    35

    By the early '70s, military failures were not our only pecking order

    problems.  We were showing signs of an unaccustomed financial

    vulnerability.  And our willingness to look world events squarely in the eye

    altered as well.

    While we still fought in Viet Nam, a guerrilla group called the Khmer

    Rouge waged war in Cambodia.  Aided by the North Vietnamese, these

    Marxist "freedom fighters" struggled violently to gain control of what had

    once been a pleasant, peaceful land.  Two years after our departure from Viet

    Nam, the Khmer Rouge finally achieved their goals.  They ousted the old

    regime and installed Communist zealot Pol Pot as prime minister.  The

    48-year-old idealist immediately set to work imposing his vision of freedom,

    peace and justice.  He executed those who didn't share his dedication to

    building a new society.  He emptied entire cities at gunpoint.  He sent his

    soldiers into hospitals, forcing the patients to pick up their beds and march to

    the fields.  He ordered college professors, doctors and civil servants into the

    countryside to help grow crops.  He turned schools into torture and

    extermination centers.  He had babies beaten to death, children's throats cut,

    old women nailed to the walls of their homes and burned alive, and

    pregnant women shot.  Then he heaped the bodies of his countrymen in

    thousands of mass graves.84

    By the time North Vietnamese invaders threw Pol Pot out in 1979,

    roughly three million Cambodians had been killed by bullets, forced labor or

    famine.  Nearly half country's population had died! 85

    What was the American reaction?  We didn't march in the streets, nor

    did our newspapers blare the tale in daily headlines.  Our moral leaders--our

    priests and rabbis--failed to protest.  And our university students did not

    demand that we cut off aid that might conceivably trickle into Pol Pot's

    hands.  Instead,  Newsweek went so far as  to deny that there were any

    atrocities.  So did The Sunday Times of London.  When a Sunday Times

    correspondent turned in a story explaining just how bad the plight of the

    Cambodians really was, the paper refused to print it.86  And leading

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