The League of Wives

by Heath Hardage Lee

  Indeed, Kathleen and many other wives felt that making public political statements could imperil not only the present expedition but also their husbands’ military standing. “We never presented ourselves as hawks or doves,” claimed Kathleen. “We were very mindful of our husbands’ positions and our husbands’ dignity.”26 Perot’s aides on the flight offered to help her practice her statements in case the press asked her difficult questions. But Kathleen knew what she wanted to say and felt that rehearsing it would not be a good idea. “I felt it was better for me to answer spontaneously and be natural.”27

  When the group arrived at Orly Airport at 8 a.m. on Christmas morning, they were hustled onto a bus. It was a rainy, cold, and damp day. The bleak weather mirrored everyone’s feelings that morning. Bruce remembered that “no one had slept on the flight. Everyone hit the ground rough.” He had a sense of his mother, Kathleen, being pulled away from him and his brother and sister by the Perot organizers.

  They immediately began phoning the North Vietnamese, trying to set up an appointment to meet that day, but the North Vietnamese refused to meet with the women and children. MIA wife Margaret Clark, a friend of Kathleen’s who was also stationed in Kansas, then suggested that the women go to pray at the Cathedral of Notre Dame. Everyone agreed this was an excellent idea, much better than just going straight back to Orly.

  Margaret’s suggestion would profoundly change the course of events that day. The children and their mothers were bused to the church, the famous Gothic cathedral that pilgrims and tourists had admired since the Middle Ages. Its flying buttresses and rose windows were architectural marvels. But to ten-year-old Bruce, the cathedral seemed deeply mysterious. To him, it was a dark, damp cavern with gigantic candles burning everywhere and the kids all praying with their moms. The atmosphere was cold and foreboding. A feeling of dread washed over the boy. Bruce felt helpless, concerned for and protective of his mom.

  What can I do to help her? he thought to himself.28

  Suddenly, what some later considered a “Christmas miracle” occurred. Two French gendarmes arrived at the church and gently tapped the ladies on their shoulders. In the hushed atmosphere of the church, the police quietly informed the women “that the North Vietnamese delegation had relented—they would receive a small delegation of women.”29 The group all trooped back on the bus, to drop off a select group at the North Vietnamese embassy. Kathleen noticed the press trailing them. This was heartening: she knew by now what valuable allies they could be.

  Wearing a leopard-print coat, Kathleen hopped off the bus. She, Andrea, and Margaret would go alone to speak to the North Vietnamese. No children or other wives were allowed. The three ladies didn’t know exactly where the embassy was, but the local press gang did. They led the ladies there, walking backward while snapping their photos and filming for the television news. The press knew what sold papers: these women were the story. They could get the world’s attention—and its sympathy—in ways that American ambassadors Lodge and Harriman never could.

  The women were received cordially by the North Vietnamese. The embassy staff politely offered the women tea, but Kathleen and her companions quickly got to the point. They asked for information regarding their husbands’ whereabouts and the prisoners of war and missing. The women represented themselves as part of a humanitarian mission, deliberately keeping politics out of the discussion. “We were never anyone’s puppets,” noted Kathleen.30

  The North Vietnamese representatives were evasive, refusing to give the women any concrete details. “When will you tell us about the men?” asked the three POW/MIA wives, “When will the war be over?”

  “Ask Nixon when the war will be over!” replied the North Vietnamese, almost in unison. Kathleen recalled dryly, “They never did share any information with us.”31 Andrea also kept trying to see Madame Binh—she had stacks of letters with her from other POW/MIA wives. She left some letters with Binh’s staff, but she brought many more back home. Andrea later recalled that Binh was a hardcore Communist, not sympathetic at all to their plight. “She did not want to see any wives from America.”32 The North Vietnamese wall could not be scaled. Not even by determined wives wearing leopard-print coats. Kathleen’s son Bruce had hoped that the meeting “would result in an understanding about whether our father was alive or dead. That hope was not realized.” But the fact that his mother, Andrea, and Margaret, with the help of the Perot organizers, obtained an audience with the North Vietnamese was a Christmas miracle in and of itself. Ross Perot was their hero, and their moms were their heroines. “It gave us a voice, too, just being part of it. It gave us a voice to be present.”33

  * * *

  If the North Vietnamese wouldn’t allow the wives of American POWs and MIAs into their confidence, what kind of Americans would they talk to?

  The POW/MIA wives’ frenemies Cora Weiss, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, the two Berrigan brothers, and Tom Hayden fit the bill. They already had the ears and the trust of Hanoi. These activists were anti-Nixon, anti-government, and far left, which aligned them ideologically with the Communists. The North Vietnamese groomed these peace delegations when they visited North Vietnam, knowing that their propaganda would be disseminated through the best conduit of all: sympathetic Americans on the ground in the United States.

  Jailers of the American POWs in Hanoi knew the plan well. Only three months after his September 1965 shoot-down, a senior North Vietnamese officer informed Jim Stockdale, “We will win the war on the streets of New York.”34 Propaganda, not guns, was the Communist’s most deadly weapon. By association, radical antiwar groups soon became foot soldiers in that campaign.

  Originally, the New Mobe, represented by radical civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, had offered to be a liaison group that would facilitate mail and communications between Hanoi and the POW/MIA families. Sybil learned of this plan while she was in Paris facing down the North Vietnamese in October of 1969. She was furious, and wrote that Kunstler was “an attorney who represented the leaders among the American pro-Communists. He was in close cahoots with David Dellinger, Rennard [Rennie] Davis, Tom Hayden, and other such Hanoi travelers, all trying to drag us and our husbands down into the muck where they survived.”35

  When the men’s plan failed, Cora Weiss and the women of the left took over instead.

  By mid-January of 1970, Weiss and David Dellinger, the self-proclaimed pacifist leader and founder of the left-wing magazine Liberation, had joined forces to officially found the Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in Vietnam (COLIAFAM). This organization had formed due to contacts between a North Vietnamese women’s delegation and members of Women Strike for Peace (led by Cora Weiss) when the WSP visited Hanoi in the summer of 1969.

  In December of 1969, Hanoi agreed to the forwarding of mail from the POWs to what would become COLIAFAM, and “North Vietnam also and for the first time agreed to answer questions on MIAs through the Committee of Liaison—a channel of communication that allowed North Vietnam to snub and bypass the Pentagon and the State Department.”36 Naturally, the U.S. government was wary of this alliance from the beginning, but it was hamstrung. POW and MIA families were demanding answers—and information that the government was unable to provide on its own.

  COLIAFAM would quickly be characterized by newly formed National League members as “the most militant of all the peace groups.”37 The new organization began coordinating the travel of three Americans to Hanoi each month. Its mission, according to Weiss, was three-pronged: “Our purposes in going (to Hanoi) were: (1) to facilitate the mail, (2) to enable others to go as eyewitness reporters and to be citizen diplomats (technically illegal under the Logan Act), and (3) to see what was going on because so many times we didn’t get any news in this country [the United States].”38

  Later, COLIAFAM members would also repatriate POWs who chose to take early release. As early release violated the military Code of Conduct, most POWs derisively called these COLIAFAM missions “the Fink Release Pr
ogram.”39

  Overtly political, COLIAFAM was the opposite of the growing League movement, which was staunchly humanitarian and mostly pro-Nixon. Sybil hated the group and feared using its courier service. But Bob Boroughs encouraged her to use any channels possible to get communication through to her husband. “I didn’t want to send letters through them but Commander Boroughs said we had to in order to improve the chances of getting coded messages to and from [Jim].”40 COLIAFAM didn’t know it, but it was transmitting secret messages to the POWs through its own mail delivery. The alliance didn’t last long.

  Early in 1970, the U.S. government, realizing the security risk posed by COLIAFAM, rescinded its initial praise of the organization’s POW/MIA efforts. The administration reversed its original stance, now advising POW families not to work with COLIAFAM.

  When Cora Weiss, Ethel Taylor, and Madeline Duckles, founding members of COLIAFAM, returned from their December 1969 trip to Hanoi, the women claimed that the Nixon administration had now turned against them, and they urged National League members to protest at the White House: “It would be marvelous to see POW families walking up and down in front of the White House with signs saying—‘Only you can bring our men home, Mr. Nixon—Set the Date!”41 Taylor recalled that “families of POWs were asked to refrain from dealing with our Committee of Liaison, even though the transmission of mail and packages depended upon our committee.”42

  According to Weiss, the U.S. government told POW families not to send packages through COLIAFAM in New York, but instead to send their mail and packages to a post office box in Europe. “Whereupon,” the peace activist later claimed, “some of the packages were opened and secret spying material was inserted. In Vietnam, we saw Colgate toothpaste tubes or wrappers of Wrigley’s chewing gum with materials, parts and wires to put together radios and communications equipment.” After this, the Vietnamese allowed only packages and mail that came through Weiss and Dellinger’s organization.43

  Of equal if not more importance to the POW/MIA wives and families, more complete POW and MIA lists were flowing primarily from the COLIAFAM mailing lists. Government channels were almost totally blocked. The only sure way to establish at least a partial list of POWs and MIAs was to rely on COLIAFAM. Sybil again recoiled at this arrangement: she did not think that antiwar groups should make POW/MIA lists public. “Something like this should go through the government.”44

  It was a Faustian deal, but many, like Louise Mulligan, Phyllis Galanti, Jane Denton, and even Sybil herself, realized they had to use COLIAFAM and other peace/antiwar emissaries like religious groups, Tom Hayden, Howard Zinn, and the Berrigan brothers to get communication through to their husbands. At the same time, the women were far from naive. Louise did not hesitate to call out antiwar activists on their rhetoric.

  In a November 23, 1969, letter to WSP/COLIAFAM founding member Ethel Taylor, Louise questioned the organization’s motives: “You speak of credibility in your letter to me—how we are to believe anything that the North Vietnamese government promises when most of our wives and mothers aren’t even given the simple request of whether their husband or son is alive?” Louise went on to request that Taylor take a letter for her on her next trip to Vietnam, where she hoped she would press for impartial POW camp inspections. “I believe this should be a rather simple request IF the men are being treated humanely as they would have the world believe.”45

  Sybil echoed this attitude in her own letter to Madeline Duckles: “We … are under no illusions about the cruel treatment our loved ones have been receiving for years nor about the propaganda Hanoi hopes to gain from granting you visas to enter their country.” She continued: “The world realizes that dissemination of information about our loved ones through other than a government or established humanitarian organization is an exploitation of our helplessness.”46

  On the other side of the world, Louise’s POW husband, Jim, had directly experienced the impact of Women Strike for Peace and, later, COLIAFAM. He would later tell a congressional committee that these “peace delegations had begun visiting the POW camps as early as 1966.” Jim testified that “many Americans, myself, were heavily pressured, heavily threatened … some men were even physically forced and tortured to visit with these delegations.” These forced visits “did not contribute at all to our morale, except to lower it. The Vietnamese were able to exploit this as much as possible and tried to use the delegations to divide us.”47

  As another POW, Ted Sienicki, bluntly put it, “The world saw communism as ‘on the march.’ Professors taught that it was the inevitable future. We knew they [the North Vietnamese] were murderers of the highest degree. So we saw the antiwar people … as aiding the murderers.”48

  Many MIA and POW wives were upset when Cora Weiss and Madeleine Duckles returned from Hanoi in December of 1969 with a list of what they claimed were American pilots who were “Known Dead.” The wives didn’t know who or what to believe at this point. The list was not an “official” government list, and the deaths could not be confirmed or denied by the American government due to the North Vietnamese lack of compliance with Geneva Conventions rules regarding dead or missing servicemen. And, of course, there was the questionable politics of their source.

  Pat Mearns’s husband, Major Arthur Mearns of the Air Force, had been shot down in 1966 and not heard from since. Now Weiss claimed that he and four others were dead. As Pat recalled, “The Air Force did not change my husband’s status and stated ‘it was impossible to check the story.’ This word added further to my three years of torture and caused a very unhappy Christmas for two small girls who believe their Daddy is still alive.”49

  Sandy Dennison, one of the founding members of the Coronado-based League of Wives under Sybil, was another of the unfortunate wives who received this communication from Weiss. Sybil noted this in her diary, commenting, “You can know just how insincere they were about wanting to help the families, just one or two days before Christmas, they contacted five wives and told them the North Vietnamese said their husbands were dead. They hadn’t asked the circumstances, they said … Not such a nice Christmas present for these families. One was our own Sandy Dennison in San Diego.”50

  By June of 1970, COLIAFAM had released a 335-name list of POWs given to them by Hanoi. The North Vietnamese told Weiss and her delegates that this was their official and complete list of American prisoners in North Vietnam.

  The U.S. government said otherwise: “The Pentagon said it had identified at least 40 other prisoners in North Vietnam through propaganda films, photographs released by Hanoi, Radio Hanoi broadcasts and statements made by nine men who were released earlier.” No reference was made to U.S. prisoners who might be held in South Vietnam and Laos. A U.S. government official echoed Pat Mearns’s sentiments: “The release of an ‘incomplete’ list causes grief to families of those not mentioned.”51

  MIA wife Marie Estocin, a founding member of the San Diego League of Wives, vividly remembered her own grief when she received word of her husband, Navy pilot Lieutenant Commander Michael J. Estocin, through a letter from Cora Weiss and COLIAFAM. Mike had been shot down on April 26, 1967, and not heard from since. Weiss’s letter claimed that Mike had never been held in North Vietnam. “I was so upset, I cried for days. I thought that information told me my husband was dead.” Contrary to this claim, the U.S. government had labeled him a POW, based on intelligence received through a letter from POW Richard Allen “Dick” Stratton, a good friend of Mike and Marie’s. Marie would not find out for years what the truth of the matter really was. Mike would receive a posthumous Congressional Medal of Honor, but he would never return.

  The COLIAFAM information could not be confirmed and was a source of agony to Marie for this reason. She was plunged into a purgatory even worse than the POW hell she had been consigned to previously.52

  Whose account could the POW and MIA wives believe? What information should they tell their children and other family members? And just who had authorized Cora Weiss and her org
anization to broadcast such information without verification? The American government seemed to have abandoned ship, leaving the antiwar activists in charge. There was an information vacuum, and the peace groups had jumped in to fill it. As new National League member Evie Grubb, no fan of Cora Weiss’s, grudgingly admitted, the peace groups “had gone to Hanoi, and they had returned with released prisoners … That was more than our government had accomplished in all the years since the first American was captured.”53

  Evie would be traumatized later when Cora Weiss announced that Evie’s husband, Newk, was dead, a year after Pat had received the same pronouncement. Evie had gotten a heads-up from the State Department right before the announcement was made to the American press. “After five years of anxiety and fear, we received the ultimate blow from a stranger named Cora Weiss, who had not even had the decency to inform the wives and families of these men before publicly disseminating such life-shattering news.”54

  This was COLIAFAM’s MO. They did not meet with the POW/MIA wives personally but instead tended to announce their casualty and missing lists during press conferences, to maximize publicity for their group. To POW/MIA wives like Pat, Marie, and Evie, COLIAFAM’s handling of the situation was callous and disrespectful, and, above all, they disseminated questionable information. It added to their anguish, and the “what-ifs” tortured them far more than any official government report of death would have. An official confirmation they could have accepted, but this was a half-baked assumption of death without documentation—something required by the Geneva Conventions in order for the claim to be valid.

  * * *

  As if these public pronouncements were not enough, antiwar activists often gave out the POW and MIA wives’ phone numbers and mailing addresses to various peace and antiwar groups demonstrating in Washington. This led to a deluge of unwanted propaganda. Louise and the other wives who used COLIAFAM services were also sent a barrage of antiwar materials, “pressure letters” about the war, and even doctored missives that deleted facts about the war to make their arguments stick.55