The particulars of impeachment
January 27th marks the 50th anniversary of the Paris Peace Accords marking the ultimate US withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Historians, however, are still learning about the full scope of the US’s interference in South East Asia. Carolyn Woods Eisenberg’s new book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger and the Wars in Southeast Asia incorporates the most wide-ranging use of declassified documents related to the wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and the crimes that lead to President Richard Nixon’s impeachment.
It was viewed as an awesome responsibility. For members of the House Judiciary Committee, whatever they had said about Richard Nixon in the past, whether in anger or admiration, a decision to approve articles of impeachment weighed heavily. If approved, it would go to the full House of Representatives for a vote; and if the vote was in favor of impeachment, then the US Senate would decide whether the president was guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” While theirs was only the first step in the process, members of the Judiciary Committee had strong reasons to believe that what they collectively decided could determine the fate of the president of the United States. More than a century had passed since the last time Congress had entertained such a possibility. And it was no small thing to unseat a president — especially Richard Nixon, who in his re-election effort had carried every state in the union but one.….
Given the weight of evidence, it was no surprise that a majority of the committee voted in favor of the first three articles: Article I, which accused the president of personally acting to obstruct justice in the Watergate case; Article II charging him with persistent misuse of his authority in upholding the country’s laws; and Article III faulting him for defying subpoenas of his records and withholding other evidence pertinent to the impeachment process.[i] With their passage, it became unlikely that Richard Nixon would finish out his term of office.
Cast into oblivion were two other articles of impeachment, which were rejected by a majority on the committee. One of these had relatively narrow significance — the accusation that the president had underpaid federal income tax and accepted government financing of improvements to his personal homes. But Article IV had a much wider reach and sparked intense debate among committee members. Introduced by Representative John Conyers of Michigan, it charged the president with “the submission to the Congress of false and misleading statements concerning the existence, scope and nature of American bombing operations in Cambodia in derogation of the power of the Congress to declare war, to make appropriations and to raise and support armies.”
For some Americans, any reference to Cambodia could evoke deep emotions. The uproar surrounding the president’s decision to send troops in April 1970 had produced the largest antiwar protest of Nixon’s first term, culminating in an explosion of dissent and some violence on college campuses, most memorably the shooting and deaths of four students at Kent State University.
For some Americans, any reference to Cambodia could evoke deep emotions.
The US invasion of Cambodia, which had been publicly announced, was not the primary focus of the proposed article. Instead, it was the fourteen months of covert bombing of Cambodia that Nixon had ordered prior to the ground invasion. During this period, B-52 bombers had launched 3,695 attacks on that country, despite the president’s repeated insistence that the United States had never intervened there prior to the invasion.[ii]…
While members of the Judiciary Committee were casting their historic votes, the New York Times published a set of articles by Sydney Schanberg, who was reporting on the ground in Cambodia. Five years after President Nixon had ordered the bombing of that country, and four and a half years after the overthrow of its head of state, Prince Sihanouk, Cambodia was ravaged by the civil war that had resulted from those events. Writing from the town of Oudong, Schanberg described the aftermath of a battle between the government and the brutal insurgents known as the Khmer Rouge. “Forests have been mowed down, schools, pagodas, mosques and hospitals have been flattened.”[iii] The same was true of nearby towns Prek Kdam and Kompong Luong, and the villages in between.
Many of the 20,000 inhabitants of Oudang were captured by the rebels when they retreated into the jungle. The rest had escaped to the capital of Phnom Penh. Schanberg described the appalling conditions in this once beautiful capital city. Thousands of homeless children roamed its streets, begging for food. Five years earlier, Phnom Penh had a population of 600,000, but the mass arrival of refugees had swelled that number to more than two million, vastly exceeding the capacity of the residents to absorb them:
Some have wood or plastic as lean- to covers to keep off the weather and some have straw mats to lie on. Others simply live in the open, sleeping in their dirty, tattered clothes on pieces of cardboard. Garbage is often piled nearby, and rats occasionally slither over sleepers.[iv]
Illness was naturally on the increase. In addition to dysentery and tuberculosis, refugees had a common vitamin deficiency called speuk, which caused a progressive loss of sensation in feet and legs until the person could no longer walk.
With political events of such magnitude occurring in Washington, few people were focused on events in Oudang, Pred Kdam, Kompong Luong, or even Phnom Penh. Ignoring the life-altering consequences of America’s war in Southeast Asia was not unusual for Americans. In voting down IV, the members of the Judiciary Committee effectively sanctioned that willful ignorance and denial and ensured that President Nixon would not face responsibility for the tragic events his invasion had set in motion. All the articles of impeachment that would be brought before the House were connected to the domestic crimes brought to light by Watergate. This meant that constitutional issues of the gravest importance would be overlooked in any impeachment proceeding….
Shameful as the Watergate offenses were, they were hardly the most serious crimes. Yet they have largely determined the public’s historical understanding. The resulting amnesia has left intact many of the ideas, practices, and institutions that over decades have damaged the United States while inflicting needless suffering on foreign nations and people.
After the fact, one could reasonably argue that the particulars of the impeachment articles made no practical difference — what mattered was that the Judiciary Committee had found President Nixon guilty and unfit for office, and this finding had caused him to resign even before the House of Representatives could commence its deliberations. Yet by excluding foreign military activities from these articles, the committee framed how the events of that time have been remembered ever since. Although the illegal actions of Nixon’s domestic officials received additional emphasis, the role of National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger was effectively spared congressional scrutiny or critique.
Shameful as the Watergate offenses were, they were hardly the most serious crimes. Yet they have largely determined the public’s historical understanding. The resulting amnesia has left intact many of the ideas, practices, and institutions that over decades have damaged the United States while inflicting needless suffering on foreign nations and people.
[i] Full Text of Articles of Impeachment, July 27,1974, https:// waterg ate.info/ impe achm ent/ artic les- of- impe achm ent
[ii] William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979), 19– 35; Seymour Hersh, “Secret Raids on Cambodia Before ’70 Totaled 3500,” New York Times, July 18,1973.
[iii] Sydney Schanberg, “Town is Devastated in Cambodian ‘Victory,’” New York Times, July 28, 1974.
[iv] “Schanberg, “Phnom Penh Streets Home for Thousands,” New York Times, July 29, 1974.
Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is a Professor of US History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944–49, winner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and the Herbert Hoover Book Prize and a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Book Prize.
