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Yet every step of the way, the Prince protested that he did not want his country to go Communist. He announced that he would replace American aid with that of another Western power, his old colonial master, France—but he also sent an arms-buying mission to Peking. Three weeks ago, not long after he expressed the hope that "the United States and Cambodia would soon be friends again," came a high point: in Pnompenh, mobs urged on by a Ministry of Information sound truck stormed the American and British embassies. They left the USIS office looking as if it had been hit by a tornado, forced the evacuation of 63 U.S. dependents.
His radio attacks on the U.S. and its allies, broadcast for domestic consumption, became so agitated that the U.S. State Department refuses to release monitored transcripts to the press so as not to aggravate the situation. Says one Washington hand: "We are now in the preposterous position where it is easier to get intelligence estimates of Soviet missile capacity than transcripts of a Sihanouk broadcast."
Yet there is method in Sihanouk's behavior. Even his enemies concede that he is a sincere patriot, obsessed by the desire to keep Cambodia independent. The closer the U.S. draws to his old enemies, the Vietnamese and the Thais, the more he feels he must swing to the other side in order to balance matters. He is probably serious when he says he does not really want the victory of Communism in Southeast Asia, because Cambodian independence depends on the continuing, balanced enmity between Communism and the West. Says he: "The day all Viet Nam is reunited under the Communists and Thailand also joins the Socialist camp, on that day we will be in danger of death."
That, he insists, is why he wants an international guarantee of Cambodian neutrality. "Suppose one day your camp is defeated," he told TIME Correspondent Eric Pace last week. "I apologize, but it is my conviction it will be. If I have nothing to show that we are a legally neutralist country with legal acceptance by an international conference, how can we survive? I don't trust the Communists too much. No, no. But recognition is much better than not having it." On another occasion he said: "Communism is inevitable in Asia. It is to be hoped that China will not absorb us geographically. At worst, we will be a sort of Hungary, but we will keep our name, our flag and our identity."
Wayward Boy-King. However such opinions may strike the West, they convince Sihanouk's own people. Of all the rulers of Southeast Asia, he is probably the most popular inside his own country, partly because he has an aura both of divine kingship and grass-roots politics. Sihanouk succeeded to the ancient Khmer throne in 1941 at 19, when the French were still firmly in control of Cambodia. Although his name, from the Sanskrit, means "lionhearted," he was a pampered prince, fussed over by a covey of nannies; not long ago, to illustrate the importance of milk to a conference of his economic advisers, he introduced them to his old wet nurse.