SEARCHING FOR AMERICA

What with the Cambodian capital in turmoil again, and the infamous Pol Pot killed, captured or at least surrounded, it was only a matter of time before Anthony Lewis wrote one of his moralistic columns in the New York Times condemning that genocidal madman, his accomplices and accessories and apologists. Mr. Lewis singled out one true believer:

"A few Western intellectuals, notably Prof. Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia. At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution."

A few? Why pick on Noam Chomsky? He was less the exception than the model for a purblind, politically correct left. And he was supported by the Best and Brightest of the country's journalists. Why not mention the role of our national paper of record in easing American fears about what would happen after the United States withdrew from Southeast Asia? "Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life" predicted a headline in the New York Times on April 13, 1975.

Some better life: cities emptied down to the last hospital bed, labor camps and extermination centers that rivaled the work of the Nazis in all but the modern technology, a fifth of the population exterminated ... but the same old voices kept assuring us that all would be well.

Where is Sidney Schanberg now? He was Mr. Lewis' old colleague at the Times who was at the scene of the crime in 1975. He consistently dismissed any danger of a Communist blood bath in Southeast Asia once the Americans had pulled out.

Have you noticed how seldom Pol Pot is identified as a Communist even now? He tends to be described as "the former dictator" (New York Times) or the ruler who "led a Marxist-inspired revolutionary regime" (the Associated Press). Anything but the Communist he was.

The Washington Post's John Cramer deserves a special spot in any Dictionary of Euphemisms for his description of what happened in Cambodia under Pol Pot's murderous direction: "The Khmer Rouge overthrew the Phnom Penh government in 1975 and launched a four-year experiment in agrarian communism."

What with Communist China officially a Most Favored Nation these days, let's not be beastly to the Reds, shall we? Indeed, we mustn't even call them Reds, or Communists, or totalitarian regimes, or anything so gauche. Shades of Owen Lattimore's classic description of the Chinese Communists as "agrarian reformers."

Even after the mass executions got under way in Cambodia, the Times' correspondent there assured readers around the world that "none of this will apparently bear any resemblance to the mass executions that had been expected by many Westerners."

Only later would Sidney Schanberg issue one of those classic I-Was-Wrong-But statements in lieu of a real apology, pointing out that most other correspondents were, too. As if this somehow absolved him, the most prominent sucker of the bunch and the one who set the worldwide tone through the good gray offices of the once-authoritative New York Times.

Cambodia wasn't lost; it was schanberged. Americans wanted so much to believe that nothing too bad would follow our pulling out of Southeast Asia that it was easy to swallow the assurances offered in dispatches datelined Phnom Penh. Four days before that capital fell, Mr. Schanberg was assuring readers of the Times that for "ordinary people of Indochina ... it is difficult to imagine how their lives can be anything but better with the Americans gone." The paucity of his imagination was soon more than compensated for by unspeakable reality.

There is nothing like a pair of ideological blinders to blunt one's powers of observation. So much of the Western press and intelligentsia was so intent on getting America out of Southeast Asia that the temptation to deny what would happen afterward proved overwhelming.

"The evidence is that in Cambodia the much-heralded blood bath that was supposed to follow the fall of Phnom Penh has not taken place," reported The Nation, even as the blood bath was taking place.

"The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is not guns, but peace. And the best way to accomplish that goal is by ending military aid now." That was Representative (now Senator) Christopher Dodd speaking in March 1975, early on in a long and successful career of excusing the inexcusable.

For that matter, if Anthony Lewis needed an example close to home of those who failed to anticipate the most terrifying campaign of mass extermination since the Second World War, he could have cited Anthony Lewis. "Some will find the whole blood-bath debate unreal. What future possibility could be more terrible than the reality of what is happening to Cambodia now?" -- Anthony Lewis in the New York Times, March 17, 1975.

Mr. Lewis' question was answered soon enough. It is difficult to believe that anyone living in the 20th century could have so underestimated man's capacity for evil, or each man's inescapable responsibility to resist it. Has Anthony Lewis ever expressed any sorrow or regret, let alone personal responsibility, for the blithe assurance he offered about what would happen to Cambodia after the United States pulled out? Has the New York Times? Newspapers have responsibilities, too.

One would like to think Mr. Lewis has made his apology, for the sake of his own peace of mind, but I don't remember seeing it. Maybe it got lost somewhere in the welter of self-righteous sermons he's since turned out on the evils of genocide.

Paul Greenberg is the editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.