“Assisted by radical congressmen like Ron Dellums and Bella Abzug, Hayden set up a caucus in the Capitol building where he lectured congressional staffers on the need to end American aid. He directed his attention to Cambodia as well, lobbying for an accommodation with the Khmer Rouge guerrillas. When Nixon resigned over Watergate, it provided all the leverage Hayden and his activists needed. The Democrats won the midterm elections, bringing to Washington a new group of legislators who were determined to undermine the settlement that Nixon and Kissinger had achieved. The aid was cut, the Saigon regime fell, and the Khmer Rouge marched into the Cambodian capital. In the two years that followed, the victorious Communists killed more Indochinese than had been killed on both sides in all 13 years of the anti-Communist war.
It was the bloodbath that our opponents, the anti-Communist defenders of America’s role in Southeast Asia, had predicted. But for the left there would be no looking back. Baez’s appeal proved to be the farthest it was possible for them to go, which was not very far. The appeal did not begin to suggest that antiwar activists needed to reassess the role they had played in making these tragedies inevitable. Ironically, it was Hayden who eventually came closest to such self-recognition: “What continues to batter my sense of morality and judgment,” he wrote in Reunion, “is that I could not even imagine that the worst stereotype of revolutionary madness was becoming a reality. Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge became the Stalins and Hitlers of my lifetime, killing hundreds of thousands of people for being ‘educated’ or ‘urban,’ for attracting the paranoid attention of a secret police who saw conspiracies behind every failure of the grand plan to be achieved. Most Western estimates settle on 1.5 million killed.” But having acknowledged those facts and his confusion over them, he could go no farther, and had no genuine second thoughts. The terrible result, which he had worked so hard to make possible, failed to prompt a reassessment of the people who had predicted the bloodbath if the Communists were to win and whose anti-Communist policies he had opposed: “None of this persuades me that Nixon and Kissinger were right.”
Excerpt From: Horowitz, David. “The Black Book of the American Left.” Encounter Books, 2013-11-04. iBooks.
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