Reflections from Bernard Kalb on Sihanouk

Cambodia's SihanoukThis isn't a Q&A, but it's definitely worth reading. Bernard Kalb (brother and uncle of Marvin and Deborah) covered the late Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk for many years. Here are some reflections from Bernard Kalb on Sihanouk over the years.

ah, the monseigneur!  

he's got to be chuckling happily, reading through the outpouring of stories, memoirs, column, our voh recollections reviewing the zigzaging panorama of his life, the teen-ager appointed king and then, in a cascade of huge ups, downs and outs over the years, emerging with almost god-like status among his "little buddhas," as he called his cambodians--and there's that one, let's not forget, that hugely terrible, backfiring decision thinking he could manipulate the murderous khmer rouge but only to be outwitted by the KR, their medieval madness resulting in the killing of almost one-fourth of the country's population at the time, almost two million people; overjoyed, he's gotta be, as he discovers that after all these years of oblivion, lost to the world, he's back on the front page.  it took death to make a comeback but to the impresario of cambodia, the great showman with a careening career, who played the game of always being on stage as a camouflage for his diplomatic gambling to try to keep his cambodia happy, intact  and unmolested, his now moving on to nirvana has got to be just another performance.

and how remembered he is!  

when was the last time there were so many stories pouring into the voh…about someone who once was and, for decades, wasn't?  royalists, dictators, reformers, presidents, politicians--all those VIPs of varying VI that we'd met during the days we lucky few were covering southeast asia; most of those characters have moved on with hardly a syllable, come and gone, farewelled with a phrase or two, unremembered.  not so the whirlwind from phnom penh:  the outpouring flows on--and why?  was it his personality?  charisma?  his calculated clownish offerings?  his diplomatic exhibitionism?  his sheer unorthodoxy--and a king yet?  what was it that yielded this ongoing rich rush of sihanoukiana?   written without--am i right?--without referring back to old notes, all of it still so vivid half a century later, all at the very tip of our memory.  

reading through all the voh stories, the published obits too, it is all of the above, of course--plus a big plus: the reality that the world-famous objectivity so worshipped by journalists has been penetrated by a sneaking streak of…affection?admiration?  maddening admiration?  empathetic understanding? exasperated appreciation?…jim pringle, elizabeth becker, tony paul, all the rest, where are you when i need you?  HELP, please!  all that maneuvering sihanouk to try to escape the buffeting and competing ideological winds of the cold war, to keep his country from being sucked into the war next door, that double-edged civil war and proxy war between the big guys. no fun then, was it, being the little guy, king of a country born into a turbulent world, just taking its first baby steps as an independent country.  and please, gentlemen, please don't describe cambodia as "little"!  or "small"!  or "tiny"!  do you remember those unmatchable news conferences where he would throw a theatrical tantrum and lecture reporters on not using those diminutives--or risk their next visa.

to those of us based in saigon, a chance to do a story next-door in cambodia was an escape from the endless war in vietnam, from the bombings and the napalm and the kia.  sihanouk's country was, at that time, a surreal relief despite the escalating tensions just behind the facade of unity; the sight of that giant clock built into the grassy knoll in central phnom penh proclaimed that you had just entered a different world, a refuge from the killing next door.  couldn't wait to get the poolside of the hotel royal and order a cheese souffle for lunch and watch the air france hostesses tip their toes into the tropical water.  the war?  what war?  a few of us got a chance to stop by the palace for an interview with the prince, and there'd always be a press conference featuring the ex-king that would always be half news, half entertainment.  once, in addition to the "little" lecture, he startled the world with a surprise announcement that the actor peter o'toole had just been written into cambodia's "liste noir."  from that very moment, peter o'toole would no longer get a visa to the country!  pourquoi?  because the actor had, in sihanouk's view, committed crimes in belittling cambodia in the movie "lord jim," filmed in and around angkor wat.  case closed!  no appeal!

Bernard Kalbbut it wasn't all comedy; there was anxiety behind the giggle. sihanouk shrewdly using those news conferences to alert the world that cambodia was facing a variety of dangers, reading aloud what he described as top-secret cables.  "here i have in my hand," he'd sing, declassifying whatever it was he saw as a threat, hoping that going public would expose--and upend--any hostile action in advance.  indeed, all sorts of pressures surrounded sihanouk's efforts to keep his little, small and tiny cambodia on a neutralist course, trying to steer clear of the cold war, all tat diplomatic broken-field running of his--this, at a time when cambodia's territory was being violated by its neighbors and secretary of state john foster dulles was condemning "neutralism" as "immoral."  

all of us who were there, i'm sure, have our vignettes about sihanouk's fears about a hanoi that would ultimately win the war.  here's mine: 

it's the late sixties, best i remember, and sihanouk has traveled to battambang to inaugurate a new museum of the country's cultural treasures.  we--a bunch of reporters--went along, not so much to view the sculptured stone masterpieces but to get a chance to ask him about what action cambodia might take to destroy hanoi's ho chi minh trail that snaked through cambodian territory to feed military supplies to hanoi's allies in south viet nam.  the story had just broken, i think, of the secret us bombing of the trail--to which, to quote that deeply substantive becker-mydans obit in their great obit in the times, sihanouk "turned a blind eye…" 

the exact wording of his responses in the q and a with us--lots of words, to be sure; remember, we're talking sihanouk--is, after all these years, a bIt hazy but it came to, more or less, this: 

to our question about what cambodia can do to crack down on the north vietnamese, he replies, with wide-eyed disbelief, you expect us to find them?  us, with so little military.  you have five hundred thousand american soldiers in viet nam and YOU can't find them.

more of this--and then he gets to the point, to the heart of his strategy: one of these days, he says, you will leave viet nam and you will leave me with the vietnamese… 

that phrase--"you will leave me with the vietnamese"--is about as close as i can get to a recalled verbatim.  and did he shake his head when he expressed his barely hidden fear?  i can't recall.  did he use the word "abandonment?"  no, i don't think so.  but it seemed he was hoping that not taking any direct military action against the north vietnamese would by a kind of future life insurance for his country--if the north emerged as the winner.

but the visit wasn't all about war and peace.  with sihanouk as our guide, we visited the museum and one of the first things that struck me: so many of the dazzling figures of cambodian sculpture had no heads.   dazzle after dazzle: no heads!   torso after torso: no heads!

"the heads, monsigneur," i blurted, naively. "where are the heads?"  (i was then, i should confess, an amateur collector and my interest wasn't exactly disinterested.)  

"ah, monsieur buneekalb," he sang.  "the heads!  in london!  paris!  new york."

images of antique shops in london, paris and new york surged before my eyes.

finally, one or two quick adds--can't resist--and i will be outta here.  

about several visits to china in the seventies; one as a result of a cable exchange withe prince.  i'd queried him, from washington, about the possibility of doing a tv interview, he arranged for an invite to come to beijing.  the result was a 30 minute cbs news special; as of now, i can not find neither the exact date--somewhere in the seventies--nor a transcript but you don't have to be a genius to imagine sihanouk's delight to be once again front of a camera, sharing his geopolitical analysis with the world.  he was then, of course, living in the chinese capital, having been given asylum after a coup in 1970 that, plotted by a general backed  by the us, ousted him from power while he was traveling abroad.

during both visits, there were dinner invitations to sihanouk's palace; my second visit featured a sihanouk surprise--a cuisine surprise, i should add.   his menus were hand-written and i discovered that, for dessert, he was offering "peche a la bernie kalb"--but without the usual ice cream.  the french wuld have been shocked--but to an amused, crowded dinner table, sihanouk explained  that, during my first visit, i had declined eating ice cream.  i didn't at the time go into dietary details but the reason was jewish religious habit: not mixing ice cream with meat.   but sihanouk remembered and so, all these months later, maybe a whole year, he honored moi with a peche that was half missing.  "buneekalb doesn't like ice cream," he said, with a gurgle of a laugh.  

a moment, please.  memory suddenly knocks.  sihanouk again.  in his royal days, years before he is overthrown.  it's 1956, i'm brand-new in asia, barely unpacked, when i receive a cable from new york to abandon hong kong and hurry to phnom penh.  the chinese premier chou en-lai will be making a state visit to cambodia.  back in those frozen sino-american days, the possibility of even a glimpse, let alone a visa, of a chinese leader would cause a press corps to drop everything and start running, in this case, chou-wards, as cablese might put it.  so i ran.  chou-wards.

the closest i got to the chinese premier was on a cruise, hosted by the prince, along the broad tonle sap river that flows through the center of phnom penh.  it was a small ship of the  cambodian royal navy, which meant that the guests and the visitors were all thrown together, almost of us within talking distance.  sihanouk was--the word "flutter"  comes to mind, a  butterfly, wings outstretched--was fluttering about, oohing, ahing, cooing, the smiling gracious host radiating charm in all directions, anxious that any whim of his guests from up north be immediately gratified.  and there, just a few steps away from me, was the second most powerful man in china.  all i could think of was visa, visa, visa, how could i get a visa to china, which the chinese were not then issuing to american journalists.  but i could not even break through the circle of security guards surrounding sihanouk and his guest.  hopeless.  just then, a cambodian in some kind of fancy uniform happened to walk by.  "any  chance," i asked, thinking of how i might drown my frustration, "of your helping me get a glass of beer?"

the cambodian came to a full stop.  "sir," he proclaimed, shocked, "i am the commander-in-chief of the cambodian navy."

but if i failed, sihanouk did not.  he got what he want: a chance to play the china card against the vietnamese--and the united states.

and one more finally, please; about that 4,647,494-hour news conference that sihanouk gave in l979 at the great hall of the people in beijing.  well, maybe that is overstated but it really did run a record six hours.  it erupted not long after sihanouk and princess monique had been airlifted out of phnom penh by the chinese; they'd been under house arrest by the pol pot regime, and the chinese rescue was carried out in anticipation of a vietnamese invasion of cambodia.  the thrust of his oceanic comments was a denunciation of the khmer rouge and the vietnamese invasion.  to those of us who had seen hm in his royal heyday in phnom penh, it was obvious that sihanouk was back in his element, exploding with words as though making up for all the imposed silence he'd suffered while in house imprisonment in phnom penh. back on stage, he reveled in the excitement before the press crowd.  i remember leaving the conference at one point, returning to my hotel to file a tv story back to cbs news, and then returning to the great hall to discover, probaby not much to my astonishment, that the old pro was still going strong, taking one question after another, hungrily, on any issue, the nonstop ex-king.  inevitably, the conference limped to a close.  the great john roderick of the ap and i--both of us had met sihanouk in the late fifties--went up to the stage where he was still pouring forth; familiar faces we were, and he greeted us with that vast, almost shy, smile of his, almost gurgling with delight, his ams flung around us, perhaps remembering the once-upon-a-time glory in phnom penh.  all of this was captured on film, and i felt impelled to send a special message to cbs new york to explain the surprise embrace.

a final finally: i'm exhausted--and so permit me to skip a lot of the sihanouk saga.

stiil, there's the challenge of getting to the the essential sihanouk, to unravel the ultimate man despite all his maneuverings, diplomatic tight-rope walking, varied careers.  though he was prophetic that the us one day would "leave" viet nam, he was catastrophic in throwing his support to the khmer rouge.  but the ultimate sihanouk, right or wrong, always was driven by the a single motivation: how, in a world in turmoil, to safeguard, preserve, protect, guarantee the integrity of little, small, tiny cambodia.  is that enough to triumph over the terrifying, numbing sight of all those corpses on the killing fields of the kr?  that question still haunts, ineradicably whatever the answer, and in deciding, to keep in mind that the world of then isn't our world of today, the cold war now an item on scholars' shelves, the swirl of suspicion, fear, uncertainty in that part of the world at least on hold.  for now anyway.

all of this emerging in a panorama in my mind as i watched, just a night or two ago, a bbc tv report of the funeral procession of the prince through the streets of phnom penh, his body carried on a giant mythological creature, thousands of cambodians filling the streets, in awed silence, his little buddhas weeping.

the indelible monseigneur.  indeed.