“In order to achieve ‘peace with honor,’ Nixon and Kissinger wanted to show Hanoi that the new President would use extreme force to prosecute the war; that he was capable of anything–an idea called The Madman Theory. Less than a month into Nixon’s presidency, Kissinger began planning an attack against North Vietnamese sanctuaries in neighboring Cambodia. The Americans started bombing Cambodia in 1969, soon after Nixon came into office because they had a problem. The problem was that whole areas of Eastern Cambodia, which was, in theory, a neutral country not on the side of the North Vietnamese or the South Vietnamese…whole areas of the country had been taken over by the North Vietnamese Communists, and they were using them as staging areas and bases for their attacks on the South Vietnamese armies in South Vietnam and upon the American army in South Vietnam.”

~The Trials of Henry Kissinger, documentary.