The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Sybil would have none of it. “I thought, ‘Why you smooth article, you’re trying to buy me off.’” She shocked herself when she exploded at Semmes: “If I told the other wives the truth about how I feel right now about your help they’d leave feeling worse rather than better.” This, of course, made for a very awkward lunch meeting. Moorer’s wife tried to smooth things over, which a grateful Sybil appreciated. But the meeting only deepened her distrust and strengthened her resolve to take POW/MIA matters into her own hands. She would soon transmit word of her latest D.C. debacle to the other wives—and effectively mobilize their support.20

  * * *

  Sybil had been corresponding with Phyllis since soon after Paul’s shoot-down, sharing information about the POWs from her sources and writing Phyllis personal notes of support.21 When Phyllis received an update from Sybil in mid-August of 1967 about her meetings with Averell Harriman and Admirals Semmes and Moorer over the summer, she immediately telegraphed Sybil’s information to other POW and MIA wives on the East Coast.

  “We have been told by the State Department that every attempt is being made to secure [humane] treatment. In spite of their assurances, we have achieved nothing in that area; and the treatment of our men are still great unknowns.” Phyllis continued, gaining momentum as she wrote: “We wives who are vitally concerned must convince our government that we are not willing to sit idly. Time is precious to us, and we must have more decisive action than what we have seen to date.” Phyllis urged her fellow wives to write to Harriman and “convey to him our dissatisfaction with the lack of progress regarding the prisoners.”22

  By late October of 1967, POW/MIA wives’ groups on the East Coast began meeting more formally. Virginia Beach, where Naval Air Station Oceana was located, quickly became the hub of the East Coast wives’ activity. They were a small group at first, perhaps thirty or forty women, but their numbers soon began to multiply.

  Phyllis steadily ramped up her involvement in the movement. She and the tenacious Evie Grubb, from Petersburg, Virginia, first met at a regional POW/MIA wives’ meeting hosted by Louise Mulligan at her home in Newport News on October 23, 1967. Paul Galanti had been captured just five months after Evie’s Air Force pilot husband, Newk, was shot down. Evie recalled, “All this time I had been feeling so alone and lost, as had Phyllis, and we were living only 30 miles apart!”23 The two women quickly became good friends and began driving to Virginia Beach together for the regional POW/MIA gatherings. The East Coast movement was spreading fast—flourishing, in fact, under the umbrella of Sybil Stockdale and her West Coast wives.

  * * *

  Month after month, in seemingly idyllic Coronado, the San Diego–area wives had written individual letters to the State Department, begging for someone—anyone—from the State Department to come talk to them and update them about what was going on in Vietnam. These letters were met with a deafening silence.24 No one cared much about an individual wife and what the government considered small problems. Harriman and his crew had sent reps to talk to the East Coast POW wives in April—wasn’t that enough? The West Coast was perceived to be so far from Washington as to be almost irrelevant, despite the high concentration of POW and MIA wives there.

  Fueling the West Coast women’s concerns was intel from the Virginia Beach wives. Several of them had talked to State Department representatives who told them they believed their captured husbands were being held in private homes in Vietnam and were teaching English to the Vietnamese. Sybil was incensed: how could they possibly be so gullible?25

  At the Pentagon, however, there were some who recognized the women’s plight. Bob Boroughs at Naval Intelligence continued to demonstrate his concern about the West Coast POW/MIA wives. He saw the neglect going on and the anguish these women were suffering. He also knew the State Department was not doing a proper job. He and his assistant Pat Twinem had observed firsthand how the State Department often refused to share information on the captured men with the Pentagon.26 Bob had worked in the Navy long enough to know how things worked, how to solve conundrums. Here was an issue Boroughs realized had a simple solution.

  The Naval Intelligence agent was convinced that Sybil needed to have the West Coast wives organize formally. They needed to establish the group legally, elect officers, create bylaws, print stationery. The group needed to legitimize itself so the top brass at the Pentagon, as well as the functionaries at the State Department, would be forced to take their cause seriously.27 Boroughs called Sybil on the phone that fall and, in a low, monotone voice, said, “Organize!” “Why now?” said Sybil. “I’m running a three-ring circus already.” In the same voice, Boroughs, always a man of few words repeated, “Organize.”28

  By October of 1967, the West Coast POW and MIA wives did just that, under Sybil’s command. The women chose the name League of Wives of American Vietnam Prisoners of War and instantly, almost magically, became a “real” group. Sybil was away for the first two meetings, tending to Jim’s sick mother in Illinois. In her absence, three of Sybil’s cohorts, Karen Butler, Jenny Connell, and Sandy Dennison, elected officers and finalized their organization’s name. When she returned, not only were these items taken care of, but Sandy, now the League’s first secretary, had rented a post office box for the group and ordered organizational stationery.29 Shirley Stark, who also worked at the Bank of America branch at NAS North Island, became the organization’s treasurer. (The group started with $19.)30 Debby Burns was also in the mix now, doing as much as she could to help the League cause.

  Soon after its inception, the group received some good news. By November, Congress had at long last amended Law 89–538 so that it would now include POWs and MIAs in the 10 percent savings plan.

  The group’s next move generated more surprising results. Sybil recalled, “Our secretary wrote to the State Department on our printed stationery, asking someone to come to San Diego and talk to us. The same request by the same few people, but now with our organization’s title. Three weeks after she mailed the letter, Averell Harriman’s assistant [Frank Sieverts] was in San Diego talking to us.”31

  Finally, things seemed to be moving in a positive direction. Washington was starting to prioritize the West Coast POW/MIA families. Bob Boroughs’s advice to “organize” had galvanized the women. Their new status as a “legitimate” entity transformed them from a group of grieving housewives into humanitarian lobbyists.

  Sybil laughed as she later recalled that the League “had become so by my magic wand, naming us as such.”32 Sybil was not only the League’s founder; she was its fairy godmother, changing their pumpkin into a coach. Someday, they just might be invited to the ball.

  Eight

  INCREDIBLY SCREWED UP

  ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 31, 1967, A Avenue in Coronado was crawling with costumed kids. Casper the Friendly Ghost, NASA astronauts, and Frankenstein monsters patrolled the streets, grasping pillowcases bulging with Swedish Fish, Pixy Stix, Astro Pops, and Fruit Stripe Gum.1

  High schooler Jim Stockdale Jr. was enrolled at Mercersburg Academy, a boarding school in Pennsylvania, so he missed the Halloween fun at home that year. In his stead, Sid was tasked with staying home at 547 A, running the Stockdale Haunted House in the basement and handing out the candy while his younger brothers, Taylor and Stanford, hit the streets. The two younger boys knew exactly what to do, thanks to their older siblings’ expert training.

  Like all kids their age, Taylor and Stan’s primary goal was to get as much candy as possible. Their secondary goal was to eat as much candy as possible before Mom attempted to regulate their sugar intake, or Sid demanded tribute. Perhaps they could hide out in the Stockdale Haunted House when they got home to gorge on it all. The makeshift haunted house was so small you had to crawl through it, providing a safe haven for the little boys from Mom and their older brother.2

  On Halloween, the two youngest Stockdale boys were just like any kids on their street. When they had their costumes on, the neighborhood’s other parents and kids might not
even know who they were. On this one night, no one thought to pity them as the children of a Vietnam prisoner of war. It was a joyful, mad rush for candy, in costume, under cover of darkness. The anonymity of the evening and being part of the crowd, not a kid people felt sorry for, must have been a welcome feeling for both Taylor and Stan.

  * * *

  After Halloween, the school year zoomed into high gear. Sid was obsessed with flag football and played the drums for the school band. An amused Sybil wrote to her husband that Sid “is interested enough in girls to thoroughly enjoy his Cotillion dancing but otherwise has no time for them now.”3 Kindergartener Taylor had learned to ride a two-wheel bike. Second grader Stan was a busy bookworm and read to the family each night.

  Though the boys were flourishing, Jim’s mother had been ailing for months, and she died of leukemia that same fall. Sybil wrote Jim to tell him the news, but she was not sure he would ever receive her letter—she had not heard from her POW husband since the previous January. In addition to being a single parent to four boys, a teacher, and the head of a newly formed POW/MIA group, Sybil now also became the manager of a 222-acre farm in Illinois, as executrix of her mother-in-law’s estate.4

  A harried Sybil was exhausted by the time the holidays arrived. The so-called most wonderful time of the year was typically rock bottom for POW and MIA families. Inevitably, everyone was melancholy and the world seemed gray. That feeling was the new normal for the families of prisoners and missing men. “It was like a big black pall had descended over our family,” said Don Denton, one of Jane and Jerry’s older boys. The pall began when Jerry was shot down and hovered there. “Every year we said, ‘He’ll be home next year,’” noted Jim Denton, Don’s younger brother.5

  What caught Sybil by surprise when she opened the mail one sunny December morning, however, was not the posed postcards of families full of holiday cheer: she had already steeled herself for those. Instead, she had received a letter from the Bureau of Naval Personnel informing her imprisoned husband, Jim, that he had been selected for “deep draft command” and that the Navy would attempt to place him in his new role as soon as possible. After the disbelief wore off, she raged, “Jim’s been a prisoner for over two years and I’ve certainly tried to impress them with this fact in Washington. Still, they’re so discoordinated [sic] they send him this letter to Coronado now?”6

  She wondered both to herself and to her League friends about the Navy and the supposedly omniscient American government. “How could they be so incredibly screwed up?”7

  * * *

  Like the POW wives, the American media were beginning to home in on the Johnson administration’s mixed messages regarding the war. Walter Cronkite was perhaps America’s most trusted and beloved journalist. As the anchor of the CBS Evening News, his was the voice and the opinion most trusted by Americans. He was “an apple-pie American, a Missouri boy who expressed the mood of the heartland as much as he presumably influenced its pulse beat.”8

  “Uncle Walter” was rapidly becoming a much more trusted figure to American families than anyone in the Johnson administration. The POW and MIA wives turned to Cronkite—not their government, nor their military—for the real story of the conflict. Vietnam became known as the first television war, where viewers saw the fighting and heard the casualty reports each evening on the news. The war’s bloody battles played out nightly in people’s living rooms.

  After an eye-opening visit to Vietnam during the Viet Cong’s Tet Offensive, launched at the Vietnamese New Year, in late January of 1968, Cronkite decided to do something extraordinary. In what would become known as a watershed event in American journalism, the anchor prefaced his February 27, 1968, evening news broadcast by acknowledging that his analysis that night would be “speculative, personal, and subjective.” Cronkite’s take on the Vietnam War that fateful February evening? “It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate.”9 What Cronkite had witnessed firsthand was that, despite the U.S. military’s claim that the United States was winning the war, American troops were losing ground against a formidable—and far more committed—Communist enemy. With this pronouncement, Cronkite dealt a mortal blow to U.S. policy in Vietnam. The “most trusted man in America” had publicly announced that the U.S. military could not win the war in Vietnam, and many Americans agreed with him. LBJ despaired when he heard the broadcast, saying something to the effect of: “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.”10

  Public opinion about the war became increasingly bitter after the Cronkite telecast. The heightened conflict provided fewer and fewer opportunities to get American troops—along with those imprisoned in Vietnam—back home safely. There seemed to be no clear exit strategy that would preserve the country’s honor, or any exit strategy at all.

  Many, including The Washington Post’s diplomatic correspondent in Vietnam, Don Oberdorfer, attributed the erosion of public support to the credibility of the Johnson administration. The president’s office regularly issued rosy pronouncements at odds with the tactical ebb and flow on the battlefield.11 The public was becoming more and more wary of such cheery proclamations in the face of the bloody realities they saw on television and in the daily body counts from Vietnam.

  Antiwar forces were gaining momentum in the face of such hopelessness. Even staunchly conservative military wives were beginning to consider other options. Perhaps, some of the women thought, the POW families should explore alternative avenues of communication with Hanoi. Regular channels of diplomacy were all but worthless, and time was running out for some of the prisoners who were in dire need of proper medical care, food, and clean water.

  One of these prisoners, Navy Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III, had been shot down October 26, 1967, from his A-4 Skyhawk bomber. He suffered severe fractures in his right knee and in both arms upon ejection from his aircraft. After being stripped and repeatedly beaten by his captors, McCain was finally given some minimal medical treatment at a hospital in central Hanoi, only because his captors realized that his father, Admiral John Sidney “Jack” McCain Jr., was the commander in chief of the U.S. Pacific Command.12 Even so, the younger McCain’s mosquito- and rat-infested living quarters and the amateur doctoring he received initially did little to ameliorate his desperate condition.

  The young pilot spent weeks in a makeshift hospital, undergoing nightmare medical procedures. Despite the primitive medical aid, McCain was one of the lucky ones who received any medical treatment at all.13 The downed pilot was soon moved into a filthy prison cell at the “Plantation” prison camp, in northeast Hanoi. Sleeping eighteen to twenty hours a day, his wounds festering, McCain’s chances for survival looked slim.14 How long could prisoners like him, in such dire circumstances, hold out? McCain later recalled of his fellow Vietnam POWs, “A lot of men died who shouldn’t have, the victims of genuine war crimes.”15 How many more would have to suffer and die before a POW rescue finally occurred?

  * * *

  January 31, 1968, dawned cold and gray in Virginia Beach. Jane Denton read in the morning newspaper that a group of prominent antiwar activists were planning to go to Vietnam to meet with Communist leaders. She immediately called her Naval Intelligence contact, Bob Boroughs, and asked if she could go find out whether the group would take letters to the POWs and search for information about their whereabouts. Boroughs gave Jane the thumbs-up, and she and her good friend and fellow POW wife Janie Tschudy scrambled to collect as many letters and photos as they could from area POW and MIA families.

  The next day, the two nervous but excited women flew to New York and were met by Naval Intelligence agents who drove them to the headquarters of Liberation magazine.16 David Dellinger founded the far-left magazine and still served as its editor. A lifelong pacifist, he was “the most visible antiwar activist, and appeared to be its intellectual inspiration and strategist.”17

  Antiwar activists were viewed as homegrown Communists in the eyes of most American military
wives. One of the largest such organizations, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (aka “the Mobe”), was composed of left-wing activists like Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Boston University professor Howard Zinn, and the Catholic left priests (and real-life brothers) Daniel and Philip Berrigan. Founded in the summer of 1966, the Mobe focused on organizing large-scale antiwar rallies. The New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (“the New Mobe”) would continue this work after its founding on April 15, 1967, organizing huge demonstrations in New York City and at the Pentagon that same year.

  Mobe members soon began traveling to Hanoi, interacting with Communist officials, and occasionally facilitating prisoner exchanges.18 The intersections between the POW/MIA wives and the antiwar activists, at one time unthinkable, were about to become more common.

  As Jane and Janie pulled up to a dirty, ancient building with no elevators, they both wondered, Is this really the correct address? As they walked up the three flights of creaky stairs, Jane made the sign of the cross on every step. When they reached the Liberation office, they found it was a messy hole in the wall, with only a typewriter, a copy machine, one male staffer, and one female staffer. Jane and Janie were shocked. Jane recalled, “So this was the cell that the oft-quoted, in the media, and influencing antiwar propaganda was emanating from?”

  The women explained the reason for their visit. The staffers were helpful and made a phone call to arrange a meeting that same day with Dellinger, Hayden, Father Daniel Berrigan, and Howard Zinn, the group who would soon be traveling to Hanoi. The women thanked the workers and scrambled down the stairs, pleased with their progress.