THE NEWLY INSTALLED NIXON administration had gotten the message loud and clear from the POW/MIA wives that they had better take notice of their husbands’ plight. Right now. The women and their families were Nixon supporters and voters—at least for the moment—and the administration wanted to keep them in that camp.
Sybil was pleased to see the direct results of her January telegram-in. “I was encouraged to be notified that a group from the Nixon administration in Washington was coming to San Diego (to the Naval Air Station Miramar Officers’ Club) on March 26 to talk to us about the prisoners and missing. What a change—they were actually coming to talk to us without our having to browbeat them!”1
Attendance at the meeting was restricted to wives and parents of the POWs and MIAs from the area. It was to be held on a “no publicity” basis, and Sybil noted in her diary that she warned all invited attendees, “I cannot impress upon you enough that this is a privileged meeting and that all discussion pertaining to it should be carefully guarded.”2 The remnants of the “keep quiet” policy remained in her comments, but they were fraying and thin as old lace curtains.
Averell “the Crocodile” Harriman persisted in holding fast with his reptilian jaws to the old ways, despite the advent of a new presidential administration. Even now, he was convinced that his quiet diplomacy would work. But now, in 1969, the wives and even the staff within the government were realizing that Harriman’s approach had become a form of appeasement.
Harriman had heard rumors of the new administration’s plans to “go public” about the POW/MIA plight. Before he left office (he would be replaced by Undersecretary of State Elliot Richardson on February 4), the crusty grandee called Melvin Laird, Nixon’s secretary of defense, to warn him off this idea.3 Laird listened to Harriman rant, but he would not reveal what he planned to do. He decided to do more research before he took any action.4
Laird selected a young man from the publishing business named Richard “Dick” Capen for a data-collecting mission. Capen had worked for Copley Press, a newspaper publisher in San Diego, and was used to taking the pulse of those in the news. Laird asked his aide to apply his listening and observational skills to the POW/MIA wives and families. Capen would go to San Diego in March and take the temperature of the POW and MIA wives, parents, and families.5 Laird would be shocked at what Capen soon found out.
The atmosphere in the Miramar Officers’ Club was electric. Buzzing with angry POW and MIA wives and parents, it was a hornet’s nest of resentment erupting with repressed feelings and emotions. Years of accumulated government doubletalk had demoralized the group. But now they had a chance to express their concerns to a captive audience. This time the captives were the bureaucrats themselves.
Capen was only thirty-four, still a young man but confident of his skills and background. Frank Sieverts, special assistant to the deputy secretary of state and a POW from the Korean War, accompanied him. They had all arrived at Miramar to reassure the San Diego–area wives and families about the government’s position on the POW/MIA issue. If Capen, Sieverts, and company had expected a warm welcome, they were speedily disabused of this notion.
The POW/MIA wives and families had had enough of the previous administration’s vague directives and lack of response to their situation. By now many of the women had been single parents for three to four years. They were the heads of their households by default. Many had struggled financially, and all had suffered emotionally since their husbands’ shoot-downs.
The white gloves were off, and nothing would have pleased the group more than to throttle the slick government reps who seemed to think they knew it all. “The Washington Road Show,” as the wives cynically referred to these representatives sent to them from the State and Defense Departments, had five hundred angry and frustrated Navy wives from the San Diego area, as well as Air Force and Marine wives from the Los Angeles area, to answer to tonight. The lions were about to be unleashed upon the government’s unsuspecting gladiators.
An Air Force wife named Pat Burns was among the first to get up at the meeting, unveiling a framed painting she had created that she said represented the lack of empathy from the top Air Force officials. Based on her own experience with the military, Pat declared that the motto “The Air Force takes care of its own” was a joke. She slammed the painting on the floor in front of the astonished visitors, screaming, “Take it back to D.C. and give it to the generals running the war!” With that, she promptly stomped out of the room. (No description remains of this painting, but the artist’s conduct indicated its theme quite clearly.) After a stunned silence, wife after wife forced the representatives to confront the truth: the military’s “keep quiet” policy was a failure. It was only further endangering the POWs and MIAs by shrouding their situation in secrecy.6
Sybil added her voice to those of the other women at the Miramar meeting, stating her deep reservations concerning the “keep quiet” policy, noting that the longer the Vietnamese held the men, tortured them, starved them, and denied them medical treatment, the more likely they were to die in prison. If the American government planned to bring the men back alive, they had better publicize their plight to the world.7
Sybil spoke about her own negative experience with the “keep quiet” policy, noting that there had been no mail from the POWs since October. She confronted Capen, saying, “We need a change of policy by our Government. Things are getting worse instead of better. There is less mail instead of more. We want our Government leaders to stand up and criticize the North Vietnamese for not abiding by the Geneva Convention.”8 Due to their secret coding and undercover work with Boroughs, Sybil and many of the women present that night knew far more than anyone from the Road Show about what was going on in the North Vietnamese prison camps.
While confronting the Nixon administration’s delegates, Sybil and Karen were also tape-recording them. Their accomplice? Bob Boroughs, from Naval Intelligence. The maverick intelligence officer had rigged the two ladies up with tape recorders and speakers, which Sybil and Karen cleverly pinned to their bras. The government departments all distrusted one another, so the only way for the Navy to get an accurate report was to spy on the meeting. (Boroughs probably did this on his own without authorization.) Since the government was so clueless, Boroughs and the women he worked with decided it was time to do whatever it took to get the full picture. Sybil and Karen didn’t hesitate to comply with his taping request.
After Sybil spoke, she noticed that Capen kept staring at her. She started to worry about the tape recorder bulge in her bra—was it obvious? She also realized that her tape and Karen’s were running out. Ever resourceful, Sybil held up a printed sign that read, WE NEED A RESTROOM BREAK, and Capen promptly declared an intermission.9
The two women ran to the bathroom together, most likely giggling nervously, and flipped their tapes over to record the second half of the meeting. Other wives and parents got up and yelled some more. The delegates, by now speechless, must have known that if they wanted to make it out of the meeting alive, they had better relay the wives’ message back to D.C., pronto.
Capen vividly remembered the women’s anger that day: “It was therapeutic and we owed it to them. They needed to vent.”10 But what he had witnessed was far more than just venting. The women knew the American prisoners’ situation was deteriorating rapidly—their “venting” was a desperate cry for help before it was too late.
The young State Department bureaucrat returned to Washington with his attitude duly adjusted. He continued his research on the issue and was horrified by what he found out. On a Department of Defense weekend retreat in early May, he presented his findings to his boss, Laird. After reviewing the evidence, Capen learned what some of the POW wives already knew: that the men were being tortured and denied proper medical treatment, food, clothing, and mail privileges. They were often not even identified as being POWs. “When he heard Capen’s findings at the conference, Laird bellowed, ‘By God, we’re going to go public.’”11 Capen made sure to vet the idea with the military head honchos, especially Admiral John S. McCain Jr., whose son John remained a prisoner of the North Vietnamese. “Whatever you feel is right, do it,” he replied. Now they had the blank check they needed to move forward.12
Capen and Laird made it their joint mission to encourage and sustain the Nixon administration’s focus on the POW/MIA issue while National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger simultaneously juggled delicate negotiations with the North Vietnamese. The POW/MIA wives and families whom Capen had gone to placate in March had taught him and Laird what they needed to know on that issue. Now the women had gained the national platform they needed to amplify their message.
Despite this breakthrough, the POW situation remained urgent. The women’s tape recorders were not the only things running out of time.
On April 5, Sybil wrote a very frank letter to Admiral Moorer’s executive assistant, admitting that at home she did not always display the self-control she did when in public. “At home I rant, rave, cry, throw dishes and hurl invectives at both Washington and Hanoi.” Sybil also mentioned her “spies at the Pentagon” and her desire—indeed, requirement—that she meet with Nixon soon.13
Sybil was clearly letting the Navy and the government know that she had power, influence, and the ear of the POW and MIA families. Her thinly veiled references in her letter indicated that she and others might blow the whistle further if the government did not move quickly on the POW/MIA issue. She now had high-profile allies in the Pentagon in Laird, Capen, and Sieverts. Sybil received a speedy reply assuring her that things were indeed moving in the direction she desired. And then she got a message that she could not have imagined possible even a year earlier under LBJ.
Early on Monday morning, May 19, Dick Capen and Frank Sieverts phoned Sybil. Capen did most of the talking, in an excited manner. “Before you leave for school this morning, we wanted you to know that here in Washington, in just a few minutes, the secretary of defense is going to do the thing you’ve been wanting him to do for so long. He’s going to publicly denounce the North Vietnamese for their treatment of the American prisoners and for their violation of the Geneva Convention.”14 All the POW and MIA wives’ hard work was finally beginning to pay off. It was unbelievable that the government was finally listening, Sybil thought. “That was a real switch … The administration was publicly abandoning the ‘keep quiet’ policy as its predecessors should have done years before.”15
In his press release that day and in his televised address, Laird broke the government’s silence: “The North Vietnamese have claimed that they are treating our men humanely. I am distressed by the fact that there is clear evidence that this is not the case … The United States Government has urged that the enemy respect the requirements of the Geneva Convention. This they have refused to do.” Laird continued to tick through the list of North Vietnamese war crimes, including its leaders’ refusal to: provide a list of imprisoned and missing men; treat and release the sick and injured Americans; allow the free exchange of mail between prisoners and their families; and allow the inspection of the prisoner camps by an impartial organization such as the Red Cross.
Even more affecting were the graphic photos of prisoners that Capen distributed to the press that day. Obtained on the black market in North Vietnam, the pictures showed prisoners with injured and atrophied limbs, and men in solitary confinement. It was all out there now for the world to judge. It made only a minor splash in the American media at first, but the ripple effect in the wider world would be significant. In honor of July 4, the North Vietnamese decided to release three POWs. These men would prove to be perhaps the most valuable intelligence asset the Americans obtained during the course of the war.16
As she drove down the sunny California highway to her teaching job, Sybil suddenly realized that today (May 19) just happened to be North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh’s birthday. She must have smiled to herself, thinking that the Laird press conference was the perfect gift for “Uncle Ho.”17
As Sybil readied for her annual sojourn to Sunset Beach, Connecticut, she got a call from her friend and fellow POW wife Karen Butler. Karen’s sister had a contact with the West Coast editor of Look magazine in L.A., and she arranged an appointment for Sybil and Karen on June 20. Look was a slightly more literate version of today’s People magazine, featuring short articles and lots of color photos. The covers in 1969 featured John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Mia Farrow, and the Smothers Brothers.18
When they arrived in L.A., both women were impressed by the luxurious Look offices, with their giant glass windows offering panoramic views of the city. Karen and Sybil spent more than an hour talking to Look’s editor about the POW mistreatment. He seemed empathetic but a bit bored. This was clearly not a story he thought would work for his magazine. Sybil was distraught: all this time and effort, and no one seemed to care about the men’s plight. As she and Karen gathered their things to leave, the editor asked where he might get in touch with them on the off chance the magazine decided to run something. Both the women said to contact the secretary for the League of Wives in San Diego.
Flying home to San Diego that evening, Sybil and Karen had an epiphany. Sybil wrote in her diary: “We reasoned that we needed a national organization if we were going to get national publicity.” They had already worked together with women all over the country for the telegraph-ins to the new president as well as to the Vietnamese embassy in Paris. Letter-writing campaigns were taking place all over the country, too, coordinated by POW and MIA wives to raise awareness of the situation. Now, Sybil felt, “all we really needed was a name. On the airplane that day we decided to call ourselves ‘THE NATIONAL LEAGUE OF FAMILIES OF AMERICAN PRISONERS IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.’ We felt the MIAs were implicit in this group, and Karen and I agreed I would be the National Coordinator.”19
Later in July, Karen received a call from the editor, declining to do an article on the POWs or even the San Diego League. The POWs had been adequately covered in Look and Life magazines already, he explained. And the regional League might be better covered by a newspaper article. Karen’s heart sank, but then she remembered the new angle she and Sybil had conceived on the plane ride home from L.A. in June. She “casually mentioned the National League. This was followed by a noticeable increase of interest in his voice. He asked if I would call him when the organization was completed.”20 The women had found the key that unlocked their all-access press pass.
The National League, just an idea in the two POW wives’ minds a few weeks earlier, quickly became a reality. Sybil later recalled, “Never was an organization launched more efficiently. The fact that we paid our own expenses and didn’t know the first thing about the rules of organizing were a saving grace.”21
The POW/MIA wives, led by Sybil, took heart as they gained power first with their new government platform and next through their media contacts. Soon they would see themselves in Look, Reader’s Digest, The New York Times, and Good Housekeeping, as well as their local newspapers. Television interviews followed. All forms of media were finally picking up the story.22
It didn’t hurt the wives that they represented the late-sixties traditional feminine ideal so well. The New York Times’ “Food, Fashion, Family, Furnishings” reporter certainly took note of this—they were an easy sell to the American public. “The wives, for the most part, are slender, gracious and attractive. One man who met several of them described them as ‘pretty—like airline stewardesses.’ Some of them were stewardesses; Mrs. Tschudy, for example, flew for American Airlines for 10 months before she was married.”23 This favorable confluence of events finally began to push the POW and MIA wives forward, out of the shadows and into the media spotlight. Now the ladies were ready for their close-up.
In June of 1969, Louise Mulligan was the first POW/MIA wife on the East Coast to go public, in the Norfolk Ledger-Star. Before she did so, she sat her six boys (ages seven to eighteen at this point) down and warned them that their lives were about to change. Her decision would affect them all and put them all into the same media spotlight the wives were stepping into. She worried about her sons and about her husband’s reaction to her public fight when he returned. But the passing years without her husband had driven her to push the very buttons the State Department had originally warned Jane Denton not to mess with.
Louise also had a temperament that was well suited to speaking out. Like Sybil, Louise was convinced that this was the one and only way to rescue their husbands from a terrible fate. Jane Denton, Janie Tschudy, Dot McDaniel, Phyllis Galanti, and other Virginia POW and MIA wives admired her for this, even if some of them were not as strident in their approach. The women needed everyone’s talents, and all different kinds of personalities, to make their organization a success.24
That same August, Phyllis received a warm letter from Louise, explaining that she was the new National League’s area representative. She also related to Phyllis that she, Jane Denton, and another POW wife, Martha Doss, had all gotten letters brought back by Rennie Davis, the antiwar activist and top lieutenant for the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. While no one was happy about who was relaying this information, any communication from the men was treasured. Louise noted of her letter from Jim, “Mine was dated July 7th and sounded good. Says he’s gaining weight, hope so.” She went on to say that several of the women from her area had been in Washington and had lunch with a newly released Navy POW, Lieutenant Robert Frishman, who gave them encouraging news. “He said that morale was tremendously high and felt that we were worrying more than the men.”25
Rennie Davis himself had brought Frishman, Navy petty officer second class Douglas Hegdahl, and Air Force captain Wesley Rumble back along with the mail. The men had not sought early release, but Rumble and Frishman were both seriously injured and thus deemed by their Communist captors as good candidates for early release. The North Vietnamese considered Hegdahl “the incredibly stupid one,” but he was, in the words of fellow POW Gerald “Jerry” Coffee, “dumb like a fox.”26 Once he was released, Hegdahl “turned out to be a gold mine of information. To the tune of ‘Old MacDonald Had a Farm,’ he had memorized the names of more than two hundred prisoners.”27
For his part, Frishman confirmed at a press conference on September 2 that Hanoi was indeed lying about providing “humane” treatment to the prisoners. He began by “refuting that claim by listing the abuse he and others had endured: the withholding of mail and lack of medical care, long periods of solitary confinement, torture, and forced confessions.”28 Later, when Rumble, the most seriously injured returnee, recovered, he was also able to give his debriefers his own list of prisoners, which was cross-checked with Hegdahl’s original one.29 This was part of the ripple effect of going public—a huge break for military intelligence, the wives, and the POWs and MIAs themselves.
The antiwar and peace activists, like Davis, Cora Weiss, and many others, seemed to have swallowed whole the North Vietnamese line that the prisoners were being treated well, perhaps to support their personal political agenda. Despite so much evidence to the contrary, Weiss still questioned Frishman and Hegdahl’s account, and she was highly skeptical of their torture reports. “Weiss flippantly dismissed Frishman’s arm injury with the comment that ‘since he was captured as a “war criminal,” he was lucky to have an arm at all.’”30 Weiss and her crew continued to blatantly deny the facts and to create their own fictional world where prisoners of war were treated as honored guests by their North Vietnamese hosts. It was clear by now that nothing could be further from the truth. The motives of the most radical antiwar groups, who wanted to stop the war at any cost, were mixed at best, self-serving at worst.
Between the POW/MIA wives’ going public in 1968 and ’69, the formation of a National League, Laird and Capen’s “go public” efforts, and new intelligence, the more radical antiwar groups appeared to be North Vietnamese sympathizers. Still, they remained the most reliable and consistent source of mail and packages for the POWs. Their work continued, and many POW wives remained trapped in this uneasy but necessary alliance. Phyllis Galanti, among many others, publicly acknowledged the growing dependence of POW wives upon antiwar activists. “Let’s face it,” she said, “it’s too valuable a source to dismiss. It’s the only way I’m getting mail.”31
While Louise, Jane, and others had recently received news about their husbands, MIA wife Helene Knapp remained in the dark regarding her husband’s fate. In an interview with the Sunday Denver Post, Helene described the limbo of not knowing the truth about her husband’s disappearance. “It’s like I lived until two-and-a-half years ago [when Herman was shot down] and then my life stopped,” she revealed. “It’s been such a lonely wait. And, each morning I think maybe today I’ll know for sure.”
Helene’s home remained full of mementos of her husband, like the bronze plaque inscribed with the words FLY HIGH, FLY TRUE, FLY PROUD, a gift Herman had sent to his son, Robbie, on his third birthday. The plaque, a bronzed copy of Herman’s favorite poem, “High Flight,” by John Gillespie Magee, and his picture were displayed on a wall near the front door of the Knapp home. Helene placed these precious items there because “this is his home. I don’t want that forgotten.” It was still possible, Helene must have thought, that Herm might walk through the door one day and scoop up her, Robbie, and Cindy in his arms.
Like Sybil, Helene was not one to sit around and wait for things to happen to her. She was by nature a worker bee, full of energy and curiosity. Helene and her fellow Colorado Springs MIA wife Mary Dodge had recently gone to D.C. to support the passage of a congressional resolution demanding humane treatment for all American POWs as well as a full accounting of all the prisoners. Both Helene and Mary were members of Sybil’s National League of Families and among the first members of the Colorado branch of the League. Mary was currently serving as the League regional coordinator for five states: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Montana, and Idaho.32
Another military wife had joined the fight in the Springs. Joan Pollard, whose husband, Air Force captain Benjamin Pollard, had been shot down on May 15, 1967, had just moved back to town in September of 1970, after three and a half years living in Shelbyville, Kentucky, her husband’s hometown. While everyone there was solicitous and supportive of her, she felt isolated and alone as an MIA wife there.
Joan eventually heard about MIA and POW wives in other states. This sorority’s members began to reach out to one another across state lines. Sybil’s informal newsletters also found their way into Joan’s hands. “Sybil knew more than anybody else did” at that time, Joan recalled. She felt less alone, more part of a group, because of this. There were others like her who “got it” and understood her position of not knowing if her husband was alive or dead. Joan knew Ben was alive somehow. But no one really believed her in Shelbyville.
Joan and Ben had been an integral part of the Air Force Academy community when he was recruited to teach there in the mid-sixties. He was part of the nascent astronautics program there, as well as a professor of aeronautics. He and Joan were a popular young couple, and she was soon elected president of the wives’ club. Through this position, she and Ben met many prominent and well-known people from all across the state and the country at Air Force social events, and she still had many friends among the Air Force Academy faculty. Joan decided that was where she and her two children, twelve-year-old Mark and seven-year-old Ginny, needed to be. There she would be part of the Air Force community and perhaps help with the POW/MIA problem. She enrolled Mark at Washington Irving Junior High and Ginny at Longfellow Elementary, in Colorado Springs.
Joan had been in the Springs scarcely two weeks when she attended an evening meeting at Peterson Air Force Base and was volunteered to help with the local POW/MIA situation by the Air Force chaplain, Chris Martin. She barely knew what she was getting into, but she didn’t hesitate to join the cause. Joan soon meet Helene through their joint advocacy. The two women had very different personalities and might never have met under other circumstances. But they shared a common cause and began working together in the Springs.
Joan would talk to anyone and was a skilled public speaker with great contacts. “I’d speak anywhere anybody asked me to,” she said. She was the first woman ever to speak at one local men’s club and later could still recall the utter silence when she began her speech.
One dark and rainy night, she showed up at the famous Broadmoor resort to tell her story. Only four men sat at the bar, and, while they invited her to join them for a beer, she felt they were all more interested in the baseball game on TV than the POWs and MIAs. “You win some, you lose some,” she thought as she braved terrible weather to get home.
The next day, she got a call from one of the men who she thought had been only mildly interested in her plight. “Call me anytime,” he said, “anything you need, I will help you.” A prominent local businessman, he would become one of the local POW/MIA group’s staunchest supporters.33
In tandem with Joan, Helene was becoming more and more involved with the POW/MIA movement, but she was still struggling with her new status. Though she’d had a gut feeling that Herman might be dead when she was first told that he was missing, now she wasn’t so sure. Aside from the terrible grief she felt, she was also experiencing a loss of her former identity and sense of self. Like other women who had become POW and MIA wives before her, she didn’t fit into any neat category as she had before, as the wife of an Air Force pilot and a mom. Just like her new friend Joan, she was both mother and father, homemaker and activist, the glue that held her family together despite the gnawing sense of grief that threatened to tear her apart. She had no concrete answer for the question so many in her situation were asking themselves: was she a wife or a widow?
That same September, Sybil, as the new National League coordinator, and a delegation of five other National League members went to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese representatives. The trip was undertaken without any sponsorship by the U.S. government. Sybil wrote to government officials before the trip, to reassure them but also to put them on notice as to the group’s intent: “Our trip should in no way be interpreted as reflecting discredit on our own government. However, we are going independently, and without government sponsorship.”
Though the government was helping some behind the scenes, the League deliberately occupied a humanitarian, nonpolitical perch. This stance would prove both strategic and wise on the League’s part. As they had found out over the years, any tinge of overt government control could quickly taint the group in the media’s eyes and in the eyes of the American public. A neutral humanitarian approach was the correct play.
Fortunately, the League members had found financial sponsors in an aviation company, Fairchild Hiller, and Reader’s Digest. The group left for Paris on Sunday, September 28, and would meet with the North Vietnamese delegation in Paris regarding both the American prisoners and the missing in Vietnam.34
The League delegation’s composition reflected its multiple viewpoints. Members of the group represented each branch of the armed forces and both enlisted men and officers. The six individuals included one missing-in-action father, Thomas “Tom” Swain, and five wives: Mary Ann “Pat” Mearns, Nancy Perisho, Candy Parish, Andrea Rander, and Sybil. Andrea was the only black member of the delegation. Though African Americans formed a huge percentage of combat troops in Vietnam by 1967 (23 percent), only 2 percent of blacks were officers in the Air Force, Navy, or Marine Corps. Since most of the POWs were officers, a similarly small percentage of those POWs were black.35 Donald Rander was among that small percentage of POWs who were both African American and Army.
Andrea recalled that she had received the call to go to Paris while she was at work one day. To this day, she is not sure who the call was from, but it may have come from the same Air Force wife who had called Sybil to join the group.36 The person on the other end of the line asked her to go to Paris without many details. The first thing the POW wife wanted to know was: Why? When the purpose of the trip was explained to her—that the group would be going to try to obtain information about their missing and imprisoned men—Andrea was intrigued, but she explained that she would have to find childcare for her two daughters before committing. Government officials and trip organizers almost always forgot that most of the POW and MIA wives had children at home and were basically single mothers. They couldn’t just leave the kids alone at a moment’s notice. Thank goodness Andrea had a great babysitter, just four doors down, who could help, as well as family members on the East Coast.37
She was used to running things on her own and juggling a busy schedule. She also knew a thing or two about managing tough situations, thanks to her day job monitoring the crisis hotline at work. All these management and coping skills would serve her well on her mission to Paris. Andrea used her savings and borrowed funds from relatives to make the trip, leaving her two daughters, seven-year-old Lysa and two-year-old Donna Page, with her neighbor and grandmother, respectively.38 This trip to Paris would mark the beginning of her activism.
The big issue on Andrea’s mind when she made this trip was rank, not race. She recalled, “My experiences growing up in NYC allowed me to be very flexible and open about the race issue. So when it got to the point where I’m with the women to go to Paris … I felt a little twinge because I was not the rank that the other women were. The race part did not enter my mind.” As the wife of an enlisted Army man, Andrea was briefly intimidated to be among older, more senior wives from other branches of the military. But it didn’t take long for the ranks and the branch differences to vanish. “It wasn’t as distinct as it could have been … because we knew what our goal was. The common goal was that we were seeking information about our husbands. This became more important than anything else as this trip developed.”39
Once in Paris, the group checked into the InterContinental Hotel, a luxurious spot chosen for its superior phone service and its proximity to the American embassy. The hotel was in one of the most fashionable neighborhoods in Paris, not too far from the chic shops on the Rue de Rivoli and near the Champs-Élysées, but these pleasures were of little consequence to the dispirited visitors. Exhausted from both nerves and their transatlantic flight, the delegates dumped their bags in the plush lobby and began to plot strategy for the week.
By now, Sybil and Jim were deep into their covert communications work with Bob Boroughs at the State Department. Though blessed with a strong constitution and a calm demeanor, Sybil was terrified that the North Vietnamese were on to her. She thanked God for the Seconal sleeping pills she had brought with her to get her through the long nights of waiting.
The League delegation met each morning to review plans as the tension mounted and minor quibbles erupted. But still, they decided to stick it out until the Vietnamese agreed to see them. Sybil called each day for an appointment, and each day she was put off. After a week of tense waiting, the group was finally granted an audience at the North Vietnamese embassy on Saturday, October 4. Sybil was so nervous that day that “three times I went into the bathroom and had dry heaves as never before in my life. My whole digestive system seemed to be pushing itself way up into my throat.” The only plus from this unpleasant experience was that Sybil was so worn out that she felt a sense of calm when she finally entered the embassy. She wore a favorite bright-pink wool suit, bought in 1965 for her husband’s last change-of-command ceremony. Perhaps, she thought, it would bring her luck.40
Sybil’s blood ran cold as Xuan Oanh, the head of the North Vietnamese delegation, greeted her with “We know all about you, Mrs. Stockdale,” holding up a photo of her on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “We know you are the organizer.” Well, thank God, Sybil thought with relief. At least they don’t know any more than that! 41
To her colleagues, Sybil seemed cool and unflappable. Andrea noted later, “I remember her being so calm and I thought, ‘How is she doing this?’” The Army POW wife had deep faith in Sybil and her leadership abilities. “I looked at her as a teacher, trainer, reader and writer—she was keeping all the notes for us.” During the meeting, Andrea kept reassuring herself, Sybil’s going to get us out of this. We’re going to walk out of here and these men are going to be free! “I was being unrealistic,” Andrea recalled, “but I was thinking this was going to end—not the war, necessarily, but the situation with the men.”42
Sybil, Andrea, and each member of her delegation then demanded information about their POW and MIA family members. They also delivered hundreds of letters of inquiry they had brought with them from POW/MIA families at home. Andrea specifically carried letters for the men (her husband among them) believed to be held in South Vietnam.43 In between, they drank gallons of tea and ate Vietnamese candies and French crackers, not daring to offend their hosts by refusing the refreshments.
Andrea recalled the two-and-a-half-hour meeting as one long propaganda fest. “The women were questioned about their husbands, shown movies of napalm bombing, and urged to participate in peace movements.” The North Vietnamese representatives promised Andrea that every effort would be made to arrange an interview for her with Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the foreign minister and chief negotiator for the National Liberation Front (NLF).44
Before the group finally parted from their hosts, the mood had lightened somewhat. Sybil recalled: “We got the recipe for the candy, exchanged American cigarettes for Vietnamese cigarettes, and even took souvenir toilet paper from their bathroom.”45 Andrea remembered thinking that the whole place must be bugged.46
The Vietnamese gave them no information of substance or real promises to help. Andrea never did get to see Madame Binh. What the delegation did receive from the enemy was unintended: the publicity generated by the visit shone the world spotlight on the POW/MIA plight once again.
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