During my research, I talked with several people who had been to school with Saloth Sar in the 1940s, who had known him in Paris or who had known him as a schoolteacher in Phnom Penh. Those who encountered him during his years in power were more discreet with anecdotal evidence, but from all these sources, as well as printed and archival material, I was able to build a consistent, but rather two-dimensional, picture. This has been enhanced, but not deepened, by interviews conducted by others since 1992.2

None of the people I spoke to—including several who live thousands of miles from Cambodia and whose families were savaged by the Pol Pot regime—were prepared to associate the person they had known with the horrors of the 1970s. Victims of Pol Pot’s regime, they were unwilling to alter or deny their relatively pleasant recollections of the man.

To his brother and sister-in-law, for example, Saloth Sar was a sweet-tempered, equable child. Schoolmates remembered him as a mediocre student but pleasant company, a reputation that persisted among those who knew him in France. As a teacher, he was remembered as calm, self-assured, smooth featured (s‘aat s’om), honest, and persuasive, even hypnotic when speaking to small groups. Among his students and his colleagues in the clandestine Communist movement, he seems in these years to have gained some of the moral authority and stature he enjoyed among his followers up to 1997. A man who met him in the late 1950s, for example, said, “I saw immediately that I could become his friend for life.” Similar testimony has emerged in confessions from S-21 and in the 1980s and 1990s from Red Khmer defectors who attended Pol Pot’s political seminars in Thailand and Cambodia. None of the defectors, although they were free to do so (as those being tortured at S-21 were not), singled out Pol Pot’s behavior or personality as a reason for betraying the party or, in the 1980s, for deserting the Communist movement. Instead, most of them came away with memories of a man they regarded almost as a saint.

With witnesses like these, and Pol Pot’s own writings, it has been impossible for me to penetrate what may be a facade, a series of masks, or a chosen repertoire of skills to discover a rougher, more diabolical, supposedly more genuine Pol Pot. Throughout his life, the man seems to have tailored his performance to fit the people he was with, making a “genocidal maniac” hard to find. Indeed, the disjunction between his genteel charisma and the death toll of his regime is one of the mysteries that hangs over his career and poses serious difficulties in trying to make sense of his life.