The personal cost of these choices for Pol Pot is impossible to assess. Between the 1960s and the mid 1980s, as far as we can tell, he rejected the comforts of family life. At many stages in his career, particularly after 1975, he rejected compromises and consensus. Although in 1981 he was almost in tears because he had “trusted too many people,” he sent hundreds of people he had worked with to their deaths, and toward the end of his life, aside from his wife and daughter, he probably trusted no one at all. He never stepped from the path he chose to follow in the 1950s and never spoke in detail about the price the Cambodian people paid to be subordinated to his vision of Cambodia and, after 1977, his abiding hostility toward Vietnam. Altering or abandoning his vision was impossible for Pol Pot. Perhaps in his final years he was fearful of the consequences—psychological and physical (in terms of his safety)—of any sweeping admission of responsibility or guilt. Self-pity, pride, and self-deception kept him from confronting what he had done and what had happened to Cambodia in the process. Whatever he thought in private, he told Nate Thayer—and thereby “history”—that his conscience was clear.

Foreign powers who exploited his vanity for their own reasons bear a responsibility for much of the suffering in Cambodia and among Cambodian refugees in Thailand and elsewhere after 1979. So do the Red Khmer, who put Pol Pot’s visionary notions into practice after 1975 and through accident or design sent hundreds of thousands of their fellow citizens to their deaths. Many of these men and women have said that they were obeying the “organization,” and Pol Pot himself has suggested that the violence, like everything else, was a response to revolutionary imperatives and pressures on the country from abroad.

In the end, however, the man who died on the Cambodian frontier in 1998 must be held responsible for what happened in Cambodia after April 1975. Perhaps, as he sat at night in his clearing in the forest, he had a faint perception (or a bleak, horrifying vision) of the sufferings he had inflicted. Perhaps he did not. He told his bodyguard that from time to time he was depressed. Was this because of what he had done, or because everything he’d done had failed? There is no way of telling, although in his last interviews self-pity seemed to outweigh self-knowledge. The story of his life traced his submission to a vision of history, of Cambodia, and of himself, where “personal responsibility,” like so much else, was burnt away in the exigencies of revolutionary transformation and holding on to power.