American Patriot

by Robert Coram

  To fully understand the dynamics of what happened, we must go back to 1964, the dawning of the Republican Party in the South. Barry Goldwater, the Republican senator from Arizona, carried several southern states with his subliminal appeal to racist sentiments and a jingoistic drumbeat on Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson won the election, but the Republican seed had been broadcast across fertile ground. In 1968 came the violent and disastrous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. LBJ pulled out of the race, and Nixon and his “Southern Strategy” carried the South. In 1972, Democrat George McGovern suffered an overwhelming defeat when Nixon again carried the South.

  By the early 1970s a new political mood had settled across the South. Moderates held governor’s offices throughout the region. Largely as a result of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, blacks were becoming a political force throughout the South, almost entirely in the Democratic Party. Nearly every southern state shifted significantly to the center but remained Democratic. Jimmy Carter embodied this and in 1976 defeated Gerald Ford for the presidency. But the Carter victory was a small bump in the road. Day had retired from the Air Force, entered the practice of law, and got involved in Republican Party politics at the moment when most southern states were ripe for plucking by Republicans. He was the right man in the right place at the right time.

  In 1978, a Republican ran for a county commission seat in Okaloosa County. It was a close election, but he lost. Then the absentee ballots were counted, and the Republican was declared the winner. Almost every absentee ballot came from a military man. And Bud Day, an ardent Republican and a man known to virtually every military man in the district, had campaigned actively for the Republican candidate. From that point forward, Day preached that Democrats could be beaten and that military people — read Republicans — could swing an election.

  Once Ronald Reagan secured the Republican nomination in 1980, the South became GOP country. Reagan carried about 68 percent of the vote in Florida’s First District. Day was Reagan’s national chairman for veterans and traveled around the country with the candidate.

  IN 1979, California governor Jerry Brown appointed Edison Miller, half of the Bob and Ed Show in Hanoi, as a supervisor — county commissioner — in the Third District of Orange County. In 1980, that appointed term was over and Miller had to run for election.

  More than two hundred former POWs signed a letter that was sent to some hundred thousand voters in the district. The letter said that Miller “cooperated with the enemy to the detriment of his fellow American prisoners of war” and that he “wrote articles” for the Communists against the interests of his government. The letter claimed that Miller violated his oath as a military officer, that he disobeyed the lawful orders of his superiors, and that he “does not have the dedication to duty, to his country, or to a sense of public service which would qualify him for any public office.” The letter ended by calling on voters in the district to reject Miller.

  They did. He received only 16 percent of the vote and later filed a defamation suit against the POWs. Bud Day was one of several lawyers who represented the POWs on a pro bono basis. The court granted the POWs’ request for a summary judgment that threw Miller’s suit out of court. Miller appealed, but his appeal was tossed out.

  Day was in and out of the hospital often during the 1980s. He underwent surgery on his left shoulder, his back, and his right shoulder, all in an attempt to overcome the Bug’s work. Scar chips remained on his buttocks from the beating with the fan belts, and sitting would always be painful. Cortisone shots for his shoulder, which had been dislocated from being in the ropes, would become familiar to him. He had extensive dental surgery. But no neurosurgeon could erase the memories.

  Day was recovering from surgery when, on November 11, 1982, he was the featured military speaker at the dedication of “The Wall,” the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.

  IN the early 1980s, Pat Holloran ran for superintendent of elections as a Republican and defeated the longtime officeholder, a Democrat and close friend of Sikes.

  The yellow dogs were running.

  By 1984, city council seats in Fort Walton Beach were shared by Republicans and Democrats. The mayor professed to be an independent, but many suspected she was a closet Republican, especially after she fired the city manager and the police chief.

  The Democrats tried to crank up a recall election for the mayor, and one of the fired Democrats sued the three Republicans on the city council. Since firing the Democrat was an official act, those being sued asked the city to pay their legal fees. The city counsel, a Democrat, refused, and a bitter legal battled ensued.

  In the city hall dispute, Day represented two of the Republicans. He won every step of the way, but after each victory, a local Democrat judge issued an order vacating the judgment. Finally, Day took the issue to the Florida Court of Appeals in Tallahassee, which ordered the local judge to issue no more orders in the case. In December 1991, the state circuit court ordered the city to pay the legal bill. Day received some $360,000, at that time the largest fee a Florida city had ever been forced to pay a lawyer. One day Wayne Waddell, a POW from Atlanta, came through Fort Walton Beach, nodded approvingly when he saw that both Bud and Dorie were driving Cadillacs, and said, “Damn, Bud. You must be making lots of money.”

  “Money won’t buy you happiness,” Day said. “But it will buy you a big car to go looking for it.”

  WHILE the legal battle with city hall was going on, Day and a few others, most of them retired military officers, had joined together and taken over the small Republican Party in Okaloosa County. Their timing was perfect. People from around the country were migrating to the Sun Belt, many of them to the Florida panhandle. In addition, the population was aging, and many people become more conservative as they grow older. Eglin AFB was expanding, and thus the local population of retired officers — almost all of whom were Republican — was growing.

  During the 1988 presidential campaign, Day had initially campaigned energetically for George H. W. Bush. Day understood the realities of presidential politics, but he thought Bush ran a mean and vicious campaign against Michael Dukakis, so Day later withdrew from the campaign. Black and white, right or wrong, good or bad — that’s the world of Bud Day. Even though he was a committed Republican and the leadership of the country was at stake, Bush had not behaved honorably and Day wanted no part of it.

  After Sikes was accused of using his political influence to benefit his real estate holdings and was forced to retire from Congress, a Republican local television anchor named Joe Scarborough was elected to his seat in 1995. Then, in 2001, to the considerable annoyance of local Republicans, Scarborough returned to television and the First District congressional seat was open. Day was determined that a Republican win the race. One of the candidates was a retired Air Force officer who knew that Bud Day influenced a large number of voters. The retired officer came to Day expecting an endorsement. But Day told the retired officer he was not seasoned enough for Congress and threw his support behind an intense former state legislator named Jeff Miller. Miller won the race.

  From that point forward, whenever there was a Republican primary in the panhandle, Day not only got entreaties for his endorsement but received dozens of phone calls and hundreds of e-mails asking whom he planned to support. And by the mid-1990s, from Panama City to Pensacola, there was only one elected Democrat, a county commissioner in Escambia County.

  DAY’S closest friends among the POWs remained McCain, whom he always referred to affectionately as “that dumb Irishman,” and Orson Swindle, whom he called “Ors.” In 1980, McCain was a Navy captain stationed in Jacksonville. When McCain got divorced, Day handled the legal work. McCain remarried a month later and soon retired from the Navy and moved to his new wife’s hometown of Phoenix, Arizona. In 1982, he ran for a congressional seat in Arizona’s First District. Bud and Doris flew to Phoenix and spent a week campaigning for him. Doris pulled out her detailed notebooks and began calling the newspaper and television report
ers and the local and state politicians she had worked with when Bud was in jail. McCain won the election and a few years later won a Senate seat.

  In 2005, McCain was interviewed in Phoenix and asked what influence, if any, Doris had on that election. “Everyone knew Dorie,” McCain said. “She gave me instant credibility. She was very important in my winning that first race.”

  In his early years in the Senate, McCain had a reputation as a hothead, a man whose anger was barely under control, a man who, when criticized by constituents, baited and taunted them. Day shook his head and laughed. McCain had not changed from the days when he ran around the courtyard taunting the guards.

  DURING the late 1970s, the 1980s, and well into the 1990s, dozens of POWs wrote of their experiences in Hanoi. Most of those books are formulaic. They begin with the shoot-down and go through the torture and the boredom and the release. Few stand on literary merit. But McCain’s book would be significant because he was a U.S. senator when it was published in 1999. Jim Stockdale’s book In Love and War was published in 1984 and was important for a reason entirely unnoticed by the general public. The most highly classified development of the POW years, and one that even today the POWs will not talk about, is that the CIA devised a way to occasionally have two-way communication with the POWs. Stockdale’s book revealed not only that there was such a system but the details of how it worked. Barry Goldwater, a general in the Air Force Reserves and a powerhouse in the Senate on defense matters, was so angry that he wrote Day and said, “I continue to be shocked at the book that was written by Jim Stockdale. I can’t imagine him doing it, but the damage has been done.” He later confronted Day and asked, “What the hell’s the matter with Jim Stockdale babbling about the comm system?” Day couldn’t figure it out either.

  Day was writing his own book, which would be ready for publication in 1989. But various publishers turned it down, saying it was “too red, white, and blue.” Day published it himself in 1990. The title: Return with Honor. For years the book was used in terminal-cancer wards of local hospitals to illustrate that no matter how bleak a situation might appear to be, there is always hope.

  WHEN 1990 arrived, Bud Day was about to turn sixty-five, the age when many men retire. At home, things had gone well for Bud and Doris. Because he was an MOH recipient, his children were eligible to apply for an appointment to any of the service academies. But Steve became a master mariner, the skipper of large oceangoing vessels that he ferried around the world. George Jr., the quiet and intense boy, entered the Air Force Academy, graduated in 1985, and began an Air Force career.

  After high school, Sonja married and had three daughters. Sandra married, had three children — one a Marine — and is now in business school working on her master’s degree.

  In 1993, Day attended a reunion in Montana. The Dining Out part of the event was presided over by Marine Corps general Walter Boomer, assistant commandant of the Marine Corps. During the ceremony, he summoned Day forward and had him stand at attention. He charged Day with “committing an offense against the mess.”

  Day was bewildered. The general said Day was not wearing medals to which he was entitled. When Day again expressed bewilderment, the general said he did not see the Marine Corps Good Conduct Medal. He pinned on Day the medal that Day’s court-martial had prevented him from receiving when he mustered out of the Marine Corps back in 1945.

  Afterward, Day would remove one of the combat medals from the crowded left breast of his uniform and proudly replace it with the Good Conduct Medal.

  ALL the medals in the world could not change the fact that Vietnam veterans were the most scorned and rejected men ever to wear the American military uniform. When they came home, they got no parades; they got shouts of “baby killer” and “rapist,” and they were spit on and reviled. Rotten fruit and human feces were hurled at them.

  Most of them remembered with pride their time in Vietnam. They married and had children. As those children grew up and the Vietnam War became a popular topic to teach in schools, they came home and asked their fathers, “Daddy, did you burn villages when you were in Vietnam?” Or “Daddy, did you ever cut the ears off a Vietnamese?” Or “Were you at My Lai? Did you kill civilians?” Or “Did black American soldiers die in greater numbers than white American soldiers in Vietnam?”

  Some three million American troops went through Vietnam, and in any group that size there will be those who operate beyond the pale. My Lai was an aberration, not the norm. Civilians were killed, but it was not an institutionalized policy that came from the highest levels of command. There were soldiers who used drugs, but they were not in the majority. Two-thirds of the men who fought in Vietnam were volunteers, not draftees. And 12.1 percent of American fatalities were black soldiers, a rate roughly corresponding to their number in society. Suicides among Vietnam veterans were no greater than in society as a whole. Joblessness was less than in the general population. Some 91 percent of the veterans were glad they had served their country.

  Most Vietnam veterans had seen countless acts of courage. They believed their comrades were the best young men in America. James Webb, a highly decorated Marine officer, a former secretary of the Navy, and a bestselling novelist, would write passionately about the Vietnam warriors, saying they “fought with a tenacity and quality that may never be truly understood.” Many Vietnam vets knew the popular perception of the war was a travesty. For this, many of them, but particularly the POWs, blamed John Kerry.

  They believed Kerry’s 1971 testimony was the template from which almost every Vietnam movie was made.

  Except for The Green Berets — a John Wayne movie of the World War II type that was savaged by reviewers — no commercial movies about Vietnam appeared until after the mid-1970s, five years or so after Kerry’s testimony. And almost every one of those movies — Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Platoon (which won the 1986 Academy Award and was considered the most “realistic” of the Vietnam movies), Full Metal Jacket, The Siege of Firebase Gloria, Hamburger Hill, Casualties of War, Gardens of Stone, and Born on the Fourth of July — included American soldiers as John Kerry had portrayed them in his testimony: crazed, dope-smoking, civilian-killing psychotics who, once they came home, were ticking bombs.

  For many Americans, the most compelling statements about the Vietnam War were found in those movies, and many veterans believe that, by extension, Kerry was responsible for America’s erroneous beliefs about Vietnam. That this belief may not be widely held outside the military is not the point. To many Vietnam veterans, particularly the POWs — some of whom were tortured while the guards repeated Kerry’s testimony and some of whom believe Kerry’s testimony extended the war — Kerry had wronged a generation of honorable men; he had stolen their honor. This was their truth. And they ached for the chance to make things right.

  DURING the 1992 presidential election, Day volunteered again to campaign for President Bush. He did not approve of Bush’s campaign techniques, but he would work for the president because Bill Clinton was the Democratic candidate.

  Years later, on June 12, 2005, Alan Ehrenhalt began a review of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by saying, “Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton.” He said Clinton haters believe that the former president was “immature, self-absorbed,” and indecisive; that he lacked discipline and was reluctant to use military force even when needed.

  Ehrenhalt’s review did not begin to plumb the depths of revulsion that military people felt in 1992 (and still feel) toward Bill Clinton. From the time he first appeared on the national stage, Clinton’s pouting expression, lip biting, and what they considered to be his inveterate womanizing, noninhaling-dope-smoking behavior made him — and this is not too strong a word — loathed by military people. Everything about “Slick Willie,” they found repugnant.

  For Bud Day, Clinton personified not only the self-indulgence and fuzzy thinking of the Democrats but weakness as well. He had no
self-discipline, no integrity, no patriotism. He had no principles. He was a man without honor. And he had no military background, which was okay, but — as Robert Patterson described in Dereliction of Duty, he was openly contemptuous of the military, which was not okay.

  When Clinton won (due in large part to the fact that third-party candidate Ross Perot received 19 percent of the vote), Day believed the republic was in danger.

  Making things worse had been an attack Day could not help but take personally. Perot’s running mate was Admiral James Stockdale. After a stumbling performance during a nationally televised debate, Stockdale was savaged by the media. Day knew that Stockdale was one of the most brilliant men ever to wear a uniform. To have reporters ridicule him widened even further the gap between the military and the media.

  Clinton lifted the economic embargo on Vietnam and appointed Pete Peterson, a former POW, as the first American ambassador to Vietnam. Day thought Vietnam should remain isolated. He could not imagine a former POW being a Democrat, much less taking a job in the Clinton administration. He wrote Peterson a letter in which he all but called the ambassador a traitor. Clearly, Day had the same tightly focused right-or-wrong view of the world that he always had. The single-mindedness that enabled him to be a great leader in Hanoi was still there. It was not always appropriate in the civilian world. In coming years it would sometimes be even less appropriate. He would seem rigid and incapable of forgiveness.

  About a year after Clinton was elected, Day drove up to Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, where the Air Force operates several schools for young officers. Part of the curriculum includes bringing in distinguished retired officers to talk to the young officers. Day was one of several MOH recipients on a panel that appeared before newly minted graduates of the Squadron Officer School. Doris was sitting in the audience with the brigadier general who was commander of the school. One of the young graduates asked if each of the old warriors would give his opinion of President Clinton. The other officers gave the proper answer: they were loyal to the commander in chief, no matter who he might be. Then it was Day’s turn, and he said, “I wouldn’t trust that . . . ” He paused, unwilling to use the profanity on the tip of his tongue. Then the dam broke. “I wouldn’t trust that son of a bitch as far as I could throw him.”