By her courageous and determined actions, Mrs. Stockdale performed an outstanding public and humanitarian service for captured and missing military members of all services, their families and the American people. Her actions and her indomitable spirit in the face of many adversities contributed immeasurably to the successful safe return of American prisoners, gave hope, support and solace to their families in a time of need and reflected the finest traditions of the Naval service and of the United States of America.2
Each of the Stockdales’ three living sons, Taylor, Sid, and Jim Jr., spoke movingly about their mother. Each remembered the unique bond they had formed with her. Taylor noted that his mother often talked about wanting to be a princess, about wanting to find her Prince Charming and to live happily ever after. He observed that his mother was indeed reunited with her Prince Charming after many years and many hardships.3
Sybil and her POW and MIA wife friends did not have the luxury of being damsels in distress, though. Fate and history made them all into something else, something far more substantial. These by-the-book military wives were transformed by circumstance into international diplomats, hostage negotiators, coders of secret letters, and POW/MIA activists for their husbands and for their country. Sybil, Jane, Phyllis, Louise, Andrea, Helene, and Kathleen did not need knights to save and defend them. In fact, when politicians called them “girls” and patted them on the head, telling them not to “worry,” they got angry. Angry and frustrated enough to take their fate and their husbands’ fates into their own capable hands. They became dragon slayers, facing the monsters of government indifference, poor diplomacy, and wartime violence—relying primarily on one another and their own inner resolve. “You have got to understand,” Sybil would tell Jim after the war, “the POW wives who worked with me were not victims. They were fighters and we were at war with our own government as well as that of the enemy.”4
These female freedom fighters never got to be princesses. Instead they got to be warrior queens who fought for their husbands’ freedom and an accounting of the missing men—and won. As a group, these ladies became a powerful force that saved their families and ultimately changed the role of military wives and the fate of American POWs. These women were a self-created lobby that not only forced their government to listen to them but also convinced the government that their opinion mattered.
If these military wives hadn’t rejected the “keep quiet” policy and spoken out, the POWs might have been left to languish in prison long after the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in April 1975. More surely would have died in prison from maltreatment and lack of medical care. They demanded the accounting of the MIAs that was built into the Paris Peace Accords. They wanted answers, not platitudes, hard facts even if they were distressing, and accountability for both the prisoners and the missing. Only months after their return home would Jerry, Jim, Paul, and their fellow captives, like John McCain, realize how much credit the POW/MIA wives deserved for the end of the Vietnamese torture campaign and for their safe return to the States. Without the National League and the wives’ relentless lobbying of the president, his national security adviser, the Defense Department, the State Department, and Congress, the women’s covert work, their savvy media campaign all across the globe, and their own personal sacrifices, the entire prisoner and missing scenario might have been ignored by a largely oblivious American nation and the world.
Jeremiah Denton would credit his wife and her League friends with the noticeable change in POW treatment that came about in 1969. He claimed that without the women’s help, certain POWs who were on the brink of death would have most certainly died in captivity. “In my analysis, the wives’ campaign was at least partly responsible for the huge change that took place—the change from night to day—in our treatment” in the fall of 1969.5
Interviewed in 1986, thirteen years after his return home, Jim Mulligan also felt strongly that his outspoken wife had been instrumental in his rescue. “Louise is even better with politics than I am because she can cut them off at the legs if she has to … it’s a good thing Louise came along when she did.” Mulligan went on to say that the women’s efforts “helped get the POWs released sooner than they otherwise would have been.”6
In 2016, Senator John McCain said much the same thing that Denton had said years before. He claimed that the POW/MIA wives’ intervention had made all the difference. “Our treatment changed dramatically. It went from bad—in my case, solitary confinement—to being with twenty-five others … It was a decision made by the Politburo. It was not gradual.” McCain firmly believes that “some of us may not have been alive had it not been for that change in treatment.” He confirmed that “keep quiet” was the wrong call. The wives’ instincts had been right all along.7
Even the government finally admitted as much. Dick Capen, Melvin Laird’s assistant secretary of defense, remembered, “Until 1969, little had been done to defend the rights of these men under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The international outrage generated in 1969 saved lives.”8 Sybil had gone public in 1968 on the West Coast, followed soon after by Louise Mulligan on the East Coast. The government backed the women up in 1969 and amplified their voices. But the POW/MIA wives and families and later their National League of Families began the process, putting the word out there, first in the media. They knew better than anyone what to do. Had it not been for the National League and the POW/MIA wives’ efforts, the world might never have known about the POW/MIA issue. For the men who could not have survived additional torture, the women were their personal SEAL Team Six.
Some historians claim that the Nixon government used the women for its own ends. However, these women also used the Nixon administration to amplify their views, recruit members for the National League, and support worldwide publicity highlighting the POW and MIA situations. They were not puppets but partners, frequently directing the president and his staff on this issue. The women became POW/MIA experts because of their devoted and fierce connection to their husbands. They had a lot more to lose than any government administrator.
As Sybil explained years later, “Of course we [the League] had authority. It was our business. Otherwise you see when Harriman was saying they had the keep quiet policy going—they took our authority or any authority away from us. And that was not ok. For the government to have the authority, the sole authority—heaven help us—no way.”9 When the League was accused of being controlled by the Nixon administration, 1970–71 League chair Carol North vehemently disagreed: “Sure there’s been a calculated campaign … but it’s our calculated campaign.”10
It was a campaign that Sybil, Jane, Louise, Phyllis, Andrea, Helene, Kathleen, and their League of Wives dared to imagine and implement.
An aerial view of Naval Amphibious Base Coronado circa 1944. Coronado would become the Navy’s training base on the West Coast. (Courtesy of Coronado Public Library)
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an executive order that cleared Coronado of its Army presence and claimed North Island for the Navy. Here, the president visits the base circa 1944. (Courtesy of Coronado Public Library)
The Navy Wife by Anne Briscoe Pye and Nancy Shea was a government-approved guide to Navy rules and etiquette. Each branch of American military service had a similar protocol manual for wives to follow. (Robert J. Dole Institute of Politics 1965 Edition, Harper & Row)
Jim and Sybil Stockdale as a young married couple. (Courtesy of the Stockdale Family Collection)
Sybil dancing with Beatle wig–wearing Navy fighter pilot Bud Collicott at an “old time aviator party” hosted at the Stockdale home 547, A Avenue in Coronado in December, 1964. (Courtesy of the Stockdale Family Collection)
Navy pilot Jeremiah “Jerry” Denton and his wife, Jane, in the late 1950s in the South of France (with their friends Navy doctor Ralph Beatty and his wife, Doris). (Courtesy of the Denton Family Collection)
Jane Denton as a young Navy wife in a portrait made just prior to Jer
ry’s departure for Vietnam in 1965. (Courtesy of the Denton Family Collection)
Herman and Helene Knapp on their wedding day, June 21, 1952. Herman, an Air Force pilot, would become MIA during the Vietnam War. (Helene Knapp scrapbook/Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum)
Helene Knapp, now a Colorado Springs Air Force wife, would become a fierce advocate for the MIAs and eventually National Coordinator of the National League of Families from 1972–1973. (Helene Knapp scrapbook/Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum)
Secretary of State Dean Rusk, President Lyndon B. Johnson, and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on February 9, 1968. The Vietnam War would haunt them all and prove to be Johnson’s political undoing. (Yoichi Robert Okamoto/WHPO)
May 6, 1966. As a prisoner at the “Hanoi Hilton,” Jerry had been brutally tortured. By blinking “T-O-R-T-U-R-E” in Morse Code during a filmed television interview, he was able to signal the abuse to Naval Intelligence. (Still created from National Archives; Records of the Central Intelligence Agency [263.2589])
The Hanoi March, July 6, 1966. The American POWs were marched through the streets of Hanoi and attacked by angry mobs of North Vietnamese. Front row (L-R): Richard Kiern and Kile Berg; second row Robert Shumaker and “Smitty” Harris; third row Ronald Byrne and Lawrence Guarino. (U.S.A.F. photo)
On September 9, 1965, Stockdale, the forty-year-old Commanding Officer, VF51 and Carrier Air Group Commander (CAG-16), flew his final mission. After returning from the target area, his A-4 Skyhawk was hit by antiaircraft fire. Stockdale would soon end up in the “Hanoi Hilton” along with his former Naval Academy classmate Jerry Denton and hundreds of other American prisoners of war. (Courtesy of the DPMO, United States Department of Defense)
Naval Commander Robert S. “Bob” Boroughs became the Navy POW wives contact in the Office of Naval Intelligence. Fortunately for the women, he didn’t always play by the government’s rules. (Courtesy of the Boroughs Family Collection)
LBJ shaking hands with Sybil and other POW wives on North Island, 1967. The president was keen for photo ops like these with the POW and MIA wives, but he would not speak to the women privately or in groups about their concerns. (Courtesy of the Hoover Institute)
National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger at the Paris peace talks which began in May of 1968. The negotiations to end the war dragged on for years. (Courtesy of the Nixon Library and Archive)
LBJ’s POW MIA Ambassador Averell Harriman and his wife, Pamela, disembarking from an airplane in Washington on January 20, 1969. Harriman knew for years about the torture of American POWs in Vietnam but was unwilling to reveal this fact to the American public. (Courtesy of the Nixon Library and Archive)
Cora Weiss, formerly of Women Strike for Peace, became the cofounder of COLIAFAM (The Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in Vietnam) and public enemy number one in the eyes of many POW MIA wives. Here, Cora is shown with COLIAFAM cofounder David Dellinger and peace activist Reverend William Sloane Coffin. (Photo by Vic DeLucia/New York Post Archives/©NYP Holdings, Inc. via Getty Images)
Sybil, the one (and only) founder and first national coordinator of the National League of Families for Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia. She is shown here with roses. They became an important symbol in her coded letters to her imprisoned husband. (Courtesy of the Stockdale Family Collection)
POW MIA wives (L-R): Ruth Ann Perisho, Candy Parish, Andrea Rander, Sybil Stockdale, and Pat Mearns leaving the North Vietnamese delegation building after meeting with North Vietnamese representatives on October 4, 1969. (UPI/Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Army POW wife Andrea Rander was a full time working mom and the only African-American woman on the founding Board of the National League of Families. (Courtesy of the Baltimore Sun)
Andrea at home with her two daughters, Page (three and a half) on the left, and Lysa, (nine) on October 9, 1969. (Courtesy of the Baltimore Sun)
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird with key members of the National League (L-R): Louise Mulligan, Jane Denton, Sybil Stockdale, Laird, Mary Winn, and Iris Powers. (Courtesy of the Denton Family Collection)
Evie Grubb (right), National Coordinator of the League of Families from 1971–1972, presents the flag of the National League of Families of POWs and MIAs to Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, center, as Jan Ray, left, looks on in Washington. The POW MIA flag would become an enduring and instantly recognizable symbol of American prisoners of war and missing. (Courtesy of the Denton Family Collection)
Kansas Senator Robert J. “Bob” Dole as a World War II Army officer. Dole’s experiences as a gravely wounded military veteran made him sympathetic to the POW/MIA cause. He was instrumental in helping to successfully launch the National League of Families in May of 1970. (Courtesy of the Robert J. Dole Archive and Special Collections)
White House press conference with the National League of Families members on December 12, 1969. (L-R): Carole Hanson, Louise Mulligan, Sybil Stockdale, President Nixon, Andrea Rander, and Pat Mearns. President Richard Nixon became a strong supporter to the POW and MIA wives and their cause. (The Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, WHPO-2620-14A)
Fellow POW wives and best friends Janie Tschudy, left, wife of Navy Lt. William L. Tschudy, and Jane Denton, at home in Virginia Beach, Dec. 19, 1969. (AP Photo/Charles Kelly)
Texas business mogul Ross Perot was a fervent supporter of the POW/MIA cause, of the Dallas-area POW/MIA wives, and later, of Sybil Stockdale and her National League of Families. Here, Perot is shown embarking on his “Peace on Earth” flight to Paris. December 21, 1969. Accompanying Perot on the flight were (L-R): Mrs. Bob Jeffrey, Mrs. Greggf Harkness, Mrs. Bonnie Singleton, all of Dallas, and Mrs. Michael McElhanon of Fort Worth. At right in doorway of plane is Murphy Martin of WFAA-TV, director of special projects. Boy at left is unidentified. (Dallas Morning News/Associated Press)
Navy POW wives Dot McDaniel and Janie Tschudy at the opening of the Virginia Beach “Operation We Care” office, October 22, 1970. This became headquarters for the Virginia Beach POW/MIA wives’ efforts.
Volunteers are shown working in Richmond, Virginia, at the “Write Hanoi” office. Phyllis Galanti and her friends Connie Richeson, Judi Clifford, and office manager Gwen Mansini worked tirelessly at the office, along with dozens of other local volunteers to publicize the plight of the prisoners and missing. (Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society)
Kathleen Johnson and her son Bryan and Andrea Rander and her daughter Lysa are pictured here arriving at Orly airport in Paris on Christmas Day, 1969. Kathleen, Andrea, and their children were among the fifty-eight wives and ninety-three children flown by Ross Perot to Paris on his “Spirit of Christmas” flight to seek news of their POW/MIA husbands and to raise awareness of the issue. (Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)
Louise Mulligan, a forceful New Englander, would be the first East Coast Navy wife to speak to the press. Her “May Day” speech on May 1, 1970, would be a galvanizing event for the POW/MIA cause. (Courtesy of the Louise Mulligan Collection)
Sybil Stockdale with Margot and Ross Perot and Senator Bob Dole at the press conference for the International Appeal to Justice/May Day events. May 1, 1970. (Courtesy of the Robert and Elizabeth Dole Archive and Special Collections, University of Kansas)
Now known as “Fearless Phyllis,” Phyllis Galanti gives a speech to the combined houses of the Virginia General Assembly in Richmond on February 9, 1971. (Courtesy of the Virginia Historical Society)
Assistant Secretary for Defense for Public Affairs, two-star Air Force General Daniel “Chappie” James became the assistant secretary for defense for public affairs and the POW/MIA liaison under Nixon. (Courtesy of the Hoover Institution Archives)
Colorado Springs Vice-Mayor Larry Ochs in Paris protesting on behalf of American POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. December 16, 1970. (Courtesy of the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum/Helene Knapp Collection)
March 8, 1971: Phyllis Galanti on t
he back of the “Write Hanoi” truck. Hundreds of thousands of letters protesting the treatment of the POWs and the missing would soon be on their way to the North Vietnamese embassy in Sweden. (Courtesy of the Virginia Museum of History)
French Communist reporter Madeleine Riffaud meeting with Phyllis Galanti in Paris in February of 1972. Madeleine had interviewed Phyllis’s POW husband, Paul, in Vietnam soon after his shoot down. (Courtesy of the Virginia Museum of History)
January 26, 1973. (L-R): Phyllis Galanti, Helene Knapp, and Darlene Sadler meeting with Nixon at the White House in their capacity as leaders of the National League of Families. (Courtesy of the Richard Nixon Library and Museum)
Sybil, Jim Jr., Stanford, and Taylor tackle Jim on the tarmac upon his return home February 15, 1973. (Courtesy of the Stockdale Family Collection)
The League of Wives Page 29
