When I met Ngor at a conference in Dallas a few months after his Oscar win, I was struck by the intensity of his passion. Perhaps no one loves liberty more than one who has been denied it at gunpoint. We became instant friends and stayed in frequent contact.
When he decided to visit Cambodia in August 1989 for the first time since his escape ten years earlier, he asked me to go with him. Dith Pran, the photographer Ngor portrayed in the movie, was among the small number in our entourage. So were Diane Sawyer and a crew from ABC’s Prime Time Live. Experiencing Cambodia with Ngor and Pran so soon after the genocide left me with vivid impressions and lasting memories.
But Cambodia in 1989 was a universe away from the Cambodia of 1979. Although the country’s suffering continued on a grand scale, I knew it was a playground compared to what Ngor and Pran had miraculously survived.
Cambodia’s Killing Fields
In 1975 crazed but battle-hardened revolutionaries known as the Khmer Rouge had seized power in Cambodia. Their leader, Pol Pot, embraced the most radical versions of class warfare, egalitarianism, and state control. His model was the Chinese Cultural Revolution. Mao and Stalin were his heroes.
The “evils” the Khmer Rouge aspired to destroy included all vestiges of the former governments of Cambodia, city life, private enterprise, the family unit, religion, money, modern medicine and industry, private property, and anything that smacked of foreign influence. They savaged an essentially defenseless population already weary of war. Pol Pot’s killing machine produced the “killing fields” for which the film was later named.
Words of Wisdom from Haing S. Ngor
“The arts can explain everything possible to tell the world.”
Signaling the goal to remake society completely, the regime declared 1975 to be “Year Zero,” and the numbering of succeeding years would follow accordingly. To break with Cambodia’s past, the Khmer Rouge changed the country’s name to Kampuchea. Racial pogroms, political executions, and random homicides were instituted as public policy to discipline, frighten, and reorganize society. Any individual’s life meant nothing in the grand scheme of the new order.
One day after taking power, the Khmer Rouge forcibly evacuated the populations of all urban areas, including the capital, Phnom Penh, a city swollen by refugees to at least two million inhabitants. Many thousands of men and women, including the sick, the elderly, and the handicapped, died on the way to their “political rehabilitation” in the countryside. Survivors slaved away in the rice fields, often separated from their families, routinely beaten and tortured for trifling offenses or for no reason at all, kept hungry by meager rations, and facing certain death for the slightest challenge to authority.
Thon Hin, a top official in the Cambodian foreign ministry at the time of our 1989 visit, told me of the propaganda blasted daily from speakers as citizens labored in the fields: “They said that everything belonged to the state, that we had no duty to anything but the state, that the state would always make the right decisions for the good of everyone. I remember so many times they would say, ‘It is always better to kill by mistake than to not kill at all.’ ”
Churches and pagodas were demolished, and thousands of Buddhist monks and worshippers were murdered. Schools were closed down and modern medicine was forbidden in favor of quack remedies and sinister experimentation. By 1979, only forty-five doctors remained in the whole country; more than four thousand had perished or fled. Eating in private and scavenging for food were considered crimes against the state. So was wearing eyeglasses, which was seen as evidence that one had read too much.
With total control of communication, Pol Pot’s gang of killers kept the Cambodian people unaware of the full extent of the state’s atrocities. Most had little idea that the horror they were witnessing was a nationwide event. The rest of the world knew even less. Mass graves unearthed years later provided grisly evidence of the violence.
During our 1989 tour, Ngor and I visited Tuol Sleng. It was a former high school in Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge had converted into a torture center. Of twenty thousand men, women, and children taken there, only seven survived. Hideous devices and blood-soaked floors remained for visitors to see. The walls were lined with snapshots of the hapless victims—pictures taken by their captors.
Fifteen kilometers away we visited a place called Choeung Ek, where a memorial houses more than eight thousand human skulls found in an adjacent field. Cambodians say that nearby streams once ran so red with blood that cattle would not drink from the water.
An estimated 2 million Cambodians died from starvation, disease, and execution during Pol Pot’s tyranny—in a nation of only 8 million inhabitants when he took power. Far more people died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in less than four years than in the last decade of the Vietnam War, when 1.2 million perished on both the American and Vietnamese sides.
Torture, Forced Labor … and Escape
Haing Ngor didn’t just see these things; he endured them. He had to get rid of his eyeglasses and deny that he was a doctor. He pretended to be a cab driver, hoping he and his wife would not draw the regime’s attention.
Nonetheless, he fell prey to the Khmer Rouge’s brutality. He and his wife were among the countless expelled from Phnom Penh in Year Zero. Driven into the countryside to work as a slave laborer, he was forced to smash heavy stones from dawn until deep into the night and even to wear a yoke and pull a plow, like an ox, as guards whipped him. Khmer Rouge thugs sliced his finger off in one torturous episode. In another, they tied him to a post, burned his leg, and put a plastic bag around his head, nearly suffocating him. In still another, they jammed him and dozens of other prisoners into a hut filled with feces. After four days, the guards set fire to the hut—and then shot anyone who ran out. Ngor stayed in the burning hut and somehow survived.
The prison camps brought constant dread. “The terror was always there, deep in our hearts,” Ngor wrote in his riveting 1987 autobiography, Survival in the Killing Fields. “In the late afternoon, wondering whether the soldiers would choose us as their victims. And then feeling guilty when the soldiers took someone else.… Then lying awake and wondering whether we would see the dawn. Waking up the next day and wondering whether it would be our last.”
In the camp, Ngor’s wife died in his arms from complications during childbirth. Ngor might have saved her; he was a skilled gynecologist and surgeon. But had he revealed he was a doctor, he and his family would have been executed on the spot.
In Survival in the Killing Fields, Ngor recounted his anguish: “The wind brought me her last words again and again: ‘Take care of yourself, sweet.’ She had taken care of me when I was sick. She had saved my life. But when it was my turn to save her, I failed.”
In 1979, as the Khmer Rouge contended with invading Vietnamese forces, Ngor seized the chance to escape. He, his ten-year-old niece, and other family members had to travel by foot through jungles, avoiding the land mines that littered the paths and eating rats to survive. Finally they made it to Thailand. Ngor spent more than a year volunteering at a medical clinic for his fellow Cambodian refugees.
“This Is Unbelievable”
Ngor left for America on August 30, 1980, a year and a half after the Vietnamese invasion ended the Khmer Rouge regime. He believed the world needed to know about the Khmer Rouge’s atrocities, fully and graphically. When fate gave him the chance to act in a movie about the period, he grabbed it and performed brilliantly.
He had never acted before, but he was driven to do well in The Killing Fields so that the rest of us would remember what happened and to whom. He often said that he really didn’t have to “act”; he had personally suffered through calamities much worse than those depicted in the film. But just imagine the pain and torment he had to revisit in making the movie. His director, Roland Joffé, was right when he said of Ngor: “He was very brave. Acting means you have to give of your soul, and he did that.” Haing Ngor deserved the Academy Award that his riveting performance earne
d him.
When he accepted his Oscar on the night of March 25, 1985, Ngor began by saying, “This is unbelievable—but so is my entire life.”
Educating for Liberty
After The Killing Fields, Ngor earned some money here and there from bit parts in film and on television. But he was too busy helping others and educating audiences about the catastrophe in his homeland to pursue a career in Hollywood. He volunteered for weeks at a time to provide free medical assistance to refugees along the Thai border.
I remained in frequent communication with him in the years after our 1989 visit to Cambodia. He always had time for his friends. If he wasn’t home when I called, he never failed to ring me back.
One cold morning in February 1996, a reporter friend from the local newspaper called my office. He had just seen a wire report and wanted my comment. My friend Dr. Haing S. Ngor, then fifty-five, had been shot and killed the day before—not somewhere in southeast Asia, but in downtown Los Angeles. The perpetrators, it turned out, were ordinary gang thugs trying to rob him as he got out of his car near his modest apartment. They took a locket, which held the only picture he still had of his deceased wife.
It’s impossible to make sense out of a senseless tragedy. I do know this, however: for Haing Ngor, rediscovering his freedom after experiencing hell on earth wasn’t enough. He couldn’t relax and resume living a quiet and anonymous life. He felt compelled to tell his story so others would know the awful things totalitarian government can do. He forced us to ponder and appreciate life more fundamentally than ever before.
We can be grateful to live in a country where we can celebrate our creative achievements in film, but we should be even more thankful for people like Haing Ngor, who did more to educate for liberty in a few short years than most of us will do in our lifetimes.
Lessons from Haing S. Ngor
Speak out for liberty: Perhaps no one loves liberty more than one who has been denied it at gunpoint. A victim of the Cambodian holocaust of the late 1970s, Dr. Haing S. Ngor worked tirelessly to inform the world of what happened so such atrocities might never occur again. Through his Oscar-winning performance in The Killing Fields, his autobiography, and his other work, he taught millions about the brutality of total government.
Don’t rest on victories: Ngor could have been expected to retire to a quiet life in America after the horrors he endured in Cambodia. He had escaped; he was free. But he felt compelled to tell his story so others would know the awful things totalitarian government can do.
38
Vivien Kellems
“Please Indict Me!”
“All our liberties are due to men who, when their conscience has compelled them, have broken the laws of the land.”
These words are often credited to John Clifford, an early-twentieth-century British politician and minister. The statement is inspiring, but did you catch the one glaring error? It leaves out the women!
Anyone who knew Vivien Kellems wouldn’t make that mistake.
Kellems was a successful entrepreneur, an accomplished public speaker, a political candidate more interested in educating than in winning, and, most famously, a tireless opponent of the IRS and its tax code. She was an outspoken crusader to the end.
Innovator and Business Leader
Born in 1896 in Des Moines, Iowa, Kellems was the daughter of evangelistic ministers. Later in life she reflected on how her parents had influenced her fiery oratorical style: “I suppose in my case shouting about all that stinking, rotten business going on in Washington simply takes the place of shouting at the Devil.”
Kellems attended the University of Oregon, where she displayed the spunk that would mark the next half century of her life. She became the first and only female on the college debate team, humbling many men in a competition widely thought at the time to be for males only. She graduated in 1918 and soon returned to the university to earn a master’s in economics in 1921. Kellems began work toward a PhD at Columbia University but suspended her studies when business opportunities beckoned. Decades later, while in her seventies, she took up her PhD studies again, this time at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The focus of her dissertation was the issue that made her a household name in America: the income tax.
The Roaring Twenties were well under way when Kellems and her brother Edgar invented the Kellems cable grip, used for lifting and supporting electrical cables. With a thousand dollars she had saved and another thousand borrowed, she founded the Kellems Company in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1927 to manufacture and market the device. By the time World War II broke out, she was a wealthy woman with a loyal following among her hundreds of employees.
When the war demanded grips to lift 2,700-pound artillery shells, Kellems innovated and ended up selling two million of the resulting product to the armed services. Doing business with the military also introduced her to the seamy side of government—the often needless paperwork, the meddlesome bureaucracy, the complicated and dubious tax code, and even a dangerous naiveté about foreign regimes.
Most Americans were reluctant to criticize Washington in the early years of the war. More pressing matters occupied us as the Axis powers scored victory after victory. But when Kellems saw waste, bungling, and stupidity in government, she didn’t hesitate to speak out and make headlines. She was incensed by the U.S. government’s shipping thousands of tons of vital materials to Stalin’s Soviet Union at a time when our own war effort demanded them. To a Chicago audience, she prophetically warned: “Mark my words. This temporary ally will soon pose a mortal threat to the United States and the entire free world.”
Words of Wisdom from Vivien Kellems
“Our tax law is a 1,598-page hydra-headed monster and I’m going to attack and attack and attack until I have ironed out every fault in it.”
Franklin Roosevelt’s minions were not amused by Kellems’s very public disapproval. Her private correspondence was intercepted by the Office of Censorship (yes, we had one of those), then leaked to two newspaper columnists and a congressman friendly to the administration. Nothing in her letters was in any way incriminating, and no action was ever taken against her, but it was plain that the government wanted to embarrass and intimidate her into silence. The feds underestimated Kellems.
As the tax burden soared, so did Kellems’s resentment of the confiscatory marginal rates (as high as 94 percent on personal and corporate income) and the bullying tactics of the “revenuers.” In speeches around the country, she ripped into FDR for promising lower taxes during his first presidential campaign in 1932, only to deliver relentlessly higher rates.
Treasury Secretary and FDR crony Henry Morgenthau hinted at treason charges and proceeded toward legal penalties against Kellems. But then a scandal enveloped the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR, the predecessor to the IRS).
Thanks in part to Kellems and the women around the country she had stirred up, congressional investigations led to the indictment or resignations of hundreds of BIR employees who had violated the very tax laws they were supposed to enforce.
Attacking the “Tax Grabbers”
Kellems opposed intrusive government at any level. When the state of Connecticut passed a law in 1947 forbidding women to work after 10 p.m., she sprung into action. The Hollywood movie star Gloria Swanson, who supported Kellems’s efforts, described how her friend and fellow activist characterized the law as “rank discrimination” and started the resistance. Kellems, Swanson said, “brought several hundred women in to work at her factory one night,” but Connecticut authorities made no arrests. “Finally, she got a job in an all-night diner and threatened to work there every night until the legislature acted. Two days later, the law was repealed.”
In 1948 Kellems challenged the federal government again. What had started out as a temporary and “voluntary” wartime measure—tax withholding—was now permanent and compulsory. Kellems would have none of it. She was not about to become an unpaid tax collector for the feds without a fight.
; In February she began paying her employees in full, which meant that they had to pay the required taxes directly to the federal government. Within days, she was on NBC’s new show Meet the Press—only the second woman to appear as a guest on the program. She said the withholding law was unconstitutional. The very rationale for creating it—to make the costs of big government less visible to workers—was, in her mind, a reason to get rid of it. People needed to know what their government was costing them. As she later put it in her 1952 book, Toil, Taxes, and Trouble (which is still available), employer withholding enabled the federal government to “hide” taxes from citizens and keep them from being “tax-conscious.”
Going after President Truman in 1948, Kellems said: “If High Tax Harry wants me to get money for him, then he must appoint me an agent for the Internal Revenue Department. He must pay me a salary for my work, he must reimburse me for my expenses incurred in collecting that tax, and I want a badge!”
Violating the law was the only way to settle the issue. Kellems wrote to the treasury secretary to inform him of her decision. She added, “I respectfully request that you please indict me.”
The indictment never came. Instead, the IRS sent agents to her bank and seized the $6,100 it said was due—an amount far greater than her company would have withheld.
Kellems fired back with a lawsuit against the government, and in 1951 a jury ordered the feds to return the money, with interest. She continued to press for a decision on constitutionality, and finally, in 1973, the United States Tax Court formally rejected her argument. Before that, however, she had relented to prevent her company from going bankrupt from IRS seizures. With great reluctance, she had begun withholding taxes from her employees.
But she never backed away from the views of the federal government that she expressed in her speeches and in Toil, Taxes, and Trouble. Kellems railed against the “tax grabbers and tax planners,” calling the feds “yellow cowards” and “mangy little bureaucrats.”
Real Heroes Page 23