Sybil was careful to emphasize the League’s independence from the government as well, assuring the audience that “we have often asked the U.S. government officials for counsel and advice, but we have then made our own decisions independently.”27 The ladies refused to be government puppets—they knew better after their years of “keep quiet” under LBJ. They were determined to run the show from here on out.
Popular singer Jack Jones followed Sybil, singing “The Impossible Dream,” which would become a theme song for the POW and MIA wives.
After Sybil, Kathleen Johnson spoke about her missing husband, Army major Bruce Johnson. Only a few days before, the Army MIA wife had flown back to the States from Paris. She had journeyed for the second time (this time without her three children) to try to get information about her missing husband. After eleven days of pleading for an audience with Madame Binh of the NLF, Kathleen had returned home discouraged and empty-handed.28 She was followed at the podium by Bonnie Singleton, the Dallas POW wife whose little son had never met his father. Both women’s stories were heart-wrenching and compelling. But the real fireworks came from Louise Mulligan. She would electrify the room with her speech.
“We beg of you to hear our call—May Day! May Day! Do not turn your back on the hundreds of mothers who want their sons returned, do not ignore the children who cry out for the love and guidance of their fathers and the hundreds of wives who have grieved for years, some for husbands who will never return! Hear our call of distress and the cry from within the walls of the prison camps—May Day! May Day!!! HELP. PLEASE HELP.”29 With the pilot’s international distress call (“Mayday” comes from the French M’aidez—“Help me”), the Virginia Beach activist got everyone’s attention. The POW and MIA families finally felt like someone had connected with them on a visceral level and had been willing to verbalize their pain. Louise demonstrated to the crowd that no one needed to suffer in silence or “keep quiet” anymore. She had helped break the sound barrier set up by her own government.
The evening was a triumph, a successful coming-out party for the National League. But despite the women’s success, a plot to take over the League was already incubating in D.C. Sybil did not have a chance to even drink a celebratory glass of champagne before she had to gird for battle again.
* * *
The next morning, May 2, the League of Families hosted its inaugural meeting in the auditorium of the Interior Department. The wives and families, still euphoric from the night before, plunged into their packed agenda. But they soon encountered counterforces attempting to take over the nascent League.
A group of retired Air Force officers from the Washington area wanted to take control of the organization and set themselves up as its paid officials and administrators. The ladies would be reduced to licking stamps and stuffing envelopes while the men ran the show. Bob Boroughs warned Sybil that she could not let this happen. “If you let them get on that stage, they will convince the families they should be in charge. You can’t let that happen, Sybil!”30
When the men appeared at the May 2 League meeting, Sybil ignored them, letting the group’s extensive agenda and swift decision to incorporate push them out. The men left, furious, but Sybil had prevented the takeover. Like Boroughs, Sybil knew that if individuals outside the League were in charge, it would lose the one thing that made it unique: the requirement that you had to be the family member of a POW or MIA to belong. She also had learned another important lesson from all of her activism: “The slightest taint of Washington slickness was the surest turn-off for the media, who were our strongest allies.”31
* * *
Real progress on behalf of the POWs and MIAs was being made thanks to the Appeal for International Justice and National League events of May 1 and 2. The National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia was incorporated on May 28, 1970, in D.C. The League’s new founding board met in August. It included Iris Powers, Joan Vinson, Muriel Egan, Edwin Brinckmann, Carole Hanson, Jane Denton, Kathleen Johnson, Eileen Cormier, Irene Davis, Shirley Johnson, Carol North, Nancy Perisho, and Andrea Rander.32
Andrea had to overcome family opposition to her involvement in the League. Don’s mother, Andrea’s mother-in-law, did not support her activism at first. “She felt I should be at work or with the children, not out in public being an activist.” Her mother-in-law saw the League as political, not as a humanitarian group, and Andrea felt she was at a crossroads. “I was scared. Am I taking on something bigger than me?” she thought. Then she decided the objective was to help Donald. She soon found that “the League gave me the strength to do what I had to do.” She also felt included. The other wives were “so welcoming to me. It was good for me and my kids.”
The fact that Andrea was African American seemed to be of minimal importance to the group. “I didn’t feel I was any less than them.” She had found, when she began her work with the League, that rank was more of an issue than race. “Rank bothered me more than my color.” Over time, Andrea and many other wives found that this barrier had begun to melt away also.
Senator Dole attested to a distinct change of tone he was seeing on the Senate floor. “In the Senate, a different Senator is making a speech every day on the prisoner of war situation. Some of those on my committee … have differing views of the war. But they all agree that our prisoners are not being treated humanely. And this is the thrust, or at least the hope that we can attract attention nationwide and worldwide to these facts.”33
Meanwhile, Phyllis finally was making progress with the media at home in Richmond. She had been trying hard to get the Richmond Times-Dispatch interested in the POW/MIA issue. Unbelievably, the staff was still telling her that the POWs were not enough of a story yet. Fortunately for Phyllis, the Times-Dispatch was not the only paper in town.
The Richmond News Leader was the afternoon rival of the morning Times-Dispatch. In 1969, a young conservative, Ross Mackenzie, had been named editor of the editorial page. He was fascinated by the POW/MIA issue—an issue that had not yet received the broad exposure he felt it deserved. Mackenzie recalled, “I was casting about for a local gal to feature on the editorial page.” Then he learned about Phyllis.
Mackenzie phoned Phyllis and set up an interview with her, her two supportive friends Judi Clifford and Connie Richeson, and Petersburg, Virginia, MIA wife and League member Evie Grubb. Mackenzie played the interview across two pages as a November 11, 1970, Veterans Day feature on Phyllis and the plight of the POWs.34
The very next day, Phyllis excitedly wrote back to Mackenzie, thrilled with the coverage and the fact that the Associated Press had picked up the piece. “Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for the wonderful spread about the prisoners of war and missing in action in last night’s paper! It was really more than I could have hoped for.” At the end of the letter, Phyllis noted that Mackenzie and his staff “had performed a fine service for our men. We are on the way to showing that they have not been forgotten.”35
Nearly all the Richmond newspaper coverage of Phyllis from this point on was in the News Leader: Mackenzie had seen what others could not: a compelling saga about the women. That interview and its companion pieces quickly snowballed and helped lead to “the groundswell of support she had locally,” as well as to a ripple effect in the press, both regionally and nationally. Years later, Phyllis would tell Mackenzie, “Ross—You really did change it all for me that day you had Connie, Judi, and me into your office. At last someone would know about our MIAs and POWs.”36 Phyllis found a powerful ally in the News Leader, soon becoming one of the most widely known women in Virginia. On February 9, 1971, Phyllis would give a rare speech to the combined houses of the Virginia General Assembly, helping to generate even more publicity for the POW/MIA cause.37
* * *
Innovative partnerships and publicity campaigns for the POWs also blossomed during this time. In 1969, two college students from Los Angeles, Carol Bates and Kay Hunter, started a POW/MIA Bracelet Campaign,
under the auspices of Voices in Vital America (VIVA), a conservative collegiate activist organization. Hunter later dropped out of the organization, but she was soon replaced by fellow student Steve Frank. Adult adviser Gloria Coppin, a wealthy L.A. housewife married to a military aviation specialist, facilitated the organization’s entrée into the California political scene.38
In 1970, Los Angeles conservative TV personality Bob Dornan introduced Carol and her VIVA colleagues to three wives of missing pilots, Jane Denton among them. The students and wives began to think of ways to draw attention to the plight of the POWs and MIAs and support U.S. soldiers without becoming embroiled in the political controversy. Jane, Phyllis, and Dot McDaniel were skeptical of the idea at first, thinking that the bracelets “didn’t fit in with our dignified white-gloves-and-pearls approach.”39 But the times were changing, and the gloves and pearls were quickly coming off.
The VIVA students decided to have simple bracelets made in nickel and copper, with each imprisoned or missing man’s name, rank, and date of loss inscribed on them. Gloria Coppin’s husband donated enough copper and brass to make the initial twelve hundred bracelets.40 On Veterans Day, November 11, 1970, VIVA officially kicked off the bracelet program. Despite the reservations of some of the POW wives, the bracelets quickly became a massive hit. “With production costs of thirty cents per piece for bracelets that sold for $2.50 to $3.50 each, the bracelet was the goose that laid the golden egg.”41 Through the bracelet sales, VIVA raised tens of thousands of dollars for all kinds of POW/MIA awareness-building programs, from bumper stickers and newspaper ads to matchbooks, buttons, and brochures.
Hollywood stars Bob Hope and Martha Raye signed on as honorary co-chairs of the organization. Notable figures such as Princess Grace of Monaco, singer Johnny Cash, and evangelist Billy Graham all wore the bracelet in support of American prisoners and missing in Vietnam.42 VIVA developed a close partnership with the League, donating large amounts of money to the organization. These shiny, malleable bracelets became the most recognizable symbol of the POWs and MIAs from the Vietnam War.43 By 1976, when VIVA closed its doors for good, the organization had sold more than five million bracelets.44
When the war finally ended, many families would find creative uses for bracelets returned to them in the mail by former bracelet wearers. POW wife Marty Halyburton, former southeast regional coordinator of the National League, would recycle fourteen pounds’ worth of POW bracelets with her husband, Porter’s, name on them by turning them into a chandelier for her breakfast room.45
Things had taken off for the League and the POW/MIA movement. At this point, Henry Kissinger emphasized, “The POWs were an absolute top priority in our mind.”46 A tremendous shift in attitudes had taken place, thanks in large part to the efforts of the POW and MIA wives. But both Sybil and Louise were exhausted by the demands placed on them in their dual roles as the West and East Coast’s most visible activists and as full-time moms. Sybil had been working day and night to keep up with her TV appearances, White House meetings, interviews, and public speaking engagements.
As the National League’s coordinator, she had been on the Today show in New York in January, with Barbara Walters and Hugh Downs. The appearance was arranged by Good Housekeeping magazine as part of its publicity for a major article on Sybil and the League that would appear in the February 1970 issue. Wearing a heather-blue knitted wool dress, her hair and makeup done by the Today show makeup artists, Sybil worried about Barbara Walters and her reputation as “abrasive.” She was pleasantly surprised to find that Walters “was as sympathetic and cooperative as she could be and asked all the questions she could to let me explain my point of view.”
The League’s national coordinator also continued coding letters to her POW husband, Jim, under the supervision of Bob Boroughs. Though she had grown prolific and skilled in this work—she was Boroughs’s best student—her missives caused her severe emotional stress. Her communications had to be done exactly right: the consequences of a botched job were too horrible for her to contemplate. Sybil later reflected, “I seemed to be motivated by the psychology that the harder I worked and the faster I ran the sooner the problem would be solved.”47
On the East Coast, Louise was also stretched too thin. Raising her six boys alone while overseeing Virginia Beach–area League operations out of her bedroom was beginning to take its toll. After the exhilaration of finally being heard at the May Day League events, she had tried her best to spend the summer focusing on her boys. But she could never forget about her husband’s ongoing plight: “You feel torn in many directions … You are trying to be a mother and a father to your children and you feel that you have to do everything you possibly can for your husband.”48
How much more could the women endure?
Fourteen
HERE COMES YOUR NINETEENTH NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
AFTER THE HUGELY SUCCESSFUL League May Day convention, the wives opened their National League office at 1 Constitution Avenue on June 30. The Reserve Officers Association donated free office space 1 and the White House donated a free long-distance WATS telephone service.2 Sybil, Jane, Andrea, Phyllis, and Kathleen could not believe they finally had a legitimate office in the nation’s capital. It was a long way from the League’s humble beginnings at Sybil’s dining room table in Coronado. Clearly, they had been heard by the current administration. Henry Kissinger later recalled that the League’s advocacy had a great “effect on the President, on me, and on Laird.”3
Now that the League had a physical headquarters, bylaws were quickly established and formulated around the two major principles under which the group had operated since the very beginning. First, the League was nonpolitical and nonpartisan. Second, the organization should be composed solely of family members of missing or captured Americans in Southeast Asia.4 Dot McDaniel succinctly articulated the difficult perch the League occupied: “The task of the National League of Families now was to pressure Hanoi publicly while privately pressuring Washington, a hard balance to maintain and a tightrope we had to walk.”5
After the May 1 and 2 events, Sybil needed a break from her own high-wire act between the government and the POW/MIA families. Like magic, Deborah Szekely, the owner of the famed Golden Door Spa, in Escondido, California, called and invited Sybil to spend a week at the spa as her guest. Sybil had mentioned to a D.C. female reporter she knew that “it was one of my suppressed desires” to go, but it cost $100 a day—way out of Sybil’s price range. Having a free week at a fabulous spa was a dream come true for the exhausted POW wife. The offer could not have come at a better time. Sybil promptly arranged for childcare for the boys and packed her bags. When she arrived at the spa, she found, to her delight, that the movie star Kim Novak was in her class of twenty. Each day, the women were issued a fresh pink sweatshirt with their breakfast tray. The meal consisted of coffee, half a grapefruit, the newspaper, and a rose served privately to guests in their rooms. Her daily schedule was packed with exercise, massage, and healthy eating. Sybil must have felt like Kim Novak herself, wearing long, elaborate gowns (borrowed from friends) for cocktails and dinner each evening. The only downside was that the “cocktails” the ladies were served were really “mocktails” of grapefruit juice, and the food was sparse. Sybil lost three pounds that week, as well as a good amount of pent-up stress. And, best of all, “I did look lots better for my trip to Washington the next week.”6
Refreshed from her week at the Golden Door, Sybil helped to formalize the incorporation of the League and install a new national coordinator, Air Force MIA wife Joan Vinson, who already lived in Washington. Sybil was elected chairman of the National League board and, along with the staff, she helped to devise a more formal organizational structure that divided the country into five regions, each with its own coordinator. Each state had its own coordinator as well. This served to increase the awareness of what was going on across the country as each regional and state coordinator submitted periodic reports on League activities, fundraising, and pub
licity in their sphere of influence.7
Sybil later remembered the initial tension at the League office as they settled in: “There was lots of dissension among the different factions and Joan and Iris and others in the office (all volunteers, remember) were often at odds with each other.”8 Trouble was still coming from outside forces as well. With the help of the League’s new attorney, Charlie Havens, Sybil managed to fend off one last coup attempt by an outside Air Force retiree.9
Unlike the LBJ regime, the Nixon administration realized it needed to cultivate good relations with the League and support the POW/MIA cause. Dan Henkin, the assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, at the time told Sybil: “We knew you were going to mop the floor with us … if we didn’t join you.”10
Henkin’s recently named deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, Air Force brigadier general Daniel “Chappie” James, would soon become the Pentagon’s most recognizable “face” of the POW/MIA issue. Like Sybil, he had to walk a tightrope between the government and the families with finesse. Otherwise he would be thrown to the lions. This didn’t faze the general, who had battled other seemingly insurmountable obstacles and enemies in the past and won.
James was born in 1920 in Pensacola, Florida. An African American, he grew up in the segregated South. As a boy, he was drawn to the Pensacola airfield, and the speed, dash, and daring of the fighter pilots he encountered there. There was no doubt in his mind that he wanted that kind of life. He attended Tuskegee Institute, in Alabama, where he joined the famed all-black military corps of Tuskegee Airmen. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1943 and completed his fighter pilot training that same year. He would serve as a fighter pilot in World War II.
The League of Wives Page 20