The news spread like wildfire among the POW and MIA wives. Sybil had found the magic words that allowed the women to begin to throw off their invisible chains. Now the wives began to flee their prisons without walls. Each new story emboldened other POW/MIA wives to tell their stories as well. By January, five other West Coast Wives had had their stories published in the press. Sybil soon received an avalanche of mail from all over the country, including from other POW/MIA wives and mothers.40
The West Coast POW and MIA wives also began to speak at public meetings about the POW plight, to write articles for newspapers and magazines, and give television interviews about what it was like to live alone, without their husbands, their children and families living in limbo while their husbands and fathers rotted in dank jungle prisons eight thousand miles away. A June 4, 1969, San Diego Union group interview described the wives’ special purgatory: “The great majority of women left behind do not know if they are wives or widows. And the years of uncertainty stretch on. There can be no planning for the future in this lonely limbo.” In the article, Sandy Dennison said that “Going Public” was one of the hardest decisions she had ever made. “We live in fear of many kinds. We were frightened that if we told our stories it might somehow be used against our husbands. But the world must know the truth about our prisoners.” In addition to this terror, many wives felt frozen in time, unable to plot their way forward. Debby Burns admitted that for two years after her husband Doug’s shoot-down, she did not plan anything beyond the next morning. “I could not picture more than 24 hours ahead,” she said quietly. “The most I’ve ever looked ahead is six months and that is because I had to sign papers on a house.”41
* * *
A fire had been lit on the West Coast in 1968. From Coronado, the POW wives’ revolution spread quickly to the East Coast. Louise Mulligan would be first to carry the torch there.
Louise and many other POW/MIA wives in the Virginia Beach area were angry. They were tired of empty promises made by their government. The women realized that little was being done to help their husbands, though they were constantly told that every effort was being made. They would have to move the ball forward themselves and force the government’s hand.
Until Sybil spoke out, the Virginia Beach wives had been afraid to go public and had stuck to what they considered “safe” letter-writing campaigns. They had asked the media to talk about the POW/MIA issue, but they were afraid to speak out themselves. Louise changed all that one Friday evening, hosting a POW wives’ get-together. Her friend and fellow POW wife Dot McDaniel recalled, “Several of us agreed that sooner or later, to make our writing campaigns more effective, we would have to make speeches and agree to media interviews. We decided there would be safety in numbers; if several of us went public at the same time, no one’s husband would be singled out for special harassment.”42
Louise soon rounded up other area POW/MIA wives. Together they wrote a joint letter and made an appointment with Paul Warnke, the assistant secretary of defense. “A letter was drafted by the wives calling on the Defense Department to put international pressure on North Vietnam. Mrs. Mulligan delivered it in person to the Pentagon.”43 Louise recalled that she then read Warnke and his staff at the Pentagon the riot act, as drafted by the East Coast wives:
“We want to go public, and we will take responsibility for our husbands, and they [the DoD] didn’t object. And, even if they had, well, we weren’t military, we didn’t have to follow orders.”44 Warnke and his staff were stunned.
Now who was in charge?
Ten
“NIXON’S THE ONE!”
THE YEAR 1968 HAD been a murderous period on the American home front. On April 4, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a sniper’s bullet as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, in Memphis. Riots broke out all across the country in response to the murder. You couldn’t even see the U.S. Capitol building the next few days due to the thick smoke generated by the rioters’ fires. General William Westmoreland, commander of U.S. troops in Vietnam, happened to be in Washington then. He recalled that the riots had left D.C. “looking worse than Saigon did at the height of the Tet offensive.”1
Andrea Rander, who was living in nearby Baltimore, was told “not to come to work. Stay put, don’t leave your house” in the wake of the riots. “We lived in a whirlwind” in that fatal spring of 1968, she recalled. “We felt like we were losing control over our lives.”2 But this was just the beginning of what would become an infamous killing season.
On June 5, shots rang out again, this time at the Ambassador Hotel, in L.A. JFK’s younger brother, New York senator and former attorney general Robert Francis Kennedy, was assassinated while celebrating his win in the California Democratic presidential primary, a key victory toward achieving the nomination he sought. (Vice President Hubert Humphrey had chosen not to enter the primaries.) Still hanging heavy over the American psyche was JFK’s assassination, on November 22, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.
Harvard psychiatrist Dr. Frank Ochberg, originator of the term that applied to so many Vietnam veterans later, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), would write, “Surely it was the triple slaying of those particular men, JFK, MLK and RFK … that focused my emotions and attention on human cruelty and tragic loss.” Ochberg and many others deemed 1968 “the darkest year” of the decade, featuring race riots, a mounting battlefield death toll in Vietnam, and widespread recreational drug use among young people turning to serious abuse among segments of the population.3
The nation mourned deeply for both the slain King and its second lost Kennedy. The country seemed to be enveloped in a gloomy, poisonous fog.
With RFK gone and other potential Democratic nominees lagging far behind, LBJ’s vice president, Humbert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination by collecting the most delegates in the non-primary states. (Only fourteen states had primaries at the time.) Though he was a strong choice, the former Minnesota senator lacked the Kennedy glamour. He was also an integral part of an administration that was increasingly tainted by the unpopular war. He continually tried to get his nerve up to tell his boss, LBJ, his feelings about the war, but every time they met, he “chickened out.”4 The POW and MIA wives knew by this time that Johnson’s administration had given low priority to their husbands’ fates. The women wanted fresh blood, a new leader who would put their husbands’ welfare high on their presidential agenda.
Enter Richard Milhous Nixon.
Born in 1913 and raised a Quaker in a humble Southern California household, Richard “Dick” Nixon was an unusual young man. He was highly intelligent, a fine debater, and an actor. Despite these gifts, he could also be petty, sour, and aloof. He would never quite fit in socially.
The bright young man attended Whittier College, in his hometown, due to a lack of funds. (He was admitted to Harvard and Yale, but his family could not afford the tuition.5) After an outstanding college career, he was thrilled to receive a scholarship to Duke Law School. Even so, after graduation, he was not able to procure a job with a law firm on the East Coast and was forced to return home to Whittier to practice law.
But there was a silver lining: the young lawyer soon fell in love with Whittier Union High’s business teacher, also a sometime Hollywood bit player and model, Thelma Catherine “Pat” Ryan. Though Nixon’s mother, Hannah, felt that she was not up to snuff in terms of social class,6 Pat was sought-after, smart, and beautiful. “Lithe and graceful, she wore fashionable skirts with bright blouses and sweaters that set off her luxuriant red-gold hair, her fresh-complexioned face, and her high cheekbones. And she wore lavender perfume. Student Robert Blake remembered, ‘Miss Ryan was quite a dish.’”7
In 1941, the young couple married and moved to Washington, where Nixon worked as a bureaucrat at the Office of Price Administration.8 Despite his Quaker background, Nixon enlisted in the Navy. In his memoirs, he later noted, “The problem with Quaker pacifism, it seems to me, was that it could only work in the face of a civilize
d, compassionate enemy. In the face of Hitler and Tojo, pacifism not only failed to stop violence, it actually played into the hands of a barbarous foe and weakened home-front morale.”9 Nixon’s religion informed his worldview, but it certainly did not dominate it. After a boring stint serving in Ottumwa, Iowa, the young soldier asked to be transferred to a war zone and was sent to the South Pacific, where he became an air transport officer, experiencing bombing raids, poisonous insects, and dangerous living conditions.10
Nixon’s Quaker conscience had not allowed him to stay out of war. However, this cast of mind seemed to make him reflect longer and harder than many other presidents on the human costs of battle. “Years later, remembering, Nixon saw war as ‘the catalyst’ that had transformed his interest in politics to a sense of mission.”11 Nixon achieved the rank of Navy lieutenant commander at the end of World War II and was awarded the Asiatic–Pacific Campaign Medal, the Navy Unit Commendation, the American Campaign Medal, and the World War II Victory Medal upon his return home.12
While he was not a notable war hero, Nixon’s wartime experiences had a major impact on his worldview. Death during war was real to him: body counts were not simply a statistic to be quantified and explained away as the cost of doing business, per Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s cold calculations. Nixon scholar Irwin Gellman noted that Nixon personally knew many men during the war who were killed or maimed. “He was sensitive to the amount of people who were survivors.” And to their wives and loved ones.13 In Nixon’s own words, his war experiences showed him “the ultimate futility of war and the terrible reality of the loss that lies behind it.”14
* * *
After the war, Nixon once again found himself in Washington, this time as an elected official. In November of 1946, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from California’s Twelfth Congressional District. He would serve in this capacity from 1947 to 1950, quickly climbing the ranks to become his state’s U.S. senator from 1950 to 1953. Known as a vehement anti-Communist, Nixon next became vice president under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, serving the country in this capacity from 1953 to 1961.15
As the POW/MIA wives had already begun to realize, politics, like war, made for strange bedfellows. As freshman congressmen, working-class Nixon and über-privileged John F. Kennedy met and unexpectedly became friends. They shared a shy nature and were mutually intrigued with each other. Despite their personal connection, the men’s friendship changed irrevocably when JFK and Nixon faced off in the 1960 presidential election. In a campaign full of “muckraking” and “dirty tricks” on both sides, Kennedy won, but only by the slimmest of margins. “So ended the tightest election in American history. Both candidates had gone to bed not knowing who won … Nixon had lost by less than 1 percent.”16
Many, including Nixon, believed the race had been won thanks to illegal votes, cheating, and fraud. Nixon considered asking for a recount but then decided against it.17 He and Pat left Washington after the inauguration, regretfully. But Nixon somehow knew this would not be the last he saw of D.C. “I suddenly stopped short—struck by the thought that this was not the end—that someday I would be back here.”18
From 1961 to 1967, Nixon remained a private citizen, working as a lawyer. In November of 1963, his old colleague President Kennedy was assassinated. Always a bit of a fatalist, Nixon was saddened but not surprised. He wrote Jackie Kennedy immediately to express his condolences and offer his help to her. She wrote him back a few weeks later. Her words now seem eerily prescient:
I know how you must feel—so long on the path—so closely missing the greatest prize—and now for you, all the questions come up again—and you must commit all of your family’s hopes and efforts again—Just one thing I would say to you—if it does not work out as you have hoped for so long—please be consoled by what you already have—your life and your family.19
Despite his friend’s assassination, Nixon plunged back into the national scene within a few years, campaigning for president on the promise of ending the war in Vietnam. He had no “secret plan to win the war,” as was widely reported at the time. Instead he broadly declared that he would “end the war and win peace in the Pacific.”20
Military force would always be valued by Nixon. When he visited Vietnam in March of 1964, just a few months after the assassinations of both JFK and Diem, what he saw there convinced him that LBJ’s Vietnam policy was a failure. During that same trip, Nixon was the houseguest of Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek, now leading his government in exile after being kicked out by Communist dictator Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai-shek was acutely aware of the flawed American approach to North Vietnam and the Communists and gave Nixon some advice about their common enemy: “It is the familiar fallacy that economic development will defeat the Communists … only bullets will really defeat them!”21
* * *
Richard Nixon represented a classic American archetype: the underdog. He was not glamorous or telegenic like his frenemy JFK. But like Kennedy, he had a “low tolerance for the back-slapping and hand-wringing” that went along with American political life.22 He did not have LBJ’s macho manner or effortless deal-making abilities. But what he did have was grit. Staying power. And an iron will to survive in the jungle of D.C. dirty politics. He would get knocked down, dust himself off, and live to fight another political day many times over.
Nixon’s personality, his experiences as a naval officer in World War II, and his resulting empathy for war veterans led to an intense and immediate connection to the POW/MIA wives and their fledgling cause. The wives, like Nixon, knew what it was like to be ignored, underestimated, and just plain overlooked.
Nixon displayed a strong attachment to the women in his adult life. His mother, Hannah, his wife, Pat, and his daughters, Julie and Tricia, were the ones he most wanted to please. “It was the women in Nixon’s life who gave him the determination to go on and do what it took to win.”23 Practical, “can do” women with conservative values appealed to him. “From his mother to his wife to his daughters, he was drawn to examples of feminine strength.”24 His support of the Vietnam War’s POW/MIA wives—led, as they were, by women like Sybil Stockdale, Jane Denton, and Louise Mulligan—was a natural fit for the new president.
Presidents Truman and Eisenhower introduced the American presence into Vietnam.25 JFK and LBJ armed the country and propelled the United States into the Vietnam War. It was now up to Nixon to get America out. POW/MIA wives like Sybil, Jane, Louise, Helene, and Phyllis voted for him hoping that he would be their champion and the one who finally ended the drawn-out conflict in Southeast Asia.
* * *
After Nixon’s victory at the polls in November of 1968, Sybil could wait no longer. She was itching to take action that would lead to real change in Washington. She was convinced that “Nixon’s the One!,” as his famous campaign slogan read.
Sybil had read that President-elect Nixon would be attending the Republican Governors Conference in Palm Springs on December 6 with the governor of California, movie star turned politician Ronald Reagan. She immediately placed calls to both Nixon and Reagan and was told she could not talk to either. Fuming, she fired off a telegram to Reagan, “telling him I had been told I could not talk to him on the phone and asking him to tell President Elect Nixon about our plea for help.” Busy with her boys and a million other obligations, Sybil promptly forgot about the telegram.26
A week later, she got what she thought was a prank call.
“Mrs. Stockdale, this is Ronald Reagan.”
Sybil recalled, “I thought it was a friend trying to fool me and almost said ‘Yes, and this is Sophia Loren, what would you like to do tonight?’”
But something in his deep, resonant, movie-star tone made her stop in her tracks and reconsider.
It was him! He was really on the phone, and he seemed to take her concerns seriously. Reagan promised Sybil that the president-elect was completely aware of the problem. Reassured and heartened by the thoughtful personal
call, Sybil thought, Maybe the Republicans really will turn things around.27 She could not help but mentally compare this change of tone with President Johnson’s one brief stop through San Diego years earlier to shake hands with the POW wives. “There was no chance to say more than ‘how do you do?’ It seemed almost as if we should feel privileged he had taken the time to shake hands with us while changing airplanes on North Island.”28
Earlier that fall, Andrea Rander had gone to a Nixon presidential rally in Baltimore. She felt she had to go to represent the POW wives and to make sure this candidate would truly do something to help. At the rally, she yelled, “Don’t forget the POWs!” She felt good to have a voice after being told to keep quiet so often. Years later, Andrea would laugh, saying she had decided after the rally that her action would surely make an impact on Nixon. “I know he’s going to do something now that I’ve talked to him!” She was beginning to be more outspoken about her beliefs and starting to speak her mind in public.29 Feeling even more emboldened by Nixon’s victory, the wives refused to keep their individual stories quiet anymore—not for the Army or the Navy, not for the U.S. government, not even for the sake of traditional diplomatic methods. Shining the media spotlight on the POWs and MIAs was critical, and perhaps the only way to force the North Vietnamese to account for their husbands. They had gained worldwide support for their cause in this way, and they did not intend to relinquish the upper hand they had so painstakingly cultivated.
The League of Wives Page 14