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III. 

Rama IX’s reign was haunted from the start. When he was 18 years old, his world was transformed by one shattering event, and the consequences and emotional cost and unanswered questions have pursued him through the decades, despite his repeated attempts to shake himself free.

On June 9, 1946, King Ananda Mahidol, Bhumibol’s elder brother, was shot through the head in his bedroom in the Barompiman Hall, a European-style mansion inside the Grand Palace complex.

The events of that morning are more than 65 years in the past now. Many Thais believe they should be left there, undisturbed, the questions they raise unanswered forever. That was my view too, when I started writing #thaistory. I wanted to concentrate on Thailand’s 21st century crisis, and it just seemed unnecessarily provocative and cruel to publish the real story of June 9, 1946. What good would it do now? It would just cause pain.

But I changed my mind. It became clear that to understand what is happening to Thailand now, at the end of Bhumibol’s reign, you need to know how his reign began, and the implications of what happened. The secret has been lurking like an unexploded bomb beneath the palace for six decades, and the actions of the king and of the royalist establishment can only be understood in this context.

There is no serious doubt that Bhumibol Adulyadej shot and killed his brother that morning. The king is only person left alive who knows for sure exactly what happened in the Barompiman Hall bedroom inside the Grand Palace where Ananda was killed, and he seems resolved to take his knowledge to the grave with him. But a wealth of contemporary documentary evidence, as well as Bhumibol’s actions and evasions in the aftermath of his brother’s death, and the absence of any other convincing explanation for what happened, add up to the overwhelming likelihood that Bhumibol was responsible. As Thammasat University professor Somsak Jeamteerasakul, the leading academic expert on the events surrounding Ananda’s death, has pointed out, deduction can go a long way, just as in crime novels like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile:

There was a limited space, only a limited number of people were involved and some have not been straight with the truth – we can think it through and explain what happened.

It was almost certainly not premeditated, and probably an accident, and Bhumibol has never got over what happened.

Ananda and Bhumibol had never been expected to become king. Their mother Sangwan was born in 1900 to impoverished parents, a Thai-Chinese father and a Thai mother, in Nonthaburi near Bangkok. By the time she was 10 both her parents and an elder sister and brother had all died, leaving her an orphan with one younger brother. Through some fortunate family connections she moved into the outer orbit of the royal court, and after an accident with a sewing needle she was sent to stay in the home of the palace surgeon who encouraged her to become a nurse. At the age of just 13 she enrolled at Siriraj Hospital’s School for Midwifery and Nursing. She met Bhumibol’s father, Mahidol Adulyadej — 69th of the 77 children of Rama V, King Chulalongkorn — in Boston in 1918 after winning a scholarship to further her nursing studies in the United States. If anybody had expected Mahidol to get anywhere near the pinnacle of the royal line of succession, his marriage to a Thai-Chinese commoner would never have been approved. But he was far down the list.

Ananda was born in September 1925 and Bhumibol in December 1927. In November 1925, King Vajiravudh, Rama VI, died aged 44 leaving no male heir. The crown passed to King Prajadhipok, still in the prime of his life. Prince Mahidol, returned to Thailand from the United States with his young family in 1928. He hoped to practise medicine at Siriraj Hospital. This proved impossible, however, as Rayne Kruger recounted in The Devil’s Discus:

He was asking for something vastly more difficult than you might think. Here is how another prince who qualified as a doctor described his experience on returning to Bangkok: ‘It was almost impossible for me to practise. When a patient came to me I had to ask, “Which part of your body is sick? Because I’m a prince and can only treat your head.” If it was the King, of course, I could only treat his feet.’ …

Prince Mahidol was obliged to give up any hope of working at Siriraj Hospital. The British and American doctors who ran it advised the King that taboo and etiquette made the presence of a prince on the staff quite impracticable. The hospital was on the farther bank of the … river and in visiting it by ordinary hire-craft instead of crossing with traditional princely ceremony Prince Mahidol had already strained the King’s tolerance. There was to be no unfitting behaviour again, no internship at the Siriraj.

Instead, Mahidol left Bangkok to practise medicine in Chiang Mai. A few months later, though, he was back at Siriraj: this time as a patient. The curse of ill-health that has afflicted so many of the Chakris, widely attributed to inbreeding, did not spare Mahidol. Doctors at Siriraj tried to save him. They failed. When he died, Ananda was only four, Bhumibol two.

Kruger describes Prince Mahidol’s death in The Devil’s Discus:

On a morning in 1929, three months after his departure for Chiengmai, he was observed alighting from a boat at the Siriraj Hospital in Bangkok. He was dressed merely in shorts, open shirt and sun helmet like any Westernized commoner, and like any busy doctor he carried a bottle with the specimen of a patient’s intestine he  wanted tested. But he had some personal business also. He consulted Dr Noble, English Professor of Surgery at the Medical School, about his own health. Noble sent him straight home to bed; then with William Perkins, American Professor of Medicine, struggled for three months to save his life. He had an amoebic abscess in his liver. They could not save him. He showed great courage and unfailing gentleness to the moment of his death. He was thirty-seven — best, most loved of Chakri princes.

In 1932, the People’s Party, an alliance of military officers and civil servants, ended the system of absolute monarchy in a bloodless revolution. King Prajadhipok became a constitutional monarch. As doubts grew about the survival – and safety – of the Thai monarchy, Sangwan took her three children to Lausanne in 1933. Two years later, the embittered Prajadhipok unexpectedly abdicated the throne. Ananda, nine years old, was named King Rama VIII.

Sangwan was conflicted about the news, as a New York Times report showed:

According to his elder sister Galyani in a 1987 memoir, Ananda was initially reluctant and wrote a list of all the reasons he didn’t want to rule Siam:

He did not wish to be king because (1) he was only a child, (2) he knew nothing, (3) he was lazy, (4) the Chair (how he referred to the throne) was too high, and he could not sit still and could therefore fall off it… (5) wherever he went he would have to use the umbrella and could not enjoy the sun, (6) too many people in front and behind him wherever he went and he could not run.

Black-and-white footage of a contemporary interview with Ananda in Switzerland shows him similarly unimpressed about being king – and playful:

Interviewer: Does it interest you?
Ananda: No.
Interviewer: Why?
Ananda: It just doesn’t interest me.
Interviewer: What does interest you?
Ananda: Playing!

Sangwan wanted her sons to finish their schooling in Switzerland before becoming immersed in the stiflingly antique and formalized world of the Siamese royal court. As she wrote to their grandmother, Queen Sawang:

Both my son and myself have no desire for honour nor riches. The reason Nan has to accept the throne is because it is his duty to the nation… At the moment he is just a child, let him be a child.

She got her wish. As a brief news item in the Times newspaper on April 1, 1935, reported:

King Ananda and Prince Bhumibol spent several idyllic years living at Villa Vadhana on a hillside overlooking Lake Geneva, in Pully just outside Lausanne. Ananda and Bhumibol shared a room. They had friends at school, but only rarely invited them home. The two boys lived a slightly insular existence; they were playmates and best friends. There is no suggestion in any accounts of their childhood of tension between the brothers. As Paul Handley wrote in The King Never Smiles:

In Lausanne, Ananda and Bhumibol studied French, Latin, and German instead of Thai and Pali, the language of Buddhism. They hiked in the mountains and skied the snow-covered peaks while most Thai kids frolicked in steamy rice paddies with water buffaloes. As teenagers they were captivated by World War II battle exploits, fast cars and American music. By the war’s end, both were better suited for the life of well-heeled bon vivants in Europe than golden-robed, sacral princes in an impoverished tropical Asian state…

Most of the pressure on Ananda came from Sangwal herself. She tried to prepare him for kingship, but he was frustratingly inattentive, she complained in letters to Sawang. Pushed hard, he became inattentive and moody. Bhumibol, meanwhile, was merry, energetic, and curious. His mother’s letters make it clear that he was her favorite, noting that he readily completed his schoolwork and chores before running off to play. Still, the difference between the two boys was only a few degrees. They were their own constant companions and best friends, and Bhumibol looked up to Ananda.

Rayne Kruger also noted Bhumibol’s playful personality and closeness to his mother:

Closest of the children to their mother was the youngest, Bhoomipol, two years Ananda’s junior. He played the clown of the family, and no one today would recognize the stern good looks of the present monarch in the irrepressibly comical bespectacled boy.

Relations were strained between Sangwan and government leaders back in Bangkok who wanted the king back in Siam. Several times she threatened that Ananda would abdicate unless he was allowed to finish his studies and return permanently to Siam only when he felt ready. And for a while, the family was happy and content in Lausanne.

               

Ananda visited Bangkok for the first time as king in 1938, aged 13. In December 1945, after World War II was over, Rama VIII flew to Bangkok again with his mother and brother. It was supposed to be a relatively brief visit; King Ananda and Prince Bhumibol were expected to go back within months to their studies in Switzerland.

There were, broadly, three political factions in Thailand at this time. The People’s Party of 1932 had split into two opposing camps: militarists loyal to Phibun Songkram, and left-leaning civilians who supported Pridi Banomyong, an inspirational French-educated civil servant. The third camp was the royalists, angry at the end of absolute monarchy in 1932 and appalled at the dwindling power and prestige of the throne. This group included senior princes like Rangsit and Dhani, and the conservative Democrat Party founded by Khuang Aphaiwong in 1946, which soon won the support of the blue-blooded Pramoj brothers Seni and Kukrit.

Phibun had been in the ascendant after 1938, fostering a nationalist and fascist ideology in which veneration for a tough military leader — himself — would replace devotion to the monarch. During World War II he allied Thailand with the invading Japanese. Pridi, meanwhile, served as regent for Ananda during the war years, and covertly led the Free Thai resistance movement against Japanese occupation, earning immense respect from Britain and the United States. In a speech in London in 1946, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander for Southeast Asia from 1943 to 1946, expressed the extent of the gratitude of the Allies for what Pridi had done for them:

By the end of the war he had arranged sabotage and guerrilla forces comprising some 60,000 fighting men and numerous passive supporters, who were in positions at all the key strategic points in Siam and poised to strike… The strain imposed on [Pridi] and the risks he ran for over three years were very formidable, but his own discipline and that which he inspired in his followers won out. He never failed us.

The defeat of Japan left Phibun disgraced, and Pridi became the dominant political figure. He showed great respect for the royal family, although not undue deference. But because of his involvement as a leader of the 1932 revolutionaries, his popularity and his left-leaning views, the royalist camp hated him and regarded him as an enormous threat. Even in 1946, fourteen years after the revolution, many royalists refused to accept what had happened and plotted ways to restore the primacy of the monarchy.

Ananda and Bhumibol received a rapturous welcome in Siam during their visit, although both of them (and Ananda in particular) were widely remarked to be exceptionally shy. In a 1950 article in Time magazine, John Stanton wrote:

Ananda, Siamese remember, was a strange young King. Full of Western ideas, he refused to talk to visitors who sat on the floor below him in Siamese fashion, insisting that they sit on chairs level with himself. Since shyness is a Siamese characteristic, the visitors often found themselves unable to talk in such a presumptuous position; King and subject would sit in silence, both blushing. Siamese tell of Ananda’s visits to little villages near Bangkok. He would summon up all his courage, walk up to an old woman and ask, “Grandmother, how go things with you?” The woman would probably burst into tears at the thought that she had been addressed by a King, and Ananda would stand before her, eyes downcast and silent.

Their departure was delayed several times. Eventually, following discussions with the royal astrologers, it was set for June 13, 1946. But Ananda was destined to die in Siam. In his memoirs, British pathologist Keith Simpson, who was asked by the Thai authorities to give his opinions on the case, describes the last hours of Ananda’s life:

On 8th June, a Saturday in the Year of the Dog 2489, Buddhist era (AD 1946), he was slightly indisposed, suffering from a mild intestinal upset. At 10 p.m. he retired to his private suite, dressed for bed in a light T shirt and blue Chinese silk trousers. He was protected while he slept by a guard of four men and the Inspector of the Watch.

At 6 next morning he was visited by his mother, who woke him up and found him perfectly well. At 7.30 a.m. his trusted page, Butr, came on duty and began preparing a breakfast table on a balcony adjoining the King’s dressing room. The night guard went off duty, and the day staff assembled.

At 8.30 a.m. Butr saw the King standing in his dressing room. The page took in the usual glass of orange juice, a few minutes later, but by then the King had gone back to bed. With a gesture he refused the juice and dismissed Butr, according to the page’s own evidence.

At 8.45 the King’s other trusted page, Nai Chit, appeared unexpectedly. The two pages were on alternating duty, but Nai Chit was not due to relieve Butr for another two hours. He said he had called to measure the King’s medals and decorations on behalf of a jeweller who was making a case for them.

At 9 a.m. Prince Bhoomipol, Ananda’s younger brother, called on the King to enquire about his health. He said afterwards that he had found the King dozing peacefully in his bed, a mosquito netting covered him all over.

Twenty minutes later a single shot rang out from the King’s bedroom. Nai Chit ran in, and out, and along the corridor to the apartments of the King’s mother. ‘The King’s shot himself!’ he cried…

Simpson says this timeline was given to him in detail by Thai official investigating the case. It differs from official testimony given by Bhumibol and the two pages in one important respect: all three stated that Bhumibol came to enquire on his brother at 9 a.m. but, upon being told that he was still asleep, returned to his own bedroom without entering Ananda’s. It is not clear whether this mistake was inserted by Simpson or whether the account given to him differed slightly from the official testimony.

In The Devils’ Discus, Kruger recounted what happened next, again reconstructed from official testimony:

The words that rose from the Princess Mother’s lips were quite mechanical: “My poor Nand.” Horror, terror, pity and desperate incredulity held her for an instant transfixed before she began to run, asking no questions, and running through her crashing world grasped at the hope that the page was foolishly mistaken, or that “shot” meant merely a graze, and that her son would greet her with a rueful smile at having been careless with one of his pistols. But the spectacle in the bedroom obliterated hope.

Ananda lay in bed as if asleep. His flowered coverlet was drawn up. He lay on his back, his legs stretched out straight together. His arms, extended fairly close to his sides, were outside the coverlet. On his left wrist was his watch, on a finger of his left hand his ring, and an inch or two from his left hand a pistol, the American Army .45. Not that the Princess Mother took in all these details. Her entire being was concentrated on the blood oozing from Ananda’s forehead. Nai Chit opened the mosquito net for her and with a scream she flung herself on her son’s body.

Not far behind came the Royal Nanny. Her account of her movements would be that she was putting away some cine-film in Bhoomipol’s room when she heard what she thought might be a shot followed by running footsteps. Seeing the Princess Mother making for the King’s quarters she hurried after her. She saw her distraught on the bed, endlessly repeating through her sobs, “My dear Nand, my dear Nand.” The Nanny half lifted her away but she again bent keening and weeping over her son, across whose face, shoulder and pillow the blood freely flowed, until the Nanny moved her towards the foot of the bed where she lay half on the floor.

The Nanny took hold of Ananda’s wrist. Though the Palace Law of 1450 had but recently given way to the Penal Code which no longer made anyone who touched the royal person guilty of a capital offence, there was still a powerful taboo and this she defied by feeling the King‟s pulse. It was beating. At this same moment of discovery – everything was confused, confusing and indescribably terrible – the Nanny was aware of the pistol close to the wrist she held. The barrel pointed towards the Princess Mother at the foot of the bed, and fearing an accident the Nanny quickly picked it up with three fingers and put it on the bedside cabinet where Ananda had placed his spectacles and where a small clock ticked off his final seconds, for when the Nanny again took his wrist the pulse had stopped.

Told this, the Princess Mother, whose weeping had momentarily been arrested by the Nanny’s first discovery, cried more unrestrainedly than before, and with a corner of the coverlet tried to staunch the flow of blood. She called for another piece of cloth and continued her efforts.

Dr Nitya Vejjavivisth, a friend of the Mahidols from their time in the United States, arrived on the scene shortly before 10 a.m. Royal custom dictated that he had to crawl to the bed where the king lay. To quote Kruger again:

When he entered the royal bedchamber the Princess Mother was sitting down – either in that room or just beyond the open doorway to the study – and Bhoomipol sat on the floor by her feet, looking sad but calm. The doctor quickly and reverently crawled across the floor to the bed. A moment’s examination and he helplessly pronounced himself unable to do anything. The Princess Mother’s voice, broken with grief, exclaimed – demanding an answer not of him but Fate – “Did you ever think such a thing could happen?”

She asked him if he would stay to clean the body. With the help of the Royal Nanny, the two pages being in attendance, he did so. He found that the wound on Ananda’s forehead, above the left eye-brow, was shaped like a small cross of the kind put at the end of a letter to signify a kiss.Fresh linen and apparel were brought; and blocks of ice ranged down either side of the bed, together with an electric fan to blow cold air continuously across the corpse. Except for the whirring of the fan and the weeping of the mother, everything, everyone in the royal suite was extraordinarily still about him who had been Lord of Life.

As Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian notes in Kings, Country and Constitutions, the crime scene was immediately compromised:

The confusion concerning the young King’s demise began practically the very minute the King was found dead in his bed in the royal chamber at the Baromphiman Palace. During the shock and the commotion which ensued, the royal nurse and, later, the royal physician, complying to the wishes of the Princess Mother, cleaned up the mess around the body and stitched up the gunshot wound so as to make His Late Majesty’s remains dignified and presentable to outsiders. By doing so they unwittingly wiped out much of the death-scene evidence and made the post-mortem investigations inconclusive.

Simpson also notes the destruction of evidence:

I was given a carefully worded description of the scene when, some time later, a Major-General of the Police of Siam came to my Department at Guy’s to seek some help in interpreting what had happened. It was my first case out of England.

Ananda lay in bed within a mosquito netting, his body covered, but the arms lying outside the coverlet alongside the body. Close to his left hand was an American Army .45 Colt automatic pistol, and above the left eye was a single bullet wound.

There were no police photographs of the scene to support this account; for by the time the police appeared on the scene, everything had been irreparably `tidied’.

One of the first to enter the bedroom was the King’s mother, who threw herself, grief-stricken, on her son’s body, weeping and moaning `My dear Nand, my dear Nand!’ The King’s old nanny followed, and after feeling his pulse she picked up the pistol and put it on the bedside cabinet. Prince Bhoomipol, hearing the disturbance, came in, and then Butr, who put the pistol in a drawer ‘for safety’, thereby adding his fingerprints to Nanny’s. Butr was sent to call a doctor. After he had come Prince Bhoomipal joined the Queen Mother, Nanny, and the two pages in washing the body, laying it out in clean linen, and applying blocks of ice and setting up a fan to cool it and delay decomposition, which the hot weather would otherwise have caused within a few hours.

He adds that any investigation of what had happened was made even more difficult by Prince Rangsit’s insistence that commoners were not to touch the body of the dead king:

At last the police arrived; in fact, it was the Chief of Police, who had to push through the confused mob of officials to reach the body, and he was not allowed to do anything useful even then. Following protocol (’No-one may touch the Divine Body’) the King’s uncle stopped him from examining either the wound or the King’s hands. Nobody was allowed to feel if the body was stiff or cold. All the Chief of Police could do was ask for the pistol; and when it was produced he added his own prints to those of Nanny and Butr. He noted that the weapon was not on the safety catch and that only one round was missing. No bullet had been found, but Nai Chit produced a spent cartridge case which he said he had found on the floor on the left side of the body.

A couple of overheard conversations between Bhumibol and his mother Sangwan that day were remembered and recorded. One comment from Sangwan was recounted by royal page But Pathamasarin to an inquiry panel in July. He was explaining why he had moved the Colt automatic, thus further compromising the forensic evidence:

In testimony to the trial of suspects in the killing in 1950, But recounted a further conversation, as reported by Rayne Kruger:

While the doctor was washing the body and Butr was in attendance, Butr heard a noise in the adjoining study where the grief-stricken Princess Mother sat on a sofa. She was stamping her feet and holding some sheets of paper while Bhoomipol paced the room; and Butr heard her exclaim, ‘Whatever you want to do, do it.’

Another striking thing about contemporary accounts of Ananda’s death is that although there was widespread horror and grief, nobody seriously entertained the notion that an unseen assassin had somehow sneaked into the Barompiman Hall inside the fortified Grand Palace, murdered Ananda, and then fled.

As Kruger reports, the large assembly of princes and politicians who gathered downstairs in the Barompiman Hall after Ananda’s death did not spend much time debating whether he had been assassinated by an intruder — as they surely would have done if there were genuine suspicions that this had been the case — but instead fretted over how to explain Ananda’s death to the public.

The Chief of the Palace Guards telephoned news of the tragedy to the aristocrat who held the office of Chief Major Domo and Protocol. He was at his private house and before setting out for the Palace he instructed another dignitary, the Chief of the Royal Fanfare and Paraphernalia Section, to report to Pridi at the latter‟s official residence by the riverside. Pridi immediately called in the King‟s Secretary-General, the Minister of the Interior, and the Police Chief (entitled Director-General of the Police Department). The first of these was to give the only account of Pridi at this moment: “He was very agitated and pacing the floor. He said to me in English, ‘The King is a suicide’.”

They all went straight to the Barompiman Hall where five senior princes together with leading cabinet ministers and courtiers were fast assembling. During the ensuing hours, after they had made obeisance before Ananda’s body, they gathered downstairs and anxiously debated the situation…

The premises… were carefully inspected and the servants, guard and officials questioned. The Police Chief had started by suspecting assassination, but after this investigation he was satisfied that Ananda had committed suicide.

His conclusion was shared by all the princes and statesmen and officials assembled downstairs… Some of those present were afterwards to say they had reservations about the conclusion of suicide; but any doubts were no more, in those stupefying hours, than a vague unease at the back of the mind. No sign could be found of an assassin’s entry or exit…

The problem agitating the princes and statesmen was not, however, the cause of death, which seemed plainly an open-and-shut case of suicide, but what to tell the public. An announcement of suicide was too shocking to the repute and dignity of the throne to be contemplated. Prince Rangsit expressed himself strongly to this effect and the others agreed. What explanation, then, were they to give the nation? Under the duress of uncertainty and grief the various suggestions put forward were scarcely satisfactory: they ranged from cholera to stomach ache. Dr Nit especially was against any suggestion of an internal malady: he knew how monstrous rumour mushrooms quicker in Bangkok than almost any city in the world, and he was not going to provoke whispers of poisoning. Time passed; they had to make up their minds; the afternoon was far advanced before at last a communiqué was drafted, agreed by them all, and issued by the Royal Household Bureau.

According to Alexander MacDonald, a U.S. former OSS agent who stayed on in Thailand after the war, becoming a stringer for Associated Press and founding the Bangkok Post newspaper, at one stage during the day some foreign diplomats were told a story that did not involve any shooting at all. He wrote in his memoir Bangkok Editor that:

Soon after the fatal shot, one ill-advised official had called some of the foreign diplomats to explain that the King had suddenly died of stomach trouble. This story had been short lived.

The eventual official communiqué presented Ananda’s death as a tragic accident, and used his stomach bug as an explanation for how a semi-divine king could come to shoot himself through the head by mistake:

As Kruger says, it was an attempt to create a narrative that would not lead people to question the doctrine of royal sanctity and infallibility:

They wanted above everything to preserve the sanctity of the throne. Therefore they strove to present an acceptable story: the King had been ill, he was weak, making more likely that while he played with a gun, which he often did, he met with an accident.

The communiqué was broadcast over the radio early in the evening. For many it confirmed dreadful rumour… But for most people the radio provided the first news, flooding them with anguish. From stilted teak houses poised over canals, from sampan homes lilting on the river, from the shady modern villas of the well-to-do, from the slits of shops and cluttered workshops, Bangkok delivered up thousands upon thousands of people who made their way in sorrow and fear and curiosity to stand outside the white walls of the Grand Palace. And through the countryside, across rice-field, jungle, and mountain, the news travelled via the monasteries and the few other possessors of radio sets, causing even greater consternation because of the greater veneration of the countrypeople.

In a conversation with family physician Dr Nitya on the evening of June 9, shortly before he was proclaimed king, Bhumibol was also insistent that Ananda’s death had been an accident, as Kruger reports:

At nine o’clock that evening he returned to the Barompiman Hall with sedatives for the Princess Mother. He intended to hand them over to the Royal Nanny but Bhoomipol said he would deliver them. The young celestial prince was in a sad, ruminative mood. There was already upon him the unsmiling gravity which would henceforward make him a stranger to the exuberant Bhoomipol everyone had previously known. The kindly, cautious, bespectacled Dr Nit had been a friend of both his parents in America before his birth, physician to the family whenever they had been in Bangkok, and he could almost be regarded as a relation. Bhoomipol said to him: ‘I think there’s no other explanation than accident for my brother’s death. I can’t help clinging to superstition because four or five days ago he was very tender towards me, especially when he led me by the hand into the dining-room. He’d never done that before.’

He paused. Then he said: ‘You must help me, Luang Nit. Don’t leave me in a situation like this.’

Long afterwards the doctor was closely questioned about Bhoomipol’s precise meaning, but he could attach no meaning to it beyond a young man’s need for help as he tried to square up to a new and totally unexpected life.

Shortly after this conversation, Prime Minister Pridi Banomyong arrived, to inform Bhumibol that a special session of the National Assembly had unanimously requested him to become the next king.

On June 10, doctors from Chulalongkorn Hospital were allowed to embalm the body as they prepared it for the funeral rites. Then Bhumibol and Sangwan performed royal rituals on the corpse and placed it in the urn, a crown upon its head.

The same day, a second public communiqué was issued, this time by the police, after they had reported their findings to all senior princes and government ministers. The communiqué said there were three possible scenarios for how Rama VIII could have been killed — he could have been murdered, he could have committed suicide, or he could have accidentally shot himself while playing with or examining the Colt .45 he kept beside his bed. It ruled out murder, saying it had been daylight and there was no evidence of intruders being seen. And it ruled out suicide, since the king had been cheerful the night before. It concluded that there was no doubt, therefore, that Ananda had accidentally pulled the trigger.

Many people were totally unconvinced. The international media began investigating the “friendship” between Ananda and Marylene Ferrari, the daughter of a Calvinist pastor in Lausanne. Had a lovelorn Ananada committed suicide? As AP reported on June 10:

Siamese in Lausanne, Switzerland, where Ananda went to school, described as baseless any suggestion that he had taken his life deliberately. Questioned about the King’s friendship for 21-year-old Marilene Ferrari, pretty daughter of a Lausanne clergyman, a close friend of the girl said “it was not a serious affair. She know it could not last.”

Ananda’s former tutor and secretary, Cleon Seraidaris, said he talked to the girl and that she told him she, too, excluded the possibility of suicide. Seraidaris, to whom the king wrote regularly each week, said he last heard from Ananda five days ago, and that the recent letters both to him and to other friends showed the king to have been in good health and spirits, eagerly anticipating his projected trip to the United States and his return to school in Switzerland.

Many Thais found the theory that Ananda shot himself by accident a little too convenient to be credible, and also considered suicide unlikely. They suspected foul play. Meanwhile, the doctors who had embalmed Ananda’s body said they had found a wound at the back of his head that was smaller than the wound in his forehead. Assuming that exit wounds are always bigger than entry wounds, they concluded Rama VIII had been shot in the back of the head: murdered. This was widely reported in newspapers and caused a sensation. It turned out that they were wrong: forensic examinations later showed the bullet had entered through Ananda’s forehead and exited out the back of his skull. But speculation had already been set ablaze.

In the days that followed, key figures in the royalist bloc, most notably the Pramoj brothers, decided to exploit it by spreading rumours that Pridi was behind a plot to murder the king. These rumours were utterly fanciful, but in the feverish climate after Ananda’s death, and given widespread incredulity about the official explanation that Rama VIII had shot himself by accident, they were widely believed. The Pramoj brothers also paid somebody to shout in a cinema: “Pridi killed the king!”

Pridi found himself in an increasingly embarrassing position. He too found the accident explanation unconvincing. At first, it appears, like many officials he assumed that Ananda had probably committed suicide. But Sangwan implored him to tell the country that the death was an accident, and he followed her wishes. As British academic Roger Kershaw noted in his book Monarchy in South East Asia:

The two Kings’ mother had prevailed on Prime Minister Pridi to announce that it had been an accident – at least in order to divert the alternative supposition that it had been a suicide, and save the royal family’s face. This kindly act on Pridi’s part had then backfired and exposed him to the rumour-mongering of his military enemies about a ‘Communist plot’.

On June 13, U.S. chargé d’affaires Charles W. Yost sent a secret cable to the Secretary of State in Washington, entitled: “Death of King of Siam”. Yost predicted:

The death of Ananda Mahidol may well be recorded as one of the unresolved mysteries of history.

Yost recounted a conversation with Pridi, who was shocked by the rumours and false accusations implicating him in regicide:

The Prime Minister spoke to me very frankly about the whole situation and ascribed the King’s death to an accident, but it was obvious that the possibility of suicide was in the back of his mind. He was violently angry at the accusations of foul play levelled against himself and most bitter at the manner in which he alleged that the Royal Family and the Opposition, particularly Seni Pramoj and Phra Sudhiat, had prejudiced the King and especially the Princess Mother against him. He repeated several times that he had been overwhelmingly busy attempting to rehabilitate and govern the country and had not had time to have luncheon and tea with Their Majesties every day or two as had members of the Opposition…

Pridi said that the King had always behaved most correctly as a constitutional monarch and that their relations had, in spite of the prejudice planted in the King’s mind, been friendly and correct. He admitted frankly however that his relations with the Princess Mother were hopelessly bad and he feared greatly that his relations with the new King would be poisoned in the same manner as had his relations with King Ananda.

Yost wrote in conclusion that Pridi “still intended to endeavor to work with the new King and his mother”.

The following day, another cable from Yost, “Footnotes on the King’s Death”, discussed the various theories about Ananda’s death, and recounted a conversation with Foreign Minister Direk Jayanama who had just had an audience with Bhumibol. It was also classified “secret”:

The Foreign Minister…informed me that he an audience this morning with the new King in which His Majesty had inquired about rumours in regard to his brother’s death are still being spread about. According to Direk, he replied that the rumours are still being circulated widely, that some claim that the King was murdered by the orders of the Prime Minister, some … murdered by former aide-de-camp and some that he committed suicide under political pressure.

King Phumipol thereupon informed the Foreign Minister that he considered these rumours absurd, that he knew his brother well and that he was certain that his death had been accidental… What the King said to Direk does not necessarily represent what he really believes, it is nevertheless interesting that he made so categorical a statement to the Foreign Minister.

Yost added that Dr Nitya had also informed him that Bhumibol had ruled out foul play in their discussions, and had insisted his brother’s death was an accident. Yost also reported that Seni Pramoj was explicitly attempting to smear Pridi by sending emissaries to the U.S. and British embassies claiming that the prime minister had plotted to kill Ananda:

The Department may also be interested to know that within 48 hours after the death of late King two relatives of Seni, first his nephew and later his wife, came to the Legation and stated categorically their conviction that the King had been assassinated at the instigation of the Prime Minister. It was of course clear that they had been sent by Seni. I felt it necessary to state to both of them in the strongest terms, in order to make it perfectly clear that this Legation could not be drawn into Siamese intrigues, that I did not believe these stories and that I considered the circulation at this time of fantastic rumours unsupported by a shred of evidence to be wholly inexcusable.

The cable noted that the British Ambassador, Sir Geoffrey Thompson, told Yost he had been visited by several politicians telling a similar story. Thompson had told them he accepted the official account of Ananda’s death and refused to discuss the matter further.

This is an exceptionally important document (it is U.S. cable RG 59 892.001/6-1446, for those who wish to go look at it for themselves in the archives in Washington). It demonstrates that Bhumibol was continuing to insist very vehemently that Ananda’s death had been an accident: the new king was making absolutely no suggestion that his brother has been murdered. It also demonstrates the lengths that leading royalists were going to in their efforts to use the incident to destroy Pridi’s reputation.

Faced with this rumourmongering, Pridi’s position became increasingly difficult. On June 15, his government called upon anyone with evidence that Rama VIII’s death was not a self-inflicted accident to step forward:

On June 18, Pridi took more decisive action, setting up a commission of inquiry tasked with finding out the truth about Ananda’s death. It was chaired by the chief judge of the supreme court, and included three senior princes; the heads of the army, navy and air force; the chief judges of the criminal and appeals courts; and the speakers of the upper and lower houses of parliament. The commission appointed a medical sub-committee of 20 doctors: 16 Thai, two British, one American and one Indian. Ignoring the taboo on desecrating the royal corpse that Prince Rangsit had tried to enforce, the doctors did some genuine – if belated – forensic work on Rama VIII’s body. On June 21 Ananda’s corpse was removed from the funeral urn, and the head was X-rayed. As Kruger says:

The panel was allowed to do something unprecedented and unthinkable in Siamese history: it carried out a post-mortem on Ananda’s body.

The great golden urn was unjointed in its eight sections, the lid of the silver urn unlocked, the poor fetid bundle eased out, the juice-sodden bandages unwrapped; and the mouldering remains were subjected to X-ray photography in ten positions, and to the scalpel, the probe, and all the gleaming instruments of dissection. The x-shaped wound starting an inch above the left eye was measured at an inch and a half each way. A surgical pin then traced the course of the bullet: after gouging a hole of half an inch diameter in the bone it followed a perfectly straight but slightly downward-inclining course until its emergence from the left occiput (one of the two bulges at the back of one’s head, between the ears) near the nape of the neck. Both holes were surrounded by broken bone; there was no metal in them. Death had been instantaneous because the bullet destroyed a vital area of the brain. Under a small square of skin taken from the forehead wound the doctors found not only a burn but pistol powder, proving conclusively that the bullet entered from the front. The intestines and parts of the liver and kidneys were removed for analysis but produced no trace of poison, so disposing of one of the rumours concerning Ananda‟s illness during his last days.

The medical panel also experimented to determine the distance at which the pistol had been fired. At the Siriraj Hospital where the Princess Mother once trained, bullets were fired into the heads of half a dozen human corpses. These were of people aged between twenty and forty, some newly dead and some not. The conclusion reached was that the muzzle of the pistol had been held no more than an inch and a half from Ananda’s face.

The parameters of the panel’s work were deliberately skewed, however. The doctors were told to choose from three possibilities: was Ananda murdered, did he commit suicide, or did he accidentally shoot himself? A fourth possibility was never mentioned: that Ananda was shot accidentally by somebody else.

As the doctors were carrying out their investigations, royalists spread rumours that Bhumibol’s life was in danger too. And in their most audacious attempted power grab of all, they tried to use their scaremongering to win support from the British ambassador for a palace-sponsored coup against Pridi Banomyong and his government. Yost informed Washington of this in a June 26 cable classified “top secret” (it is serial number RG59 892.001/6-2646 in the Washington archives):

A member of the Royal family a few days ago sought from the British Minister support for a coup d’état, claiming otherwise the Dynasty would be wiped out. Thompson categorically refused to support and warned the petitioner of probable fatal consequences of any attempt of this kind.

And then, on July 1, the panel of doctors announced an explosive conclusion:

The full report of the medical commission is below:

Doctors had quickly concluded that the possibility that King Ananda shot himself by accident while handling the Colt .45 was nil. The Colt is a relatively heavy handgun, weighing more than a kilogram when fully loaded, and to be fired it requires considerable pressure to be placed not just on the trigger but also simultaneously on a safety panel on the back of the butt. The chances of Ananda doing this by accident, while the gun was pointed at his forehead, were extremely slim. Furthermore, the gun was found lying beside Ananda’s left hand. But he was right handed. Also the evidence seemed to suggest that Ananda had been lying flat on his back when he was shot. And he had not been wearing his spectacles, without which his vision was appalling. It seemed barely credible that Ananda would have been playing with his Colt .45 while lying on his back and without his glasses.

Suicide was a slightly more credible theory, but for many of the same reasons that ruled out Ananda accidentally shooting himself, it seemed desperately unlikely. It is almost unheard of for somebody to commit suicide lying on their back, and the trajectory the bullet had taken through Ananda’s skull was also very unusual for a suicide.

The issue of “cadaveric spasm” was to become of huge importance in the case. If muscles are in use at the moment of death, they tend to remain fixed in that position. And so if Ananda had been gripping a heavy pistol and pulling the trigger to shoot himself through the head, it would be expected that his body would still retain some of this position after death. Instead, all witnesses who saw his body say he was lying as if peacefully sleeping, arms and legs straight and relaxed, eyes closed. The implication was that it was therefore very likely that he had been sleeping when killed.

From June 26, the inquiry commission began public hearings to question those at the Barompiman Hall the morning Rama VIII was killed. The royal nanny insisted that Ananda had not been depressed and would never have committed suicide; she was convinced he had been murdered. Bhumibol himself testified on July 27. Whereas in the days after his brother’s death Bhumibol had vehemently insisted that Ananda had shot himself by accident, he was now much vaguer.

On August 11, Bhumibol performed a formal posthumous coronation for Ananda, elevating his dead brother to the status of a full Chakri king. He and Sangwan also made plans to return to Lausanne, even though the 100-day mourning period was not complete. Astrologers set a departure date of August 19.

By now, Siam was abuzz with rumours that Bhumibol’s life was in danger from the same conspirators who had killed his brother. A secret cable from ambassador Thompson on August 14 showed that even the British embassy had become alarmed:

Thompson sent another secret cable the following day ordering that the York aircraft that the British were sending to take Bhumibol and Sangwan from Siam to Switzerland should be carefully guarded at Bangkok’s airport to prevent sabotage:

Baseless rumours also began circulating that an attempt had been made to assassinate Bhumibol. Thompson was clearly concerned, and felt the king should leave Siam as soon as possible. He was also worried that court astrologers had insisted on a late take-off of the York plane on August 19, which would make it vulnerable to difficult weather conditions:

William Stevenson says Bhumibol told him that on the eve of his departure from Siam, after paying respects at his brother’s urn, he had an encounter with Ananda’s spirit. Bhumibol is quoted as saying:

I heard footsteps following as I left the urn. In royal ceremonies, I always had to walk behind my brother. In this moment I forgot he was dead, and I told him, “It is for me to walk behind you. That is the proper way.” My brother replied, “From now on, I walk behind you.”

The following day, Bhumibol and his mother were driven to Don Muang airport for their flight to Switzerland. Thousands of people lined the road as his motorcade passed. Bhumibol wrote an account of this journey for literary journal Wong Wannakhadi, and described an incident on the way to the airport:

En route, I heard somebody shout out “Don’t forsake the people!”. I wish I could have shouted back: “If the people do not forsake me, how can I forsake them?” But the car went so quickly and had passed him by.

At the airport, Bhumibol and his grieving mother boarded a plane provided by Britain’s Royal Air Force. Because of fears about the king’s safety it had been kept strictly monitored ever since it landed. As Kruger writes:

On the arrival of an RAF York aircraft sent by the British to fly the King to Switzerland, British troops guarded it continuously, it was floodlit at night, and the crew were forbidden the city. The time of day fixed by the Royal Astrologer for the royal departure bothered the pilot, who wanted an earlier time in order to cross the mountainous border before the south-west monsoon turned the weather against him. But the Royal Astrologer could not be moved, and indeed Bhumibol and his mother were carried safely from the scene of such a dreadful memory.

A secret cable from Thompson noted that Bhumibol and Sangwan behaved coldly towards Prime Minister Pridi as they departed. Thompson said Pridi had “bitter enemies” in the royal family and their animosity towards him was wearing the prime minister down:

Bhumibol resumed his studies in Lausanne, switching to law and political science to better serve him in his new role.

By now Pridi Banomyong and his government had come to an extremely disturbing conclusion. All the evidence in the case pointed to Ananda having been shot by somebody else. But there was no credible evidence that an unknown assassin had sneaked into the Grand Palace complex, then into the Barompiman Hall, located Ananda’s bedchamber, was fortunate enough to find the king still dozing even well after he usually awoke, shot him through the head, placed the king’s gun beside him to give the impression Rama VIII had committed suicide, and then made their escape, all without being seen by anyone. The theory of an outside assassin was simply not credible. As Kruger wrote in The Devil’s Discus:

It is possible that someone unknown and unguessed-at entered and departed unseen by unfathomable means, such that not all the years since have produced any hint or rumour of that person or that means. All this is possible, in the amplitude of the word possible. But when the probability is nil, and the odds against almost infinitely great, mere possibility has no practical meaning.

If Ananda was not assassinated by an intruder, did not shoot himself by accident, and did not commit suicide, that means he was shot by somebody known to be at the Barompiman Hall that morning. And only one person was not able to fully account for their movements that morning: Bhumibol. In particular, his testimony to investigators appeared to conflict with that of the royal nanny. She testified that she was in Bhumibol’s bedroom, in the opposite wing of the Barompiman Hall, when she heard a gunshot, and raced to see what had happened: she made no mention of seeing Bhumibol. Bhumibol meanwhile testified that he had been going back and forth between his playroom and his bedroom when he heard shouting — he claimed not to have heard a shot — and ran towards Ananda’s bedroom, the source of the commotion. The discrepancy with the nanny’s testimony, and the fact that he claimed not to have heard any gunshot, were striking and troubling.

There were other aspects of the official story that failed to add up. Whoever shot Ananda had been right beside the bed, inside the mosquito net (no bullet hole had been found in it). Could they really have escaped from the bedroom afterwards without having been seen? It seemed improbable. It became increasingly clear to those investigating the case that the scene had been deliberately tampered with, and that some witnesses were not telling the truth.

These whispers had reached the ears of the British ambassador in late June. Thompson sent a telegram to London which he marked “of particular secrecy” on June 27, 1946. It recounted a troubling conversation with Direk, the Thai foreign minister:

Although he did not actually say so, the minister for foreign affairs gave me the impression that the tragedy had resulted from some sinister intrigue or quarrel within the royal palace itself. Whispers to this effect derive from the fact that some delay occurred before any outside person was admitted to the late king’s bedroom, by which time the royal remains had been tidied up, the weapon put aside and the melancholy mise en scène interfered with in other ways.

There is absolutely no evidence that Bhumibol wanted to kill his brother, and certainly no evidence of premeditation. They were exceptionally close, and Bhumibol had never shown a desire to be king — indeed, both he and Ananda appear to have been extremely ambivalent about having to spend their lives inside the Siamese royal court. Bhumibol was also visibly desolated by Ananda’s death.

But the fact remains that Bhumibol’s alibi for where he was when Ananda was killed was contradicted by the royal nanny. Discrepancies in the accounts of what happened when Bhumibol went to see Ananda at 9 a.m. are also telling. Investigators began to suspect the most likely scenario was that Bhumibol had indeed gone to see Ananda, but had not been turned away by the pages as he and they were later to claim. He went into Ananda’s room.

What happened there over the next 20 minutes, only Bhumibol knows for sure. Bhumibol and Ananda both owned several guns and enjoyed playing with them. Indeed, Bhumibol had been known in the past to playfully point a gun at his brother. This has led many people to speculate privately that Bhumibol and Ananda were playing some kind of game in the bedroom that morning and that something had gone terribly wrong. The forensic evidence suggests Ananda was asleep when he was killed, however, although there remains the likelihood that, as the British ambassador’s secret cable suggests, the scene was rearranged after Ananda’s death. In any event, no credible explanation for the death of Ananda has ever been proposed other than this: between 9 a.m. and 9:20 a.m. Ananda’s Colt .45 was taken out from his bedside cabinet, and somehow Bhumibol came to shoot his brother with it, with the muzzle very close to Ananda’s forehead. Perhaps they were playing, or perhaps Ananda was still dozing and Bhumibol wanted to wake him with a practical joke, holding the gun to his head and pulling the trigger. Most probably, he removed the magazine from the Colt .45 automatic, put it to his brother’s head, and pulled the trigger, forgetting that even with the magazine removed, one round remains in the breech. Less likely, but possible, is that  they argued about something and Bhumibol brandished the gun in a fit of anger. Bhumibol alone has the answer, and he seems unlikely to ever give us the truth.

But while it remains unknown whether it happened by accident or during an argument, there is no longer credible doubt that Bhumibol was responsible. He shot his brother through the brain, and suddenly, sickeningly, his whole world fell apart.

In the unreal, dreadful hours that followed, the heartbroken Bhumibol and Sangwan decided the only option was to somehow carry on. The story of what really happened would be kept secret, and the world would be told Ananda had shot himself by acccident. However much they may have wanted to escape back to Switzerland forever and never come back, the overwhelming enormity of what had taken place allowed only one response: Bhumibol would do his duty, and rule as king in his brother’s place.

Pridi Banomyong was in an impossible situation. He wanted to protect Bhumibol, and therefore to suppress the mounting evidence that the king had killed Ananda. But as it became more and more obvious to Thais that the official story was bogus, the rumours that Pridi had something to do with killing Ananda began to appear more credible. And the royalists were cynical enough to exploit his protection of the king to destroy his political career forever. Pridi was to lose everything for the sake of defending Bhumibol Adulyadej.

MacDonald describes the grim mood in the country in the months after Ananda’s death:

The very atmosphere in Bangkok was charged with tension. The people, still stunned by the violent death of their young King, spoke everywhere in whispers. Men, women and children were in heavy mourning. The tragedy had snuffed out in an instant the blaze of gayety touched off months before by the Japanese surrender. The whole mood of the nation had changed.

In an effort to contain rumours and speculation, Pridi imposed censorship, a move that only made it seem more than ever that he had something to hide. In a poignant passage in Bangkok Editor, MacDonald describes going to see Pridi at his official residence on the Chao Phraya river to remonstrate about censorship. He cannot understand why Pridi, who he greatly respects, insists it is necessary. But with the benefit of hindsight, we know why:

Even as he walked towards me, I could see how the strain had told. His step was still brisk, and he smiled that same smile which gave him the unstatesmanlike dimple; but trouble was written in his eyes and in the tired lines of his face… He was in white, with a black armband of mourning.

“I’ve seen your newspaper,” he said, shaking hands. Congratulations.” …

I told him my errand at once: “I came to see you about this censorship. I think it’s a bad mistake.”

“Why?” he asked mildly.

“It looks bad to people abroad. At home here it’s only giving your enemies an added weapon. They’ll say, they’re already saying, that the government’s trying to hide something.”

“I know, I know. No one dislikes it more than I do. Yet it has to be done… Someone, something has got to stop them. It isn’t that I am worrying about myself, or even this particular government. It’s the entire country they’re harming. Their lies are poisoning Siam.” Pridi waved his cigarette in a tired, desperate gesture. Like some men, he could put subtle meanings and expression into the briefest movement. Pridi’s hands were especially eloquent.

“That’s the point though,” I insisted. “They are lies. Sooner or later the truth will be known. Lies have a way of cancelling themselves out. By trying to smother them now, you only seem to confirm them.”

“I know — but too many things can happen in the meantime to the country. I’m afraid you don’t know how bad a people we can be.” He smiled wryly.

“If you’re in the right the lies won’t matter when it’s all said and done. Let them print their lies and rumours. They’ll finally talk themselves out.”

“No,” he said slowly. “I think that of the two evils, censorship is less dangerous. I believe we should try it for a while, anyway. When the worst of the storm has blown over, we can lift it.”

MacDonald was unaware, of course, that Pridi wanted censorship not only to suppress lies that he was involved in Ananda’s death, but also to hide the truth that Bhumibol had killed his brother, a revelation that he feared could cause chaos in Siam. Pridi goes on to discuss his precarious political situation, and the campaign of the royalists to destroy him:

Pridi then explained, more calmly, some of the forces in the kingdom now working against him. What hurt and discouraged him, he said, was that his fiercest enemies were those whom he had released from prison. During the six-year premiership of Pibun Songkram, scores of political opponents, most of them monarchists, had been banished from Siam or imprisoned. One of Pridi’s first acts after the overthrow of Pibun was to declare an amnesty for all of them; but, immediately they were free, many had set out at once to undermine his leadership. What they were fighting was the revolution of 1932. They were out to tear down anything that represented the overthrow of the old monarchial system…

“So they’re ready to use even this terrible tragedy against me,” he told me, more with sorrow than with bitterness. It was the first and only time we referred to the King’s death. I think he knew that any mention of the matter — because of the very crudity and monstrousness of the rumors linking his name with it — would be embarrassing for both of us…

He walked to the door with me, stood there as I got into my jeep and started away. He looked dejected, and it struck me then how deeply he must be hurt, how cruelly this sudden turning against him must torment him. Pridi had cause that day for the utmost dejection.

A few weeks later, on August 21, Pridi stepped aside as prime minister, exhausted by having to fend off intrigue and false accusations, which he estimated took up 80 percent of his time. He took the position of senior statesman, while another former member of the Free Thai movement, Admiral Thamrong Navaswadhi, became prime minister. In a conversation with U.S. ambassador Edwin Stanton over tea on March 30, 1948, Thamrong recalled the dilemma his government had faced over the king’s death case. The evidence implicated Bhumibol, and the government did not wish to reveal this. And so, suspicions about Pridi and his allies grew:

On October 31, the inquiry commission presented its official report on Ananda’s death. It ruled out the possibility that Ananda could have shot himself by accident, saying the death was either suicide or murder. This put the government in an even weaker position: it had agreed to the accident explanation back in June at the behest of the royal family, who insisted it would be unacceptable to say Ananda had committed suicide. And for following the royal family’s wishes, Pridi and the government now looked dishonest and suspicious.

Trapped, the government failed to formally respond until November 28, when a cabinet sub-committee recommended that a whole new police investigation into the death should be held. As Associated Press reported:

Meanwhile, back in Lausanne, Bhumibol Adulyadej and his mother Sangwan were facing their own personal crises. Both had been shattered by what had happened, and Bhumibol was clearly traumatized and terrified by the prospect of returning to Siam for Ananda’s cremation — not surprisingly, given that he was responsible for his brother’s accidental death. In late 1946 he sent word that he would not be returning for the cremation any time soon. A secret cable from British naval attache Captain Stratford Hercules Dennis in December 1946 discusses the reaction among royalists in Siam:

Pridi Banomyong travelled to Britain and Europe in December 1947 and January 1948. During his time in London he met with former Queen Rambhai, widow of Rama VII, and her entourage. He also travelled to Switzerland to try to persuade Bhumibol to return to Siam. A cable from the British Foreign Office in January 1947 discusses his visit:

In Siam, the investigation into Ananda’s death was going nowhere. The reason, of course, was that the government had realized what had probably happened, and was trying to suppress it. By November 1947, more than 16 months after Rama VIII was shot dead in his bed, they had not made any apparent progress in solving the case. To many people, this lack of urgency appeared clear evidence that Pridi and the government had something to hide. They had falsely claimed Ananda’s death was an accident. And now that an independent commission, with expert medical advice, had declared it was almost certainly murder, they were failing to make any real effort to investigate.

Not only did the royalists exploit this, but they were also willing to ally with their old nemesis Phibun if that was what it took to destroy Pridi Banomyong and restore some of the power of the palace. As Kobkua explains:

It was… during this period that the efforts to build up an affiliation between the Democrat Party, the political front of the conservatives-royalists, and the military clique appeared a real possibility…

The opposition never lacked issues with which it could effectively cudgel and discredit the Government… perhaps most importantly the unsolved and vexing mystery of King Ananda’s death…

In order to eliminate Pridi and his hand-picked cabinet, the royalists now joined hands with the military wing of the People’s Party which had been estranged from the ruling civilian wing since the fall of Prime Minister Phibun in 1944.

By the middle of 1947, the political atmosphere in Thailand was deeply toxic, poisoned by the killing of King Ananda. A Bangkok Post column in July 1947 decried the “policy of passivity or protection or whatever it might be called” towards the king’s death case. The writer, Alexander MacDonald, had not yet realized that it was Bhumibol who was being protected:

Also in late July, British naval attache Captain Stratford Dennis reported an ominous remark from Admiral Sindhu Kamolnavin, commander-in-chief of the Siamese navy:

On November 8, 1947, the royalists and militarists made their move, overthrowing the elected government in a military coup. They used the widespread popular belief that Pridi was hiding crucial evidence about Ananda’s death to legitimize their power grab. The first major contribution of the Democrat Party to Thai politics was colluding in the military overthrow of an elected government. Khuang, the party’s founder, was installed as the prime minister of a puppet cabinet.

MacDonald recounts the night of the coup:

It was difficult to describe the violence which took place in Bangkok on the night of November 8, 1947, because it was violence without a drop of blood being shed. It was difficult, too, because there was something very ridiculous about it, ridiculous without being the least bit funny. The dominant effect was shock, followed by jubilation or anger, depression or delight, fear, hope or panic, depending on how one’s sympathies lay.

The shock came because of the unmistakable threat in the violence and because of the sheer boldness of the act. Those who saw the tanks rattling along the street or the machine-gun nests springing up, or saw the bare blades of the bayonets knew how ugly and serious it could have been. Suddenly force started them in the face, and they were overwhelmed by the sense of their own powerlessness.

Troops were sent to arrest — and probably to kill — Pridi Banomyong. He fled Thailand with the help of the U.S. and British embassies; both countries remained grateful to him for his wartime service running the Free Thai movement within Siam, and the American and British ambassadors were convinced he had nothing to do with Ananda’s death. He was given shelter by the British ambassador and spirited out of the country by boat. The deposed Prime Minister Thamrong went into hiding too.

The new regime declared that Pridi and his aide, naval Lieutenant Vacharachai Chaiyasithiwet — also on the run — were the masterminds of Rama VIII’s murder. And they arrested several alleged co-conspirators including Ananda’s former secretary Chaleo Pootomros and his two royal pages, But Pathamasarin and Chit Singhaseni:

The regime claimed Pridi had been about to launch a republican takeover of Siam on November 30 and had despatched another assassin to Lausanne to kill Bhumibol. MacDonald recounts that:

The announcement, which was broadcast throughout the city later in the day by the Publicity Department loud-speaker vans, staggered Bangkok and sent out waves which reached all the way to Switzerland. The Swiss Foreign Office received warning that a man was on the way to push the King of Siam over a cliff, and hasty orders were issued for a special guard about His Majesty’s quarters.

The regime put Seni Pramoj’s brother-in-law Pinit Chongkadi, a police major-general, in charge of gathering evidence on Pridi’s alleged communist conspiracy to kill King Ananda. He travelled to London in May 1948 to enlist the help of Keith Simpson, the eminent pathologist at Guy’s Hospital whose timeline of the events leading up to the killing was quoted earlier. From looking at the evidence, Simpson’s view was that Ananda had clearly been shot dead by somebody – he had neither committed suicide nor shot himself in the head by accident:

On 13th May 1948, the Major-General came with an interpreter to see me in London. The question was still the same: accident, suicide, or murder?

The King had been keenly interested in small firearms, and had often practiced shooting with Vacharachai. He had kept an American Army .45 Colt automatic in his bedside drawer. Could it have gone off accidentally while he was examining it? Would an intelligent man who knew anything about firearms inspect a pistol with the safety catch off and the magazine fully charged while lying in bed on his back, his head on the pillow and the pistol pointing at his forehead? The idea seemed wildly far-fetched, even apart from the fact that the King’s sight was so defective that he could not have examined anything without his spectacles, and at the time of his death these were lying on the bedroom table.

The position of the body made suicide almost equally unlikely. In twenty years’ experience I had not seen a suicide shoot himself whilst lying flat on his back. No such case existed, so far as I knew. The suicide sits up or stands up to shoot himself.   There were other strong indications against suicide. The pistol found at the King’s side was by his left hand, but he was right-handed. The wound, over the left eye, was not in one of the elective sites, nor a ‘contact’ discharge. The direction of fire was not inward towards the centre of the head. Furthermore the King had never hinted at suicide to anyone and had not been depressed at the time of his death.

That left only murder, for which the evidence was very strong. I thought he had almost certainly been shot while dozing, and that unconsciousness had followed instantly. The muzzle of the pistol had evidently been close to but not against the skin, giving the King no warning or any chance to try to protect himself. ‘This is not a case of suicidal discharge nor of accident, but one of deliberate killing by firearm,’ I concluded my report.

On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28, 1948, the King Ananda murder trial began. Chaleo, But and Chit were in the dock, as conspirators. The prosecution alleged that Pridi had masterminded the plot, and that his aide Lieutenant Vacharachai was the assassin who had sneaked into the Barompiman Hall to murder Rama VIII. With Pridi and Vacharachai still on the run, the three defendants were the best scapegoats the new regime could find to put on trial. The trial and appeals were to drag on for more than six years.

And yet, although Phibun and the Pramoj brothers were conspiring to frame Pridi for the death of Ananda, diplomatic cables show Phibun was well aware that Pridi was not guilty of the crime. In 1948 he said so himself, privately, to Dr Ruth Bacon, the U.S. diplomat in charge of the Far East Desk at the State Department. According to a cable from ambassador Edwin Stanton on June 8, Phibun said he:

personally doubted whether Nai Pridi was directly involved for two reasons: … Pridi is a very clever politician and … he has a ‘kind heart’.

Phibun aded that he did not think Pridi “would cause anybody to be murdered” but added that he might have been guilty of suppressing or destroying “some of the evidence thinking thereby to protect his present Majesty”. The implication of this comment was very clear,

Phibun’s wife also insisted Pridi had nothing to do with Ananda’s shooting, telling Bacon:

in a rather emphatic manner that she did not believe Pridi was in anyway involved in the late King’s death.

But in spite of this, Phibun used the issue to justify his coup. And then, with the assistance of Phao Sriyanond — the notoriously corrupt and criminal police chief — and the Pramoj brothers, a show trial of three innocent men was set up to force Pridi out of Thai politics forever.

Back in Pully, at Villa Vadhana, King Bhumibol, Sangwan and Galyani tried to put the tragedy behind them. But the royalists in Bangkok were getting increasingly worried. Bhumibol appeared to be having serious doubts about whether he would ever go back to Siam. He and Sangwan had rejected a call for him to return after the 1947 coup:

The alliance between Phibun’s militarist clique and the royalists had only been a marriage of convenience and soon began to go sour. With Phibun and Phao able to control the investigation into Ananda’s death — and the show trial of the three suspects — they were in an excellent strategic position to exploit the case for their own interests. The royalists and Bhumibol could be effectively blackmailed with the threat that if they stepped out of line, the king’s involvement in his brother’s death could be revealed. And so the royalist Democrat Party (presumably with the approval of senior princes like Rangsit and Dhani) decided to pre-empt the issue. Concluding that the king was a liability, Khuang and the Pramoj brothers hatched a plan to announce Bhumibol’s guilt, in order to force his abdication in favour of Prince Chumphot Paripatra, seen as a more forceful and less compromised character who would be a superior figurehead to rally the royalist cause.

On February 20, 1948, U.S. State Department Southeast Asia Division Assistant Chief Kenneth Landon, a former missionary in Siam, revealed this plan in a confidential memorandum to Washington:

Prime Minister Khuang is preparing to announce that King Bhumiphol killed his brother accidentally; that Bhumiphol will abdicate and that Prince Chumphot will become King…

It may be true that Bhumiphol killed his brother either intentionally or accidentally.

Landon added that Phibun was opposed to the plan. During this turbulent period of Thai history, it was the royalists who wanted to dethrone Bhumibol. Phibun and his allies saw the young king as weak and easy for them to manipulate, and so had no wish to see him forced to abdicate. As Roger Kershaw wrote in Monarchy in South East Asia:

The death of Ananda resulted in two unexpected benefits of special benefit for Field Marshal Phibun… The death of the King enabled the militarist clique to circulate rumours implicating Pridi in the event. The only witness – presumed – to the late King’s death had become King in his place…

As Kershaw says, this left Bhumibol highly vulnerable to “blackmailing insinuation about his own possible role”.

Phibun had only installed Khuang and the Democrats after his coup because the United States and Britain would never have recognized his overthrow of the Thamrong government and Pridi otherwise: memories of the field marshal’s actions during World War II, siding with Japan and declaring war on the Allies, were still fresh. But by 1948, with global geopolitics realigning and communism the new spectre for the Americans, the desire for a strongly ruled rightist Siam began to override other considerations, and Phibun’s wartime behaviour was quickly and conveniently forgotten. It helped that once Pridi’s supporters had been thoroughly intimidated and purged from positions of influence, elections were held that gave Phibun and the Democrats a veneer of legitimacy. As MacDonald wrote in Bangkok Editor:

Humourlessly the government and the military…announced this would be the fairest and most free elections in Siam’s history. Elaborate pronouncements were made as to honesty at the polls and the need for a whopping big national vote. On January 29, 1948, 22 per cent of the electorate went apathetically to the polls and voted for the new House of Parliament. Some months later, in a by-election at Bangkok to fill a vacated seat in the House, an all-time low was hit when 7 per cent of the electorate cast its vote. In an editorial the next day the Post mourned what the coup had done to democracy in Siam.

Another unique but not surprising result of the January election was that, when it was over, the Khuang government and Phibun’s military found themselves in the highly strategic position of having a Parliament in which there was no opposition. Khuang’s Democrats and Pibun’s Tharmathipat parties naturally had swept the field. It began to look not a little like the National Socialist and Communist victories at the polls in Germany and Soviet Russia. The results were hailed, however, as the people’s endorsement of the November coup.

It is interesting to reflect on how a political faction that called itself the Democrat Party had so comprehensively worked to sabotage Thai democracy in the first few years of its existence, and that despite its professed royalism it came close to announcing Bhumibol had killed Ananda to force him off the throne. What made the opportunism of Khuang and the Pramoj brothers particularly depressing was that it was so short-sighted. After the elections, with the new regime now officially recognized by the United States and Britain, Phibun felt himself to be in a strong enough position to knife his royalist former allies and prevent them from forcing Bhumibol’s abdication. He sent four armed colonels to Khuang’s office on the afternoon of April 4, 1948, to order him to resign. Phibun would now rule Siam directly instead of via a puppet Democrat Party government.

The royalists were humiliated and marginalized. And as Handley says in The King Never Smiles:

All of this… must have bewildered King Bhumibol. He had personally endorsed the 1947 coup. Now he found his prerogative of signing into office the democratically chosen prime minister and cabinet had been wiped away in an instant by the ambitions of the army, and that his exhortation for moderation and selflessness fell on deaf ears. Whatever the constitution said, the generals did as they pleased.

Bhumibol was well aware that innocent men were on trial for a crime they did not commit, as a result of his own shooting of his brother. He appears to have discussed his abdication with senior princes, and in an effort to bolster his resolve, Prince Dhani and others tried to arrange for him to visit Britain. They felt a chance for Bhumibol to bask in British pomp and pageantry might make him more enthusiastic about being king. The problem was, the British were well aware of the overwhelming evidence that Bhumibol had killed his brother, and refused to allow an official visit as a result.

In May 1948, Prince Dhani approached Lord Mountbatten, to request that Bhumibol be allowed to visit Britain. In a memorandum of the conversation written on May 27, 1948, Mountbatten records his discussion with Dhani:

I said that I trusted that for the future of the Siamese monarchy the story of the late king’s death would be publicly and satisfactorily cleared up in the near future.

I told him that I had followed the details of the late king’s death… It was known that the late king and his brother, the present king, were inordinately fond of firearms and were constantly firing off their revolvers. I suggested that an accident might very well have occurred in which the younger brother had by sheer mischance and ill-fortune killed the elder…

If this were indeed the truth the future of the Siamese monarchy was in grave jeopardy, for at any time the enemies of that monarchy would be able to reveal that the present King was regicide, and would no doubt claim that his accident had been deliberate and not accidental.

I said that if this theory was indeed true, I would urge that the King of Siam should fully and frankly confess, saying that he had been so overcome by grief at having killed the person that he loved most in the world that he had allowed himself to be persuaded not to make a statement at the time lest the double shock might prove too great for his people.

According to Mountbatten, Dhani replied that Bhumibol had a clear alibi: he had been in his own bedroom when the shot was fired. Mountbatten asked why this had not been made public:

He replied that he presumed that the reason for this was that no one should be encouraged even to imagine that for the King to have killed his brother was a possibility.

Dhani then changed tack, telling Mountbatten that Pridi’s aide Lieutenant Vacharachai was thought to be the assassin. Mountbatten replied:

It would not be essential to proclaim either the assassin or the motive in order to clear the present King, since the minimum that was wanted was a cast-iron alibi which was apparently already available. I could not in any event recommend that the present king should visit England until the question of his being involved in the accidental shooting of his brother was completely cleared up.

But there was no cast-iron alibi. Quite the reverse. As Mountbatten and Dhani both knew, the royal nanny had specifically said she had not seen Bhumibol in his bedroom when the shot was fired or in the period leading up to Ananda’s death.

The Siamese royalists decided to change their approach. Since the British monarchy was not prepared to accept an official visit by Bhumibol without proof that he had not killed his brother — proof that, for obvious reasons, could not be provided — then would Britain’s government find it acceptable if Bhumibol visited the country incognito? In June 1948, Dhani visited London, where he met Foreign Office Assistant Under-Secretary Esler Dening for lunch at the Dorchester Hotel, to make this request. In a note to his superiors, Dening said he believed that the trial of the three men accused of Ananda’s murder was unlikely to lay the matter to rest, but added the following about Bhumibol:

I do not think we need worry unduly about his possible connection with the late king’s death, because even if he might have shot him accidentally (which Prince Dhani says was impossible), I do not think it would ever come out.

The British government decided to leave the decision up to King George VI, whose private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, told the Foreign Office on July 22:

Any question of the King of Siam’s being invited to stay with our King and Queen should be postponed until the King of Siam has been crowned, and the trial regarding the late King’s death has been concluded.

Things went from bad to worse for the haunted, reluctant young king in October 1948:

Bhumibol had been driving his Fiat 500 Topolino near Lausanne with Galyani’s husband when he crashed it into the back of a truck. He spent weeks in hospital and for a while it was feared that he had been blinded; in the end he lost the sight in one eye but the other was saved. Stevenson reports that Sangwan was worried the injury might be regarded by some Siamese as Bhumibol’s karma for killing his brother:

They would say he was punished for sins previously committed, and revive the lie that he killed Nan.

For the same reason, Stevenson says, Bhumibol was sensitive about the issue even five decades later:

When I first spoke of this loss of an eye, he was upset. He had been totally blind for a while. Few knew about this. He deplored idle chatter about physical handicaps because superstitious people saw any handicap as punishment for past wickedness.

But the crash was to be instrumental in cementing Bhumibol’s relationship with Sirikit Kitiyakara, second daughter of the Siamese ambassador in Paris.

In Bangkok, meanwhile, the trial of the three scapegoats in the so-called King’s Death Case was under way. In January 1949, the authorities sent Dr Songkran Niyomsen, a forensic pathologist who had been on the 1946 medical panel, to London for further consultations with Keith Simpson. Songkran asked Simpson if he would be willing to come to Thailand to testify at the trial. The authorities had been delighted with Simpson’s pronouncements that Ananda had definitely been murdered; he seemed not to have realized that the evidence was also consistent with Ananda being accidentally shot by Bhumibol.

Simpson asked advice from the British authorities about whether he should travel to Thailand for the trial. The advice from ambassador Thompson was that he should stay away. Thompson also had a very intriguing question for the pathologist:

Britain’s ambassador to Bangkok was trying to give Simpson a hint about what had really happened, in order to dampen the wild conspiracy theories about a murder plot. He believed that Ananda had probably been killed accidentally by somebody who had removed the magazine from the Colt .45 automatic but had forgotten there was one round left in the chamber. Ananda Mahidol had been shot by Bhumibol Adulyadej.

On February 26, 1949, Dr Nitya Vejjavivisth testified at the trial. He was an old friend of Prince Mahidol and Sangwan. He had arrived at Ananda’s bedchamber before 10 a.m. on the morning of Rama VIII’s death and had observed the unfolding events and the actions of Bhumibol, his mother and their royal staff through much of the day. He had been one of the doctors on the medical inquiry panel. In his trial testimony, he said Ananda had been a “thoughtful and happy king” and that suicide would have been totally out of character.

Nitya noted that the wound in Ananda’s forehead had been cleaned before his arrival. He noted that “the present King and his mother were sitting in an adjoining room and the mother’s voice seemed to be raised in anger”, and added that “his first impression was that there had been an accident; any other cause of death seemed out of the question”.

On February 26, Pridi Banomyong and his supporters tried to seize back power by force, with the support of the Thai navy and former Seri Thai members. Alexander MacDonald, who reported on the abortive coup for the Associated Press, recounted what happened in Bangkok Editor:

A band of plotters, believed to be Pridi’s former Free Thai men, had seized the Grand Palace. At strategic points throughout the city, army and navy units faced each other. At the Police Department, for example, navy artillery was drawn up on one side of the building, army guns on the other. They faced each other belligerently, without shooting.

But I ran into shooting in other parts of the city. Army tanks rolled down some streets and were stopped by navy and marine guns. Artillery fire raised havoc along Rajadamri Road. There were casualties. I passed a riddled, overturned navy jeep. A civilian lay dead on Petchburi Road, most of his head shot off. From the river came the occasional boom of naval guns.

But Pridi’s attempt to wrest back power in Siam was a failure. As he realized his forces were too weak to prevail, he fled the country for a second time, and his supporters scattered. Senior military brass explained the whole thing away as a “misunderstanding”.

Retribution was swift, especially from Phao’s criminalized police force. Several were murdered. As MacDonald says:

One police colonel who hoped to escape detection was found at his home two days after the abortive coup by the “special suppression unit” set up to investigate the plot, and was shot and killed “while trying to make his escape.” Witnesses said he was shaving when shot.

Among the fifty or sixty suspects under arrest were four former ministers in [the] Pridi and Thamrong cabinets. Three of them were from the northeast provinces, the hotbed of opposition to Pibun.

The four former ministers — two of whom were also acting as defence counsel in the King’s Death Case — were all murdered by police. MacDonald describes their injuries:

The face of one had been burned, as if with lighted cigarettes… The legs of three of them had been broken. Their faces were terribly swollen from beating, and one’s ribs had been crushed in. They were riddled with bullets.

An official police statement claimed the men were being transferred from their cells to another prison when the police convoy was ambushed by bandits. No police were wounded in this alleged attack, of course.

Thailand was tumbling further and further away from democracy, becoming an authoritarian mafia state. And the pivotal event that had set the country on this course was Bhumibol’s shooting of Ananda. To the young Rama IX, watching events from Switzerland, it must have seemed as if everything was spinning out of control. The lies that had been told to cover up the heartbreaking accidental killing of his brother were being magnified and twisted. Now Phibun and Phao, contemptuous of the monarchy, were firmly entrenched in power. And with the King’s Death Case they could continue turning the screws on Bhumibol. Everything was going so wrong.

In March 1949, Britain’s Times newspaper published an article summarizing the key issues and developments in the case.

The article noted the weakness of any evidence produced so far to implicate Pridi and noted that “the evident desire of the innermost circle of the royal household to shield the monarchy from calumny” was one of the main factors preventing the truth from getting out:

A year later, the New York Times published an analysis of the case, by correspondent Tillman Durdin. The article noted that progress in solving the King’s Death Case was going backwards, not forwards: “Nearly four years after the slim, shy, twenty-year-old monarch was found in his palace bedroom…with a bullet through his head, the mystery seems further from solution than ever.”

But during 1949 Thailand’s royalists did at least manage to mount a counterstrike against the dominance of Phibun and his military clique. The Democrat Party engineered the promulgation of a constitution that restored massive powers to the palace. In Kings, Country and Constitutions, Kobkua describes the the 1949 constitution as “the triumph of the royalist version of the constitutional monarchy”:

One of the most celebrated articles of the 1949 Constitution was the political power of the monarch to appoint members of the Senate/Upper House without having to consult or heed the Premier’s advice or objection. This direct royal participation in politics made the monarch something of a political force to be reckoned with and no longer a politically inactive and neutral head of state who could be easily side-tracked at the wish of the political masters.

But it was a hollow triumph, and a grave miscalculation. The royalists had manage to incense the ruling military clique and progressive members of the establishment. As Handley says in The King Never Smiles:

When it was released, the final draft created an uproar among the generals, Pridi supporters, and many in the public at large. It was attacked as contrary to the spirit of the 1932 revolution, and Prince Dhani and Prince Upalisarn were accused of planning to form a royalist political party. In response, Dhani claimed that there was no need for such a plan because in fact “all the political parties now support the throne”, while other royalists branded the critics as republicans and communists.

Phibun and his clique were certain to try to wrench power back from the royalists. The only question was when they would make their move. They knew that the suspicions about Ananda’s death made Bhumibol very vulnerable. By overplaying their hand to such an extent, the royalists virtually guaranteed that Rama IX would come under attack. Kobkua notes that Phibun and his allies knew they would have to act sooner rather than later: “The leaders of the junta entertained great fear as to their political future if and when a mature King returned to reign personally over his Kingdom.”

In March 1950, the reluctant Bhumibol finally returned to Thailand — albeit briefly — to cremate his brother. But although Ananda had at last been formally laid to rest, the  King’s Death Case could not be so easily put behind him. The trial was still dragging on, and according to Stevenson in The Revolutionary King, police chief Phao Sriyanond visited Sirikit at the Klai Kangwon palace in Hua Hin during her honeymoon with Bhumibol to try to intimidate her:

Phao… had hurried there with gossip that he hoped would destroy Queen Sirikit’s trust in her husband. He had heard the queen wanted to go with him to London and wrongly assumed the king had not told her that George VI had declined to receive the king, saying ‘Buckingham Palace does not host murderers.’ But Sirikit already knew. Kings of England did not intimidate her. Neither did conspirators like Phao. She sent him packing, aware that he was a dangerous enemy to make; but she had the courage of the very young, reinforced by the romantic vision of herself and Lek as past lovers who had been great warriors at different periods, each pursuing the other through many incarnations until they finally met in the same lifespan.

After his return to Bangkok, Bhumibol had to provide testimony at the trial of the three men accused of Ananda’s murder. The king did not come to the court room; instead, the judges, counsel and accused were taken to his residence for his testimony. In The Devil’s Discus, Rayne Kruger provides an English-language summary of what Bhumibol said. He stuck to the same account of whereabouts that he had told investigators in 1946: he had been moving between his bedroom and playroom, had run towards Ananda’s bedroom after hearing a commotion, and had arrived there shortly after the royal nanny. But whereas he had been strangely adamant in the days after Ananda’s death that his brother had shot himself by accident, he now filled his testimony with several insinuating little stories about Pridi’s alleged lack of respect for Ananda. They were trifling incidents, even in a country like Thailand where huge deference is demanded for the monarch, but they seemed intended to convey a sense of suspicion about Pridi Banomyong. Bhumibol also added some remarks that showed the three accused, Chaleo, But and Chit, in a less than positive light. Some of this, of course, was in response to questions, but it is telling that Bhumibol did not make any apparent attempt to express any doubts about the guilt of three men who he knew to be innocent. The translation provided by Kruger, in which he normalized Bhumibol’s use of the majestic plural, is as follows:

King Ananda shot with guns at fairs in foreign countries and with toy guns. When he returned to Bangkok he used to shoot with guns given him by people at Cholburi in December when Pridi arranged the FTM demonstration … the person who showed him how to use the weapons was Lt Vacharachai. People who had given the King the guns said Lt Vacharachai should teach him and it was the King’s own wish to learn. The shooting took place in the garden behind the Barompiman Hall and I went too. The King shot with both short and long guns. They included the US Army .45. When he shot with that some of the pages used to keep some of the spent cartridges. I saw both Nai Chit and Butr pick up spent cartridges. After shooting we’d let Lt Vacharachai take charge of the guns. The King had to wear glasses but I can’t remember if he wore them every time he shot … Nai Chit could not point out where he had picked up the spent cartridge in the King’s bedroom.

I’d heard that Chaleo let his car be driven right up to the door of the Barompiman Hall: whether my brother was displeased or not I don’t know, but I do remember once when my mother wanted a car it couldn’t be got because one was being repaired and Chaleo had sent the other to Pridi, so Kuang had to lend his car. The King never told me anything about Chaleo being disrespectful but I assumed he left because the King was displeased.

When the King went to Hua Hin on holiday, Pridi went too. There Pridi used the royal jeep, the King’s personal property, without permission. He also did not get permission for a party of ex-members of the FTM. It turned out a very noisy party.

Pridi once arranged to get the King a piano to play at, I don’t know where from, but when it arrived he was led to believe it was Pridi’s own, until later he learnt it came from the Royal household. I don’t know if Pridi and my brother had any disagreement over the appointment of the Regency Council, but regarding the replacement of Chaleo, Pridi took so long that the man chosen by the King had not yet been appointed when he died.

It was my brother’s own wish to visit the US and Britain on the way to Switzerland. He wished to leave in a hurry as the date was set for the thirteenth… Between the King, myself and the Princess Mother there was never any trouble or misunderstanding. The King never told me that anything troubled him. The only complaint he ever made was about the heat. If anything was annoying him in his work he didn’t tell me of it, but in his private life there was nothing seriously worrying him. He was a very calm person, and when he used guns he was very careful in every way and even warned me that when playing with a pistol I should make sure that the breach was empty. The King never discussed politics with me. I never heard that he wanted to meet FM Pibul. Chan [the senior page who pre-deceased Ananda] was very loyal and used to worry about our welfare and safety. He never said much to me but he used to tell me to be careful and I understood this to mean careful of myself. He’d told me this ever since we’d returned to Thailand.

Under cross-examination, Bhumibol was further pressed about his precise location when Ananda was killed, and Kruger provides a translation of his response:

I did not hear anything abnormal before I heard someone running. While I was walking back and forth between my bedroom and playroom I didn’t notice if anyone else was about. I paid no attention when I heard someone running. I heard both a shout of astonishment and weeping — it sounded like the same person. Apart from encountering the lady-in-waiting near the front porch I saw no one. I didn’t notice if the door of the writing room was open. It was usually closed if the King was sleeping.

This testimony still left significant discrepancies with that of the royal nanny.

Bhumibol and Sirikit only stayed in Thailand for 10 weeks, and left on June 6, which allowed the king to get out of the country before the fourth anniversary of Ananda’s death three days later. But as the trial of the three scapegoats continued, he found that even in Switzerland he could not escape its reach. He was always being confronted with reminders of what had happened, faced with traumatic ordeals to keep the truth hidden. In the summer of 1950, investigators flew to Switzerland to question Sangwan once again, in the Thai embassy in Berne:

Twice in 1951, Phao flew to Lausanne to demand Bhumibol give up some of the powers the monarchy had won in the 1949 constitution. Phao is known to have shamelessly used the threat of publicly exposing Bhumibol as Ananda’s killer several times in the 1950s, and it seems unlikely that he missed the chance to twist the knife during these meetings. Bhumibol stood firm, but upon his return to Thailand in late 1951 the “Silent Coup” showed him how weak his position really was. The shooting of Ananda gave everyone leverage over Bhumibol — not just Phao and Phibun, but also the ultra-royalists, who could respond to any signs of perceived weakness in the king by castigating him over the terrible crime he had committed and ordering him to toughen up or else. The king was caught in the middle with his grief and his shame and his fear.

The three accused in the King’s Death Case, But Pathamasarin, Chit Singhaseni and Chaleo Pootomros, suffered years of torment. During their prolonged incarceration they were beaten, tortured, abused and drugged. Chit in particular must have known more than he revealed in court, and kept quiet to protect Bhumibol. On September 27, 1951, the court laid down its verdict. Sensationally, Chaleo and But were found not guilty; Chit was declared guilty of murder. Both sides appealed, and the interminable legal process ground onwards. In December 1953, the appeals court gave its judgment: Chaleo’s acquittal was upheld, but the judges ruled that both Chit and But were guilty. The case moved to the supreme court, where a final judgment was given on October 13, 1954. The convictions of But and Chit were upheld, and Chaleo, who had been rearrested two days earlier, was also found guilty. All three men were sentenced to death.

Contrasting with the inhumanity of the treatment the three men suffered was the compassion and courage shown by many who tried to save them. Fak Nasongkhla, a young lawyer, volunteered to defend the men when nobody else would, showing immense bravery given the risks: Phao’s police tortured and murdered two defense counsel in March 1949, and arrested two more for treason in October 1949. Chaleo’s 23-year-old daughter also joined the defense during the trial, having studied law so she could help her father. Several officials made an effort to save at least some of the three accused from a fate that was widely known to be a travesty of justice. In the end, they all failed.

On February 17, 1955, But Pathamasarin, Chit Singhaseni and Chaleo Pootomros were executed by firing squad. The killings were overseen by Phao Sriyanond. As Time‘s account of the executions makes clear, it was widely known that justice had not been done:

Who killed King Ananda Mahidol? For close to nine years, Siamese have asked the question—privately, over the tinkle of thousands of teacups; publicly, in one of the longest murder hearings in history.

On the morning of June 9. 1946, the young King (elder brother of the present popular, jazz-composing King Phumiphon Adundet) was found in his bed with a bullet hole through his forehead and a .45 near his hand. Soon afterward, the then Premier, Pridi Phanomyong, announced that the King had killed himself accidentally.

A year later there was a small revolution. Marshal Phibun Songgram, Pridi’s ancient rival in the seesaw of Siamese politics, took over as Premier and charged that Pridi himself was responsible for the King’s murder. (Pridi has since turned up in Peking, leading a “Free Thai” movement blessed by the Communists.) In the years that followed, successive courts of inquiry tried to fix the blame for the King’s death on other guilty parties to no positive avail.

Last week, in the midst of Bangkok’s frenetic preconference housecleaning, the Phibun government did its best to remove the skeleton from Ananda’s closet by executing three Siamese vaguely convicted of “complicity” in his murder. The three were the late King’s pages, Busya Patamasirind, 50, and Chit Singhaseni, 44, who discovered the body, and the King’s former secretary, Chaliew Pathumros, who had been fired a month before the King’s death. At 5 o’clock one morning last week, fortified with a final bottle of orange squash apiece, the three were led into the execution pavilion at Bangkwang Prison. Their hands were clasped together in the traditional Buddhist greeting and lashed to an upright pole. In each upraised hand, prison guards placed a ceremonial candle, joss sticks and a garland of small, pink Siamese orchids. Then a dark blue curtain was dropped behind each victim and the executioner fired a burst from his machine gun.

That morning Police Chief General Phao Srihanond had dropped by for a last chat with Private Secretary Chaliew, his comrade-in-arms during an anti-government coup back in 1932. “Good-bye, old comrade,” said the general as machine-gun slugs tore into his friend. After ten rounds, Chaliew was dead. It took ten more rounds before the prison doctor pronounced Chit dead, and 20 full rounds for Busya. But at last the execution was done, the closet was tidy, and only one question remained unanswered: Who killed King Ananda?

In The King Never Smiles, Paul Handley discusses Sangwan’s interesting behaviour at the time of the executions:

Princess Mother Sangwal [began] a private course in soulclearing vipassana meditation two days before the execution. For one month she confined herself to Srapathum Palace, emerging only to meet her meditation teacher Phra Thepsiddhimuni at Wat Mahathat. Sangwal’s sudden desire to meditate was later explained as a result of her suffering from insomnia, but the timing suggests that she sought to clear her conscience.

Nearly nine years after Bhumibol fired the shot that killed his brother, three more people had died because of his actions that morning and the lies and evasions that had followed. He had probably believed, at the time, that the whole episode could be dismissed as an accident, and that the right thing to do was to cover it up and to do his royal duty. Now he had three more deaths on his conscience, after a trial that had already seen two defense counsel murdered. Pridi Banomyong remained in exile, and Thailand was ruled by a venal and unabashedly criminal military regime.

Bhumibol’s secret was safer now, but it still haunted him. He was troubled by the fact that privately, many people believed he was responsible for his brother’s death. British ambassador Sir Berkeley Gage informed London on May 28, 1957, after a conversation with Prince Dhani, that:

Prince Dhani had previously indicated to me that the King had been hurt after the death of his brother at the view which he understood was generally held in ‘high circles’ in London that he in some way or another had been responsible for it. I disclaimed all knowledge of such a view but Dhani went on to urge that an invitation should be issued to Their Majesties soon to visit the United Kingdom at a time convenient to the Queen and Themselves. He said that the Americans had already extended an invitation for the United States but His Majesty would particularly appreciate one from the Queen…

Bhumibol seemed to think that an invitation from Britain’s queen would somehow prove his innocence. That, at least, is the account Stevenson gives of Bhumibol’s views in The Revolutionary King:

The lie that [Bhumibol] killed his brother could be laid to rest if Queen Elizabeth welcomed him to London.

In fact, of course, the British had changed their stance because there had been a trial and convictions — however dubious — rather than because of any change in their views.

Over the decades that followed Ananda’s ghost kept reappearing, again and again. In 1964, The Devil’s Discus by Rayne Kruger (already extensively quoted in this article) was published. It was a book-length account of the death of Ananda and the subsequent trial. It demonstrated in meticulous detail that the three men accused of killing Rama VIII were innocent, Pridi Banomyong had nothing to do with any plot, and that indeed there were only two explanations of Ananda’s death with any credibility: either Bhumibol shot him, or he committed suicide.

Those who have read The Devil’s Discus usually tend to find one aspect of it strange: it makes a far better case for the likelihood that Bhumibol killed his brother than it does for suicide, only to dismiss the possibility of fratricide with some bogus and perfunctory arguments and conclude that it must have been suicide after all. This is a result of the circumstances through which the book came to be written. Kruger wrote it on the suggestion of Prince Subhasvasti, brother of Prajadhipok’s wife Queen Rambhai. Subhasvasti had been head of the royal bodyguard and after Prajadhipok’s abdication he decamped to Britain with the former king’s entourage. During the war he ran the Free Thai movement in the UK, using the nom-de-guerre Tai Chin. He came to trust and respect Pridi as a result of their wartime cooperation, and grew to dislike Seni Pramoj. And he was impressed by Pridi’s actions following the fall of Phibun’s pro-Japan administration in 1944, such as freeing Prince Rangsit and other royalists from prison, and restoring Prajadhipok’s titles and decorations. He believed – entirely correctly – that Pridi had nothing to do with Ananda’s death. The Devil’s Discus was envisaged as a way of rehabilitating Pridi’s reputation in the hope that he would be able to return from exile and play a leading role in Thai politics once again.

The Devil’s Discus did a very good job of demolishing the case against Pridi. But the problem was that an alternative explanation for Ananda’s death had to be provided. And to conclude that Bhumibol was responsible was, of course, totally unacceptable to the royalist establishment — the book was supposed to enable détente between Rama IX and Pridi, not to declare full-scale war. So Kruger had to find a way to discard the likeliest explanation — that Bhumibol shot his brother — and promote the only credible alternative conclusion, suicide. He makes a valiant effort to do so, but fails to convince.

After dismissing the possibility of a self-inflicted accident, The Devil’s Discus has this to say about whether Bhumibol may have shot his brother:

The accident theory has been shown to be almost worthless, but this has been on the assumption that Ananda was alone when he died. However, the fact that the boys always played with their guns together, and the less well-known fact that the high-spirited Bhoomipol sometimes playfully pointed a gun at Ananda who sternly told him not to, has given rise to a far more persuasive theory, which continues to be held by most Westerners. It is that Bhoomipol visited the sick Ananda and while they were playing with the .45 he accidentally fired it.

No one ever gave more authority to this idea than Bhoomipol himself, by his extraordinary change from gaiety throughout his seventeen years preceding Ananda’s death to unsmiling gravity in the following fourteen. The resilience of youth, and the Siamese trait of quickly forgetting disagreeable events, appeared in him to have been overborne by an emotion which many interpret as remorse or guilt.

The evidence in the regicide case also gives ample scope for speculation. Before the fatal shot, the Royal Nanny and Bhoomipol were in and out of the playroom and Bhoomipol’s bedroom at the same time. She was in the bedroom putting away movie films when she heard the shot and rushed out, while Bhoomipol said he heard not a shot but a shout which drew him from the playroom. This difference is as odd as their lack of reference to each other in their respective testimonies; indeed Bhoomipol even said he saw no one. Moreover he said the shout drew him out to the front porch where, directly along the front corridor to Ananda’s study, he met the lady-in-waiting. If indeed the study door was for some reason left unlocked, it is theoretically possible for him to have gone this way to Ananda, and after the accident run out by the same door, unremarked by the two pages in the back corridor outside the dressing-room but encountering the lady-in-waiting.

Then there is the Princess Mother’s agitated conversation with him which Butr allegedly overheard when the body was being washed, “Whatever you wish to do, do it!” The explanation of this could be that Bhoomipol wished to confess to the Palace Meeting going on below. An equally incriminating interpretation can be placed on his cri de coeur to the Royal Physician that evening, “You can’t leave me in a situation like this.”

Strangely, no inquiry was made at the regicide trial whether Ananda was right- or left-handed. He was in fact right-handed. Yet the pistol was by his left hand. Note also that the cabinet containing the pistol was on his left side, and the fatal wound above his left eye. These facts may mean that Bhoomipol got the pistol out as he stood next to his brother’s bed, playfully pointed it, accidentally fired it, and after an instant of stupefied horror let it drop and ran out: the pistol could then have been where it was found.

Now however unfavourable all this is to Bhoomipol, how much more so does it become if the theory were not one of accident but murder. The notion that he visited Ananda then tends to indicate sinister intent, else he would have used the dressing-room entrance where the two pages were stationed (to his knowledge, since he had spoken to them there). A clear motive can be presumed, the ambition to be King. He had the opportunity. No one saw him at the crucial moments. He knew where the .45 was, and how to use it. Add to these circumstances his demeanour during the years following, which suggested an emotion outside ordinary grief. Add the alleged equivocal passage between himself and his mother. Add the unreliability of his testimony in that he said he never heard the shot though the Royal Nanny did, that he never saw anyone though he could hardly have missed seeing the Nanny if he was where he said he was, and that he never noticed where Ananda’s right (that is, firing) arm was though everyone else did. Add, finally, his conversation that night with the Royal Physician, when besides asking him not to leave him he spoke in favour of the accident theory although he should have known that the .45’s safety device, if not Ananda’s habitual caution, rendered the theory highly improbable.

The resulting tally of suspicion is such that had Prince Bhoomipol been charged with regicide, and precisely the same reasoning and attitude been applied by the judges as they adopted in convicting the three accused, he must certainly have been condemned.

Having established that the weight of evidence clearly suggests Bhumibol killed his brother, either accidentally or deliberately, Kruger then has to find a way to dismiss it:

Strip it down and what are we left with but faint shadows and surmise. The same simple reason that makes the impartial observer reject the case against them must also acquit Bhoomipol: there is absolutely no evidential link between him and the shooting.

Had he and Ananda been known to have quarrelled, or if Bhoomipol had ever expressed hatred towards Ananda, or had he been seen in the proximity of Ananda’s quarters just before or just after the shooting, or had the pistol been in his possession immediately before the shooting, or had the two pages heard him talking to Ananda or moving about in Ananda’s room, or had there been any suggestion by the lady-in-waiting that Bhoomipol approached her not from the direction of his quarters but Ananda’s, or had the conversations with his mother and the doctor not admitted of other explanations – had there been by any means whatever any such link between Bhoomipol and the shooting, suspicion might begin to take root. But there was none.

Nor do the surrounding factors indicate guilt. The two boys “club” in the grounds of the Villa Watana was scarcely behind them: the bond of fraternal intimacy was especially strong, and with their mother they had been a singularly united family…

Nothing suggests a desire to occupy the throne. He had known from birth that it was not his, and he had seen enough to know that it was a very doubtful privilege. Even if he nevertheless wanted it at all costs, his intelligence would scarcely have let him choose a bright morning with people everywhere, including two pages at the very door. This jazz-loving, conspicuously gay youth never gave the slightest hint in his life or character to suggest the impulsive murderer or the possessor of a homicidal rage. And when his conduct in the hours after the shooting is examined, one gets no impression of a youth who had just been the perpetrator either of murder or of a most dreadful accident.

His conduct beyond that immediate time is understandable enough. The shock of seeing his brother suddenly dead; and then the hours with his prostrate mother by Ananda’s corpse, the macabre rites culminating in the closing of the silver urn, the treachery which the royal family gradually became convinced lay behind Ananda‟s death, and the threat to his own life implicit in such treachery, were not the only experiences that broke upon him after the sheltered, safe and unselfconscious life which he had always known. To the traumatic effect of Ananda’s death was added the fact that he was suddenly King, Lord of Life, Protector of a nation, and answerable to history for his conduct. Finally, he was less delicately perceptive in human relations than Ananda; and this meant a harder dynamic that responded hardly to so convulsive an event in his young life that previously had been insulated from the realities of either peace or war.

Bhoomipol, then, was as guiltless as rumour was false.

Kruger is correct that, with the forensic evidence catastrophically compromised within minutes of the shooting, with other evidence suppressed to protect the monarchy, and given the absence of witnesses, there is no direct proof of Bhumibol’s involvement. But there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence, plus the absence of any other credible explanation. And Kruger’s attempt to absolve Bhumibol is based mainly on a rhetorical trick. He makes a convincing case that Bhumibol is very unlikely to be guilty of the premeditated murder of his brother, but few people have ever alleged such a thing. Instead, it seems obvious that Bhumibol either killed Ananda by accident or in a sudden rage without premeditation. And Kruger’s arguments do nothing to undermine that likelihood. Indeed, he goes on to argue that suicide is the most credible scenario by using arguments that instead point more towards Bhumibol shooting Ananda and then being immediately overcome by grief and remorse:

First of all we should look at the instant reaction of the people closest concerned, since in a sudden situation this often gives the clearest indication of the true nature of that situation.

The Princess Mother has never gone on record with any explanation of Ananda’s death, but her actions are noteworthy. She ordered the bed linen and Ananda’s night clothes to be replaced as soon as the doctor had announced his verdict, and she asked him to wash the body. Her distraught exclamation to the doctor, “Who could ever have imagined such a thing happening?” lacked fear or the slightest hint of any thought of murder. She had a search made for a suicide note; her grief was intense and prolonged (today she still cannot speak about Ananda’s death) beyond what one would have thought possible had it been turned outward by reflection on the insanity or malice of the murderer. As to Prince Bhoomipol, he acted with a quiet sad calm, quite inconsistent with the belief that a murderer might still be lurking about. He did not immediately tell anyone what he years later told the court, “The senior page Chan warned me of danger”: on the contrary, having spent the day comforting his mother he that evening said to the Royal Physician, “In my opinion there is no explanation other than accident for my brother’s death.” The remark suggests he was clutching at the straw held out by the afternoon communiqué – and for the same reason that prompted the communiqué’s draftsmen to conceal suicide by pretending to an accident, which Bhoomipol’s knowledge of the .45 must have told him was highly unlikely; while his vastly changed bearing suggests a deeper emotion than an accident would have given rise to.

Reading between the lines, it is clear that Kruger found his own conclusion of suicide unconvincing. As an attempt to dazzle the reader into accepting it, he came up with what he said was new evidence about Ananda’s relationship with Marylene Ferrari, theorizing that a lovelorn Rama VIII may have killed himself because as king he could never be with her. In fact, this was nothing new: within a day of Ananda’s death, media were investigating the Marylene Ferrari angle. Overall, Kruger’s book makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of what happened, but for political reasons it just gives a misleading conclusion. It bolsters, rather than undermines, the case for Bhumibol’s guilt.

Kruger, meanwhile, was never able to visit Thailand again. The book was banned by the authorities and copies of it are exceptionally scarce, allegedly evidence of a concerted campaign to try to buy up as many of them as possible to suppress the book’s contents. Thanks to Kruger’s widow Prue Leith and Freedom Against Censorship Thailand, however, it is now available for free download.

Later in 1964, a precocious 31-year-old Sino-Thai intellectual named Sulak Sivaraksa wrote a review of The Devil’s Discus for a magazine he had set up the previous year, Social Science Review. It was scathing:

The author suggested that undeniably the younger generation of Thai people, particularly those with university degrees, are wearied by the dearth of democratic rights in the country. For them, the voice of Pridi Banomyong still reverberates in the air, forcefully calling for freedom and social justice. Pridi stands tall as a democratic icon, despite once having the communist label stamped all over his face. As part of this new generation, I share their convictions and concerns. I too yearn for social liberty and justice. But, speaking on behalf of the majority in my generation, we do not want Pridi back. The author has completely missed this crucial and elementary point, highlighting his dismal understanding of contemporary Thai society and lack of intellectual vigor. We then must not take his analysis of the events surrounding the king’s death — as labyrinthine and complicated as they were — seriously. On the whole, this work merits little attention. That such a book is even written and published perhaps suggests that someone has secretly funded the murder of history.

Sulak was, at the time, thoroughly convinced that Pridi Banomyong had something to do with Ananda’s murder. As he has since admitted, he did not think deeply about many of his assumptions and prejudices: in his essay Powers That Be he describes himself back then as a “wild-eyed henchman of the conservative ruling class”. In a book published in 1972, Pridi called Sulak among other things, “a hated debris of the corrupt aristocracy, a social parasite, and an arrogant, selfish scavenger”. Clearly, the two men were not great fans of each other.

But Sulak Sivaraksa decided to test his assumptions. He started reading as much information as he could find about the death of Ananda. He interviewed many key sources. By 1980 he had concluded not only that Pridi was not responsible for Ananda’s death, but that Bhumibol was. As he told Bill Schiller of the Toronto Star last year:

The truth is the present king killed his brother — accidentally.

Sulak sent a letter to Pridi in 1980 apologizing for his past accusations. He has since become a persistent advocate for reform of Thailand’s monarchy. He has faced lèse majesté charges on several occasions, but — very unusually — has never been convicted.

By the 1970s, the palace had stopped claiming that Pridi was behind Ananda’s death. Instead, official statements and publications tended to refer to it, when they had to, as an unexplained mystery. The three men executed for Ananda’s murder have never been formally pardoned, but it also emerged that the palace had authorized payments to their families. It had clearly been decided at the highest levels that continuing to blame Pridi Banomyong for the incident was insupportable.

In 1979, Bhumibol and Sirikit granted unprecedented access to the BBC for a special two-hour documentary, Soul of a Nation, broadcast in 1980. During an extensive interview, journalist David Lomax asked Bhumibol about his brother’s death. The king replied:

The investigation provided the fact that he died with a bullet wound in his forehead. It was proved that it was not an accident and not a suicide. One doesn’t know… But what happened is very mysterious, because immediately much of the evidence was just shifted. And because it was political, so everyone was political, even the police were political, [it was] not very clear. I only know [that] when I arrived he was dead. Many people wanted to advance not theories but facts to clear up the affair. They were suppressed. And they were suppressed by influential people in this country and in international politics.

This was a wholly insufficient answer, evasive and uninformative. Bhumibol says it was proved that his brother was murdered, but provides no insight into who might have done such a thing. And he pretends that he has been unable to uncover the truth because mysterious influential people in Thailand and beyond suppressed the evidence. In fact, as he well knew, evidence was indeed suppressed by politicians at the time, but that was to protect him. The conspiracy had been to hide Bhumibol’s culpability.

Meanwhile, Pridi Banomyong remained in exile. Supporters pressed for official word to be given that he could at least return home to Thailand. As Handley writes in The King Never Smiles, the palace dealt with this problem with the help of Prem Tinsulanonda, a royalist cavalry officer who was appointed prime minister in 1980 and governed explicitly as Bhumibol’s proxy:

When Prem took power, Pridi was in Paris, 80 years old, and longing to come home after more than three decades in exile. His family and friends appealed to Bhumibol to permit his return, challenging the king’s sense of compassion and forgiveness. But the palace feared that Pridi remained a political threat, still a hero among a generation of students from the 1970s, many of them now teachers and bureaucrats.

Prem finessed the challenge for the king. Privately the government circulated the news that Pridi could return, and that the palace didn’t hold him responsible for Ananda’s death. But official permission never came, as if there was a bureaucratic snafu for which no one was blamed.

Pridi Banomyong died in exile in Paris on May 2, 1983. Bhumibol’s tacit admission that he had nothing to do with Ananda’s death came too late for him. And even after his death, he was denied the respect he deserved. To quote Handley again:

His body was repatriated, but the government refused him a state funeral, and the palace declined to sponsor his cremation, which it had done for every other Thai leader except Phibun.

Pridi, it seemed, was still hated by Thailand’s royalist elite. They knew he had nothing to do with Ananda’s death, but they had still never forgiven him for 1932, and for being popular.

Pridi Banomyong was dead. Bhumibol was revered by most of his people. Ananda’s death was decades in the past. But still, the king could not let it go. And so, five decades after Ananda was shot in his bedroom, Bhumibol launched his most determined effort yet to clear himself once and for all of the suspicion that he was implicated. It was to prove a self-inflicted catastrophe.

William Stevenson is a Canadian author and journalist who had spent some time in Asia, served in Britain’s Royal Navy, and made some contacts in the intelligence world. After the war he wrote a number of books in the “popular history” genre, including one that became an international bestseller: A Man Called Intrepid, about Sir William Stephenson, no relation of the author, who had been head of British intelligence for the western hemisphere in World War II. Published in 1976, it was later made into a TV miniseries starring British actor David Niven. The book fascinated Bhumibol enough that he decided to translate it into Thai.

Rama IX corresponded with Stevenson during the translation of his book, and the pair agreed to cooperate on a biography of Bhumibol to be written by the Canadian author. Stevenson relocated to Bangkok where he lived for more than five years from late 1990, and over this period he had unprecedented access to King Bhumibol and his inner circle, obtaining hundreds of hours of interviews. He talked extensively to Sangwan also. His daughter Alexandra attended the palace school inside Chitralada. No other writer, Thai or foreign, from outside the royal family has ever matched this level of access.

Bhumibol, it appears, either did not know or did not care that Stevenson had little credibility as a serious writer and that his books were notorious for being full of many wild mistakes and much palpable nonsense. A Man Called Intrepid was eventually reclassified as fiction by its publishers Macmillan because of all the complaints and bad reviews it generated. Walter Pforzheimer, the CIA’s first legislative counsel and the first curator of the Historical Intelligence Collection, described the book as: ”inaccurate in many respects, badly documented and grossly inflated”.

Stevenson claims that Sir William had always been convinced that Rama IX was not involved in Ananda’s death, and this helped lead to Bhumibol’s decision to cooperate on a book:

A former director of British secret operations in World War II, Sir William Stephenson… was certain Lek did not kill his brother. After the war, Stephenson (no relative of mine) started an enterprise to continue Anglo-American intelligence cooperation. It was eventually called World Commerce Corporation and became very active in Bangkok. Stephenson had been in touch with the king for a long time when he asked me to read his files on the regicide and later sent me to Tokyo to question the man he believed did kill the Eighth Rama. Stephenson wrote, ‘King’s Bhumibol’s enemies keep alive the lie that he killed his brother so they can control the throne’.

An invitation from the king reached me after interminable delays and diversions. The Ninth Rama did not want it thought that I was investigating the murder of his brother, but out of gratitude for Stephenson’s help, showed me how he was carrying out his brother’s vision of a Buddhist democracy. We became friends and I decided to write his story because it was so strange.

“Lek” is Bhumibol, incidentally: throughout The Revolutionary King, Stevenson refers to Rama IX by his Thai nickname, which shocked some Thai readers. That wasn’t all. The book was published in 1999 to near-universal derision. It was riddled with basic factual errors as well as broader and more astonishing misunderstandings throughout, and no effort seemed to have been made to remedy them for its second printing in 2001. Historian Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian described the book in an outraged footnote to Kings, Country and Constitutions as “a very unreliable account both in terms of facts and interpretation”:

It is most sad that such a person who appears to learn very little about the Thai monarchy and Thai social-cultural sensitivity should be allowed to move freely among the royalty and those who should have known better. His account of the present King is in bad taste, in terms of literary style, factual accuracy, and analysis.

Given that Bhumibol personally initiated the project, this represents perhaps the most negative comment about Rama IX to be found anywhere in Kobkua’s work: she habitually suspends her sometimes acute critical faculties when discussing Thai royalty. Duncan McCargo pithily skewered the book as an “error-strewn 1999 hagiography”, while Chris Baker said of Stevenson that: ”His book on the king is … best read as a comic fantasy.”

Writing a review in the International Herald Tribune, Philip Bowring was only slightly less withering. But he recognized the importance of the book. It should not be read as a work of serious history – on that level it is, indeed, a fantasy, although more tragicomic than comic. But as an insight into Bhumibol’s view of himself, and how the palace inner circle perceives reality, and how they want to be seen, it is absolutely invaluable:

It is often inaccurate and written in a gushing style that is unlikely to be convincing even to those with little familiarity with the subject matter. About most subjects, it would not be worth a review.

Yet because of its subject, it is an interesting and in some respects valuable book…

Many of the thoughts expressed in William Stevenson’s biography are clearly those of very senior Thais.  Stevenson claims to have had open access over an extended period to the king and to several people close to him. He also indicates access to Western intelligence sources…  Though his new book is banned in Thailand, there is no reason to doubt that Stevenson had royal and other high-level access. The problem is the use he made of his sources…

The often breathless prose rattles along without regard for checking facts against obvious known sources. It gives the impression of having been assembled from half-recollected talks with sources who in many cases were speaking colloquially or impressionistically.

A more serious author would have weighed individuals’ comments and interpretations against known facts, or alternative views.

But Stevenson just gushes along, in the process often getting dates and relationships muddled up. Unsourced statements on key issues are legion.

Nonetheless, it has verisimilitude of a sort. Most important, it addresses the political and other circumstances surrounding the 1946 shooting death of the king’s elder brother, King Ananda. Whether or not Stevenson’s description of events is accurate, it evidently came from within the palace…

In sum it ought to be a revealing as well as sympathetic account of a man who has evolved into a king who has played a pivotal role in Thailand’s modern transformation. But its style and inaccuracy demean the man it sets out to praise and devalue the insights that were offered to its author.

As Roger Kershaw wrote in a review of the book in Asian Affairs in 2001:

Stevenson’s privileged position as an informal mouthpiece of the King has guaranteed, for us, the privilege of access to the royal family’s construction of its own past and present role.

The book abandons any suggestion that Pridi was to blame for Ananda’s death, and instead paints the Thai military as the bad guys of modern Thai history. In particular, Phibun and Phao are treated contemptuously. Stevenson repeatedly claims in the book that they, and others, deliberately spread a false story that Bhumibol killed Ananda. Hinting frequently at access to unspecified intelligence files and sources, he promises to reveal the truth about what happened back in 1946.

Except, he doesn’t. It is commonly assumed — even by those who have read it — that The Revolutionary King purports to unmask Ananda’s killer once and for all: a Japanese soldier named Masanobu Tsuji. But this is not quite correct. He paints Tsuji throughout the book as a horrendous supervillain with a penchant for cannibalism and cruelty, responsible for all kinds of heinous deeds and geopolitical shenanigans. Here is a small roundup:

British investigators into Tsuji’s World  War Two crimes would dub him God of Evil [p.22]… Masanobu Tsuji, ‘a person of great and mysterious influence,’ according to a contemporary [p.40]…. He had already established  a record of horrific war crimes in China. He had incinerated prostitutes inside their Shanghai brothels because, he said, they sapped the vigour of Japanese soldiers [p.41]…  Army intelligence officers were looking for Tsuji as ‘one of the most dangerous men on the planet’ [p.70]… A man who had been driven by such hatred that he urged individual Japanese soldiers to deal with each enemy as if he was their father’s murderer [p.140]… One of the most monstrous men of the twentieth century [p.196]… ‘One of the worst men on the planet,’ concluded British hunters of war criminals. An expert on Tsuji, Ian Ward, says: ‘The man and his grotesque manipulations have been allowed to warp and mangle history’ [p.266].

Tsuji, Stevenson appears to be trying to hint, was a very bad man indeed. Stevenson also claims several times in the book that the Japanese spy had long plotted to murder Ananda, thinking that this would destabilize Thailand forever to Japan’s benefit. And he tells us that around the time of Ananda’s death, Tsuji was operating from a nearby temple, disguised as a monk. But he never actually comes out and says plainly that Tsuji was the assassin who shot King Ananda in his bedchamber in the Barompiman Hall in June 1946. He suggests at one point that saying so would offend Thais too much, so he can only hint:

I believed Tsuji, Japan’s God of Evil (or God of Strategy, depending on who you believe) had been in the vicinity of the Grand Palace that fatal morning but had come in the guise of a monk. To say this was deeply offensive to many Buddhists. Only the Ninth Rama could discuss it. For others, it was dangerous to overstep so many invisible boundaries. The instinct that made courtiers snap, ‘Let the story die with you!’ was still deeply entrenched. [p.246]

More likely, he didn’t want to state his case too plainly because it is quite clearly utterly bogus. So he just relied on frequent repetition of innuendo, in the hope that this would convince people that Ananda really was murdered by the Japanese. As Roger Kershaw, a scholar who is by no means unsympathetic to Bhumibol, wrote in his review, it treats the king “as a hero of our times but uses a type of presentation which will leave most readers mystified”:

Just conceivably, the more infuriating features of William Stevenson’s style are essential to his major purpose, which seems to be to implant, by dint of constant repetition, a general impression that King Ananda was the victim of a murder plot by Japanese Intelligence, whereas a careful dissection of the evidence might lead one to an alternative view. Thus at each recurring point where the guilt of the Japanese evil genius Tsuji, or conversely the innocence of Bhumibol, are about to be demonstrated, the writer will switch to some entertaining but totally irrelevant, different topic in the life and times of the royal family, or the culture of Thailand.

The theory that Tsuji murdered Ananda is so audaciously outlandish that it seems almost unsporting to demolish it. As Chris Baker has commented:

If you can imagine Douglas MacArthur dressed as a nun skulking around post-war London and murdering Princess Elizabeth, then you can buy this story too.

Even cursory research quickly undermines Stevenson’s tale. Stevenson is correct that Tsuji spent some time disguised as a monk in a temple near the Grand Palace. The temple was Wat Liab, also known as Wat Rajaburana, and in the 1930s an ossuary was built there to house the ashes of members of the Japanese community who died in Thailand. It is still there today, and ever since World War II, one or more Japanese Buddhist monks have been resident there. Tsuji arrived in Bangkok in June 1945, and when British troops entered the city he disguised himself as a monk along with seven of his followers. This was done with the knowledge and assent of the Siamese government, as former British intelligence officer Louis Allen makes clear in his book The End of the War in Asia, published in 1977, well before Stevenson’s. Tsuji and one of the seven followers took refuge at the Japanese ossuary, while the other six sought shelter at Wat Mahathat beside Thammasat University. On October 29, 1945, Tsuji left the ossuary, now disguised as an elderly Chinese man. Members of Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek’s Blue-Shirt Society helped him escape Bangkok by train from Hualamphong Station to Ubon on November 1. From there he travelled to Vientiane, Hanoi, and then to Chungking (now known as Chongqing) where Chiang Kai-shek was based. He arrived there on March 9, 1946. Considerable documentary evidence of Tsuji’s movements exists. He was, without doubt, more than a thousand miles away from Bangkok on June 6, 1946.

This is not the end of the damage that The Revolutionary King does to Bhumibol’s reputation. It intentionally and very misleadingly depicts Bhumibol as convinced from the beginning that his brother was murdered and determined to investigate — but in fact, we know from contemporary sources that the king was insisting to everybody that Ananda had shot himself by accident. And it tries to tarnish the reputation of Dr Nitya, the family doctor who had been a close friend of the Mahidols and who used his trial testimony to hint that Bhumibol had killed his brother:

It was a stab in the back from Dr Nitya (Nit) Vejjavivisth who had gone to Harvard on a scholarship bestowed by Papa, and who had known Mama in Boston. Nit had been the first court physician to see the dead king’s body. He courted jail by his reference to the Princess mother. It was lèse-majesté. Yet no charges were laid. Nit had been put up to this by the chief of paramilitary police, Phao Sriyanon.

Again, this is very dishonest. Far from being an ally of Phao, the doctor testified at the trial — at considerable personal risk to himself — that he considered Pridi to be a good man.

Perhaps most dubiously of all, The Revolutionary King claims that Bhumibol wanted to pardon the three scapegoats convicted of his brother’s murder, but a wily Phao had them executed without warning:

The king hurried back from Far-From-Worry when the rumours reached him. He had let the months pass without interfering with the due process of law, thinking he had won his demand for a strong and independent judiciary. In his silent rage, he saw how powerless he really was. He had insisted that every citizen had the right to petition him directly. Now he discovered that attempts to reach him by the scapegoats’ families had been stopped by courtiers subverted by Phao’s police.

Phao circulated reports that the king had approved the executions because he wanted to end speculation about his part in the murder. On Phao’s desk remained the last written appeals from the dead men for a king’s pardon.

While it is true that Bhumibol’s influence was curtailed in those days and he was marginalized by the ruling clique of military and police, he could have issued a royal pardon. Four months went by between the final sentencing and the executions. The trials had been going on for seven years. The suggestion that Rama IX didn’t act because he was waiting to get an official request does not stand up to scrutiny. Moreover, Sulak Sivaraksa says in Powers That Be that:

I came upon documentary evidence suggesting that Phibun, on behalf of the accused in the ‘regicide’ trial, thrice appealed to Rama IX for clemency. In all three separate instances, the king turned down the appeal.

The Revolutionary King was supposed to burnish Bhumibol’s reputation, and absolve him of suspicion that he had killed his brother. But by putting forward a totally insupportable alternative theory, and by reporting several incidents dishonestly to falsely show the king in a better light — and doing all this with the apparent support and approval of Rama IX and his inner circle — the project backfired spectacularly. It made Bhumibol’s culpability even more obvious. More than half a century after Ananda’s death, Bhumibol was still trying to escape blame, and his efforts were having the opposite effect. As Kershaw says:

It does rather seem as if certain quarters hoped that such a book could lay to rest the “canard” of the King’s involvement once and for all. But in view of the manifest convictions of Lord Mountbatten and King George VI in the matter in 1946, and the clear fact that the elder brother did not die at his own hand with a bullet from his own Colt .45, one may conclude, with utmost sadness, that the royal family would have been better served by a straight-forward “PR job” … or simply by silence. (It is certainly counterproductive to dismiss Mountbatten as an “imperial bully” and King George VI as innately prejudiced and suggestible to any myth or lie.) Even sadder is the disingenuous attempt to exonerate the King for not intervening to save the scapegoats, who were finally executed by Police-General Phao in 1955.

After the book was published in 1999, it was clearer than ever that Bhumibol had killed his brother, and that he had done nothing to save the three scapegoats from execution. And that he felt ashamed.

The Revolutionary King does, at least, include a small and belated conciliatory gesture to the memory of Pridi Banomyong:

Many years later, Lek said he did not believe that Pridi was a communist nor had anything to do with Nan’s death, but in those early years he was trying to pick his way through tangles of lies.

This is once again a deeply misleading statement, because Bhumibol was responsible for the tangle of lies: he had shot his brother, and he and others were lying to conceal this. But at least it seemed better than nothing. But a year after the publication of Stevenson’s book came another ugly episode, recounted by Handley in The King Never Smiles:

In 2000 an entire generation of middle-aged academics, activists, and progressive politicians made a consciously subversive challenge to the palace’s control of Ninth Reign history. The year marked the centennial of Pridi Bhanomyong, and his supporters wanted to use the occasion to revive his name and reputation. But the year was also the centennial of the king’s mother, Sangwal, and the palace wanted all the attention on her. What ensued was a battle over superior virtue, and over who could decide just who the people’s heroes are. Pridi’s supporters pushed first as early as 1997, prodding the government to plan commemorations, to issue a stamp or even a banknote featuring Pridi, and to nominate him to the UNESCO millennium list of great personalities of the 20th century. When palace offcials caught wind of this, they responded by planning a big year for sanctifying Sangwal. They nominated her to UNESCO, despite her being virtually unknown outside of Thailand. But the palace viewed this as almost a right. The previous Thai nomination to the UNESCO list, in 1992, was the even less known Prince Mahidol, the king’s father.

The battle was fought through new books, academic conferences, and media articles on Pridi challenging the official view that he betrayed the country. They exposed the manipulation and perjury that led to his being condemned for King Ananda’s murder, and highlighted his advocacy of democracy and leadership of the Free Thai movement. The palace could only counter by saturating radio and television with expensive promotion of the princess mother. The result was a draw.

Events to honor Pridi were not blocked, but also not acknowledged by the palace. Both Pridi and Sangwal were named to the UNESCO list, but the palace publicized only Sangwal. Pridi was kept off stamps, banknotes, and television and radio, and out of school materials, while Sangwal surfaced in all those venues. This limited Pridi’s corrected reputation to the urban educated middle and upper classes who read the Bangkok print media. The people who mattered for the palace, grade-school students and peasants in the countryside, would still only know of royal heroes.

There was a fin de siècle air in all of this: on the palace side, a rush to score more deeply into the Thai people, especially a generation of teenagers ignorant of the past, a veneration for the throne that would sustain it into the future; on another side, long-stifled Thais starting to take advantage of the throne’s weakening clutch on its own image by asserting their own, contrary views.

The latest effort by the palace side to secure lasting veneration for the throne, that they hope will survive even after the end of the Ninth Reign, is, of course, King Bhumibol Adulyadej: A Life’s Work. Given the great fanfare that accompanied the book’s publication, and the distinguished contributors who worked on it, news of the book’s launch raised one intriguing question above all: How would it treat the death of King Ananda Mahidol?

KBAALW’s account of the incident and its aftermath, on pages 83-86, is reproduced verbatim below. As noted in part II of this review, the passage follows directly on from a discussion of Bhumibol’s musical hobby, hence the bizarre sentence that begins it:

Musical pursuits, however, took a back seat after a tragic turn of events. On 5 June 1946, Prince Bhumibol accompanied King Ananda to an agricultural fair in Bang Khen in Bangkok a few days before the brothers were due to leave for the US on their way back to Switzerland. The departure was postponed because some constitutional adjustments requiring King Ananda’s signature were not ready. The king also developed a stomach problem that was inconsequential. Early on the morning of 9 June, he was in his chambers in the Borombiman Mansion. He had been seen there in bed by his mother and  a page, and out of bed by another page.

Prince Bhumibol last saw King Ananda briefly the night before, and the brothers said very little. The prince was on his way out to a ceremony near the Ministry of Commerce for Raksa Dindan military reservists, where he was standing in for the indisposed king. Upon returning home Prince Bhumibol went directly to bed. The next morning, learning from a page that his brother was still in his room, Bhumibol took breakfast alone on the landing outside King Ananda’s chambers. He did not disturb the king and returned to his own room on the same floor at the other end of Borombiman Mansion.

The event that followed thereafter has never been clearly explained. At 9.20 am, about 20 minutes after Prince Bhumibol had left the breakfast table, a shot rang out. A bullet had entered King Ananda’s forehead over his right eye and exited as a more minor wound into the bed’s mattress. The king was evidently lying on his back at the time of the shot, which apparently came from the Colt given to the brothers by MacDonald. The pistol had a special safety catch system involving a squeeze grip designed to guard against accidental discharge. The alarm was raised by a page, Chit Singhaseni, who ran to the princess mother’s chamber, calling out, “The king has shot himself.”

The household was plunged into confusion. The princess mother and a royal nanny arrived. The king’s mother beheld her dead son and sobbed. “Nand ja, Nand ja!” ["My dear Nand, my dear Nand!"]. Prince Bhumibol was one of the next to reach his brother’s chambers. “When I arrived, he was dead,” he told correspondent David Lomax in Soul of a Nation, a 1979 BBC television documentary.

There was no isolation of the death scene, so within minutes it was contaminated. The presumed weapon, the Colt lying beside the right-handed King Ananda’s left hand, was handled by a page, a nanny and later the chief of police. Utterly distraught, the princess mother bathed King Ananda, assisted by Prince Bhumibol, the nanny and the two pages. Ice blocks were laid beside the body and a fan brought in.

One of the first reports issued by the Associated Press quoted the palace as saying the death had been an accident and a radio broadcast said the same. The size and design of the weapon made it unlikely that the accident had been self-inflicted, and King Ananda was not wearing the spectacles he would have needed with his poor eyesight to be inspecting the weapon properly. With King Ananda lying on his back, either dozing or asleep, a struggle with someone else over the weapon seemed unlikely.

Pathologists reported that there were no powder burns, inward bullet trajectory, or normal site selection for a deliberately self-inflicted wound – factors that would appear to work against suicide as an explanation. There has been speculation about a girlfriend in Switzerland, fellow student Marylene Ferrari with whom King Ananda had communicated by postcard during his time away from Switzerland. If it was serious, such a relationship would have drawn unfavourable comment in royal circles and have been ill-starred as King Ananda moved towards his coronation and permanent residence in Thailand. But in the meantime, King Ananda was due to return to Switzerland to complete his law studies and had much to look forward to. The king was to fly home via Washington, where Harry S Truman had invited him to the White House, and then on to London, where King George VI had asked him to tea at Buckingham Palace. He was said to be excited about the impending visits and had made an enthusiastic farewell visit to the supreme patriarch.

A panel of 15 physicians was convened to conduct a post-mortem, 12 of whom concluded murder to be the most likely explanation. Dr Edwin Cort, the missionary physician from Chiang Mai with whom Prince Mahidol had briefly resided in 1929, was among them. He was quoted as saying that the position of the wound and the track of the bullet seemed to show that the death was the result of assassination rather than suicide. An accident was also deemed improbable, the panel concluded. A censorship board was set up to vet further publicity on the matter. In October 1946, after King Bhumibol’s return to Lausanne, a commission of inquiry concluded that King Ananda’s death could not have been accidental. The alternatives were suicide or murder, but no conclusion was drawn either way.

In 1948 and 1949, Dr Keith Simpson, pathologist to the British Home Office and founding chairman of the Department of Forensic Medicine at Guy’s Hospital London, was consulted first by a senior Thai officer and then by Dr Songkran Niyomsen, Thailand’s first forensic pathologist. The scene in Borombiman Mansion had not been photographed but from the detailed written evidence given to him and extensive discussions, Dr Simpson endorsed the panel of doctors in Bangkok, ruling out suicide or self-inflicted accidental death.

“This is not a case of suicidal discharge nor of accident, but one of deliberate killing by firearm,” Dr Simpson concluded in his report. The British pathologist was prepared to come to Bangkok in 1950 to give evidence in the trial of three royal members of staff hauled up in 1947 for conspiracy in regicide, but it did not come to pass.

“Owing to some crisis in politics in this country, it is not sure that this trial will continue,” Dr Songkran, the pathologist in Bangkok, wrote in apology – inferring the kind of political interference King Bhumibol would mention 30 years later in his interview with the BBC. “If a new government is formed, the aspect of the trial may be changed; and we doctors who confirmed regicide do not know our fate yet. We are expecting a coup d’etat any morning on waking up; besides, communist invasion may come at any time.”

A protracted trial failed to establish the identity of the killer. The proceedings involved acquittals that were later rescinded and failed appeals. Two royal pages and a secretary were executed in 1955 after being convicted of complicity in regicide. The executions did not bring closure to one of the most tragic and mysterious moments in modern Thai history.

In the late 1990s, a theory based on unidentified sources was advanced that King Ananda’s death was the work of Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a Japanese “spy” who had supposedly avoided prosecution for war crimes by making himself useful to the Americans, and was allegedly hiding out in Bangkok. The theory fails to provide a motive or to explain why somebody in hiding would risk attracting attention by murdering the most prominent person in the kingdom. Japanese accounts place Tsuji in Thailand at the end of the war and in contact with nationalist Chinese, but not at the time of  King Ananda’s death the following year. In November 1945, Tsuji left Thailand for Vietnam, travelling to Kunming, China, in February 1946 and from there to Chunking. He was in Nanjing in July 1946 and did not return to Japan until May 1948. Tsuji disappeared in Laos on April 1961 and was legally declared dead in 1968.

In his interview with the BBC in 1979, King Bhumibol said: “Many people wanted to advance not theories but facts to clear up this affair. They were suppressed – and they were suppressed by influential people in this country or in international politics.” King Bhumibol told the BBC that the investigation “proved that it was not an accident, or not a suicide. One doesn’t know.”

Like most of KBAALW, this dishonest little passage is a jumble of facts (some taken out of context), half-truths and outright lies, put together in a way that produces the required impression, regardless of the truth. It gets basic details wrong — the bullet entered Ananda’s forehead above his left eye, not his right. The authors have attempted to evoke an atmosphere of mystery and spooky political influences, of a conspiracy to hide the truth from poor bereft Bhumibol and his people. It uses misdirection to conceal the possibility that Bhumibol accidentally shot his brother, suggesting entirely spuriously that the fact that Ananda seems to have been asleep when shot rules out a struggle over his pistol. It omits to mention how the Tsuji theory came to be “advanced”: by an author commissioned by Bhumibol himself. And it gives significant and undue prominence to Dr Songkran’s letter, as if this holds some clue to darker forces at work. The mention of communism — a blatant red herring — echoes the unfounded accusations of the past that Ananda was killed in a communist plot masterminded by Pridi.

Since the effort by William Stevenson to pin the blame on Tsuji proved so transparently ridiculous, and since no more credible scapegoats spring to mind, KBAALW goes back to the time-honoured royalist strategy of smearing Pridi Banomyong instead. On page 86 it states:

For Pridi Banomyong, the coup and accusations against him after King Ananda’s death were the final blows to his political career. As the wartime regent and incumbent prime minister he had at the very least failed to keep King Ananda safe.

And on page 87 it manages to stoke lingering suspicions with this cynical innuendo:

Many did not believe Pridi had played any role in King Ananda’s death, but after the 1949 failed coup he never came home and offered no explanation himself beyond saying he did not know who was responsible.

After all that has happened, for these statements to be made in a book published in 2011 claiming to be a serious scholarly work with the participation not only of leading Thai royalists but also international academics and journalists is shocking and shameful. It is deeply hypocritical too, from a book that accuses The King Never Smiles of “mean-spiritedness”.  One wonders if any of the contributors will be brave enough to publicly disassociate themselves. Or are they happy to be part of a book that repeats old discredited slander against a man who can no longer answer back to defend himself?

To spell it out one more time: Pridi Banomyong did not somehow fail to keep Ananda safe. Ananda Mahidol was shot dead in his own bedchamber by his brother Bhumibol Adulyadej, an event which Pridi could neither have foreseen nor prevented. Over the days, months, years and decades that followed, Pridi protected Bhumibol (and, he believed, Thailand) by never revealing what he knew about Ananda’s death. This cost him his political career and allowed his enemies to force him into exile. Many of his friends and comrades were imprisoned or killed. He died abroad, never having seen the country he loved for decades. After all that, he deserves far better than having his memory tarnished by a crass coffee-table propaganda tome like KBAALW.

One of the striking things about KBAALW and its failed effort to conceal the truth about 1946 is the extent to which it echoes the debacle of The Revolutionary King. In the 1990s, Bhumibol and key members of his inner circle brought in William Stevenson to write a whitewash of the Ninth Reign, only to see their plan explode damagingly in their faces. With KBAALW, the basic strategy hasn’t changed: they just seem to have concluded they needed to try to do it more competently. So a whole team of foreign journalists and academics has been drafted in this time, and a panel of the most loyal network monarchists appointed to oversee their efforts under the trusty stewardship of Anand Panyarachun. What could possibly go wrong?

The problem, as Thailand’s royalist establishment appears to fail to understand, is that no matter how many people you lock up for lèse majesté, or how many foreign writers you employ to spin things for you, or how hard you try to suppress facts you don’t like, the truth doesn’t change. And it has a way of getting out, sooner or later.

King Bhumibol may have told the BBC in 1979 that “one doesn’t know” who killed his brother, but he knows exactly what happened. He has allowed others to be executed or exiled in his attempts to protect his secret. And he has allowed dishonesty and deception to persist and multiply, not least through books like The Revolutionary King and King Bhumibol Adulyadej: A Life’s Work.

It’s time to stop. It won’t work. Enough damage has been done. Fairy tales will not save 21st century Thailand. What is needed is an honest and critical assessment of Bhumibol’s reign, and its likely legacy. I will provide some thoughts on that in part IV.

CONTINUE TO PART IV

I  • II • III • IV • V

II.

There is really no polite way of saying this. King Bhumibol Adulyadej: A Life’s Work is a staggeringly awful book. The content is overwhelmingly inane, the style is relentlessly inept, and the entire project is tainted by a corrosive dishonesty that renders it worthless.

To get a sense of the scale of dishonesty, let’s begin on page 11, the foreword by Anand Panyarachun. It is the first substantive piece of writing in the book after the credits and contents. Anand begins the book like this:

His Majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand succeeded to the throne on 9 June 1946. He left the kingdom shortly afterwards to complete his university education in Switzerland.

This is the first paragraph of King Bhumibol Adulyadej: A Life’s Work (henceforth to be referred to as KBAALW for the sake of brevity) and already Anand is being economical with the truth. Bhumibol may hold the world record for the biggest number of honorary degrees (Paul Handley recounts how in 1997, “Kasetsart University tossed off all restraint and awarded him ten honorary doctorates at once, in subjects from biology and geology to linguistics and business administration”), but he has never received a genuine university degree. Although it is true, technically, that Bhumibol left Siam in 1946 intending to complete his university education, he never actually did so. He dropped out of Lausanne University in 1948 after he crashed his Fiat 500 Topolino sports car into a truck and lost his sight in one eye, and never finished his formal studies. By the second sentence of KBAALW, in the foreword, before the main body of the book even begins, readers are already being misled. This is not a promising start.

Anand continues by making more bold claims about the book:

King Bhumibol Adulyadej: A Life’s Work provides an account of the king’s life and work. The book strives for balance, objectivity, accuracy and readability so that it may stand the test of time, helping any reader, today or in the future, to understand Thailand better and to learn more about its head of state, the world’s longest reigning monarch.

The editors and contributing writers, among them respected academics and journalists, worked independently to draft the volume in its entirety. The role of the board was to critique the manuscript for accuracy, balance and relevance.

This dialogue between Thai experts, many of whom have enjoyed decades of personal interaction with the king in their official capacities, and the mostly international editorial team proved to be very effective, enlightening and spirited. Differing opinions and perspectives were exchanged freely and forthrightly to achieve the finished volume.

The book’ quality, however, is for readers to judge. Our hope is that, by reading the passages that follow, you will gain a better understanding of Thailand and its monarchy, as well as a deeper insight into His Majesty King Bhumibol’s lifelong work in fulfillment of his promise to the people. [p.11]

Contrary to Anand’s assertions, balance and objectivity are in short supply in KBAALW. But the unevenness of the text shows that some of the foreign authors did make an attempt to introduce some reality into the fairy tale, only to have it squashed by the heavy handed advisory committee. Authors who worked on the book describe a painful and dispiriting process of composition: each contributor was assigned specific chapters to work on, and periodically would meet with one or more members of the committee to have their efforts vetted. Some committee members, including Anand, were widely described as relatively reasonable; others were excruciatingly pedantic and blinkered. The “enlightening and spirited” dialogue between the writers and overseers that Anand mentions was almost never about the important issues and debates facing Thailand’s monarchy in the 21st century, but minor points of protocol and detail. A close reading of the text can uncover the fossilized remains of a better and more interesting book hidden beneath the surface, the legacy of battles over KBAALW‘s content.

The book’s introductory chapter, “A History of Kings”, illustrates this clearly. A quick chronological canter from prehistory to the reign of Rama IX, with a brief summary of the theology of Thai kingship thrown in, the chapter contains some intelligent prose that suggests the work of Chris Baker. But another authorial voice — clearly, one or more of the committee — keeps butting in with oversimplistic homilies just when things are getting interesting. It is particularly ironic because one of the points the introduction quite rightly makes is that much of the history taught to Thais is bunk:

Behind the narrative commonly presented in Thai textbooks of four successive Siamese kingdoms — Sukhothai (c. 1249—1378), Ayudhya (c. 1351—1767), Thon Buri (1767—82) and Rattanakosin (1782—present) — lies a more complex history of competition, warfare, consolidation and transformation… [p.17]

Children attending state schools in Thailand are taught that the Sukhothai kingdom… was the first independent state founded by the Siamese people. They are told its first king helped break the yoke of Hindu Angkor, and that its reach once spread as far north as Luang Prabang (in modern-day Laos), as far south as Nakhon Si Thammarat province (in peninsular Thailand) and all the way to Hongsawadi (in modern-day Myanmar, formerly Burma). Most importantly, they learn that the kings of Sukhothai ruled paternalistically according to the Buddhist ideal. Indeed, this history is inextricably linked to the Siamese conception of kingship.

Much of this history was disseminated by the military governments of the 1930s as part of a nationalist movement. It was formalised, however, during the early 20th century reign of the sixth king in the Royal House of Chakri, King Vajiravudh (r. 1910-1925), who sought to define the origins of the native Siamese and engender patriotism among them. [p.21-22]

This is an explicit admission that much official Thai history was largely invented over the past century, a set of myths and legends formulated by royalists in an effort to stoke nationalist fervour and support for the monarchy. The fact that KBAALW is conceding this right at the start leads the reader to expect that a revisionist and game-changing text of real value lies ahead. But while the introduction contains plenty of interesting material, it is never allowed to properly develop the intriguing issues it raises.

It is absolutely correct that an idealized view of history is central to the ideology of kingship propagated in modern Thailand to justify the power and prestige of the monarchy. As anthropologist Clifford Geertz argued in his brilliant essay Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power, in any complex society the ruling elite “justify their existence and order their actions in terms of a collection of stories, ceremonies, insignia, formalities, and appurtenances that they have either inherited or, in more revolutionary situations, invented”. Siam’s elite uses a fairytale version of history and Thai culture as the basis for so-called “Thai-style democracy”, which royalists like to claim is far superior to imported “Western” models of governance.

Thai-style democracy is basically normal democracy minus all the exasperating stuff about the people actually having a say in how their country is governed and being able to hold their leaders to account. In other words, it is democracy without the democratic parts. The justification for this startlingly counterintuitive form of democracy goes something like this. First, democracy is defined broadly in terms of its desired outcome: it is a system that ensures the country is governed for the common good of the people, and prevents power being monopolized by any group seeking only to advance its own narrow self-interest. Any system that reliably produces this outcome, the argument goes, can be said to be democratic. Secondly, Thailand is portrayed as a country with unique cultural and social conditions. In particular, it is blessed with an ancient tradition of innately benevolent and virtuous monarchs who have always sought to promote the common good of all their people, and who have fostered the emergence of a cadre of loyal and well-educated “good men” also devoted to selflessly serving the kingdom. On the downside, the ordinary people who make up the majority of the population remain poorly educated and lacking in moral virtue, and if allowed to decide how Thailand is governed, the misguided masses are liable to be tricked or bribed into supporting villainous leaders who will rule only for the benefit of themselves and their cronies. Thirdly, putting these two elements together, it becomes clear that in Thailand the interests of democracy are best served by a system which enables the monarch and his loyal circle of royalists to play a central role guiding the government of the country, and which restricts the influence of politicians elected by the masses. One unspecified day in the future, as the education and morals of ordinary people improve, a more “Western-style” democracy may be introduced, but for now, the common good of the people is best served by this unique Thai political invention.

The introduction is also spot on in identifying the mysterious Sukhothai Inscription One as a crucial element of the myth. This was a text inscribed on a stone obelisk supposedly discovered by the future King Mongkut in 1833 while he was in the monkhood (Mongkut had an excellent claim to the throne when Rama II died in 1824, but a half-brother whose mother was a royal concubine rather than queen was installed instead as Rama III, putting Mongkut in a very precarious position given the long Siamese tradition of monarchs murdering powerful rivals; he protected himself by ostentatiously abandoning worldly desires and becoming a monk for 27 years until he became Rama IV in 1851). Ostensibly written more than seven centuries ago in 1292 during the reign of King Ramkhamhaeng, the inscription describes a prosperous and paradisal realm in which fish and rice are plentiful and everybody is happy and free. Ruling over this arcadian land is the benevolent fatherly figure of King Ramkhamhaeng:

He has hung a bell in the opening of the gate over there: if any commoner in the land has a grievance which sickens his belly and gripes his heart, and which he wants to make known to his ruler and lord, it is easy; he goes and strikes the bell which the king has hung there; King Ramkhamhaeng, the ruler of the kingdom, hears the call; he goes and questions the man, examines the case, and decides it justly for him. So the people of … Sukhothai praise him…

This is the idealized template of the Thai monarch: a paternal king wielding unchallenged moral authority who ensures harmony, happiness and prosperity across the land. The fact that anyone could get a fair ruling from the king by ringing a bell near his palace is, according to Thai royalists, proof that Siamese monarchs were fundamentally democratic centuries before formal elections were ever held. As the KBAALW introduction says:

Sukhothai Inscription One is a pivotal historical document that has, as scholar Michael Wright notes, “taken on a sacred character, symbol of the nation, first constitution, enshrining the essence of all that ‘Thainess’ meant” …. Its story of the bell, for example, shows that even Siamese kings of yore have been accessible and responsive to the needs of their subjects.  [p.23]

Ignoring for a moment the fact that this book really does use phrases like “kings of yore” without apparent irony (I will get onto its stylistic atrocities later), there are two problems with using the Ramkhamhaeng inscription as a foundation for the whole theoretical edifice of modern “democratic” Thai kingship, and to its credit the introduction of KBAALW touches on both of them. The first is that the inscription may not be genuine. It is, perhaps, itself a piece of forged royalist propaganda:

In recent decades, there has been controversy over the authenticity of this inscription. While most historians believe that it is either the actual work of King Ramkhamhaeng or produced by a later Sukhothai king to glorify the dynasty, a few argue that the inscription is a forgery produced by King Mongkut, who they say hoped to convince encroaching Western powers of Siam’s long and rich history. [p.22]

But whether or not the inscription is genuine, and gives a genuine account of what life was like in Sukhothai under Ramkhamhaeng, is really beside the point. The more serious problem for the royalist myths based on the obelisk is that, for seven centuries at least, Siamese society has not resembled in the slightest this idealized nirvana. The idea that at any time an aggrieved Thai citizen could just rock up to the palace and jingle a bell to receive a fair ruling on whatever was bothering him is pure fantasy. And the contention that all citizens were free is equally bogus. The introduction does not attempt to hide this:

The kings of Ayudhya codified a highly original, hierarchical and bureaucratic system that placed all but the nobles, monks and foreign traders into a rigid framework known as sakdina. Titles and numerical units were allotted to every member of society, from top to bottom, rigidly defining his or her position in the hierarchy. Slaves, for example, received a sakdina of five units while the highest ministers received 10,000 units. This system persisted into the late-1800s.

In Ayudhya there was no standing army or official salaries. Instead, manpower and land were the key forms of capital that defined the sakdina system. By the 17th century, an estimated two thousand people and their families formed a nobility that controlled the entire population of Ayudhya under the unseen gaze of the king. The common people (called phrai) owed up to six months a year in service to the crown… Some fled to the forests. Enemies captured during warfare were resettled in the capital and became slaves.  [p.24-25]

Slavery was not formally abolished until 1912, and echoes of the sakdina system persist throughout Thailand, particularly in the ubiquity of official corruption and the insistence of many Thais on maintaining strict gradations of social hierarchy and deference. During the 19th century, when Chakri kings conquered more territory, particularly in Lao regions, the local population was forcibly tattooed with numbers on their wrists to indicate whose property they were. This was hardly a democratic and free society ruled over by enlightened and beneficent monarchs.

H.G. Quaritch Wales, who was totally in favour of absolute monarchial rule, nevertheless had no illusions about what life was like for ordinary people. As he wrote in  Siamese State Ceremonies:

In old Siam the inhabitants of the country were considered only as the goods and chattels of the king, who had absolute power over their lives and property, and could use them as best suited his purpose. Otherwise they were of no importance whatever… The absolutism of the monarch was accompanied and indeed maintained by the utmost severity, kings … practising cruelties on their subjects for no other purpose than that of imbuing them with humility and meekness. Indeed, more gentle methods would have been looked upon as signs of weakness, since fear was the only attitude towards the throne which was understood, and tyranny the only means by which the government could be maintained. Despite the fact that all were equally of no account in the presence of the king, a many-graded social organization had been evolved, and the ingrained habit of fear and obedience produced a deep reverence for all forms of authority.

Furthermore, the history of Siamese monarchy is a blood-soaked tale of murder, conflict and internecine savagery. As the introduction of KBAALW says of Ayudhya:

Internally, competition for the throne, which had accrued enormous wealth, was intense. Succession laws were unclear. Intrigue was rife. When a king died, bloodline was a significant determinant of the heir but so too was clout. Hoping to advance their own status and and gain the spoils of increased manpower for themselves, factions of nobles surrounding the court lobbied in the name of rival heirs. Foreign traders and monks patronised by high princes also exerted influence over the selection. The losers in the succession dramas often lost their lives, and their entire families and allies were violently purged. [p,25-26]

Readers may well ask themselves, upon reading this passage, how much has really changed even in 21st century Thailand.

The introduction deals only cursorily, and rather simplistically, with the fact that while the majority of Thailand’s people are Buddhist, the ceremonies, symbolism and iconography of the Siamese monarchy are overwhelmingly Hindu, a fact many royalists appear to consider embarrassing. Royal ideology also contains a complex mix of Buddhist and Hindu beliefs, plus plenty of animism, and it is rather misleading to say, as KBAALW does, that:

While the sophisticated social structure and elaborate court rituals and customs of Angkor would strongly influence the Siamese conception of monarchy, it was the Buddhist ideal that was to become the defining paradigm of Siamese kingship. [p.18]

But it is certainly true that the Buddhist ideal of the virtuous dhammaraja monarch, like the Ramkhamhaeng inscription, has become part of the official royalist narrative in Thailand. The story goes like this:

A Buddhist monarch … carries tremendous responsibility. He is bound to observe the Ten Virtues of the King (dosapit rajadhamma). They include dana (generosity), sila (moral conduct), paricagga (self-sacrifice), ajjava (honesty and integrity), maddava (gentleness), tapa (perseverance), akkodha (freedom from hatred, ill-will and enmity), avihisma (causing no harm to others), khanti (patience, forbearance and tolerance) ad avirodhana (steadfastness and justice).

A king who follows these moral precepts ensures order and happiness in his kingdom. Those who ignore them will lead the kingdom into chaos…

The Buddhist rules of kingship thus act to check the potentially unmitigated power of the king and present him with a clear social contract. As sovereign, he is accorded tremendous respect and power, but he enjoys this status only because his subjects, believing in his worthiness, assent to it. As a result, the individual personality and abilities of the “Great Elect” (mahasammata, as he is sometimes called) become a significant variable in determining the strength of his reign. A good king who fulfils the expectations of the Buddhist ideal can command enormous reverence and authority. A bad king rules weakly. [p.21]

This is all very well in theory, as an idealized model, but royalist claims that the Thai monarchy functions this way in practice are, once again, fanciful. For one thing, a monarch who was gentle, tolerant, and avoided ever causing harm to others would not have lasted long in the vicious intrigue of court politics during most of Siam’s history, and anyone who says otherwise should work on their ajjava. Secondly, even in modern Thailand’s constitutional monarchy, claims that the rule of the king is somehow inherently democratic are simply not supportable. Bhumibol told Life magazine in 1967 that:

I really am an elected king. If the people do not want me, they can throw me out, eh? Then I will be out of a job.

But how exactly do the Thai people give their assent to a good king, or withdraw it from a bad king? What is the mechanism for them to make their views known? As King Prajadhipok, Rama VII, wrote in a letter to U.S. adviser Francis Sayre, quoted in KBAALW:

As you well know, the king has absolute power in everything. This principle is very good, and very suitable for the country, as long as we have a good king. If the king is really an “elected king”, it is probable that he would be a fairly good king. But this idea of election is really a theoretical one… [p.38]

In any event, in contemporary Thailand, with the military sworn to defend the monarchy no matter what, and the lèse majesté law punishing anyone critical of the palace with years behind bars, the claim the king is somehow “elected” is fantastical. One of the great ironies of the modern Thai monarchy is that royalists insist that the king rules with popular assent and at the same time frantically suppress any open democratic debate about his rule. KBAALW states boldly that:

In the 20th century, monarchies around Southeast Asia and the world were toppled. Yet nothing has changed the fact that the Siamese choose to place a king at their head. [p.17]

But how was this choice made? Can it be reversed? How does it reconcile with Thailand’s oppressive lèse majesté laws? As Streckfuss says in Truth on Trial in Thailand:

The difficulty for defenders of the law is to explain how the institution of Thai monarchy could be so utterly loved if it required the most repressive lèse majesté law the modern world has known.

Editorial tension is apparent throughout the introduction, giving it a schizophrenic tone. Some issues are dealt with relatively fairly, including the beginning of the Chakri dynasty, a very sensitive subject because King Bhuddha Yod Fa Chulalok, or Rama I, took power in 1782 after the violent overthrow of King Taksin, who was executed. Monarchies are built on myths of permanence and inviolability, and the fact that the dynasty was begun only 230 years ago by a general who was not part of the royal line but managed to usurp the throne is a matter of considerable embarrassment, not usually discussed. The issue is given extra piquancy by the belief of some Thais — including allegedly some key protagonists in the current political crisis — that Thaksin Shinawatra is a reincarnation of King Taksin, back to get his revenge on the Chakri dynasty.

The overthrow of King Taksin is often explained away in official narratives with the claim that he had gone insane, but KBAALW avoids this and tells the story relatively straight. The introduction also reminds readers that a century later, in 1873, King Chulalongkorn, who reigned as Rama V and is the most revered Chakri king besides Bhumibol, abolished the practice of prostration. As he told an assembled gathering in the Grand Palace:

His Majesty has noticed that the great countries and powers in Asia where oppression existed, compelling inferiors to prostate and worship their masters, have ceased these customs… They have done so to make manifest there shall be no more oppression… His Majesty therefore proposes to substitute, in place of crouching and crawling on all-fours, standing upright with a graceful bow of the head… [p.36]

It is welcome to have this detail included because it is also not widely known, or discussed, due to the rather uncomfortable fact that Bhumibol and Thailand’s royalist establishment have reintroduced the practice of crouching and crawling on all-fours. Prostration is not obligatory, but it is widely believed to be, and Bhumibol and his family clearly expect their Thai subjects to prostrate themselves when they have an official audience.

An extraordinary televised interview of Bhumibol’s youngest offspring Princess Chulabhorn by talkshow host Woody Milintachinda in April 2011 demonstrates how much has changed since Chulalongkorn told his people to stand tall and recognise royalty with a graceful bow of the head: Woody spends most of the programme grovelling on the floor in a variety of locations, and at one stage enthusiastically shares food for the princess’s pet dog.

But elsewhere in the introduction, dubious assertions are suddenly made without any attempt to back them up, clear examples of the process through which the book was written, with the royalist advisory committee scrambling to insert the accepted official narrative. So KBAALW repeats the standard story that the Chakri kings were always eager to give the people more democracy as soon as they were ready for it  (a very controversial argument, to say the least) and makes no mention of the Bowaradet Rebellion in 1933 when the royalists tried to restore the absolute monarchy by force. And discussing the monarchy’s collapse in influence and status following the bloodless coup that ended absolute Chakri rule in 1932 and the abdication of Prajadhipok in 1935, it states:

The Siamese people still had a king — a republic was unthinkable — but the status of monarchy had reached its nadir. [p.41]

In fact, a republic was actively considered by many of those involved in the 1932 revolution, and military leader Phibun Songgkram made a real effort to slowly strangle the monarchy during the late 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. A republic was by no means unthinkable for 20th century Thailand, and nor is it in the 21st century.

Overall, the introduction is clearly a once impressive and thought-provoking piece of writing that has been ruined by clumsy editing and censoring, turning it into an intellectual slalom ride veering back and forth between insight and risibility. It still manages to get the point across — despite this being heresy to contemporary royalists — that the history of the Siamese kings, including the Chakri dynasty, is one of power struggles, despotic even if intermittently intelligent rule, and systematic oppression of those on the lower rungs of society. It also makes clear that the official version of Thai history is a fictional construct explicitly created for the purposes of cementing the social and political status quo and creating a fake rationale for royalty.

But then, in another white-knuckle wrenching change in tone, it brings us up to the current reign and gives this summary of King Bhumibol’s rule:

Extremely disciplined, meticulous and imbued with a great sense of duty following the death of his brother, he assiduously fulfilled his obligations as monarch and maintained the visual language, customs and trappings of the crown, for which the Thais had an inherent and deeply ingrained understanding and respect… Potent ritual symbolism — such as an annual ploughing ceremony linking the monarch to the farmers — was resurrected during his reign. By applying the royal code of conduct emphasising the 10 virtues of kingship and conscientiously performing royal rituals, his public image was beyond tarnish.

King Bhumibol also energetically enacted the paternalistic and righteous Buddhist concept of kingship of the Sukhothai ideal. Travelling the country and meeting his subjects, listening to their problems and creating solutions, the king initiated projects on behalf of the most needy. Possessing a passion for science like his great grandfather King Mongkut, this modern-day Lord of the Land has spent many days and nights seeking answers to the nitty-gritty problems faced by the majority of his subjects: drought and deforestation, nutrition and disease, and later even traffic. His abiding passion became sustainable development. Personal visits to villages and farms across the country led directly to thousands of small-scale irrigation, soil and natural resource projects. Through his many, mostly Western hobbies — jazz, radio, sailing, photography and oil painting — he even fulfilled his kingly duty to delight and impress his subjects with his contemporary skills and talents.

Although the palace still maintained Hindu and Brahman rituals, mainly in the form of public ceremonies and iconography, such traditions were eclipsed by the personally inspired activities of King Bhumibol. The public once again came to revere their king as a modern-day dhammaraja, trusting him to preside over the security and welfare of the nation – and monarchy once again came to occupy the heart of Thai life. Daily television broadcasts followed the king’s travels through the country and cinemas paid tribute to him before every film. Both the wealth of the crown and country soared. With his reign proving so auspicious, the king could do no wrong in the eyes of an adoring public.

The reverence he earned and the influence he gained were all the more impressive given they were realised under the new, constitutional form of monarchy for which he has been the key shaper. In this role, the monarch functions as the head of state and armed forces. He exercises the power of royal assent, signing new legislation into law. He also holds various royal prerogatives such as naming his heir and members of his Privy Council, and granting pardons. Through private audiences with the prime minister and cabinet ministers, he has the royal prerogative to be consulted, to warn and to encourage. In addition, his public statements and addresses have undertones of warning and encouragement, but in general his powers are limited. Yet King Bhumibol, using tradition, discipline and ingenuity, has played a decisive role in the nation’s modern development and history. At the peak of his reign, the longest in Siamese history, the unexpected monarch was seen by almost all his subjects as the “father” of the people… [p.41-42]

This is a stunning passage. It is pure and unadulterated royalist hagiography, of exactly the kind Anand had promised KBAALW would not peddle. It could have been transposed virtually verbatim from any of the sycophantic coffee-table volumes glorifying Rama IX’s reign that dominate the bookshelves at Suvarnabhumi airport shops alongside prison memoirs of unlucky drug smugglers and prurient tales of the sex trade (and it does in fact bear striking similarities to the analysis of the monarchy by Anand Panyarachun in the Bangkok Post’s adulatory and glossy 1996 publication Thailand’s Guiding Light). Whoever wrote it has been living in a parallel universe in which the Thai monarchy is not in crisis, The King Never Smiles was never written, and the “cheerful, childlike citizens” of “slumbrous, easy-going Siam” (as Time magazine has described the Thais) universally worship their beloved Bhumibol. It is at this point that the pervasive dishonesty of KBAALW becomes clear. Anand was not only being economical with the truth in his opening remarks: he was also lying when he claimed before publication that the book would not retreat from debate or present a “sugar-coated” account of the monarchy. It is hard to conceive of a more saccharine and less intellectually rigorous summary of Bhumibol’s reign than the passage that confronts readers at the end of KBAALW‘s introduction.

To find a concise and compelling counternarrative, Thongchai Winichakul’s Toppling Democracy in the Journal of Contemporary Asia in 2008 is a useful place to start. Thongchai discusses how royal ritual under Bhumibol was not only resurrected, but often invented, part of a deliberate campaign to resacralize the throne:

The deification rituals are not necessarily ancient ones. Several traditions have been invented, both by the government and by civil society. The important point is that they enhance the monarchy’s perceived barami (virtuous or moral power), an ancient concept of power innate to the righteous king. Among the prominent invented rituals is the royal birthday celebration that became a major annual festival for the entire country. The king’s birthday has been designated “Father’s Day” and the queen’s birthday as “Mother’s Day,” and there are grander celebrations every tenth anniversary and every twelve-year cycle for each of them. The birthday rituals reinforce the cultivated notion that they are the parents of all Thais. Grand celebrations for the Silver, Golden and Diamond jubilees for the reign, and so on, have reinforced the idea of King Bhumibol as Dhammaraja. A year hardly goes by without a grand royal celebration for one occasion or another.

Thongchai also notes that the king’s ceaselessly promoted royal development projects and travels around the country were a central part of the myth created around him:

The monarch has been highly praised for his dedication to royal development projects that aim at helping the poor, particularly the rural and highland people. Beginning in the 1950s, the breadth and scope of the royal projects expanded enormously especially during the Cold War and after 1973. Several of them began as non-governmental but eventually most of them were integrated into government bureaucracies and budgets. The truth about these projects, and their successes and failures, will probably remain unknown for years to come, given that public accountability and transparency for royal activities is unthinkable. Suffice it to say that the endlessly repeated images of the monarch travelling through remote areas, walking tirelessly along dirt roads, muddy paths and puddles, with maps, pens and a notebook in hand, a camera and sometimes a pair of binoculars around his neck, are common in the media, in public buildings and private homes. These images have captured the popular imagination during the past several decades. Bhumibol is portrayed as a popular king, a down-to-earth monarch who works tirelessly for his people and, we may say, has been in touch with his constituents for decades long before any politicians in the current generation began their career.

He points out the constant glorification of even the king’s most ordinary deeds — “any accomplishments were and are celebrated to the highest level” — and concludes:

All of this means that Thais who are currently sixty years old or younger grew up under the pervasive aura of an unprecedented royal cult.

Many people might find such an analysis of Bhumibol’s reign unduly harsh. They would argue that despite the often ridiculous propaganda, the king has worked extremely hard during his life in a genuine effort to help Thailand’s poor. It is certainly a debate worth having as the country seeks consensus on the appropriate role of the palace in Bhumibol’s twilight years and beyond. But KBAALW refuses to even get close to engaging in such a debate. Instead of tacking commentators like Handley and Thongchai head-on, treating their arguments as serious and formulating a credible attempt at rebuttal, the book pretends opposing views do not exist. The King Never Smiles is mentioned only once in KBAALW, on page 179:

The King Never Smiles, written by an American journalist, Paul Handley, and published by Yale University Press in 2006, was a harbinger of … more intense journalistic and academic scrutiny of the crown. The only critical biography of King Bhumibol ever printed, many in Thailand dismissed it for its gossipy content, inaccuracies and mean spiritedness. It was nevertheless a new departure in commentaries on Thai society and its workings. The book, which has not been distributed in Thailand, offers a stark counterpoint to any treatment of the monarchy hitherto seen.

Whatever one’s view of The King Never Smiles, no serious work on the life of King Bhumibol can afford to dismiss it so superficially. It betrays an attitude of profound ignorance. (Handley’s remarkably restrained review of KBAALW, meanwhile, can be read here.)

As the book unfolds, a further aspect of its intrinsic and distasteful dishonesty becomes apparent. After the introduction, the main body of the work is divided into three parts: “The Life”, a 124-page chronological biography of Bhumibol with a chapter for each of the seven 12-year astrological cycles he has lived through; “The Work”, a 78-page assessment of four key themes that supposedly characterized his reign; and “The Crown”, 54 pages which focus on five aspects of the modern Thai monarchy: the royal finances, the  lèse majesté law, the privy council, the issue of succession, and royal ceremonies. The first two sections are almost uniformly atrocious, but the third contains some interesting and useful material. Discussions with contributors revealed the reason why: KBAALW was constructed in assembly-line fashion, not dissimilar to how a canned-fish factory might be managed, with different people responsible working on different sections under the watchful gaze of the monarchist overseers. Most of “The Life” and “The Work” were written by the journeyman journalists on the team. The academics only worked on a few very specific parts of the book. Baker was responsible mainly for the introduction and the chapter in section two on the king’s sufficiency economy philosophy; Streckfuss wrote the chapters on lèse majesté, succession and the privy council, and Porphant did the chapter on the Crown Property Bureau. All three academics are acknowledged experts in their fields, and while their contributions to KBAALW are disfigured by the crude meddling of the editorial advisory board in places, the chapters they worked on remain worthwhile. Indeed, they are the only worthwhile parts of the book. But these sections are essentially appendices to the main thrust of the narrative.

(According to Richard Ehrlich, one of the journalists on the project, he only contributed to one section, the chapter on “Ceremonies and Regalia”, and also did not participate in the key parts of the book.)

Porphant, Baker and Streckfuss had nothing to do with the bulk of KBAALW, and the crassly simplistic and obsequious portrayal of the monarchy that imbues “The Life” and “The Work” sections in particular runs wholly contrary to the nuanced views that emerge from their own writings. But their names have been prominently promoted as if they were heavily involved in all aspects of the project, and as if the overall narrative bears their professional stamp of approval. Nothing could be further from the truth.

This is really quite extraordinary: KBAALW is a book so deceitful that its backers even deliberately misrepresented its authorship to give it an entirely spurious aura of credibility. It seemed bad enough that the dishonesty began in the second sentence of Anand’s foreword on page 11, but in fact the level of fraud is even worse: the deception begins on page 4, in the list of contributors, where the names of Baker, Streckfuss and Porphant are prominently displayed ahead of the journalists who actually authored the vast majority of the work (one might argue, in fact, that the lies begin right on the front cover — the book’s subtitle is Thailand’s Monarchy in Perspective). KBAALW has hijacked the reputations of three respected academics to dress itself up in fake academic integrity.

What makes this all the more incredible is that it is just so inept. Did the people who put this book together really think nobody would call them on these issues? Or did they just not care? Is this kind of shoddy chicanery really the best that Bhumibol’s leading acolytes can offer on the occasion of his seventh-cycle birthday? The book is intended to glorify Bhumibol and enable future generations to learn of his greatness, but it only succeeds in making him look ridiculous. This is not the king’s fault: it is the responsibility of Anand and his advisory board, as well as editor-in-chief Nicholas Grossman and senior editor Dominic Faulder. With friends like these, who needs enemies? I can only hope none of them ever gives me a birthday present. Mercifully I suspect it is very unlikely now that they ever will.

To see how ludicrous KBAALW‘s sycophancy is, let’s jump to pages 47-48, where the glorious birth of baby Bhumibol has just been described in worshipful prose:

Since 1946, King Bhumibol’s reign has notched up some singular firsts. He is the only monarch in the world to have been born in the US, one of the world’s proudest republics. King Bhumibol has lived longer than any Chakri king, and the duration of his reign has greatly exceeded all others in Siamese history. Unlike virtually all of his predecessors, King Bhumibol has reigned not as an absolute monarch but as a constitutional monarch. With the death at age 83 in November 1989 of Franz Josef II, hereditary prince of Liechtenstein since 1938, King Bhumibol became the longest reigning monarch in the world. By the middle of 2011, King Bhumibol’s reign had spanned 65 years, exceeding the reigns of Queen Victoria of Great Britain (63 years) in the 19th century and Emperor Hirohito of Japan (62 years) in the 20th century. King Bhumibol’s reign straddles two centuries and represents one of the longest tenures by any head of state in recorded history. The Royal House of Chakri has stood through nine reigns and 229 years since 1782; nearly three out of every ten of those years have been with the ninth king of the Chakri dynasty, King Bhumibol, as monarch.

My life, too, has straddled two centuries. Perhaps I am an overachiever, but I have to say that until now I had never really considered this to be among my most singular accomplishments. To be honest, I didn’t even realize it was an achievement at all. Out of the long list above, the only element that Bhumibol had even modest control over was the fact that he has managed to live to 84 years. All the rest had nothing to do with him whatsoever. This is not to say that Bhumibol has achieved nothing worth celebrating during his reign: he has had an extraordinary life and whatever one’s view of his overall contribution to Thailand, few would begrudge him praise and respect for some of the things that he has done. But pretending that mere accidents of history are fabulous feats that incontrovertibly prove his greatness does him no service whatsoever.

KBAALW somehow manages to tell the remarkable story of Bhumibol’s life in a way that makes it excruciatingly tedious. One is often tempted to throw the book across the room, but given its vast bulk this could result in structural damage. The breathless and sycophantic tone continues throughout the long account of Bhumibol’s life and becomes increasingly wearying. On page 103, for example, KBAALW recounts how Bhumibol entered the monkhood for 15 days in 1956. A few weeks later, he played jazz with legendary U.S. clarinetist and band leader Benny Goodman. Now, both of these episodes showed Bhumibol in a genuinely engaging light and contributed to the great affection that most Thais felt towards their king. But KBAALW doesn’t say that. Instead, it portentously informs us:

Just weeks after King Bhumibol’s time in the monkhood, Benny Goodman, the “king of jazz”, and his band arrived in town and “played the palace” three times with King Bhumibol always sitting in. It was a dramatic change of roles, and a remarkable shift from an ancient world to a contemporary one.

This is just superficial, stupid, vacuous prose. Earlier today I watered the plants on my apartment’s roof garden, tending to my crops as humans have done ever since they stopped being hunter-gatherers thousands of years ago in the prehistoric past. Just moments later I checked my Facebook messages on my iPhone. This, too, was a dramatic change of roles and a remarkable shift from an ancient world to a contemporary one. Big deal. Aside from undiscovered tribes living deep in the rainforests of the Amazon basin or New Guinea, moving between ancient activities and more modern ones is something everybody does frequently every single day of their lives.

It gets worse. On page 114, with Bhumibol now in his mid-30s, “a picture of vigour and health” whose “sporting and cultural achievements … won genuine admiration at home and abroad”, KBAALW turns to his frequent journeys to remote areas to inspect royal projects and talk to villagers:

Wherever he went, the king projected order and purpose. On his carefully planned forays into the Thai hinterland, he carried detailed maps that he taped together himself and carefully annotated.

“When he made a personal trip in casual wear, a small row of sharpened pencils were [sic] usually tucked inside his shirt pocket,” wrote Police General Vasit Dejkunjorn, a former chief of the royal court police, in his personal memoir, In His Majesty’s Footsteps. “He preferred to do things himself. Sharpening pencils was one of them.” In private, members of his Aw Saw Friday Band saw him clean and care for his own instruments.

Is there no end to the man’s greatness? Does he trim his own toenails too?

The flipside of this relentless exaltation of mundane things is that the tragedies and struggles of Bhumibol’s life are underplayed throughout KBAALW. Presumably the authors wanted to maintain an unremittingly jaunty tone, fearing that any genuine drama or sorrow would spoil the adulatory mood. Bhumibol became King Rama IX on June 9, 1946 in hideous circumstances: his elder brother, constant companion and only friend, Ananda, was shot through the head in bed in the Grand Palace. A contemporary British news report describes what happened:

It must have been an utterly harrowing time for the 18-year-old Bhumibol. His mother, Sangwan, was distraught and heartbroken. Together with her, Bhumibol had to prepare his brother’s corpse the day after his death in accordance with royal rituals, described by South African author Rayne Kruger in The Devil’s Discuss:

The first ceremony was ritual bathing. The new King, his mother, senior princes and officers of the State in turn poured scented water, which had been blessed by monks and kept in crystal vessels, over Ananda’s feet. Next, the special section of pages permitted to touch the royal person dressed him in the glittering robes he would have worn for his coronation…

He was placed in a sitting posture with his legs crossed and drawn close to his body, his hands clasped together holding incense sticks and a candle as if he prayed to the Buddha, and strips of white cloth were tightly wrapped round him like the bandaging of a mummy. Thus trussed and swathed he was put, still upright, in a silver urn – wedged, rather, for the fit was very tight. All this had to be watched by Bhoomipol, who then placed a crown on the corpse’s head, before finally the lid of the urn, following the contoured spire of the Siamese crown, was locked shut.

As part of this process, some of Ananda’s bones had to be broken by Bhumibol and Sangwan, to get his corpse into the required position to be placed in the urn. For weeks afterwards, each afternoon, towards dusk, Bhumibol and his mother came to the Grand Palace throne hall to sit quietly in front of the urn, along with Thais who had come to pay their respects. As Thai historian Kobkua Suwannathat-Pian wrote in her book Kings, Country and Constitutions: 

The King’s attachment to his elder brother was much evident during the last month in Bangkok prior to His Majesty’s departure for further study in Switzerland. Bhumibol never failed to pay a daily visit to King Ananda’s remains in the golden urn.

Bhumibol’s dignified behaviour and stoicism during this dreadful period were truly admirable. Despite his sorrow, he conducted himself with grace and courage. During the 1990s, Bhumibol gave Canadian author William Stevenson unprecedented access to the royal court to write a biography, published in 1999 as The Revolutionary King. The book was catastrophically flawed in many ways, but at least it made a genuine effort to treat Bhumibol like a real human being with real human emotions, and to capture the utter desolation and profound grief that Bhumibol had to endure. He was an 18-year-old youth and he had just been given the overwhelming and unwanted role of king of Siam, a country that he barely knew or understood, after the sudden and shocking death of a brother to whom he was exceptionally close. Lesser men would have fallen apart.

Stevenson describes the urn that Bhumibol and Sangwan visited daily (inside, Ananda’s corpse was slowly decomposing):

The eight outer sections of gem-encrusted gold unfolded Nan. Through the perforated floor, bodily fluids would be drawn off daily through a stop-cock until the corpse became dry.

He recounts comments from Prince Chakrabandhu, who had sometimes played jazz with the two brothers, and had been due to meet them for a music session at 9 a.m. on the morning of Ananda’s death:

‘On that last Sunday, the boys were late for a nine o’clock appointment. I was thinking they were playing another of their tricks on me. .. But when they should be making music, His Majesty was already dead. I heard the shouts and hurried to the mansion. Among all those dignitaries, I felt out of place. Much later, I tried to tip-toe away.’

The new king caught him at a side door. ‘Don’t go! I need you. The only close friend I had was my brother. Please be my friend.’

‘But you have many friends,’ said the prince.

‘Acquaintances. At school. On the ski slopes. Not friends. And nobody here.’

‘Then,’ said the old prince, ‘my king for the first time cried.’

There is nothing so affecting and empathetic in KBAALW. The king is a cypher in its pages, his inner world never explored, as if human emotions do not affect him. Famously, Bhumibol’s whole personality and demeanour were radically altered by Ananda’s death, and he was rarely seen smiling in public ever again. As Rayne Kruger says in The Devil’s Discus, Bhumibol underwent an “extraordinary change from gaiety throughout his seventeen years preceding Ananda’s death to unsmiling gravity…” But instead of attempting to understand and evoke how Bhumibol must have felt as he began his reign, KBAALW strikes a jarringly ill-judged tone. On page 45 it tells us:

In 1946, at the age of 18, his life took a dramatic turn. His beloved brother, King Ananda Mahidol, died unexpectedly, and the young prince acceded to the throne as the ninth king in the Royal House of Chakri.

Lest anybody think that this rather inadequate phraseology was a one-off aberration, an even more startling example appears on page 83 at the start of the section that describes Ananda’s death in more detail. This passage follows on from an account of Bhumibol’s enthusiasm for music, and begins:

Musical pursuits, however, took a back seat after a tragic turn of events.

Of all the ways one could possibly think of to introduce an account of the death of King Rama VIII, an event which profoundly changed Bhumibol and Thailand forever, this must surely be among the most surreal and incompetent.

Just as the psychological drama of Bhumibol’s life — his hopes, fears, doubts, stoicism, determination, growing self-confidence — is utterly excised from the sterile chronology of events in KBAALW, the authors also appear to have felt that the setbacks and controversies of Bhumibol’s reign should be mentioned only in passing, if at all. No real sense is given of the tension and conflict of the 1950s in which the young Bhumibol showed real courage and resolve standing up to military leader Field Marshal Phibun Songgkram and notorious police chief Phao Sriyanond. Bhumibol waged this struggle for six years until Field Marshal Sarit Thanarat deposed Phibun and Phao in a 1957 coup and formed a very fruitful political alliance with the palace. Until then, Bhumibol was often treated by Thailand’s military leaders with undisguised contempt. There is little of this drama in KBAALW. Here is how it summarizes the issue on page 96:

Academic accounts of this period focus on the inevitable tension between King Bhumibol, who had sworn at his coronation to reign for the benefit and happiness of his people, and the first prime minister in Thailand to test the workings of a constitutional monarchy with the reigning king firmly in place. It was never a close working relationship, and they remained distant for the next six years.

This kind of bland understatement is typical, and it makes KBAALW‘s account of Bhumibol’s life boring beyond belief. Perhaps the authors felt it would be somehow disrespectful to Bhumibol or distressing to readers to provide too much detail about a period in which the king was not treated with total deference. Also, of course, the writers were instructed to stick to the fiction that Bhumibol has never interfered in politics and only intervenes reluctantly at times of great crisis. This myth was comprehensively and categorically debunked by The King Never Smiles. As Kevin Hewison wrote in A Book, the King and the 2006 Coup, an academic assessment of Handley’s book and its impact:

By focusing on the palace’s comeback from its dark days of 1932, Handley charts the course of modern Thai political history. For students of Thailand, Handley completes a long-neglected task: he writes the monarchy back into the political events from 1932 to 2005. Indeed, he allocates a central political role to the palace.

Identifying this political role for the monarch is controversial. The palace spinmeisters regularly assert that the king is above politics and that he carefully maintains his constitutional position… In fact, one of the great values of Handley’s study is that he demonstrates that this particular argument, borrowed from palace propaganda, can no longer be accepted by serious scholars.

It may not be accepted by serious scholars, but the creators of KBAALW appear to believe this particular argument can still be peddled with abandon.

In support of their efforts to airbrush any controversy out of Bhumibol’s past actions while still claiming he has done immense good work for Thailand, the authors use various rhetorical tricks. One of them, very familiar to me as a former Reuters journalist (wire agencies do it all the time) is the strategic use of quotations by alleged experts to support spurious assertions. Instead of analysing an issue in detail, just fling in a quote that seems convincing from somebody with an impressive-sounding title and move on as quickly as possible before anybody spots the sleight-of-hand. Chulalongkorn University professor Suchit Bunbongkarn is used repeatedly for this purpose. On page 96 he makes the questionable assertion that in the 1950s the relationship between Bhumibol and Phibun was characterized by “inevitable points of friction…rather than outright antagonism”, and on page 105 he says of Sarit’s coup of September 1957:

The coup had nothing to do with the king but with the deep rivalry between Phao and Sarit. It was a rivalry in terms of almost everything — politically, economically, even the opium trade.

In fact, Bhumibol and the royalists were aware in advance of Sarit’s coup plans and fully co-operated. In a cable to London on September 21, 1957, British ambassador Sir Richard Whittington reported that Prince Dhani, one of the key royalist figures behind the throne, “assured me personally that the coup is ‘just what the royalists wanted’.”

On page 178, Suchit is back again, this time sharing his wisdom on the 2006 coup that turned Thailand’s political divisions into a full-blown crisis:

I would say the king did not have anything to do with the coup. It turned out to be a disaster for the palace.

The second part of his statement is very true, but does not follow logically from the first, which is extremely questionable, to say the least, and undermined by several cables from the U.S. embassy in Bangkok, among other evidence. Besides, if Bhumibol had really been against the coup and knew it would be a disaster, why did he give it his blessing so readily? He had stood against coup attempts several times before. He could have done so again. But there is no rigorous discussion of any of these issues. Suchit is given a cameo appearance to deliver a throwaway line claiming the king was not inappropriately meddling in Thai politics, and that is supposed to be that.

Had the creators of KBAALW bothered to ask David Streckfuss about the 2006 coup — after all, he was one of the contributing academics so surely he could have been consulted— he might have told them something like the following, taken from Truth on Trial in Thailand, to explain why it has been such a catastrophe for the monarchy:

The 2006 coup was different from the previous 18 ones punctuating Thai history over the past 60 years. This coup and its aftermath laid bare the peculiar anatomy of the Thai body politic for closer examination; it exposed fissures which previously obscured a clearer view of this peculiar social, cultural and political landscape.

Instead, however, they chose to quote Suchit, whose opinion about the coup is considerably less credible. How strange.

Another frequently used stylistic device is the passive voice: sentences are constructed in a way that informs the reader that something happened while obscuring who caused it to happen. This is extremely common in public discourse in Thailand, and Streckfuss has something to say about it too in Truth on Trial in Thailand. Commenting on the military’s report on the Black May violence of 1992 (it was, of course, a whitewash), he writes:

History becomes magically mechanized by anonymous action, movements of undifferentiated masses and mobs, and shouting in the night, without actual agency, without people doing things. No blood, no shootings, no orders, no death appear in the military’s report on the 1992 uprising. All that happened was the movement of dark forces, gangs, factions, rumours, behind the scenes maneuvering, and the prompting of masses on the streets to march towards their own suppression.

The official history is that of bright, shining faces, of great men whose names ring out as their accomplishments are proclaimed. It is ever the glorious times of a happy people: the general reaches down and pats a child on the head; the grandma, smiling, raises her hands in devotion and obeisance.

Exactly the same kind of style permeates KBAALW. As long as the narrative can skip forward with a cloyingly upbeat and cheerful tone, all is well, but when history moves through dark and difficult phases (which is fairly often, this being Thailand) then suddenly the passive voice takes over. It is also useful when something embarrassing happens (also fairly often). And so, for example, when dealing with the thoroughly discredited attempt by William Stevenson’s book The Revolutionary King to pin the blame for the death of King Ananda on a Japanese agent who supposedly snuck into the Grand Palace disguised as a monk, KBAALW states:

In the late 1990s, a theory based on unidentified sources was advanced that King Ananda’s death was the work of Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a Japanese “spy”…

Neither Stevenson nor his book are named, and it is also not stated that The Revolutionary King was commissioned by Bhumibol himself. But since any informed reader will know these details, and will find the omission of them striking and strange, this approach by those behind KBAALW only succeeds in making them look ridiculous.

More seriously, the account of the appalling 1976 massacre at Thammasat University is cursory and inadequate and depicts the royal family as being helpless witnesses to the events that led to the carnage.

KBAALW makes the extraordinary claim that we still do not really know whether the Thammasat massacre was the culmination of a deliberate campaign of ultra-right-wing royalist agitation or just a shocking accident:

Whether this agitation was deliberately instigated, or was the outcome of a terrible series of ill-considered escalating acts of violence, is still hotly debated. What is not in dispute is that early on the morning of 6 October, a brutal assault was mounted on Thammasat University campus by police, soldiers, Village Scouts, Red Gaurs, Nawaphon and vocational students. Although a few students were armed and were reported to have fired back, the overwhelming force was irresistible. A terrible maelstrom of pent-up rage and anti-communist hysteria was unleashed. Students on the campus and Sanam Luang were beaten, stripped, humiliated, shot, lynched and burned alive. The lucky ones were arrested without serious misadventure. [p.136]

KBAALW does not say by whom the events of October 6, 1976, are hotly debated. In fact, what happened that day is rarely discussed in Thailand because it conflicts so starkly with what everybody is taught about the monarchy. The official story is that the royals are above politics, never take sides, and promote peace and unity. It would be very embarrassing to acknowledge that Bhumibol and Sirikit had become associated with extreme rightist groups and that while they may not have ordered or directly encouraged the massacre (the extent of their direct involvement remains unconfirmed and controversial), they undoubtedly contributed to the paranoid and violent climate that allowed it to happen. To quote Paul Handley:

One one level, King Bhumibol’s embrace of the violent right, as both its leader and its tool, was understandable. The cardinal duty of any sovereign king is to defend and sustain the monarchy. As communist regimes took power in neighbouring states and the Thai insurgency grew, the Mahidol family became obligated to ally itself against the forces that would protect the throne above all other. But this doesn’t explain Bhumibol and Sirikit going so far as to aggravate a hysteria that turned one half of Thai society against the other half and left no room in the middle. It cast a shadow over the monarchical institution itself — the dhammaraja was no longer the nation’s unifier.

Thongchai Winichakul was one of the student leaders at Thammasat in 1976. In the aftermath of the massacre he was jailed for nearly two years. In a poignant paper he delivered in the Philippines a quarter of a century later, Thongchai described the struggle to arrange a memorial ceremony for the dead. It took 20 years, because the incident was so controversial, particularly due to the role of the Thai monarchy:

The political ramifications of truth may be unthinkable, literally, for Thai society, since several individuals and institutions which command power and respect in the society, namely the monarchy and the Buddhist sangha, had been involved in the conspiracy that led to the killing… Truth might have been devastating to the society and to those who try to get to the truth themselves. Silence is therefore mostly self-imposed, either out of fear or out of concern for the unthinkable consequences to the country. The massacre of 1976 was, so to say, in the realm of the unspeakable, of silence. Its full history is probably impossible to write under the present system of ‘Democracy with the Monarchy as the Head of the State’…

Thai historiography is a saga of the unity of Thai people under the benevolent monarchs against the threats posed by foreign countries. A massacre by the state is, therefore, an alien concept.

Sometimes, KBAALW doesn’t even bother with semantic subterfuge to camouflage insupportable statements. It just openly lies. Here is an example from page 137, discussing the aftermath of the Thammasat massacre:

Two days after the Thammasat debacle, Thanin Kraivixien, a conservative supreme court judge, was appointed prime minister… Thanin’s government proved to be more assertive than anything seen in the previous three years, but alienated much of the public and the military. Within a year, Thanin was toppled…

King Bhumibol appointed Thanin a privy councillor, but kept himself well apart from the perilous entanglements of politics.

This is an astonishing little passage. First, it uses the wholly inadequate word “debacle” to describe the vicious orgy of murder, rape and torture that unfolded at Thammasat that day. Then it employs the passive voice to skirt around the uncomfortable fact that it was Bhumibol and Sirikit who engineered the appointment of Thanin — perhaps the most extremist and incompetent prime minister Thailand has ever had. Then it states that he was “more assertive than anything seen in the previous three years”, a comical euphemism for the fact that the previous three years were a brief democratic interlude and that Thanin’s government was a dictatorship installed by the palace after a savage massacre of student protesters and a military coup. Thanin turned out to be so ultra-right-wing that even the military found his extremism unpalatable and turfed him out, and at this point an affronted Bhumibol appointed him to the privy council, a clear signal of palace support. To state at the end of this whole appalling episode that the king was keeping out of politics really beggars belief. The reality was exactly the reverse: Bhumibol and Sirikit had made a series of disastrous interventions which had taken Thailand to the brink of civil war.

Just a page later, on 138-139, we get more duplicity. Discussing the elevation of “Princess Angel” to a potential successor to Bhumibol, in a ceremony overseen by the king in 1977, readers are told:

She could accede to the throne should circumstances require it, but this did not place her in any kind of competition with her older brother, Crown Prince Maha Vajoralonkorn, who married the same year.

Do the authors think readers would not be well aware that this statement is nonsense? We already know from a 2010 U.S. embassy cable that Anand Panyarachun is deeply concerned about the succession and the prospect of Vajiralongkorn becoming king. He said so himself to U.S. ambassador Eric John:

Anand said that he had always believed that the Crown Prince would succeed his father, according to law. However, there could be complicating factors — if Vajiralongkohn proved unable to stay out of politics, or avoid embarrassing financial transactions. After a pause, Anand added that the consensus view among many Thai was that the Crown Prince could not stop either, nor would he be able, at age 57, to rectify his behavior. After another pause, Anand added that someone really should raise the matter with the King, before adding with regret that there really was no one who could raise such a delicate topic (note: implied was the need for an alternative to Vajiralongkorn).

But the problems Bhumibol has had with his family are another crucial part of his life that KBAALW fails to illuminate. There is no mention of the fact that he has been estranged from Sirikit for well over two decades, since the queen suffered a breakdown and disappeared from public view for several months in 1985/86 following a scandal over one of her military aides who died suddenly. There is no sense of Bhumibol’s heartbreak when his cherished daughter Ubolrat, to whom he had been extremely close, renounced royal life to marry an American she met while studying nuclear physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bhumibol had loved yachting with Ubolrat, and at the time had been closest to her of all his children. The pair won joint gold medals at the Southeast Asian Peninsular Games in 1967, a fact still widely celebrated in royal mythology. After Ubolrat turned her back on the palace and became plain Julie Jensen, a housewife in California, the distraught Bhumibol never sailed again. Ubolrat is now back in royal circles in Bangkok after divorcing her husband in the late 1990s. She has acted in several movies, including the big-budget 2010 Thai blockbuster My Best Bodyguard in which she plays a courageous journalist who risks everything to uncover the truth about a dark conspiracy that even involves her father:

Bhumibol has never fully forgiven Ubolrat for her perceived betrayal, refusing to restore her formal title of princess. The king also has strained relations with his youngest daughter Chulabhorn. William Stevenson recounts that they fell out during the 1990s:

The king voiced concern that her Chulabhorn Research Foundation was open to criticism for misusing funds. He was baffled and hurt when she wrote him impersonal letters addressed to ‘Your Majesty’ and signed ‘Professor Doctor Air Marshal Princess Chulabhorn’. He never saw her to talk with any more…

But it is the collapse of Bhumibol’s relationship with Vajiralongkorn, and the implications of this for the succession and for Thailand, that is among the biggest of the yawning gaps in KBAALW. Defenders of the Thai monarchy often claim that such matters are “gossip” and not appropriate for public discussion. That misconception needs to be skewered right here: it is absolutely valid for Thais to want information on, and to be able to discuss, the mutual loathing of their very influential monarch and the man most likely to inherit the throne. These are not just family matters, because this is the royal family, a family that claims the right to wield enormous hereditary power in Thailand even into the 21st century. The broken relationship between Bhumibol and Vajiralongkorn is not a private issue because it affects every Thai, and also affects Thailand’s reputation and place in the world community. Analysing the dynamics between the two men is not prurience: it is essential for understanding Thailand and forecasting its likely future.

Also, of course, it is extremely poignant that King Bhumibol, the “father of the nation”, a man who has worked all his reign to do what he thought was right for the people of Thailand, lost his own family in the process, becoming irretrievably distanced and alienated from his wife and all of his children except Sirindhorn. It is part of the tragedy of his life, one of the many trials he has endured. To appreciate the challenges and obstacles Bhumibol has faced during his reign, and the sacrifices he has made, and the emotional hurt he has suffered, it is essential to be aware of his family troubles, and the political struggles of his reign, and the efforts of many powerful people over the years to undermine and defy him. Only by being aware of these issues can Thais really understand and develop informed respect for their king and what he has achieved. But KBAALW totally fails in its duty to inform readers about such things. In the banality of its content and the vacant cheeriness of its tone, the account it gives of Bhumibol’s life resembles the “society” sections of some Thai newspapers and magazines, which recount the Bangkok parties, gala dinners and charity auctions attended by grotesquely-coiffed and grinning minor nobility, tycoons and social climbers. It is a biography in the style of Hello! magazine.

KBAALW is littered with heinous abuses of the English language, and one of the most enjoyable things about reading it is savouring the stylistic misjudgements. My own personal favourite comes on page 88 and is a line so breathtakingly bad that it really is a gem to be treasured. It introduces into the narrative Bhumibol’s future wife Sirikit Kitiyakara, with whom he shared a grandfather:

Love came knocking at his door in the shape of a cousin…

Compared with this drivel, The Story of Tongdaeng is like Dostoyevsky.

Part two of the book, “The Work”, is no better. The problem KBAALW faces is that because it has spent 124 excruciating pages telling a fictionalized life story of Bhumibol in which he never oversteps the constitutional boundaries supposedly constraining his power, readers might reasonably ask what purpose he has served and what he has achieved. Part two is supposed to answer that question. In four chapters, it sets out the king’s contribution to Thai healthcare, education and general national development, and discusses his “sufficiency economy” and “new theory” philosophy.

Chris Baker, clearly having drawn the short straw, was faced with the thankless task of trying to explain the sufficiency economy model. This is akin to trying to push water uphill. Basically, the theory is not really a theory, just a set of perfectly reasonable guidelines for living. The problems arise when trying to translate these principles into clear, practical, specific advice for small-scale rural farmers, or factory workers, or somtam vendors or whomever. The whole theory is just so vague it falls down when it meets the real world. KBAALW quotes the official exposition of the theory approved by Bhumibol in 1999:

The Sufficiency Economy is an approach to life and conduct which is applicable at every level from the individual through the family and community to the management and development of the nation.

It promotes a middle path, especially in developing the economy to keep up with the world in the era of globalisation.

Sufficiency has three components: moderation; wisdom or insight; and the need for built-in resilience against the risks which arise from internal or external change. In addition, the application of theories in planning and implementation requires great care and good judgement at every stage.

At the same time, all members of the nation — especially officials, intellectuals, and business people — need to develop their commitment to the importance of knowledge, integrity and honesty, and to conduct their lives with perseverance, toleration, wisdom and insight so that the country has the strength and balance to respond to the rapid and widespread changes in economy, society, environment and culture in the outside world. [p.274]

So just to summarize, the theory posits the following:
RECOMMENDED: moderation, wisdom, insight, good judgment, resilience, knowledge, integrity, honesty, tolerance, strength, balance, flexibility.
NOT RECOMMENDED: extremism, foolishness, ignorance, stupidity, fragility, duplicity, dishonesty, intolerance, weakness, inflexibility.

Seems sensible. But is this really an insight? Don’t we know all this stuff? The difficulty, surely, is how we ensure that this kind of behaviour is followed in the real world, which is complex and messy and imperfect. The theory seems rather silent on that point. But a picture is worth a thousand words, and so perhaps a helpful diagram also on page 274 can clarify things for us:

Well, OK, perhaps not. Asking Thai officials to explain is unlikely to help either (I’ve tried that too): they can tell you it is about moderation, wisdom, a middle path etc etc but if you ask them for specifics about any particular field, an uncomfortable silence ensues. As a U.S. cable said in 2006:

Economists note that the principles have been expressed in vague terms that limit their practicality, and while RTG institutions pay lip service to them (as with any ideas supported by the King), they have so far been applied only to small-scale farming projects…

Although couched in terminology that makes it difficult to criticize (as one economist said, “Who can oppose a model that promote ‘reasonableness’, ‘good behavior’, and protection from shocks’?”) schisms have arisen where activists interpret “Sufficiency Economy” to oppose policies or projects supported by the King.

A further problem is that many right-wing royalists interpret the sufficiency economy theory to mean that rural peasants and the urban poor should recognize their place in the social hierarchy, be content with their humble lot in life, and stop voting for Thaksin Shinawatra. According to this view, the fugitive former prime minister epitiomizes greed and avarice that is leading the poor astray: they are too lazy to work hard as Bhumibol suggests, so they have been dazzled by Thaksin’s get-rich-quick promises. As Andrew Walker, professor at the Australian National University, wrote in a 2006 New Mandala post, this interpretation of sufficiency economy really means sufficiency democracy:

The enthusiasm with which the new regime in Thailand has latched onto the “sufficiency economy” concept underlies its regulatory force. Over the past decade or so a number of different approaches have emerged which seek to moderate and regulate the aspirations of Thailand’s rural poor. Expressed in various elitist, royalist and activist forms these approaches have argued that the rights of rural people should only be fully respected provided they are willing to pursue livelihoods that make modest claims on natural resources and government budgets. Many of the rights-based campaigns waged by NGOs have been based on a regulatory vision of rural lifestyles in which images of subsistence-oriented economic pursuits (grounded in traditional local wisdom and original local communities) predominate. Participation in the market was all too often condemned as an individualistic aberration.

Now the chickens of this regulatory vision are coming home to roost. Not only are rural people to be shielded (or excluded) from full and active participation in the national economy but their full and active participation in electoral democracy has been pushed aside in favour of Bangkok’s enlightened national leadership. Sufficiency democracy, like sufficiency economy, amounts to keeping rural aspirations firmly in their place.

I discuss my own alternative proposal, sufficiency monarchy, here.

Baker succeeds in getting a number of useful points past the book’s censors, including the way the theory has been used by royalists and right-wingers to support the hierarchical status quo. As he concludes towards the end of his chapter: “the theory is not properly tuned to the ambitions and aspirations of most people”. His chapter is entitled “More From Less”, and Baker is to be congratulated that in stretching it to 15 pages, he has followed this dictum with impressive aplomb.

KBAALW manages with remarkable regularity to accidentally undermine the very thing it is attempting to support — i.e. the institution of the monarchy in Thailand. For example, discussing Bhumibol’s birth on page 47, it tells us “what nobody would have imagined at the time was that this baby prince would through some extraordinary twists of fate one day become king as well”. In case we didn’t get the point, a page later it exclaims that Bhumibol’s reign “could all so easily have never happened”. Well, yes, indeed, and this is exactly why systems of hereditary monarchy are so inadvisable: it is a matter of pure chance whether one gets a great monarch or an abysmal one. As Thomas Paine observed in The Rights of Man in 1791:

The hereditary monarchical system … indiscriminately admits every species of character to the same authority. Vice and virtue, ignorance and wisdom, in short, every quality, good or bad, is put on the same level. Kings succeed each other, not as rationals, but as animals. It signifies not what their mental or moral characters are. Can we then be surprised at the abject state of the human mind in monarchical countries…? … It has no fixed character. To-day it is one thing; to-morrow it is something else. It changes with the temper of every succeeding individual, and is subject to all the varieties of each. It is government through the medium of passions and accidents. It appears under all the various characters of childhood, decrepitude, dotage, a thing at nurse, in leading-strings, or in crutches. It reverses the wholesome order of nature. It occasionally puts children over men, and the conceits of non-age over wisdom and experience. In short, we cannot conceive a more ridiculous figure of government, than hereditary succession, in all its cases, presents.

In other words, it is not particularly sensible for the creators of KBAALW to remind readers that the man the book idolizes as Thailand’s greatest ever monarch only landed on the throne due to a series of very improbable accidents. That is not the best way to generate faith in the desirability and sustainability of a hereditary monarchial system. As Christopher Hitchens wrote last year, paraphrasing Paine:

A hereditary monarch … is as absurd a proposition as a hereditary doctor or mathematician.

The chapter “A King for All Regions”, ostensibly a summary of the royal projects and the king’s development work, falls into a similar trap. Instead of demonstrating the virtues of the king’s methods, it accidentally shows off their shortcomings. The chapter kicks off with a tale about how the king formulated his development policies. While staying at his Hua Hin holiday palace (known as Klai Kangwon, or “Far from Worries) at the start of the monsoon season in 1952, Bhumibol decides to take his jeep for a spin through the surrounding countryside, and gets stuck in the mud:

The farmers of Huai Mongkol near Hua Hin rarely saw strangers negotiating the tortuous, rutted track through the forest and across the fields to their village. To this day, Lee Sae Loe remembers the jeep getting bogged down behind her family’s wooden house.

“There were jokes made as some villagers and soldiers helped push the jeep out of the mud,” the 69-year-old Lee, who was 11 at the time, recalls. “It was only when the young driver got out and introduced himself that our men realised they had just helped our king.” …

The king chatted with the villagers. They told him that the markets in Hua Hin were over 25 km away, and the delivery of a simple load of bananas by truck or handcart was arduous. A proper road was needed. Soon after, the king donated some bulldozers to the Naresuan Border Patrol Police. Within six months, a porous, red earth road had been pushed through to the village. Travel time to the market was cut from almost a day to a matter of hours.

The chance meeting at Huai Mongkol was to have longer repercussions than anyone could have imagined that afternoon. It inspired, in part, the royal development work of the decades to follow and provided an early model for action. First, the king established direct contact with ordinary people and learned something of their problems. Second, he offered practical suggestions to help address their needs — based on his own research and knowledge. Third, in order to cut through bureaucratic red tape, he made use of his own contacts, influence and resources to implement a solution. Afterwards, he monitored results and progress.

Such a hands on approach was unusual for any head of state — especially a Siamese or Thai monarch. [p.231]

This heart-warming anecdote demonstrates exactly why Bhumibol’s approach may not be in Thailand’s best interests. It’s great for the villagers of Huai Mongkol to have their road, but they only got it through pure chance. What about all the villages throughout Thailand not lucky enough to have had the king’s jeep getting mired in the mud nearby? What if many of them needed a road more urgently? What if building the road elsewhere would have benefited the country more? Despite the wild claims of royalists, Bhumibol does not have mystical knowledge of what is going on at all times in every corner of his kingdom, and cannot tell where his help is needed most. He cannot be everywhere at once. Deciding on royal projects just on the basis of which places and problems happen to catch the king’s attention is not a coherent and sensible strategy for national development.

Thailand’s bureaucracy and political class are notoriously corrupt, incompetent and disinclined to help those at the bottom of the social spectrum. The system has always been stacked against the poor. And so for those lucky enough to have Bhumibol and his entourage striding into their village and fixing a few problems, it was a breath of fresh air. The king appeared to listen to them, and to care about them, and was eager to get something done to help them. They loved him for it.

But as Bhumibol himself is quoted as saying in 1986:

No one really appreciates. They always want more. That’s why they must be encouraged to make themselves self-supporting, to stand on their own feet. [p.250]

He was talking about the villagers helped by his projects, and he failed to realize that his words were equally valid when applied to his whole system. As anybody who has worked in a dysfunctional organization knows, an enlightened and committed manager who can be called upon to personally solve problems is welcome, but this often means that fundamental flaws in the system are not resolved. Good managers will not rely on their own ability to bypass the system and get things done that would otherwise not be fixed: they work on improving the system, making it self-supporting, able to function without constant intervention from above. But Bhumibol never did this. His system was always about him. It revolved around his highly publicized trips to different parts of the country where he would share some insight and some money to save the day. Meanwhile, in the rest of the country, in places not blessed by a royal visit, similar problems festered unresolved and often not even known about.

Bhumibol did plenty of good, of course, and improved a lot of people’s lives. But this kind of personal approach is simply unworkable as a sensible and viable development strategy in a large and complex nation like Thailand. Now that Bhumibol is a hermit in Siriraj Hospital, who will help the country’s people and fix their problems? If he had really wanted to make a lasting difference, he would have worked on repairing and improving Thai governance at the roots, rather than just bypassing a broken system to help people on a case-by-case basis. His system of personalized interventions totally failed to follow his own sufficiency economy precepts, which stress the importance of building systems that are sustainable and robust, able to withstand internal and external shocks. And so for all the good that he did, the overall judgment on Bhumibol’s royal projects must be a negative one: they hindered, rather than helped, the evolution of a genuinely responsive, flexible and enlightened governance system in Thailand.

It is in the chapter called “Learning for Life”, on Bhumibol’s contribution to education, that KBAALW‘s hypocrisy is most clearly exposed. This chapter is particularly dishonest because the sad fact is that Thailand’s education system remains truly abysmal, far worse than many considerably less developed countries. In 2010 the education department asked nearly 50,000 high-school teachers to sit the same tests as their students in the subjects that they taught. The results were astonishing: the failure rate among teachers was 88 percent for computer studies, 84 percent for mathematics, 86 percent for biology and 71 percent for physics. Worse still, 37,414 school directors — the most senior staff — were tested on administrative knowledge, leadership, English language, and information and communications technology. The failure rate was 95 percent.

There are many reasons for this incompetence: for one thing, prospective teachers are graded not on qualities like intelligence, communication skills, and ability to inspire, but on the neatness of their clothing and hairstyle, the quality of their teeth, and the way they walk.

Teaching is overwhelmingly based on rote learning, and analytical thought is discouraged. Even polite questioning of teachers is unwelcome in the vast majority of schools. Rigid conformity is enforced, even in many universities where senior students haze juniors in so-called SOTUS rituals (it stands for Seniority Order Tradition Unity Spirit).

This hierarchical, unquestioning approach to education is entirely in line with the model of society supported by most Thai royalists. As Nick Nostitz, one of the best journalists covering contemporary Thailand, wrote in volume one of his planned trilogy Red vs Yellow:

Both to its own population and to foreign countries the Thai state has long projected the image of the “Land of Smiles” based on a fabricated construct of “Thainess”, supported by a carefully built balance between military, politicians, bureaucracy and palace. The majority of the population was educated in line with a state ideology that allowed little space for critical interpretation of the system and its history.

The culture of enforced “Thainess” and the draconian lèse majesté legislation laws have created an intellectual climate in Thailand that is profoundly hostile to genuine learning, rational analysis, open-mindedness, and respectful debate. To give just one example, Thanong Khanthong, the managing editor of Nation Group in Thailand, has repeatedly accused me of being part of a plot (paid for by Thaksin Shinawatra) to destroy Thailand with my work on #thaistory. He has never made it clear exactly how my articles could destroy an entire country, especially one with such a long and proud history as Thailand, but his view are by no means unique. There is a pervasive sense amongst some Thai royalists that views they disagree with are somehow terrifyingly dangerous and must be strictly suppressed. And the overarching expression of this is, of course, Article 112.

How can a society in which hundreds of bureaucrats and military officiers are assigned full-time to the task of blocking “offensive” websites, where a teenage student is denied entry to universities because of her sincerely held opinions, and where an elderly grandfather is jailed for 20 years just for four alleged text messages critical of the monarchy, ever hope to advance and evolve in the modern world?

The Thai royalist contempt for the truth and fear of debate are on full display in KBAALW. The claim by its creators that it is a fair and scholarly work, carefully researched and assembled by a team of experts to tell the real story of King Bhumibol, is — as this book review has endeavoured to show in some detail — absolute rubbish. Aside from the useful chapters by respected academics tucked away at the end of the volume to give it fake credibility, the whole vapid, mendacious, unctuous narrative of KBAALW is the polar opposite of genuine scholarship.

It is sublimely ironic to read the chapter on education, which begins with Bhumibol’s philosophy of learning:

“The reason I would like everyone to pursue knowledge and establish themselves is so that they can have a prosperous life, with happiness and self-reliance as the first step,” the king once explained. Summing up his views on another occasion, he said, “A holistic education that covers moral etiquette, general subjects and vocational training is an important base to develop the skills of a person so that he can contribute to the prosperity and stability of the country in the future.”

Over the ensuing decades, the main messages of the king’s speeches on education … remained remarkably consistent. Influenced by his own scientific bent, the king emphasised that theoretical knowledge must be tested and adjusted through real-life application. He encouraged a broad-based approach toward teaching that would inspire analytical and problem-solving skills over rote learning. As a devout Buddhist, he emphasised that academic learning should always be complemented by morality and mindfulness if knowledge is to be applied in ways that genuinely benefit both the individual and society. He also said he believed learning to be a life-long process.

He king’s words and actions carried added weight because he clearly took his own advice. His ethical standards, especially in comparison to some other leaders in society, meant that students keenly attuned to adult hypocrisy could not so easily dismiss his exhortations to work for the public good. [p212-213]

How sad that the network monarchists and fading journalists who put this book together were not more keenly attuned to their own hypocrisy. Did it never occur to them that by producing such a dishonest and inaccurate book that they were going against King Bhumibol’s clearly expressed wishes? Lest there be any doubt about this, the king’s views are also stated very clearly on page 251:

The king … was not looking for “yes men”, and said it was important to ascertain the facts. Scientists should always tell the truth, he said — even if at times it was more diplomatic to avoid disagreement.

Anand Panyarachun and his team, alas, do not appear to have been listening.

Not only does KBAALW defy Bhumibol’s wishes, it also insults him. By filling its pages with untruths, evasions and shameless flattery of mundane things, and by avoiding sensible discussion of the genuine trials and challenges that Thailand’s king has had to deal with during the course of his extraordinary life, the authors are implying that the real story of Bhumibol’s reign is not impressive enough. They believe that in order to get readers to respect Rama IX, the story must be embellished and twisted and denuded of drama. Is the truth about Bhumibol’s life so shameful that it cannot be told? That is the message the creators of KBAALW are sending their monarch on the occasion of his 84th birthday.

It is also, of course, an insult to those who have paid $40 dollars for a copy of the book, and indeed to the people of Thailand. Don’t they deserve the truth about their country and their king? What gives Anand and his team the right to mock their intelligence with this volume? It is simply not good enough.

My own view is that the people of Thailand, and indeed all people who care deeply about Thailand and its future, do deserve the truth. And since King Bhumibol Adulydadej: A Life’s Work fails to give it to them, then this book review will have to make a start instead instead. Beginning at the beginning: the real story of how the reign of Rama IX began.

CONTINUE TO PART III