000 U.S. ground troops were involved. But, Kissinger says, casualties "never reached more than a quarter of the 800 a week that Laird had feared," and dropped sharply after that. At the time, Kissinger estimated that the action would delay Hanoi's next major offensive by six to eight months; Sir Robert Thompson, the British expert on guerrilla warfare, figured that it would set the North Vietnamese back by as much as two years. Thompson proved to be right. But that did not help to defuse a gathering explosion at home. The May 4 killing of four students at Kent State University by rifle fire from Ohio National Guardsmen proved to be a match thrown into a powder keg.
Campus unrest and violence overtook the Cambodian operation itself as the major issue before the public. Washington took on the character of a besieged city. On May 9 a crowd estimated at between 75,000 and 100,000 demonstrated on the Ellipse, south of the White House. The President saw himself as the firm rock in this rushing stream, but the turmoil had its effect. Pretending indifference, he was deeply wounded by the hatred of the protesters. In his ambivalence Nixon reached a point of exhaustion that caused his advisers deep concern.
Exhaustion was the hallmark of us all. I had to move from my apartment, ringed by protesters, into the basement of the White House to get some sleep. Much of my own time was spent with unhappy, nearly panicky colleagues, even more with student and colleague demonstrators.
I found my discussions with students rather more rewarding than those with their protesting teachers. When I had lunch in the Situation Room with a group of Harvard professors, their objections to the Cambodian decision illustrated that hyperbole was not confined to the Administration. One distinguished professor gave it as his considered analysis that "somebody had forgotten to tell the President that Cambodia was a country; he acted as if he didn't know this." Another declared that we had provoked