In May, 1980, when the Geneva meeting on Humani tarian Assistance and Relief to the Kampuchean People took place and funds to continue aid were pledged, the food distribution system inside Kampuchea was a sham bles. Rice-laden ships were backed up in the harbors at Kampong Som and Pnompenh, where warehouses were full. Rice, unlike rice seed, was not reaching the villages.

There was rare consensus on this point, even among those international organizations and voluntary agencies that had been presenting a generally positive pic ture of developments inside Kampuchea. Relief work ers in Pnompenh took the unprecedented step of jointly warning the Heng Samrin regime that it could not count on continued international aid unless distribu tion improved. Interviews with Khmer peasants treking on foot, by bicycle, and oxcart to the Thai border from several provinces in west and northwest Kampuchea confirmed that food distribution was grossly inadequate if it existed at all. Heng Samrin's own village commit tees, with no rice to give peasants and farmers, were issuing passes to the Thai border that were being hon ored by the Vietnamese soldiers who control much of the access to the relief “land bridge” at Nong Chan.

“Could you tell us why you, a self-professed Democrat, a liberal, happened to be selected by the Reagan administration to represent the United States at the United Nations? It is, after all, a conservative administration.” The question came from Charles H. Percy (R., 111.), chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The response followed sharp and confident.

“I suppose,” said Georgetown political scientist Jeane I. Kirkpatrick, “President Reagan asked me to take this very difficult job because he believes that we share a particular sense of the problems that confront the United States, the democracies, and Western civilization.” That “particular sense,” as she explained it, seems to relate back to the comparatively straightforward, bipolar world of the early 1950s, when Ambassador Kirkpatrick was studying political science in Paris and Stalin's soldiers still surrounded Vienna.