Don Noel
- 1966
Fellowship Title:
- Attitudes Toward the Cold War in Cambodia and Romania
Fellowship Year:
- 1966
Cambodian Politics II: The Man to Get
Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh 25 January 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from the Hartford Times. Permission to publish this article may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH — The office was furnished with chairs, rugs and drapes in solid reds and blues. Original oils, both Western and Cambodian, graced the walls. The taste was excellent. The wide, handsome desk was busy-looking, but not cluttered. Two telephones stood on a side-table, and a switch for a speakerphone. In the window an air-conditioner — forbidden, under austerity rules, save where foreign guests are received — whirred quietly. As our interview neared an end, Chau Seng fingered a buzzer under the desk, and a man appeared. Wordlessly, he took my host’s immaculate blue suit jacket from a silent-valet stand, handed it to his master, and left the room again. Chau Seng is more like a top U.S. executive than anyone I have met here. Crisply efficient, he keeps a battery
Cambodian Politics I: Gently to the Right?
DON -4 Bungalow 10 Hotel leRoyal Phnom Penh 15 January 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from The Hartford Times. Permission to publish these articles may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH — Early in January, Prince Norodom Sihanouk boarded a plane for France for a month’s long-postponed medical and dietary treatment. He left behind him a new government, described here as “center-right.” It has weathered four months of crisis, and has emerged strong enough to move gingerly in directions of its own choosing. But the Prince also left behind two forces, representing varying shades of leftist sentiment, which will serve as public watchdogs. One is a unique “Counter-Government” of moderate views. The other is a personal aide to the Prince, more radical in his views, named Chau Seng. “Center-right” government here for the next four years — if the government lasts — will have a meaning of its own: It will not mean “pro-American,” and would not even if
GANEFO: The Politics of Sport
DON-5 Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh, Cambodia 21 January 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from the Hartford Times. Permission to publish this article may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH – A gracefully nimble Chinese athlete came within a centimeter of the world high jump record here early in December. It was the sort of event sportswriters love. Gradually leaving his competitors behind, Ni Chih Chin kept clearing the bar on his first jump. It got up to 2.27 meters, just below the world mark now held by a Russian. He cleared it effortlessly; witnesses and photographs alike testify that he had room to spare He missed the next jump, a try for a 2.29-meter record. The moment had passed; he had been delayed by an intervening track event, and by a discussion among officials of the soggy jumping track. Guy LaGorce of the French sports daily “L’Equipe,” one of the few Western newsmen present, seized on
CAMBODIA: Muddling on the Mekong
DON-3 Phnom Penh, Cambodia January 4, 1967 Mr. Noel is a 1965-66 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from the Hartford Times. Permission to publish these articles may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. PHNOM PENH: The United States backed out on a $10 million promise this fall. Western and UN diplomats in this neutral capital are still trying to pick up the pieces. The promise — to help build the multi-purpose Prek Thnot Dam here as part of international development of the Mekong River — could have been a useful first step in patching up America’s shattered relations with Cambodia. Instead, U.S. standing here has slipped farther back. With it has suffered the prestige of the United Nations, and the entire concept of international, non-political cooperation. Efforts are now under way to finance Prek Thnot without the U.S. The success of these efforts, in which Washington itself is helping, will be known next month (February) when the four-power Mekong Committee meets in Laos. An acceptable compromise funding solution
Cambodia: Up by the Bootstraps
DON-2 Bungalow 10 Hotel le Royal Phnom Penh, Cambodia November 29, 1966 Mr. Noel is an Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship award winner on leave from the Hartford (Conn.) Times. Permission to publish these articles may be sought from the Managing Editor, The Hartford Times. Kompong Cham — “Have you seen the new university?” The visitor to this smallish provincial capital upriver on the Mekong could hardly miss the Université Royale. No one would let him. It is a focal point of local pride. With good reason: the people built it themselves. First publicly proposed by Prince Norodom Sihanouk three years ago, the university already has 500 enrolled as freshmen and sophomores. The campus is not, in fact, completed yet: the library shelves are half-empty; technical laboratories are still being outfitted (1); only 19 of the eventual 53 classroom and administrative buildings are up. But every one of those 19 was built with local funds. A well-organized campaign appears to have tapped successfully the rich, the poor, and the middle-class civil servants. (Two of those