THIS BOOK is an attempt to examine the Nixon administration s uses of<br >power. It tries to demonstrate how decisions made in Washington af-<br >fected the lives of one particular and distant people. It is， in some ways，<br >a look at the foreign-policy side of Watergate.<br > During the early seventies Cambodia was often referred to as a<br >"sideshow." Journalists who covered the war there used the term with<br >irony; in Washington some officials employed it almost as a matter of<br >policy. It was apt enough. The main arena was Vietnam， and it was there<br >that attention was concentrated. Cambodia was always off stage， away<br >from the light. Many of the decisions regarding the country were made in<br >secret， others were presented inaccurately; inquiry was discouraged and<br >exactly what was happening remained obscure.<br > From 1970 onward I reported the war in Indochina for The Sunday<br >Times of London and other papers. I regret that I too saw Cambodia as<br >peripheral and was there for only one week; those who knew the country<br >well may find that aspects that they loved are missing from these pages.<br >In 1972 I covered the North Vietnamese offensive in South Vietnam. and<br >then the Harkness Foundation gave me a scholarship to go and learn<br >something about the United States. I became a Congressional Fellow of<br >the American Political Science Association and worked on Capitol Hill<br >through much of 1973. I also wrote for The Sunday Times， was the Wash-<br >ington correspondent of the New Statesman and of the Far Eastern Eco-<br >11<br >