IN LATE DECEMBER OF 1969, uber-wealthy Dallas businessman Ross Perot chartered two Braniff Boeing 707s in an attempt to deliver food, medicine, and Christmas gifts to American POWs held in Vietnam. In November, Perot had formed and funded the POW/MIA awareness group United We Stand. The organization supported the office of the president and spent $1 million on newspaper and television advertisements to promote awareness of the POW/MIA situation.1
Perot had recently begun to work with the Nixon White House, POW family organizations, and Congress to spotlight the POW/MIA issue.2 The wiry, crew-cut Texan, president of Electronic Data Systems, took these actions as a private citizen, without official U.S. government backing but with Nixon and Kissinger’s tacit approval. Perot had been recruited by Melvin Laird and Dick Capen to be part of Laird’s POW Task Force and would prove to be “the sharpest burr … in the saddle of Hanoi.”3
A 1957 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (the alma mater of so many downed airmen, like Jim Stockdale and Jerry Denton), Perot attributed much of his success to his Navy leadership and being a person of decisive action.4 He was moved by the plight of the women and children left behind by the American servicemen taken prisoner and missing in action. Dallas-area POW/MIA wives had come to him seeking help.
One of these women, MIA wife Bonnie Singleton, had a son who had never met his father. She contacted Perot for assistance on behalf of the local POW/MIA wives. Sybil would later refer to Bonnie as “a real fireburner.”5 Bonnie’s fellow POW/MIA wives in Texas respected her courage and outspokenness. Her friend and fellow Texas MIA wife Sallie Stratton remembered, “Bonnie was very active and I met her right away at the very first meeting of the area POW/MIA wives at Shirley Johnson’s home. She was always very outspoken and at the time, more radical than I, but I admired her tremendously.”6
Perot decided to deliver aid—Texas style. His first action under the United We Stand banner was to advertise the issue on a national scale. On November 9, which Nixon had declared a National Day of Prayer and Concern for the prisoners of war in Vietnam, Perot ran full-page ads in major newspapers across the country. These vivid images featured “two small children praying ‘Bring our Daddy home safe, sound, and soon’ … The ads demanded that the ‘North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong … Release the prisoners now.’”7
Sybil must have jumped up and down for joy. Finally, this was the anti–North Vietnamese propaganda campaign she had been praying for. She had suggested this kind of effort years earlier to the Navy and the government, but to no avail. Because of his timing, money, and influence—and, no doubt, his being male—Perot was the one finally able to implement the anti-Communist campaign of Sybil’s dreams. Soon she would be working more directly with the Dallas businessman. The ads were only the beginning of the Perot Pressure Plan.
On December 21, Perot’s chartered Boeing 707 Peace on Earth was loaded up with fourteen hundred meals and other supplies to be transported to Hanoi for Vietnam POWs. The Braniff jet, sporting a gigantic red-ribbon decal, left Dallas Love Field that morning for Honolulu, Wake Island, Hong Kong, Bangkok, and finally Vientiane, in the country of Laos. The weary Perot entourage, accompanied by a stewardess/translator, finally met with a North Vietnamese representative and officials from the Pathet Lao at that group’s headquarters, in Vientiane. Here they learned that the North Vietnamese would not let them land in Hanoi.
The rejected and dejected group returned to Bangkok via private plane to regroup and meet with North Vietnamese embassy officials. There, the group was informed that their delivery would have to be sent to Hanoi via Russia. “North Vietnam has said it would accept Perot’s gifts, reportedly worth $400,000, only through the Soviet channel.”8
Hanoi lay just three hundred miles to the northeast of Vientiane. A plane flight there would have taken just over an hour and twenty minutes.9 Frustrated, the group next proceeded to Tokyo, then on to Anchorage, Alaska, where all the supplies had to be repackaged to fit Russian freight mail regulations. The entire local community pitched in: military, students, and other volunteers. Incredibly, the whole operation was completed in less than six hours. The flight ultimately landed in Copenhagen. After more meetings in Denmark at the Russian embassy, Perot realized that the delivery mission was futile. “The Russians were just as difficult as the NVA [the North Vietnamese Army] and Perot decided to scrub the mission completely.”10
The Perot entourage returned to Dallas on New Year’s Day 1970. They had not delivered any Christmas meals, but they had achieved something perhaps more valuable: they had served up a heaping helping of bad publicity for the North Vietnamese. The world had been watching the beribboned jet on television as it was shunted from one destination to the next, first by the North Vietnamese and then by the Russians. The fact that the generous Texas Santa and his jet sleigh were barred from delivering much-needed supplies to American prisoners rubbed the noses of the North Vietnamese and the Russians in another pile of negative publicity.
It was a calculated move on Perot’s part, eliciting even more sympathy for the American prisoners. When he was interviewed upon his return to the States, the tech magnate drawled, “My new year’s resolution is to quadruple my efforts to help the POWs.”11 More than a year later, Perot clarified the trip’s primary objective: “The purpose of the Christmas trip was not to take packages to prisoners, but to put the North Vietnamese in the position where they had to talk. We wanted to create a pressure-cooker situation where they had to see us. They didn’t have to love us, but they had to see us.”12 Perot historian Libby Craft affirmed, “The primary objective was to embarrass and try the North Vietnamese in the court of public opinion to get them to the ‘table’ to discuss the POW/MIA situation. The humanitarian objective was to do everything possible to improve the circumstances and secure the release of the men held in Southeast Asia.”13
Like Sybil, Jane, Louise, Phyllis, Andrea, and many other POW and MIA wives, the businessman fully understood the value of publicity. He also had something in abundance that most military wives did not. As one reporter noted, the Christmas flights were a “diplomatic blitz with Perot supplying the most needed resource: money.”14 As MIA wife and later League coordinator Evelyn Grubb noted: “We’re grateful to Ross Perot for his faith, his help, and his outreach with a strong hand and for putting his money where his mouth was!”15
Perot’s support extended beyond the financial. Laird’s second in command, Dick Capen, recalled that the Texan’s greatest gift “was to give hope and support to the families when they badly needed it.”16 He would soon become the POW/MIA movement’s most tireless private-sector champion.
On Christmas Day 1969, Perot had sent another Braniff jet to Paris for the latest round of the Paris peace talks. The spanking-new red Douglas DC-8 carried precious cargo: fifty-eight POW wives and ninety-four POW children. This time, the wives would attempt to plead with the North Vietnamese representatives in Paris for the American prisoners’ release. MIA wife Kathleen Johnson, from Kansas, was on that flight, which she dubbed The Spirit of Christmas. Her husband, Army captain Bruce Johnson, was one of the early American advisers sent to Vietnam in July of 1964 after attending SERE school in California and undergoing extensive Vietnamese language training. His helicopter had been hit by enemy fire on June 10, 1965—just a month before he was due home from his Vietnam tour. Bruce had been listed as missing in action since that time.
Kathleen recalled that all the women, some with their children, had met up in New York to fly to Paris the next day. Kathleen took her three children, Bruce (ten), Bryan (eight), and Colleen (six), on the flight with her.17
The next day, every seat on the plane was filled. All the families on the flight were hopeful that their efforts might lead to a breakthrough. Bruce recalled, “By then, it had been four and a half years since Dad had been missing. We were still certain that our dad was alive and that we might have contact with him soon.” The rules for this flight were much looser than those governing flights today. At a certain point, the kids were free to move around the cabin as they wished. Bruce decided to hang out around the cockpit. One of the pilots noticed him and beckoned for him to come inside. “Hey, you wanna fly this thing?” The pilot put Bruce in his seat and he even let him turn the dials. What kid would not love this? The pilot winked at Bruce: “Keep this under your hat!” Bruce nodded shyly, but he was bursting with excitement and had to tell his brother, Bryan, about it. To be noticed like that and made to feel special meant a lot to Bruce. He had felt immense pressure since his father left, but that pressure did not come from his mother. It was perhaps self-imposed. “Be the man of the house” was certainly something many military dads told their sons as they left for their tours of duty. As the oldest boy, Bruce felt responsible for his mom and his younger siblings. “I was focused on making Dad proud when he came back.”
It was also a revelation for Bruce to meet other POW/MIA kids in a large group like this one. “It was the first time we had interacted with kids in the same situation.” He realized he was not alone, not the only one in this nightmare scenario. Like their wives, the children found comfort in their shared experience. Bruce remembered meeting Andrea Rander and her two daughters, Lysa and Donna Page, on the flight. One of the girls had brought her baby doll with her for the trip. Bruce’s sister, Colleen, had brought her own baby doll as well. He noted how kind Mrs. Rander was and how Andrea and his mother had an instant positive connection: the two women were not only both POW/MIA wives, but they were both Army wives.18 There were few Army wives in the group or among the POWs and MIAs in general since the Air Force and the Navy accounted for most of the prisoners of war and missing during the Vietnam War. There were even fewer African American POWs and MIAs; Andrea was in a very small minority of African American POW wives and the only black woman on the Perot trip.
Under President Harry S. Truman, Executive Order 9981 officially desegregated the armed forces in 1948, but some units remained segregated until as late as 1954. The Vietnam War was the first major conflict to see a fully integrated military.19 Vietnam War historian Marc Leepson noted, “Because of the draft, the racial composition of the Army during the Vietnam War—and to a lesser extent the Marine Corps—more or less reflected the racial composition of society in general. That was not true, though, in the Navy and Air Force, since those two services rarely had trouble filling their enlistment quotas, and African Americans served in those branches in much less representative numbers. And it was starkly different in the National Guard and Reserves.”20 Indeed, in 1969–70, “only about 1 percent of all [National] guardsmen were black.”21
By 1969, when the Perot flight took place, African American servicemen made up 13.3 percent of all the personnel in the Army and the Marine Corps.22 However, the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard tended to be much less diverse, mainly because those branches had enough volunteers and did not participate in the draft.23 “While many draft-eligible men voluntarily enlisted in the Navy and Air Force—as those branches were perceived to be less dangerous—the draft itself conscripted men into the Army and, to a lesser extent, the Marines.”24
During the flight, Kathleen was one of three women asked to be spokeswomen for the group. So was Andrea Rander. Both Andrea and Kathleen had attended the December 12 meeting at the White House for POW and MIA wives as representatives of Army families. Margaret Fisher, the wife of an Air Force pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, was the third representative.25 The women on board the Paris flight felt that this was a purely humanitarian mission. “We didn’t go for political reasons. We only went for our men,” recalled Kathleen.
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 Program.”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 organization 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
POW and MIA wives were forced to consume propaganda from the North Vietnamese strained through COLIAFAM’s antiwar/“peace” filter. Peace didn’t really mean peace: instead it meant pro-Communist rhetoric. Like the North Vietnamese pig-fat soup their husbands had to eat to survive, the POW wives were force-fed an antiwar propaganda diet. They had to accept this if they wanted their letters to go through. Those who refused, like Navy POW Edwin “Ned” Shuman’s wife, Eleanor Sue Allen Shuman, were punished by having their mail cut off. Sue would later tell a Congressional Hearing Committee of her near nervous breakdown during that time.56
By early 1970, a great number of the POW/MIA wives appeared to be playing by the COLIAFAM rules. But these women had learned quite a bit under the LBJ regime about underground resistance and managing difficult people. The women had taken on their own government and had made critical progress. They had helped reject one ineffective administration, and now they were being given more attention under a new president whose goals meshed more favorably with their own. Next, they would use the peace activists to further their communications with their husbands and to help with accounting for the missing, accepting (but not buying) peace propaganda as a price to be paid.
While the peace activists might be the power brokers in Hanoi, the POW wives were on their way to becoming an even more powerful lobby in Washington. Sybil, Jane, Phyllis, Andrea, Louise, Helene, and hundreds of other wives were about to have a showdown in the nation’s capital, supported by a posse of patriots: their new champion, Texas cowboy Ross Perot; Kansas senator and decorated World War II veteran Bob Dole; American astronauts like Apollo 13 commander James A. Lovell (many astronauts of the era were former test pilots and sometime drinking buddies of certain POWs); and even the Duke, western movie star John Wayne. The cavalry was coming, if the wives could hold the fort down just a bit longer.