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Le Duc Tho considered negotiations as another battle. His idea of a negotiation was to put forward his unilateral demands. Their essence was for the U.S. to withdraw on a deadline so short that the collapse of Saigon would be inevitable. On the way out we were being asked to dismantle an allied government and establish an alternative whose composition would be prescribed by Hanoi. Any proposition that failed to agree with this he rejected as "not concrete."
The first series of secret negotiations with Le Duc Tho ended with his statement that unless we changed our position, there was nothing more to discuss.
A Wider War
Perhaps the most bitterly disputed episode of a bitterly disputed war is the decline and fall of Cambodia. In March, with Prince Sihanouk traveling in France, anti-Vietnamese riots began to erupt across Cambodia. Prime Minister Lon Nol and Deputy Prime Minister Sirik Matak ousted Sihanouk, who there upon took refuge in Peking and turned against the U.S. Kissinger 's critics argue that the U.S. engineered Sihanouk's downfall and later, by attacking the North Vietnamese sanctuaries, caused the war to engulf all of Cambodia and to ensure victory for the Communist Khmer Rouge. Kissinger maintains with much documentation that the coup took the U.S. completely by surprise, that it came about because "the sanctuaries increasingly aroused the nationalist outrage of Cambodians," and that Hanoi's forces began overrunning Cambodia as early as the end of March 1970. Kissinger reveals, for the first time, that on April 4, 1970, in Paris, he proposed to Le Duc Tho that they should "discuss immediately concrete and specific measures to guarantee the neutrality of Cambodia, [either] bilaterally or in an international frame work. " But Tho abruptly dismissed any suggestion of neutralization or of a conference. He emphasized that "it was his people's destiny not merely to take over South Viet Nam but to dominate the whole of Indochina. The boasts were made in secret, but the military moves that expressed these ambitions were plain to see." The moves began in February 1970, when the North Vietnamese launched an offensive on the Plain of Jars in Laos. On March 16 Le Duc Tho turned down an immediate de-escalation in Laos as well as in—or from—Cambodia.
From an inexhaustible national masochism there sprang the folklore that American decisions triggered the Cambodian nightmare, and the myth survives even today when the Vietnamese, without the excuse of American provocation but with barely a whimper of world protest, have finally fulfilled the ambition of conquering the whole of Indochina. The military responses we made were much agonized over and in our view minimal if we were to conduct a retreat that did not become a rout. Hanoi's insatiable quest for hegemony—not America's hesitant and ambivalent response—is the root cause of Cambodia's ordeal. The persistence of the image of American officials plotting the overthrow of neutralist Prince Sihanouk in Cambodia and plunging deeper into war in Laos as well as Cambodia illustrates the prevalence of emotion over reality. By the middle of April, before we had undertaken any significant action, Sihanouk had irrevocably joined forces with the Communists, the North Vietnamese