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The principles of America's honor and America's responsibility were not empty phrases to me. I had been born in Germany in the Bavarian town of Fürth. Hitler came to power when I was nine years old. Until I emigrated to America, my family and I endured progressive ostracism and discrimination. When I first walked the streets of New York City, seeing a group of boys, I began to cross to the other side to avoid being beaten up. And then I remembered where I was.
I therefore have always had a special feeling for what America means. I could not accept the self-hatred that took every imperfection as an excuse to denigrate a precious experiment. I was enormously gratified to have an opportunity to repay my debt to a society whose blemishes could not obscure for me its greatness, its idealism, its humanity and its embodiment of mankind's hopes. Ironically, in view of the later charges of "historical pessimism" leveled against me, it was precisely the issue of our self-confidence and faith in our future that I considered at stake in the outcome in Viet Nam.
I could never think of the war as a monstrous criminal conspiracy, as was fashionable in some circles. Our entry into the war had been the product not of a militarist psychosis but of a naive idealism that wanted to set right all the world's ills and believed American good will supplied its own efficacy.
The "Secret" Bombing
In January 1969, a complete halt in the bombings against North Viet Nam had been in effect for more than two months. No large-scale ground operations were under way. Peace talks had been going on for eight months in a mansion on Avenue Kleber in Paris, but their single achievement at that point was to decide on the shape of the table at which the negotiators were to sit. Soon evidence mounted that Hanoi was preparing a major offensive, a clear violation of the tacit understanding that had brought about the bombing halt. The new Administration began weighing how to respond.
Alternatives were hard to come by. Thought turned to bombing of the North Vietnamese sanctuary areas in Cambodia for reasons exactly the opposite of what has been assumed: it was not from a desire to expand the war, but to avoid bombing North Viet Nam and yet to blunt an unprovoked offensive.
Revisionists have sometimes focused on the Nixon Administration's alleged assault on the "neutral" status of a "peaceful" country. But the issue concerned territory which was no longer Cambodian in any practical sense. For four years, as many as four North Vietnamese divisions had been operating on Cambodian soil. In 1978 the Communist victors in Cambodia put the uninvited North Vietnamese presence in northeastern Cambodia in 1969-70 at 300,000, which far exceeded our estimates. From their