Have been looking into the secret bombing of Cambodia and was wondering if any historians had done some in depth research on the subject and public reactions. Also am open to any first hand accounts of people who were there when the news was released.
Yes, there has been plenty of in depth work done on the Cambodian bombings, both during the MENU and the Freedom Deal phases. There isn't a consensus on the effectiveness: that's a very politically flavored subject.
Defense Secretary Mel Laird actually advocated to be open about the bombing just because he thought it would eventually leak out anyway, interestingly enough.
Well, it depends. It was first revealed in 1969 in the NYT, which led to J. Edgar Hoover wiretapping the NSC on the behest of Nixon and Kissinger, but MENU didn't cause a huge splash. Congress on the whole remained ignorant-only a very limited amount of people who Nixon personally trusted, like Gerald Ford or John Stennis, were informed. This was partially because of the North Vietnamese: they didn't complain about the bombings or even mention them, because if they did, that would be admitting they had troops in Eastern Cambodia.
In 1973, however, when MENU's post-1970 successor, Operation Freedom Deal (which targeted the Khmer Rouge instead of the PAVN and went against all of the country rather than just the Fishhook area: the nature of the bombing changed when the Cambodian Civil War started) started to come to the notice of Congress, it was one more nail against Nixon. Congress would sign the Case Church Act, preventing future military activity of any sort within the region. It was generally agreed that covertness to deceive Congress was unacceptable. By that time, however, Watergate had replaced Vietnam as the major issue at home, so it was just "part of the news", so to speak.