Sihanouk Reminisces: World Leaders I Have Known by Norodom Sihanouk Search Amazon for other books by or about Norodom Sihanouk. Rating: Reviewed by: John Walsh

Norodom Sihanouk was King of Cambodia from WWII until the Lon Nol coup in 1970 (apart from a brief period when he abdicated in favour of his father) and enjoyed 45 years of statesmanship--that lengthy and extraordinary career, in which he tried and failed to keep Cambodia an independent and peaceful country, is recounted in part in this memoir. Taking as a basic theme the use of charisma in leadership, Sihanouk recounts some of those leaders he has met and the charisma that they exhibited. The two great heroes he has are General De Gaulle and Chou En Lai. There are others of great renown--Nehru, Mao Zedong, Sukarno, and so forth--but these are portrayed as flawed in some way.

The King comes across as a deeply unreliable narrator and one who is egregiously vain and self-regarding to the extent that he can hardly see the truth of the lives of either his people or the people of other countries he visits. For example, he recalls Chou En-Lai explaining, while the King had a lengthy sojourn in China after being ousted (p.97): Looking back, I cannot recall that Chou ever discussed ideology with me. On the contrary, he once volunteered that, You do not have to become a communist country. You must remain a monarchy because Cambodia is Cambodia and I know the feelings of your people--You must remain a monarchy.Chou En-Lai, Prime Minister of China, told me that!This, it scarcely needs saying, is difficult to believe. One might be more willing to give the king the benefit of the doubt about some of the unexpected declarations of the great leaders he has met if his observations were no so shot through with delusion and, indeed, self-delusion. For example, wherever he goes, he is surrounded by people expressing his love for both his kingly self and the institution he represents. Further, the colleagues he meets receive the same kind of adulatory treatment, even characters of such dubious popularity as Tito and Ceausescu. Since he at no stage shows any interest in his people or how he might help them out of poverty (he dictates the memoir to his amanuensis Krisher and the word "democracy" or any variant of it does not pass his lips), it is hard to imagine that the people really did offer the spontaneous outpourings of love that we are led to believe occurred and hard to imagine why there should be first a coup against him and then the communist revolution that brought the Khmer Rouge into power. The king's opportunism in making derisory comments about those who in one way or another offended him (generally by not supporting him as the legitimate ruler of Cambodia after the coup or the Khmer Rouge success) is also indicative of a certain lack of character.

Of course, it is usually incorrect to assume that one individual can make a sustainable difference to the long-term, large-scale forces that shape history but there are some occasions when an individual can achieve something similar. King Sihanouk might, perhaps, be regarded as such a person and his efforts to place Cambodia within the non-aligned movement (which is what enabled him to meet many of the rulers here described), although ultimately a failure, might have saved some lives along the way, although the opposite is also possible. It is certainly true that he has a rather skewed opinion of women: on the one hand, his wife Monique appears in his imagination to have been not just a paragon virtue and intelligence but wholly irresistible to a series of world leaders, not least Khrushchev and Haile Selassie. Many of the leaders he meets, Sukarno in particular, are notable womanisers and Sihanouk was not above pandering to the visiting Indonesian president through, as he writes in a perhaps unlikely aside, by importing young women from the Philippines and Hong Kong for the duration. Although he claims to have been totally faithful to Monique (he had been a noted playboy before the marriage), he finds many of the young women he encounters "charming" and there is no doubt he views their role in life to be aesthetically pleasing and to wait upon his pleasure. As he observes, rather strangely, in the case of Mao Zedong, his "fatal flaw" was his "questionable" taste in women.

This is a fascinating if flawed book that it is hard to summarize usefully. Those readers with an interest in Cambodian history or in the lives and times of those leaders whom he met will find much of interest here--others will no doubt look upon it with mystification.