My Essay (APUSH 2020-21) "The Devastating Ramifications of Operation MENU and Related Campaigns"12/9/2020 This essay contains a lot of themes which have been prevalent in my global studies journey, polar power, deception, cynicism, Vietnam and Cambodia, and Liberalism and Globalism's role in everyone's lives. Life today is drastically different than 50 years ago but our leaders are still often caught playing the same old games.
In March of 1969, President Richard Nixon secretly authorized the United States’ use of Boeing B-52 Bombers to carpet bomb rural Cambodia in a covert effort code named Operation MENU. Over the next fourteen months, the United States would drop over a hundred thousand tons of ordnance on the Fishhook region of eastern Cambodia, kept secret by a limited number of officials, generals, and senators, and kept hidden from Congress for the next four years. President Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, saw success at the beginning of the operation, but two years later the illegality surrounding the campaign caught up to the Nixon administration. From the wiretapping of Kissinger’s aids to the string of faked telephone records, Operation MENU was treachery in the name of national defense. One key article in the New York Times was published on the matter in 1969, and, while it sparked limited attention, it led to the illegal wiretapping of more than two dozen people. Despite limited press coverage and outcry from the public, Operation MENU normalized the illegal actions that would eventually lead to the Watergate Scandal and the impeachment of President Nixon and helped radicalize the Khmer Rouge insurgency which would go on to kill more than one-fourth of the Cambodian population. Beginning with President Lyndon B. Johnson, the United States bombed Cambodia as early as 1965, but still less than one-hundred times before March of 1969. The Vietnam War raged in the late 1960s when President Johnson authorized the bombing of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was a supply route that ran through Laos and Cambodia used by North Vietnamese soldiers. In 1965, Cambodia severed all ties with the United States while the head of state and king of Cambodia, Norodom Sihanouk, continued to stress Cambodia’s neutrality in the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese soon took advantage of this neutrality and occupied border areas of Cambodia near the port of Sihanoukville. Sihanouk drifted leftward in his policies, eventually allowing the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong to operate in the East and North of Cambodia. However, following Johnson, the United State’s Cambodian bombing was promptly scaled-up shortly after Nixon took office with Operation Menu. Over the course of the secret campaign, named MENU because each mission was titled after some sort of meal: Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Supper, and Dessert, the United States dropped thousands of tons of bombs in Eastern Cambodia. As the resistance of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong to United States intervention continued to increase throughout the 1960s and the United States became more concerned with withdrawing its troops from Vietnam, the United States began to scale up its bombing operation of Cambodia, and by 1973, half of Cambodia had experienced some sort of bombings. In February of 1969, Nixon met with Kissinger to propose a new, covert bombing operation in Cambodia. At the time, United States General Creighton Abrams, in charge of operations in South Vietnam, strongly believed that the United States Military needed to increase its bombing of supply routes and Vietnamese bases hidden close beyond the Cambodian-Vietnam border. In an effort to convince Nixon, he stated that there were few Cambodian Civilians in the area, which was the first of many lies associated with Operation MENU. By March 17th, Kissinger’s military aide, Alexander Haig, devised a plan for the carpet bombing, and soon afterward, Operation Breakfast, the first mission of Operation MENU, began. Of course, Nixon knew any bombing of Cambodia would violate international law and treaties, namely the Geneva Convention, due to Cambodia’s neutrality. In a meeting soon after he approved Operation MENU, Nixon even asked Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and Secretary of State William Rogers whether or not the United States should bomb Cambodia but by then, Operation Breakfast had already begun. The desperation Nixon had for the United States to win the war revealed itself as the MENU Campaign continued to devastate the Cambodian Countryside. B-52 bomber planes reigned terror on Cambodia for more than three years after Nixon approved Operation MENU. Quickly after the bombing runs ended small raids of United States and South Vietnamese Soldiers were permitted to cross the Eastern Cambodian Border and survey possible hidden enemy encampments for later B-52 bombings. Over 3,600 B-52 sorties, or dispatches of a combat aircraft, were flown over the six missions. To prevent leaks of information regarding Operation MENU, an elaborate system was created by the masterminds of the operation, which was a product of the combination of Nixon’s determination to win the war in Vietnam without public dismay and Cambodia’s neutrality. When the operation was first proposed, only a select few individuals had any knowledge of it at the top of their departments, and even fewer had any say in the operation. The chain of command went as follows: General Abrams, at the start of the chain, spoke to Admiral John McCain Jr, who then spoke to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the advisors of the United States Department of Defense, who then consulted the president. With all of their go-ahead, missions would be flown out of the Strategic Air Command Base in Biên Hòa, near Phnom Penh. At the radar site of the airbase, Major Hal Knight relayed the Cambodian targets to the pilots and navigators who flew the sorties and personally destroyed any documents associated with the bombings, covering up what might be searched for by suspecting officials. Accompanying the chain of approval, an elaborate dual reporting system was created by Colonel Raymond Sitton. Each mission group of B-52 pilots for each sortie was briefed together on their targets as if they were in South Vietnam. After the mass briefings, selected pilots were briefed again by Lieutenant General Alvin Gillem who told them to wait and receive instructions coming from ground radar sites in Vietnam that used IBM 360/65 computers that in the final moments of their flights would essentially take control of the B-52s’ flying and pilot them to the computer inputted coordinates in Cambodia, their real targets, as well as calculate when to drop the ordnance. When they returned home, the crews that bombed Cambodia reported their data as if they flew over South Vietnam and that data was accessible by departments like the CIA. With all of the confidentiality surrounding the missions, the New York Times article on the MENU Bombings shocked the Nixon Administration and provoked a totally illegal response. On May 9th, 1969, the New York Times published an article by correspondent William Beecher on the B-52 bombings of Cambodia titled Raids in Cambodia By U.S. Unprotested. In his article, Beecher outlined the three factors that lead to the approval of the carpet bombing being that many military men believed that the weapons and ammunition used by the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were coming through Cambodia, for the bombings to serve as a message to Hanoi that the Nixon administration was willing to take more military risks than the Johnson administration, and the worry that Prince Norodom Sihanouk could not dislodge the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese then entrenched in a few northern and eastern provinces of Cambodia. The article also covered the refusal of Nixon to allow United States battalions to follow up air strikes in Cambodia to establish better relations with the Prince, as well as covering the bombing tactic utilized on the entrenched three Vietnamese divisions operating around the Cambodian-Vietnamese border. Lastly, Beecher noted that the MENU bombing was feasible because Sihanouk hinted that he would not oppose these bombings because there was a small likelihood of them expanding the war further and that Cambodian Army officers had been helping Americans and the South Vietnamese coordinate their actions. Although the article seemed relatively tame and brief, the response it provoked from the Nixon administration showed the large craving of Nixon to come out of Vietnam with victory. When the article ran, Kissinger, under the order of Nixon, immediately pursued the source of Beecher’s information, due to its highly confidential nature. When Kissinger heard about the article he immediately suspected two people as the leakers, secretaries Melvin Laird and William Rogers. To figure out how Beecher obtained his information, John Hoover, the Director of the FBI, was commissioned to track down the source. In the beginning, Nixon and Hoover both suspected Morton Halperin, one of Kissinger’s aides, and at dinnertime on May tenth, Halperin’s phone was tapped. Of course, wiretapping was and is illegal without a warrant under the fourth amendment. But Nixon and Hoover did not stop there, first by making sure no records were taken of any of the taps and second by going and tapping more than a dozen others associated with the operation or investigation. These people included more of Kissinger’s aides, Laird’s aides, and Joseph Kraft, a DC journalist who would later testify to the Senate about his wiretapping and the United States’ Cambodian gamble of 1970. The taps remained for years, but brought no hard evidence of any source for Hoover to go off of, so despite the massive breach of privacy installed to protect national security, the only true revelation that came out of the wiretapping was that Nixon was more and more creating an atmosphere around his administration akin to a police state, where the privacy for many was sacrificed for the personal interests of a few individuals. Those individuals were, of course, Nixon and Kissinger, but specifically, Nixon. He, the most powerful individual on Earth at the time, was extremely forceful in getting his way, as shown by his authorization of illegal activities such as burning records and wiretapping, and both actions later played a significant role in the Watergate scandal. He even partially admitted his illegal actions in an infamous quote, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” Three years after the beginning of the bombings, very few Washington officials had any knowledge of Operation MENU. Save for six congressmen who were informed of the campaign in 1969 because Nixon believed they would remain silent about the operation and could be counted on to accept the secret extension of the war without question. That would change in 1973 when Major Knight testified before the Committee on Armed Services about his strategic role in the operation. Under oath, he went into detail about the chain of command and system used to plan, coordinate, and execute the carpet bombings, as well as speaking about his letter to Senator William Proxmire that January. This letter, according to Knight, questioned the retiring of a General over the falsification of strike reports in South Vietnam and inquired about the policy that led to Operation MENU. The irony of his letter, as pointed out by Senator Harold Hughes, was that Knight had admitted a crime, the falsification of records, and simultaneously he was adhering to his senior officials’ orders, a paradoxical position which exemplified the dubious grounds that the officials, Kissinger, Nixon, and the Generals, used to carry out their secret bombings. What Knight depicted during the testimony painted the entire operation as beyond highly classified and as a rewriting of history, for as Hughes pointed out, “Once [Knight] attached the false computer page to the report there would never [be] a way of finding out the record of the bombing in Cambodia.” This session would not be the last time Operation MENU was brought before congress, for in October of 1974, a motion of impeachment was created against Nixon by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee John Conyers, who cited the secret bombing of Cambodia as a violation of the people’s trust, Nixon’s accountability, and a bypass of “Sections 7 and 8 of Article I, which give to the Congress the authority to make appropriations and declare war.” While the MENU bombings remained secret, the public was given a much greater view of the United States’ Cambodian strategy in early 1970. A major change to the United States policy regarding Cambodia in the context of the Vietnam War came when Prince Sihanouk was deposed by Lon Nol, a pro-American General. When Sihanouk was out of Cambodia visiting Moscow, the Cambodian National Assembly voted to overthrow him in a coup d’Etat and general Lon Nol became the new Head of State. Shortly afterward, while in exile in Beijing, Sihanouk allied himself with the North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, and the Khmer Rouge, a Communist Cambodian organization and party. With a new government in Phnom Penh, the North Vietnamese increasingly stationed soldiers in Cambodia and began aiding the Khmer Rouge, which had plunged into a civil war against Lon Nol’s army by March of 1970. Quickly after the infighting in Cambodia began, Nixon eagerly brought the United States into the conflict. The secrecy surrounding everything that the United States did in Cambodia would be largely lifted in April of 1970 with Nixon’s announcement of the Cambodian Incursion, a large-scale military operation to combat the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese in the Fishhook region. Through a broadcasted speech on live television, Nixon announced that “to protect our men who are in Vietnam, and to guarantee the continued success of our withdrawal and Vietnamization programs, I have concluded that the time has come for action.” That action was attacks carried out by combined South Vietnamese and American forces to clear out enemy communist sanctuaries on the Cambodian-Vietnam border. For the first time since the beginning of the Vietnam war, the public heard about any of the United States’ bombing of Cambodia from an official source, and despite it being five years since the true beginning of the bombing, there was significant outrage over the decision. Large protests struck University campuses after the announcement and even resulted in the killings of four students at Kent State in that May, known as the Kent State Massacre. More and more Nixon’s approval rating dropped as the war continued despite significant calls for peace, but his drive for victory would not quell. Some of the most impactful moments of Nixon’s presidency came close to the very end of it when the web of deception that covered many of his administration’s actions was massively uncovered during the Watergate scandal. Much like during the aftermath of Beecher’s article, wiretapping was used again by Nixon and his accomplices when men broke into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and attempted to re-wiretap phone lines. This wiretapping would be unveiled much quicker than those during MENU because the burglars were caught and because Nixon got so wrapped up in trying to silence the investigation of the break-in that he obstructed justice and abused his presidential power. What worked during the MENU coverup was that the secrecy was maintained, at least in the short term, so when Watergate was plotted, Nixon and others involved in the Watergate Scandal were willing to rely on the same deception and manipulation used during MENU. But, of course, they did not get away with it again, and Nixon was eventually impeached for obstruction of justice. The bombing of Cambodia continued past the Watergate scandal though, and so did the casualties continue. Ultimately, much of the United States’ bombing halted in June of 1973 when Congress voted to ban all funds for military activity in Indochina. Experts still speculate on the casualties of the United State’s bombing in Cambodia, with numbers varying from 50,000 to 600,000 between the start of the MENU bombings in 1969 and the end of Operation Freedom Deal, which was the name of the operation that continued the United States’ bombing in Cambodia in May of 1970 after MENU, which ended in 1974. However, it was clear to every researcher that a significant amount of those casualties and fatalities were civilians. The sad fact is that the effort to destroy enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia was largely ineffective and many innocents were killed because of indiscriminate bombings by the United States. The roughly 100,000 tons of bombs according to the Pentagon dropped during MENU not only failed their purpose because the Ho-Chi Minh trail and other Vietnamese supply routes were still active after the operation, but they harmed and killed many innocent Cambodian civilians. In numerous accounts from the villagers, peasants, and soldiers living in the parts of Cambodia that experienced carpet-bombing during MENU and further operations, the fright and terror from the massive B-52 bombings were incredible. One account from a civilian in 1973 after a town in Luong Cambodia was accidentally bombed by an American B-52 showed just how damaging United States bombing could be for innocent Cambodians. In an interview from the New York Times months after the event, townspeople spoke about their experience after the mistake bombing as traumatic and harmful to their health, as well as the serious fear of another mistake. In the 1970s, Cambodia became a battleground of many sides, each with their own motives. Through the Cambodian civil war, the Vietnam War next door, and the United States’ Incursion, the Cambodian people were being torn apart, and many were losing their lives to wars that had no benefits for them. When the Khmer Rouge started to take hold around Cambodia, a significant portion of their members were enticed to join by the propaganda created by the rebels of the bombings. Nixon’s bombs were meant to defeat the ‘communists,’ not strengthen them, but when the Khmer Rouge took power over Cambodia in April of 1975, it made perfect sense that a large part of their rise could be attributed to the radicalization of the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians affected by the bombs. By the time Lon Nol took power, the Khmer Rouge had gained significant influence in the countryside, especially where the United States had bombed during Operation MENU and then later invaded during the Cambodian Incursion. With the fall of Phnom Penh in April of 1975, Cambodia, for the time being, had a new leader, Pol Pot, who in 1976 recreated Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea and officiated the Cambodian genocide, the persecution and killing of around two million Cambodians to attempt to create an egalitarian agrarian society. Thus, not only did the secret bombings damn those who orchestrated them by their own normalization of deceit to Congress and the American public, but the bombings also indirectly aided an organization that would go on to commit one of the most horrific genocides in human history, a result Nixon and Kissinger never anticipated. When Nixon was impeached and resigned in 1973, he left behind a legacy of lies, falsifications, and illegal surveillance: today those themes have remained in the Oval Office, and frequently Americans hear about the people in power blatantly lying to the public, going so far as to fire those who renounce or disagree with them. Unlike in the 1970s, today we live in a society in which information spreads rapidly and the majority of us have the resources to follow the constant stream of news. While it is seemingly easier to discern what we should be concerned about, it is equally easy for that information to be manipulated, just like how Nixon and his accomplices manipulated Congress and lied to the public by sustaining the destruction of incriminating documents, attempting to defame leakers, and by hiding any incriminating evidence they could during Operation MENU. Bibliography Beecher, William. "CAMBODIA RAIDS GO UNPROTESTED." New York Times (NYC), May 9, 1969. Ben, Taylor. "Bombs over Cambodia." The Walrus, October 12, 2006. Accessed December 5, 2020. https://thewalrus.ca/2006-10-history/. Bombing in Cambodia: Hearings, Ninety-third Congress, first session., Ninety-third Congress, first session 8-11 (1973) (statement of Hal Knight). Bunch, Will. "'When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.'" 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