Webinar for the 50th anniversary of the end of US bombing in Cambodia

 50 Years Ago: The Actual End of US Combat

Thursday, August 3, 2 p.m. ET

View the webinar recording here    https://youtu.be/ireGit39Cm4

August 15, 1973 - The Forgotten US Exit from the Vietnam War: When the U.S. dropped its last bombs over Cambodia and ended active military engagement in the Vietnam War.

It's not a date that has been widely noted or remembered, but August 15, 1973 was a milestone in the American war in Indochina. On that date, in accordance with a congressional action shutting off funds for military actions in Southeast Asia, the U.S. stopped bombing in Cambodia, the last American combat operations relating to the Vietnam war.

Thus that date marked the actual end of direct U.S. military involvement in Indochina, though fighting between U.S.-supported government troops and Communist forces in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia would continue for nearly two more years. The August 1973 shutoff was also significant in that it was the first time Congress had exercised its fiscal power to end fighting while U.S. units were still engaged (earlier restrictions did not go into effect until the operations involved were already over).

To mark the approaching 50th anniversary of that event, the Vietnam Peace Commemoration Committee will present a panel discussion with:

• Elizabeth Becker, the Cambodia correspondent for the Washington Post in 1973-74, in Phnom Penh on the day the bombing ended

• John H. (Jack) Sullivan, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee staff and the author of many of that committee's reports on the wars and U.S. actions in Indochina

• Larry Levin, the executive director of the Coalition To Stop Funding the War, a lobbying group representing a number of religious, antiwar and civic organizations.

• Arnold R. Isaacs, moderator, an eyewitness in Vietnam and Cambodia in 1973, as the Baltimore Sun's Indochina correspondent from mid-1972 to the last days of the war in April 1975.

The speakers will present first-hand recollections of August 1973 from three distinct angles of vision: Becker and Isaacs from the ground in Cambodia and Vietnam, Sullivan from inside the halls of Congress, and Levin from the grass roots lobby activism of the antiwar movement.

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Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning American journalist and author, most recently of  You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War which won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. Foreign Affairs named it the military book of the year.

 An expert on Cambodia, she interviewed Pol Pot while he was in power and later was an expert witness at the international war crimes tribunal of the senior Khmer Rouge leaders. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge is now a classic and won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award. She is the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

 Her 2013 book “OVERBOOKED: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism” was an Amazon book of the year and was hailed by Arthur Former as "required reading" about the future of global tourism. In 2019 Conde Nast Traveler named Becker one of the people who has changed how the world travels.

 Becker covered international affairs for over four decades, beginning as a war correspondent in Cambodia for the Washington Post,  as Senior Foreign Editor at National Public Radio and as a New York Times correspondent.  She was part of the Times’ team that won a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of 9/11. She won two DuPont Columbia awards for NPR coverage of the Rwanda genocide and South Africa’s first democratic election. She has reported from around the world including foreign postings in Phnom Penh and Paris.

She was a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center, holds a degree from the University of Washington and studied language at the Kendriya Hindi Sansthaan in Agra, India. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the board of the Oxfam America Advocacy Fund.

 www.elizabethbecker.com

John H. (Jack) Sullivan's career spans 55 years.  He has been a police reporter,  Congressional investigator,  Deputy Staff Director of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs,  lecturer in political science,  head of U.S.  foreign assistance programs in Asia and the Pacific, and an executive with two Washington area-based international consulting firms.  In 1973 He was a delegate to the United Nations General Assembly.   He has worked in 65 countries in Asia, the Pacific, Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Eastern Europe.

Dr. Sullivan also has been active in politics and community affairs in Alexandria, Virginia, where he has resided for the past 45  years.   From 1998 to 2000 he was co-chair of the Alexandria Federation of Civic Associations.   He has been chairman of the Alexandria Cable Television Commission and a member of the HIV-AIDS Policy Taskforce,  the 1998 Zoning Reforms Taskforce, the Landmark Redevelopment Advisory Group, and the Gumyri (Armenia)-Alexandria Sister City Committee, and most recently the Combined Sewer System Advisory Group.  For seven years Dr. Sullivan was part of the Alexandria Citizen Committee working with the Army on the conversion of Cameron Station that secured Brenman and Booth Parks.   In 2022 he was named “Enviromentalist of the Year” by the City of Alexandria.  This year he has been chosen as an Alexandria “Living Legend” and will be honored at a ceremony in September.

 Dr. Sullivan has taught political science and international  relations at the American University,  George Washington,  Marquette and Boston Universities.  He has lectured at Cornell,  the University of New Hampshire,  Notre Dame, and Georgetown.   He holds B.A. (1957) and M.A.(1960)  degrees in journalism from Marquette and a PhD in international relations from the American University (1969) where he was given a “Distinguished Alumni Award” in both 1970 and 1976 by the College of Public Affairs.

pre-prowhiskeymen@blogspot.com

Larry Levin was the executive director from 1972 to 1975 of the Coalition To Stop Funding the War, a lobbying group representing approximately 25 church, civic, antiwar and labor organizations working to defund U.S. military action in Southeast Asia. Previously he was the Washington representative for  Medical Aid for Indochina (MAI)  and before that a co-founder of the Indochina Peace Campaign (IPC). During the 1972 election campaign he was the coordinator for Jane Fonda's and Tom Hayden’s national tour supporting the antiwar cause in key election states. In 1975, one month before the war ended, he traveled to Hanoi to represent the Coalition as a member of a Swedish-sponsored Commission to Investigate U.S. War Crimes in Vietnam.

After the Vietnam era, Levin was active in California Democratic politics and spent a number of years as communications director for Democratic members of the California State Senate in Sacramento. He earlier had a career in journalism, including posts at CBS and NBC television stations in Los Angeles, the NBC bureau in Frankfurt, Germany, and as the producer of a Bonn-based PBS news magazine called “European Journal.” During his time in Europe he covered the 1989-90 revolutions against Communist rule in Eastern Europe and the reunification of East and West Germany. Between reporting stints he worked as a press advisor to the German Green Party and later in Ireland as a communications advisor for the Sinn Fein party in a number of election campaigns. 

Levin also taught journalism in the 1990s at Ohio University and in the 2000s as a visiting professor at universities in Ireland and Germany. He now resides in both those countries, dividing his time between Dublin and Berlin. In January 2023, at the invitation of the the Viet Nam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), he returned to Vietnam to attend ceremonies commemorating the 50th Anniversary of the Paris Agreement. During that visit he received a state medal and citation in recognition of his work in the 1970s against U.S. war funding.

Arnold R. Isaacs (moderator) is an author, freelance writer and editor, and educator, and was previously a reporter, foreign and Washington correspondent and editor for the Baltimore Sun. Among other overseas assignments for the Sun, he covered the final three years of the Vietnam war and later wrote  Without Honor: Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (reissued in a new and updated edition in 2022). A selection of his wartime reporting appears in the Library of America anthology Reporting Vietnam: American Journalism 1959-1975. Isaacs is also the author of Vietnam Shadows: The War, Its Ghosts, and Its Legacy, and an online report, From Troubled Lands: Listening to Pakistani Americans and Afghan Americans in post-9/11 America, available at www.fromtroubledlands.net.

After leaving the Sun Isaacs traveled extensively as an educator and journalism trainer. He has been awarded a Knight International Press Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship; was a visiting faculty member at universities in China, Ukraine and Bulgaria; and has conducted training for journalists and journalism students in some 20 countries in the former Soviet Union, the Balkans and Central Europe, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.

www.arnoldisaacs.net   aisaacs@mindspring.com

Resources

Assuming Responsibility: Thomas F. Eagleton, The Senate and the Bombing of Cambodia

Joel K. Goldstein

Saint Louis University School of Law

https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1148&context=faculty

Holly High, James R. Curran, and Gareth Robinson “Electronic Record of the Air War over Southeast Asia,” Journal of Vietnamese Studies 8, No. 4 (Fall 2013)    available from University of California JStor

 

IMAGES OF A LOST WAR   

 

 (photos by David Hume Kennerly/courtesy of Gerald R. Ford Library).

 

 

 Weeks before the end of the war in Cambodia, a government soldier's wife waits by her wounded husband's bed in a makeshift Phnom Penh hospital          

                

                                                           

Two Cambodian children in a refugee center

 

 

 GIRL WITH EMPTY EYES    This haunting image was one of David Hume Kennerly's photographs that was hung in the White House as the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia drew to their tragic end