the Left to "discover" the murderous qualities of the Khmer Rouge—qualities that had been obvious to unbiased observers for years. Kiernan fits this pattern nicely. His book even displays an eagerness to absolve of genocidal responsibility those members of the Khmer Rouge who defected to Hanoi and were later reinstalled in power in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia in 1978." In 1994, Kiernan was awarded a $499,000 grant by the United States Congress to help the Cambodian government document the Khmer Rouge's abuses. Stephen J. Morris, at the time a research associate in the department of government at Harvard University, cited statements Kiernan had made regarding the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s. In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, Morris claimed that Kiernan's earlier opinions made him a poor choice to study Khmer Rouge abuses. Gerard Henderson, executive director of Australia's Sydney Institute, stated that Kiernan had "barracked for the Khmer Rouge when the Cambodian killing fields were choked with corpses". The Morris article was challenged by 29 Cambodia specialists who praised Kiernan as "a first-rate historian and an excellent choice for the State Department grant". Kiernan's 2017 work Việt Nam: A History from Earliest Times to the Present was criticized for his inability to read primary sources, his poor choice of secondary sources, and the lack of updating scholarship on both premodern Vietnam and the Vietnam War, among "many factual errors, misinterpretations, and problems" in the book. Selected bibliography References External links Kiernan's bio at Yale 1953 births Academics from Melbourne Historians of Southeast Asia Living people Monash University alumni Yale University faculty Yale Sterling Professors Cold War historians