While the American women didn’t get exactly what they wanted, the worldwide media portrayed the Vietnamese as heartless and cruel—exactly the opposite of the image they wished to show to the world. The ladies hoped that because the Vietnamese Communist regime had been placed in the public eye, the court of world opinion would unite against them and trigger the POWs’ eventual group release and an accurate accounting of the MIAs. They returned home exhausted but triumphant in the knowledge that their mission impossible had once again put them—and the POW/MIA issue—in the spotlight.
* * *
That same October, the antiwar movement, led by the New Mobilization Committee (“the New Mobe”), led a peaceful national protest, dubbed the October Moratorium. On October 15, hundreds of thousands of Americans protested the war in churches, in schools, in local meetings. “From the White House that night, the staff could see thousands of candles flickering across the Mall.” Though the protests were mostly peaceful, Nixon was desperately worried.47 He decided he needed to comfort the country and tamp down some of the antiwar rhetoric. Out of that dark night, a landmark speech was born.
On Monday, November 3, at 9:30 p.m., President Nixon addressed the country in a televised address. He reached out to his core supporters, famously dubbing them the “silent majority.” Nixon also outlined his “Vietnamization” strategy. This was Laird’s term for the plan to withdraw American troops from the country while simultaneously training the South Vietnamese to defend themselves against not just the Viet Cong rebels in the South but also the North Vietnamese Army.48
After the speech, former ambassador and Nixon nemesis Averell Harriman appeared on ABC News “as a scoffing commentator—the same Harriman who had announced, ‘I will not break bread with that man [Nixon]’ … after the 1950 Senate campaign.”49 Harriman’s long-standing antipathy toward Nixon coupled with the fact that Nixon had not asked him to stay on as part of his new administration generated the former diplomat’s negative take on the speech. According to Nixon biographer Evan Thomas, Nixon had also “shifted the public perception, aligned himself with the patriots and identified the antiwar movement with the bombers and flag burners.”50
Despite Harriman’s sour grapes and the outrage of antiwar advocates, the speech was a resounding success: a Gallup poll found that 77 percent of Americans supported Nixon’s view of the war.51
Though firmly in his “silent majority” camp, Sybil fired off a telegram to President Nixon after the speech, rebuking him for “not mentioning the plight of the prisoners in your message to the nation on November 3rd. I personally can understand the difficulty which mentioning them imposed for you. Many, however, cannot understand the deletion of their loved ones’ desperate plight from your message and have expressed their deep concern to me about not being able to meet with you personally.”52 She did not realize it then, but her telegram would have its intended impact.
On Thursday, November 13, some incredible news came for Joan Pollard. After more than three and a half years with no word from Ben, she had received a ninety-word letter from North Vietnam. Joan had the letter in hand in Colorado Springs just after 3 p.m. the next day.
He was alive and was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam!
She could not believe it—and did not dare let herself believe it at first. Cora Weiss had gone over to North Vietnam and returned with a letter from her husband. Weiss had dropped the letter in the regular mail, with no special delivery. As Joan remembered vividly, “She didn’t call me, she called the press.” Soon the media was clamoring to speak to her: ABC, NBC, and CBS all contacted her (but not the government, which found out about Ben after the media did).53
* * *
The potent brew of media exposure from the League trip, Sybil’s telegram to Nixon after his “silent majority” speech, and Laird and Capen’s sustained pressure on Nixon to prioritize the POW issue finally provided the POW/MIA wives and mothers with the ultimate entrée.54 In December, Sybil, Andrea, and twenty-odd other POW and MIA wives and mothers were invited to Washington for a reception, coffee, and press conference with the president. Their husbands, the American POWs and MIAs, represented their own kind of silent majority—a forgotten majority,55 one that the women now stood for. They would speak for those whose voices could not be heard.
The scene at the officers’ club reception on the evening of December 11 was dazzling. All the heads of the U.S. government agencies were present. “These included the Chiefs and Secretaries of all the Armed Services as well as the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State, and several of their assistants. Someone said it was the only time in Washington all these men were gathered in the same room.”56 (Capen and Sieverts, the “Washington Road Show” alums in attendance that night, must have warned their bosses and the military men that they had better show up if they didn’t want to face the women’s wrath.)
The next day, December 12, President Nixon spoke at a press conference in the White House. He and his wife, Pat, had spent the day with the twenty-six women (twenty-one wives and five mothers), feted at the previous evening’s reception. These ladies represented the approximately fifteen hundred women, mothers, and wives of American POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. They represented all the military branches as well.
Of these women, only five were invited to stand with the president for the press conference photo call: Sybil Stockdale, Carole Hanson, Louise Mulligan, Andrea Rander, and Pat Mearns. All these women were National League members. Sybil was asked to take over as the spokesperson for the press conference when the president was done speaking. The government officials and even Nixon himself probably realized that she knew more than he did about POW/MIA issues.
Nixon would begin his speech to the press with these wives clustered around him like a phalanx of Amazon warriors:
“I have the very great honor to present in this room today five of the most courageous women I have had the privilege to meet in my life.”57 Sybil stood next to him, nodding in approval, dressed again in her favorite bright-pink wool suit. There was no doubt in her mind that she had gotten her money’s worth out of that outfit.58
Twelve
DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS
IN LATE DECEMBER OF 1969, uber-wealthy Dallas businessman Ross Perot chartered two Braniff Boeing 707s in an attempt to deliver food, medicine, and Christmas gifts to American POWs held in Vietnam. In November, Perot had formed and funded the POW/MIA awareness group United We Stand. The organization supported the office of the president and spent $1 million on newspaper and television advertisements to promote awareness of the POW/MIA situation.1
Perot had recently begun to work with the Nixon White House, POW family organizations, and Congress to spotlight the POW/MIA issue.2 The wiry, crew-cut Texan, president of Electronic Data Systems, took these actions as a private citizen, without official U.S. government backing but with Nixon and Kissinger’s tacit approval. Perot had been recruited by Melvin Laird and Dick Capen to be part of Laird’s POW Task Force and would prove to be “the sharpest burr … in the saddle of Hanoi.”3
A 1957 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (the alma mater of so many downed airmen, like Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton), Perot attributed much of his success to his Navy leadership and being a person of decisive action.4 He was moved by the plight of the women and children left behind by the American servicemen taken prisoner and missing in action. Dallas-area POW/MIA wives had come to him seeking help.
One of these women, MIA wife Bonnie Singleton, had a son who had never met his father. She contacted Perot for assistance on behalf of the local POW/MIA wives. Sybil would later refer to Bonnie as “a real fireburner.”5 Bonnie’s fellow POW/MIA wives in Texas respected her courage and outspokenness. Her friend and fellow Texas MIA wife Sallie Stratton remembered, “Bonnie was very active and I met her right away at the very first meeting of the area POW/MIA wives at Shirley Johnson’s home. She was always very outspoken and at the time, more radical than I, but I admired her tremendously.”6
&n
bsp; Perot decided to deliver aid—Texas style. His first action under the United We Stand banner was to advertise the issue on a national scale. On November 9, which Nixon had declared a National Day of Prayer and Concern for the prisoners of war in Vietnam, Perot ran full-page ads in major newspapers across the country. These vivid images featured “two small children praying ‘Bring our Daddy home safe, sound, and soon’ … The ads demanded that the ‘North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong … Release the prisoners now.’”7
Sybil must have jumped up and down for joy. Finally, this was the anti–North Vietnamese propaganda campaign she had been praying for. She had suggested this kind of effort years earlier to the Navy and the government, but to no avail. Because of his timing, money, and influence—and, no doubt, his being male—Perot was the one finally able to implement the anti-Communist campaign of Sybil’s dreams. Soon she would be working more directly with the Dallas businessman. The ads were only the beginning of the Perot Pressure Plan.
On December 21, Perot’s chartered Boeing 707 Peace on Earth was loaded up with fourteen hundred meals and other supplies to be transported to Hanoi for Vietnam POWs. The Braniff jet, sporting a gigantic red-ribbon decal, left Dallas Love Field that morning for Honolulu, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and finally Vientiane, in the country of Laos. The weary Perot entourage, accompanied by a stewardess/translator, finally met with a North Vietnamese representative and officials from the Pathet Lao at that group’s headquarters, in Vientiane. Here they learned that the North Vietnamese would not let them land in Hanoi.
The rejected and dejected group returned to Bangkok via private plane to regroup and meet with North Vietnamese embassy officials. There, the group was informed that their delivery would have to be sent to Hanoi via Russia. “North Vietnam has said it would accept Perot’s gifts, reportedly worth $400,000, only through the Soviet channel.”8
Hanoi lay just three hundred miles to the northeast of Vientiane. A plane flight there would have taken just over an hour and twenty minutes.9 Frustrated, the group next proceeded to Tokyo, then on to Anchorage, Alaska, where all the supplies had to be repackaged to fit Russian freight mail regulations. The entire local community pitched in: military, students, and other volunteers. Incredibly, the whole operation was completed in less than six hours. The flight ultimately landed in Copenhagen. After more meetings in Denmark at the Russian embassy, Perot realized that the delivery mission was futile. “The Russians were just as difficult as the NVA [the North Vietnamese Army] and Perot decided to scrub the mission completely.”10
The Perot entourage returned to Dallas on New Year’s Day 1970. They had not delivered any Christmas meals, but they had achieved something perhaps more valuable: they had served up a heaping helping of bad publicity for the North Vietnamese. The world had been watching the beribboned jet on television as it was shunted from one destination to the next, first by the North Vietnamese and then by the Russians. The fact that the generous Texas Santa and his jet sleigh were barred from delivering much-needed supplies to American prisoners rubbed the noses of the North Vietnamese and the Russians in another pile of negative publicity.
It was a calculated move on Perot’s part, eliciting even more sympathy for the American prisoners. When he was interviewed upon his return to the States, the tech magnate drawled, “My new year’s resolution is to quadruple my efforts to help the POWs.”11 More than a year later, Perot clarified the trip’s primary objective: “The purpose of the Christmas trip was not to take packages to prisoners, but to put the North Vietnamese in the position where they had to talk. We wanted to create a pressure-cooker situation where they had to see us. They didn’t have to love us, but they had to see us.”12 Perot historian Libby Craft affirmed, “The primary objective was to embarrass and try the North Vietnamese in the court of public opinion to get them to the ‘table’ to discuss the POW/MIA situation. The humanitarian objective was to do everything possible to improve the circumstances and secure the release of the men held in Southeast Asia.”13
Like Sybil, Jane, Louise, Phyllis, Andrea, and many other POW and MIA wives, the businessman fully understood the value of publicity. He also had something in abundance that most military wives did not. As one reporter noted, the Christmas flights were a “diplomatic blitz with Perot supplying the most needed resource: money.”14 As MIA wife and later League coordinator Evelyn Grubb noted: “We’re grateful to Ross Perot for his faith, his help, and his outreach with a strong hand and for putting his money where his mouth was!”15
Perot’s support extended beyond the financial. Laird’s second in command, Dick Capen, recalled that the Texan’s greatest gift “was to give hope and support to the families when they badly needed it.”16 He would soon become the POW/MIA movement’s most tireless private-sector champion.
* * *
On Christmas Day 1969, Perot had sent another Braniff jet to Paris for the latest round of the Paris peace talks. The spanking-new red Douglas DC-8 carried precious cargo: fifty-eight POW wives and ninety-four POW children. This time, the wives would attempt to plead with the North Vietnamese representatives in Paris for the American prisoners’ release. MIA wife Kathleen Johnson, from Kansas, was on that flight, which she dubbed The Spirit of Christmas. Her husband, Army captain Bruce Johnson, was one of the early American advisers sent to Vietnam in July of 1964 after attending SERE school in California and undergoing extensive Vietnamese language training. His helicopter had been hit by enemy fire on June 10, 1965—just a month before he was due home from his Vietnam tour. Bruce had been listed as missing in action since that time.
Kathleen recalled that all the women, some with their children, had met up in New York to fly to Paris the next day. Kathleen took her three children, Bruce (ten), Bryan (eight), and Colleen (six), on the flight with her.17
The next day, every seat on the plane was filled. All the families on the flight were hopeful that their efforts might lead to a breakthrough. Bruce recalled, “By then, it had been four and a half years since Dad had been missing. We were still certain that our dad was alive and that we might have contact with him soon.” The rules for this flight were much looser than those governing flights today. At a certain point, the kids were free to move around the cabin as they wished. Bruce decided to hang out around the cockpit. One of the pilots noticed him and beckoned for him to come inside. “Hey, you wanna fly this thing?” The pilot put Bruce in his seat and he even let him turn the dials. What kid would not love this? The pilot winked at Bruce: “Keep this under your hat!” Bruce nodded shyly, but he was bursting with excitement and had to tell his brother, Bryan, about it. To be noticed like that and made to feel special meant a lot to Bruce. He had felt immense pressure since his father left, but that pressure did not come from his mother. It was perhaps self-imposed. “Be the man of the house” was certainly something many military dads told their sons as they left for their tours of duty. As the oldest boy, Bruce felt responsible for his mom and his younger siblings. “I was focused on making Dad proud when he came back.”
It was also a revelation for Bruce to meet other POW/MIA kids in a large group like this one. “It was the first time we had interacted with kids in the same situation.” He realized he was not alone, not the only one in this nightmare scenario. Like their wives, the children found comfort in their shared experience. Bruce remembered meeting Andrea Rander and her two daughters, Lysa and Donna Page, on the flight. One of the girls had brought her baby doll with her for the trip. Bruce’s sister, Colleen, had brought her own baby doll as well. He noted how kind Mrs. Rander was and how Andrea and his mother had an instant positive connection: the two women were not only both POW/MIA wives, but they were both Army wives.18 There were few Army wives in the group or among the POWs and MIAs in general since the Air Force and the Navy accounted for most of the prisoners of war and missing during the Vietnam War. There were even fewer African American POWs and MIAs; Andrea was in a very small minority of African American POW wives and the only black woman on the
Perot trip.
Under President Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9981 officially desegregated the armed forces in 1948, but some units remained segregated until as late as 1954. The Vietnam War was the first major conflict to see a fully integrated military.19 Vietnam War historian Marc Leepson noted, “Because of the draft, the racial composition of the Army during the Vietnam War—and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps—more or less reflected the racial composition of society in general. That was not true, though, in the Navy and Air Force, since those two services rarely had trouble filling their enlistment quotas, and African Americans served in those branches in much less representative numbers. And it was starkly different in the National Guard and Reserves.”20 Indeed, in 1969–70, “only about 1 percent of all [National] guardsmen were black.”21
By 1969, when the Perot flight took place, African American servicemen made up 13.3 percent of all the personnel in the Army and the Marine Corps.22 However, the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard tended to be much less diverse, mainly because those branches had enough volunteers and did not participate in the draft.23 “While many draft-eligible men voluntarily enlisted in the Navy and Air Force—as those branches were perceived to be less dangerous—the draft itself conscripted men into the Army and, to a lesser extent, the Marines.”24
During the flight, Kathleen was one of three women asked to be spokeswomen for the group. So was Andrea Rander. Both Andrea and Kathleen had attended the December 12 meeting at the White House for POW and MIA wives as representatives of Army families. Margaret Fisher, the wife of an Air Force pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, was the third representative.25 The women on board the Paris flight felt that this was a purely humanitarian mission. “We didn’t go for political reasons. We only went for our men,” recalled Kathleen.
The League of Wives Page 17