The concealment or absence of conflict in Pol Pot’s personal life has also made it difficult to reach sweeping or persuasive psychological conclusions about him. Was he only apparently a happy child and an inspiring teacher? Was his kindly manner faked? Was he a cynical political animal, a true believer, or a mélange of both? Was he a paranoid nourished by a sense of betrayal or persecution, or a utopian who saw his vision wrecked by others? Is there a difference? His own writings and speeches, which avoid personal details, provide little information to help us answer any of these questions. Even after his two-hour interview with Nate Thayer in 1997, less than a year before he died, Pol Pot defies analysis.3

Pol Pot’s lifetime overlaps the story of Cambodian politics since World War II. His revolutionary movement benefited from Vietnamese help during its formative years and during Vietnam’s war with the United States. Without the war, Pol Pot’s coming to power, like Sihanouk’s demise, is inconceivable.4

Saloth Sar/Pol Pot was also a product of twentieth-century Cambodian society. From that society, he fought against, and ironically benefited from, a deeply rooted sense of hierarchy that frequently permitted a single man, properly positioned, nicely behaved, and thought to be meritorious, to exercise enormous power. Like most Khmer of his generation, he was incurious about the outside world. He distrusted foreigners and their intentions toward his country. From Cambodian Buddhism, he absorbed the ideas of disciplined personal transformation, rebirth, and enlightenment—found within the privileged, otherworldly communities of monks or Communists—through teaching, “right action,” self-denial, and meditation. As a teacher, he automatically enjoyed high status—another legacy of Buddhism.5

Although Pol Pot was introspective and xenophobic, his ideas and his career were shaped to a large extent by foreign influences. France, as a colonial power, provided him with seventeen years of formal education and the only foreign language he is known to have spoken. This education introduced him to the idea of progress and the concepts of democracy, imperialism, and revolutionary change. His three years in Paris, where he encountered Marxist-Leninist ideas, led him to adopt a radical alignment—he probably joined the Communist party of France (CPF) in 1952.

When Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia in early 1953, he became a member of the Vietnamese-dominated Indochina Communist party (ICP). For several years he worked from concealment to accomplish its objectives. From his Vietnamese-trained mentors, he learned about party discipline, organization, and theory, as well as the importance of clandestinity and concealment. The Vietnamese, for their part, seem to have assumed that he was loyal to them.