The World

His main enemy could not believe it: ‘Nixon’s in a difficult position,’ said Brezhnev, chatting to Castro, ‘but we think he’ll get himself out of the problem. He has Kissinger, that cunning guy, he’ll help him.’ Castro hated the president – ‘Nixon’s a son of a bitch,’ he said – but Brezhnev was so sympathetic he wrote to Nixon: ‘We see how tendentiously and shamelessly your opponents manipulate this or that … I can’t say it all. I think you understand everything the way I want you to understand it.’ Brezhnev never sent the letter, but Nixon, losing even Republican support in Congress, faced imminent impeachment. On the night before he resigned, he asked Kissinger to kneel and pray.

On 9 August 1974, he resigned: ‘Sometimes I’ve succeeded, sometimes I’ve failed, but always I’ve taken heart from what Theodore Roosevelt once said about the man in the arena, “whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood …”’

BROTHER NO. 1 AND THE GANG OF FOUR

Watching from Beijing, the ageing Mao sympathized with Nixon, musing on the fall of emperors. Yet he was disappointed by the results of his American detente, grumbling to Kim Il-sung that Kissinger (secretary of state for the new President Ford) was ‘a bad man’ who had used China to seduce Moscow. He needed to protect his revolution but time was short; his henchmen Kang Sheng and Zhou Enlai were dying of cancer; Lin was dead; but he had his wife, ‘the scorpion’ Jiang Qing. He promoted her and her epigones, whom he nicknamed the Gang of Four. Of these he favoured a suave Shanghai security guard turned Red Guard leader, the thirty-seven-year-old Wang Hongwen, whom he appointed vice-chairman, his heir apparent.

Yet even Mao realized that the Gang lacked the authority to rule China, so he brought back Deng Xiaoping – Little Cannon – to command the army. As Mao, diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s Disease, started to wither and choke, he still micromanaged the leadership, refusing to allow Zhou any surgery for his cancer. The dying Zhou pressured Mao into appointing Deng first vice-premier, something Mao resented.^*

Mao waited his moment to again unleash the Scorpion while celebrating the triumph of another of his vicious protégés, Pol Pot, bizarrely backed by ex-king Sihanouk.

On 17 April 1975, the young fighters of the Khmer Rouge, wearing black pyjamas and red scarves, emerged out of the jungle to occupy the elegant and Frenchified capital Phnom Penh, which resembled a sinking ship as the Americans choppered out, the government fled and the last premier was beheaded. The Khmer Rouge – only 68,000 of them – immediately ordered the capital’s 370,000 people to leave within three days. On 23 April, Pol Pot arrived in a deserted Phnom Penh.

Pol Pot, forty-five years old, ascetic, soft-spoken and neurotic, a fan of French poetry, was ‘very likeable, really nice, friendly’, recalled a comrade, ‘very sensible’. Formed by years of clandestine life in the jungles, ‘he’d never blame you or scold you’, usually holding a fan like the Buddhist monks who had taught him, yet he was a micromanaging fanatic obsessed with a vision of radical revolution to outpace even his patron Mao. General secretary of the Party since 1963, Pol led a tiny cabal of fanatical teachers so secretive that he rarely used a name, usually just Brother No. 1 or Brother No. 87, and so tight-knit that he and Brother No. 3, his old friend from Paris, Ieng Sary, were married to sisters Khieu Thirith and Khieu Ponnary, privileged daughters of a judge, whom they met at their private lycée before the sisters departed to study Shakespeare at the Sorbonne. Their Paris friend, another teacher Son Sen – Brother No. 89 – ran the secret police the Santebal (Peacekeepers) while his teacher wife ran education. This sixsome of homicidal pedagogues dominated Angkar – the Organization, the faceless government. Together, aided by the veteran intellectual Khieu Samphan, No. 4, they planned to forge ‘a precious model for humanity’ by murdering all educated and privileged classes, emptying the capitalistic cities and forcing Cambodians to return to a pre-industrial classless society in a Year Zero of Democratic Kampuchea. ‘We’ll burn the old grass,’ said Pol, ‘and the new will grow.’ Two and a half million people trekked out of the cities, 20,000 died or were killed on the way, with executions starting immediately.