Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot by David P. Chandler; Why VietnamInvaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War by Stephen J. MorrisReview by: Lucian W. PyeForeign Affairs, Vol. 78, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1999), p. 185Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049512 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 01:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.62 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 01:45:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Recent Books

Elliott succeeds in bringing to life the social and political realities of modern

Vietnam. Her great-grandfather was a

Confucian mandarin-scholar in traditional

Vietnam, her grandfather a high official

under the French, and her father an official

during the transition to independence in

1954. Her own generation of siblings and

cousins experienced the agonies of the

Vietnam War. Today, her once tightly knit

family is scattered in America, France,

Canada, Australia, and Vietnam. Now

married to an American, Mai Elliott

brilliantly captures the social and psycho

logical strains of native officials under

colonial rule as they sought the elusive goals

of national identity and modernization.

She is equally impressive in recounting the

conflicting pressures that all Vietnamese

had to endure in the last days of the war,

when they had to accept the fact that the

future lay with the communists.

Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot, rev. ed. by david p.

chandler. Boulder: Westview Press,

1999, 264 pp. $16.00 (paper).

Why Vietnam Invaded Cambodia: Political Culture and the Causes of War. by

Stephen j. morris. Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1999, 315 pp.

$45.00 (paper, $16.95). The story of modern Cambodia is so

tragic that it takes moral resolve to read

about it. It also raises some perplexing

puzzles. How could the gentle Buddhist

Cambodians become so violent? What knd

of evil genius was Pol Pot, who presided over the slaughter of more than a million

of his compatriots? In writing his book, Chandler explored every bit of evidence

about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, but the more evidence he uncovered, the

more bland and ordinary the Cambodian

leader became. No traumatic experiences, social or economic difficulties, or

psycho

logical problems explain Pol Pot's brutal

actions; the author found accounts only of a mild-mannered, pleasant personality

who was a normal but mediocre student.

Born into a family with close connections

to the royal palace, Pol Pot was randomly selected as one of the first hundred

Cambodian students after World War II

to study in France, where he never took

any examinations or received a degree.

What did set him apart was joining the French Communist Party, which gave him instant high status among the local

communists when he returned to Cambo

dia. Pol Pot then spent seven years fighting enemies and rising to the top with purge after purge. Chandler concludes that this

experience in Cambodia is probably what turned him into a vicious kller.

The paranoid atmosphere that

enveloped the leaders of both the Cambodian and Vietnamese communist

parties also dominates Morris' vivid

analysis. His systematic study delves

into the causes of the only extended war

between two communist states, seekng to explain the seemingly irrational decision

of weak Cambodia to attack the much

stronger Vietnam and the equally irrational

Vietnamese provocation of China. As

the first Southeast Asian specialist to gain access to the recently opened Moscow

files on the Indochinese Communist Party, Morris ably documents the paranoid

style of thinkng that characterized

these Marxist-Leninist leaders. Given

the mindset that Morris describes, the

behavior of both Pol Pot and the leaders in Hanoi becomes more understandable, if not forgivable.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS September/October 1999 [185]

This content downloaded from 185.44.79.62 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 01:45:09 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions