to decide "I would like to write a book about Dubcek", and to spend several months in Czechoslovakia researching it. The book concluded that Dubcek "was quite convinced that he had discovered in 1968 that for which philosophers and philanthropists have for centuries searched—the just society. He may have been right."The New York Times Book Review, in December 1971, named Dubcek among the year's "noteworthy titles", describing it in a June 1971 capsule review as: "Written less than a year after Alexander Dubcek's resignation, this biography of the Czech leader by a London journalist is an authoritative, first‐rate job." Shawcross revised and reissued Dubcek in 1990 upon its subject's return to prominence and power during the Velvet Revolution, following two decades of rustication. Crime and Compromise: Janos Kadar and the Politics of Hungary Since Revolution (1974) Shawcross next wrote "a political study of Hungarian politician Janos Kadar" who, like Dubcek, "tried to negotiate with Communist dogmas to create more humane regimes." In it, Shawcross argued that, following Kadar's 1956 betrayal of Hungarian President Imre Nagy, "Kadar worked to reunite Hungary and succeeded in making it one of the most advanced countries in the Warsaw Pact in both economic and democratic terms." In his mostly-favourable review in The Washington Post, Robert Dean, a CIA analyst, wrote that "Shawcross has succeeded admirably in conveying a sense of the atmosphere which has come to prevail in the wake of the reform, and how a cautious reformist ethos and economic success have in turn shaped cultural life, social policies, and the attitudes of youth." Dean thought that the book portrayed Kadar less well than it did Hungary: "One senses that Shawcross would have liked to have produced a biography of Kadar but was stymied by the incompleteness of information." Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (1979)Sideshow is, at least in the United States, Shawcross's best known and most controversial book. To write it, Shawcross interviewed over 300 people and reviewed thousands of US Government documents, some classified Top Secret, obtained using the Freedom of Information Act. Sideshow exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia conducted by US President Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger, and argued that Nixon's and Kissinger's policy "led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the subsequent massacre of a third of Cambodia's population," According to one summary, Sideshowdenounces the systematic destruction of Cambodia by the Nixon