Gareth Porter - Vietnam and Cambodia

Vietnam and Cambodia

Gareth Porter challenged the main rationale offered by U.S. President Richard Nixon in 1969 for continuing the Vietnam War, and argued that there would not be a communist "bloodbath" in South Vietnam after the U.S. withdrew its forces from Vietnam. He wrote a series of articles and monographs on the bloodbath argument.

His first monograph was The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered in 1973. He challenged the account of mass killings in North Vietnam's land reform (see Land reform in Vietnam) by Hoang Van Chi, Bernard Fall and others. Instead of tens or hundreds of thousands killed, Gareth Porter suggested that 800 to 2,500 would be a more realistic estimate. His analysis was disputed by a non-academic critic, Daniel Teodoru, whose critique was entered into a hearing record and published by the Internal Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate. Porter replied to Teodoru point by point, and his response was entered into a separate hearing record published by the subcommittee. Porter was also criticized by historian Robert F. Turner and Hoang Van Chi.

Porter wrote a detailed exposé in 1974 of an account by U.S. Information Agency official Douglas Pike on what has been called the "Huế Massacre" by Vietnamese communists during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Porter alleged that Pike manipulated the official figures for civilian deaths in the destruction of Huế during Tet, primarily by U.S. bombing and artillery, to arrive at his figure of nearly 4,000 civilians murdered by the Viet Cong, and that Pike’s hypothesis about the Communist policy during the occupation of Huế was contradicted by captured Communist documents and other evidence.

In 1976-77, continuing his challenge to the bloodbath argument, Gareth Porter rejected early accounts of the mass killings by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. With George Hildebrand he wrote a book, Cambodia: Starvation and Revolution, which documented the deaths from starvation of thousands of people in Phnom Penh in the last months of the war in Cambodia and argued that there was a legitimate basis for sending most of the population of Phnom Penh—much of which had been refugees from rural areas—back to rural areas. Critics have argued that the book's sources included official statements from Khmer Rouge media about the availability of food in rural areas. Testifying before Congress in May 1977, Gareth Porter said that "the notion that the leadership of Democratic Kampuchea adopted a policy of physically eliminating whole classes of people" was "a myth fostered primarily by the authors of a Readers Digest book." Congressman Stephen J. Solarz compared Gareth Porter to those who denied the murder of 6 million Jews in the Nazi Holocaust. Gareth Porter rejected this comparison and cited reporting by reputable news outlets in support of this position.

But in an appearance on The Today Show in August 1978, Porter agreed that the Khmer Rouge regime was guilty of mass killings and mass starvation. He reiterated that view in articles during the 1980s in The Guardian, The Nation, and Foreign Affairs among other publications. He also wrote articles and op-eds criticizing the Reagan administration and congressional supporters like Solarz for a U.S. policy of collaborating with Thailand and China to strengthen the military forces of Pol Pot in Cambodia.