The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Phyllis arrived at the embassy with Ted and Joe in tow at 10:30 a.m. sharp. The embassy was a villa in the suburbs of Stockholm. Ted and Joe later recalled that the structure resembled the infamous Bates Motel, from the Hitchcock thriller Psycho. It was not exactly a welcoming place. The Americans were served various refreshments, which Joe and Ted later compared to “Styrofoam potato chips.”18

  The Americans were told where to sit, and to speak in English. Monsieur G. Viet, the North Vietnamese chargé d’affaires, and his assistant interspersed their English with French, which was the diplomatic language and the language they would use to communicate that day between themselves in front of their visitors. Their assumption that the Americans spoke only English would prove to be a serious strategic mistake.

  Phyllis took the lead, surprising the North Vietnamese, who did not expect a woman to lead the discussion. “I want to know how my husband, Paul, is—what is his physical condition?” The men took down her mailing address, and Phyllis was shown his name on a list of POWs sent from Hanoi. They refused all information and letters she had brought with her, but one of the men did read a letter from a seven-year-old American child asking for the POWs’ safe return. Phyllis then asked the men, “Would it would be possible to bring the American POWs to Sweden for internment?” referring to Prime Minister Palme’s offer to accept the American prisoners. The men stubbornly continued to insist that they had no knowledge of this offer.

  When Monsieur G. Viet and his cohort spoke about her in French, assuming she did not speak the language, college French major Phyllis stopped them, letting them know she understood exactly what they were saying about her. When they claimed they had no way to communicate with Hanoi, she called their bluff, noting the obvious antennas and communications equipment attached to the top of their building. At every turn, Phyllis showed herself much cleverer than the diplomats charged with keeping her at bay.

  After an hour and twenty minutes, the conversation began to disintegrate. The North Vietnamese soon asked Phyllis, Ted, and Joe to leave. Viet and his staffer did not stand up; this was a subtle dismissal and a knowing disregard for diplomatic politesse. They hoped to put this sassy American woman in a place of submission this way. But Phyllis knew how to handle them.

  She got up and left without being officially dismissed, leaving her letters for Paul on the table. She later would tell Judi and Connie about the scene at the embassy. They were totally astonished that shy Phyllis had made such a bold move. “She was controlling them and the situation. I don’t know how she knew to do that, but she did!” noted Judi proudly.19

  The story of Phyllis and her entourage and her success in gaining entry to the North Vietnamese embassy helped generate fresh interest in the POW/MIA story—an ongoing goal for the National League and all the families of POWs and MIAs. Too often, the ladies knew, the POW/MIA story took a backseat to issues of far less importance. The country kept forgetting about its captured and missing men and needed to be constantly reminded of them. Phyllis and the other POW and MIA wives refused to let them fall off the radar.

  * * *

  During that same trip, under-the-radar efforts were also made to meet secretly with Prime Minister Palme. Judi remembered, “It seemed there was no hope of getting to Palme. Then ‘a man’ from the U.S. State Department contacted her under ‘utmost secrecy’ with phone numbers to use.” After a flurry of calls from Phyllis, Judi, and Connie, an appointment was set. But only the three women were to attend. None of the men from their entourage were invited. Judi noted, “We were to tell absolutely no one including those traveling with us and especially no other POW wives. The officials didn’t want a steady flow of POW wives there.”

  Judi vividly recollected the Stockholm secret meeting: “We went out several days later saying we were going shopping. A man met us and took us to a small hotel nearby. He walked with Phyllis and talked to her the whole time in excellent English though he was Swedish. At the Hotel café, we were told that ‘because of high security risks’ we would not see Palme. But this man would take our material and photos. He gave us gold brooches with the seal of Sweden on them from Palme, he said. He stressed again secrecy.… We felt he was very sincere.”

  But nothing happened. Phyllis and her friends were very disappointed with this outcome. Had they come this far only to leave empty-handed? “Phyllis asked again why we had to keep the meeting a secret since we hadn’t met with him. The man said he was doing a favor for ‘an important American friend.’ So we agreed.” The mysterious man looked through all of Phyllis’s materials and asked her questions for ninety minutes. After the episode, the man disappeared. “Phyllis was very firm that we never speak of it.”20

  Unbeknownst to the women, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Dick Capen had also tried, through secret channels, to work with the Swedish government on interning the American POWs. Like Senator Dole, Sybil, and Phyllis, he saw the Swedish solution as a real possibility.

  Before Capen came on board at the Defense Department, he had worked in the newspaper business, and he had developed a friendly relationship with a newsprint supplier based in Sweden. This colleague’s family owned a shipping line that included two ships named the Gripsholm and the Drottningholm. These two ships had a unique history: both had been employed during World War II to transport prisoners of war to neutral countries.

  Capen remembered: “I led a secret, small mission to Sweden to meet with my friend the chairman of this line who readily agreed to donate two ships for a proposed move of POWs from Hanoi and South Vietnam to Sweden or another neutral site. The Geneva Conventions encourage such internment in neutral countries. My contact went to Olof Palme, a strong ally of NVN. He in turn met with the NVN and made this proposal. It all was set up in such a way that Palme would get full credit for his humanitarian gesture. My plan was to raise the funds secretly to underwrite the costs. I felt quite confident that this could be done.”

  But in the end, Palme showed his true allegiance: “Palme thought this would be seen as a gesture of support for the USA so he backed off.” Capen had known all along that the secret plan was a long shot, but, like Phyllis and Sybil, he was willing to pursue all leads, try anything he could to help rescue the men.21

  Once again, the Americans had hit the North Vietnamese wall—impossible to scale and unyielding.

  * * *

  After her return from Sweden, shy Phyllis was well on her way to becoming Fearless Phyllis, as she would later be known. She was becoming increasingly outspoken and more critical of the Nixon government. In a letter to her friend Ross Perot on April 6, 1971, she vented her frustration and her willingness to go further in League efforts to obtain the release of the POWs and an accounting of the MIAs. Phyllis noted that while she was in Sweden, the Swedes kept asking her, “Why doesn’t your government do something?” She found she could not convincingly answer that question.

  Phyllis also noted the shift she was seeing among her League friends and within herself. The women had avoided becoming political, consistently choosing the humanitarian path instead. While this approach had been highly effective in the past, it still was not enough. “It is now becoming very apparent that everyone else is using our men politically, both the North Vietnamese and the United States government. I don’t think it will be very long before the families begin taking a political stand, because we are not getting the results we want … Why should I have to travel halfway around the world to try to get help for our men who were sent to war by their own government?”

  Phyllis ended her letter to Perot with a declaration of intent. Something was changing, she sensed, among her friends in the League and within herself. It was not just their policies that were transforming, but the way the women saw themselves and their roles. Phyllis would never be a feminist. But she was becoming a human rights activist and one who would never quit until the POW rescue was complete. And she was finding that the National League was evolving along with her: things needed to be clearer, stronger, lo
uder.

  “We do not want to become a group of loud, boisterous, pushy women … But the lives of our husbands are at stake. If we have to take a more political stand to achieve this end, many of us are willing to do it.”22 The personal was about to finally become political.

  * * *

  By May, the U.S. government was finally beginning to realize the level of frustration the National League and its officers, like Phyllis, were experiencing. As Sybil had told the men in Washington years earlier, the wives of POWs needed to be treated like their own wives—you couldn’t just say you loved them on your wedding day and then forget about them.

  On May 27, Sweden announced its support for the Viet Cong, sending the group $550,000 in medical aid.23 This must have been a crushing blow for Phyllis, after all of her efforts—and the publicity coup—in Sweden. As in World War II, the Swedish government refused to commit to one side or the other during wartime. In June, an editorial in Newsday punctured the hopes of POW wives everywhere. It bluntly stated, “Sweden, the only Western nation recognizing North Vietnam, plainly doesn’t want to offend the Hanoi government in any way. It doesn’t need Sweden, but Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme’s Social Democratic Party needs Hanoi to keep its left wing happy.”24 By refusing to take sides, Sweden had taken sides—with the Communists in Hanoi. They refused the role they could have taken as a Good Samaritan host country. It became disappointingly clear to the U.S. government and the POW/MIA wives that Sweden had chosen not to stay neutral.

  Air Force general James Donald “Don” Hughes, one of Nixon’s military assistants, wrote to Senator Dole on May 19, 1971, telling him he had contacted Phyllis. The U.S. government had identified her as a key influencer regarding POW/MIA issues. The men knew they had to be careful, as she had a direct line of communication with military families. If women like Phyllis, Sybil, Jane, and Helene weren’t “handled” properly, the U.S. government might just have a full-on rebellion on their hands. Regarding Phyllis, the condescending Hughes wrote that “she, like so many others feels the ever-increasing pressures of frustration and anxiety and need to be reassured periodically.” He was relieved that she was already pro-Nixon, and he felt that “she will influence the other girls in her area as best she can.”25

  Dole agreed with Hughes in his response: “Certainly understand the feelings these girls have occasionally of the need to be reassured, and appreciate your giving her a call.”26 However, it wasn’t just “the girls” who needed reassurance at this point. Other family members were also showing their displeasure with the American government and the seemingly endless war. Senator Dole received hundreds of letters from POW/MIA family members attesting to this.

  One particularly poignant letter Dole received came from Paul Galanti’s father, Philip Galanti. The June 15, 1971, letter begged the Kansas senator to work within the government to set a withdrawal date from Vietnam for all U.S. troops, provided the prisoners were released within thirty days. He deemed the war and Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy “tiresome, worn-out, meaningless, and trite.”

  Time was running out. Like his daughter-in-law, Philip was not willing to wait and be patient anymore. He knew what the outcome would be for Paul and his fellow POWs if the war continued for much longer. All the blood, treasure, and time spent by the United States would end up being for naught. “If some dramatic positive action is not taken soon,” Philip wrote, “the prisoner problem will go away since they will probably all be dead.”27

  * * *

  The League trip to Europe that Patsy Crayton had labored over in the League office for months, and which Jane, Dot, and many other POW/MIA wives had fundraised so tirelessly to support, would also take place in May. Sybil would not be on that trip. She decided she still needed some distance from the organization. “I just wanted to be occupied elsewhere,” she later recalled.28

  In contrast, Helene was beginning to ramp up her own activity with the League in Colorado Springs. She and her friend and fellow Air Force MIA wife Mary Dodge were among the 174 participants in the League’s trip abroad. Along with other area POW and MIA wives and some family members, they left on May 19 from Peterson Field, in Colorado Springs. Their first objective: to meet and influence delegates to the Geneva Conventions meeting on May 24, which was being held under the auspices of the International Red Cross. The title of the conference was “Government Experts on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts.” The meeting was limited to legal experts from thirty countries, all of whom had signed and agreed to the tenets of the Geneva Conventions.29

  The goal of the League delegates was to contact and try to influence the legal experts present to help and support the POW/MIA cause. They soon found that the side conversations and the relationships developed outside the closed conference walls made a difference. Joan Vinson, the League’s national coordinator at that time, stated, “We hope to express our concern for all prisoners of war, and all those affected by the conflict in Vietnam. We hope that the countries represented at the meeting will resolve to demand impartial inspection of all POW camps, a complete account of prisoners and the missing, immediate release of the sick and wounded, and that mail flow be in accordance with provisions of the Geneva Conventions.”30

  Helene and Mary were assigned to cover Switzerland, Sweden, and London at the Paris peace talks. They were particularly horrified by the Swedish delegation: the Swedes gave them a bulletin with a photo of happy, smiling, well-fed American “POWs.” Clearly this was a propaganda piece sent by Hanoi, the channel through which Sweden got most of its news of the war.31 Like Phyllis had found before, Sweden was not really a neutral country. It was the job of Helene, Mary, and the other National League members on this trip to call out these images as false representations of what was going on in the prison camps.

  In Paris, the women encountered delegates who were both hostile to and sympathetic to their cause. One English-speaking man at the conference refused to talk to Helene about the American POWs and MIAs, instead asking, “Did you bring the wives of the Vietnamese men missing in action with you?” Despite this attitude, Helene followed him and continued trying to reason with him. “I didn’t come to this conference to talk to the likes of you,” the man snapped. “I have no time for you.”32

  The League group had its supporters, too. Helene and Mary were most impressed by Philip Habib, whom they met on May 28 in Paris. The chief assistant to U.S. envoy David K. E. Bruce, Habib spent hours with the group and answered every question they had directly. He assured the women that peace was coming and eventually all the POWs would be returned.33 No one was too sure, however, about the MIAs, like Herman Knapp and Ward Dodge, husband of Mary Dodge.

  But the League trip was successful in that it kept the POW/MIA issue in the world spotlight. The group visited thirty embassy offices in eleven cities that May.34

  In June, Sybil and her boys moved back home to Coronado. As they made the cross-country trip, they became more and more excited. Sid had joined them and was pressed into service to drive, while Stan made tuna fish sandwiches in the backseat. No one wanted to stop for long. After the dreary D.C. days, the sunshine and palm trees of California could not have looked more appealing to Sybil. When they finally arrived at their destination, she “wanted to hug everyone I met on the streets of Coronado. Oh, how relieved I was to be back where I seemed to belong. Even the furniture seemed to heave a sigh of relief as it settled back into its familiar locations.”35

  On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published what would soon be known as the infamous Pentagon Papers, leaked by a former Marine, Defense Department staffer, and analyst for the RAND Corporation think tank, Daniel Ellsberg. This classified study was compiled on the orders of former secretary of defense Robert McNamara. The papers examined U.S. policy toward Vietnam from President Truman through the Johnson administration (1945–1967). The U.S. Justice Department under Nixon tried to stop publication of the papers, but the effort ultimatel
y failed. Articles were published first in the Times and then in The Washington Post.

  The damning conclusion? That the United States government had escalated the war all the while knowing that it was on the losing side of the equation. The report also confirmed that JFK’s administration had helped to overthrow and assassinate Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of the South Vietnamese government, which America supported. If our own government had no faith in our allies and our capabilities, then why the hell, readers of the Times and the Post wondered, were we still sending our men to be killed in Vietnam?36

  Support for the war at home was eroding daily; the protests were increasing, with voices calling, louder and louder, for an end to the conflict. Rebellion was brewing even from within the “silent majority.” Most of the POW/MIA wives had been in this camp for years. They had been trained to be strong government and military supporters, but they were now completely disgusted with Washington politics. Their suspicions about the war and those leading it were confirmed. McNamara was now right up there with Cora Weiss as a target of their ire. They knew to be wary of antiwar figures, but McNamara? Wasn’t he supposed to be on their side?

  The Nixon administration was not implicated in the Pentagon Papers, though the president was incensed to see classified government reports leaked to the public. Instead of seeing the papers as a potential help, separating his administration’s policy on Vietnam from those of JFK and LBJ, “the leak of the Pentagon Papers brought forth a profound paranoia in Richard Nixon … The ultimate manifestation of this drive was the White House Special Investigations Unit, informally referred to as the Plumbers, whose first assignment was to raid the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. Later, members of the group would carry out one final mission, the Watergate break-in, which ultimately cost Nixon the very thing he had sought to defend: his presidency.”37