WHEN PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON was inaugurated for the second time, on January 20, 1965, his address to the nation mirrored his character: “It was pragmatic rather than poetic, utilitarian rather than inspirational,” remarked the Associated Press. LBJ’s delivery lacked the smooth theatrics and aristocratic cadences of JFK: “It was so slow and deliberate that one critic said it sounded as if the president was dictating to a stonemason.”1 In contrast to Kennedy’s gossamer Camelot, the Johnson administration was clearly earthbound.
LBJ promised that all Americans would be part of his “Great Society,” where everyone would be a valued part of the national community. Minorities would be respected, immigrants encouraged to rise, the environment protected. It would be a democracy where, he promised, “every man must someday be free.”2
What about prisoners of war and those missing in action? They were barely on LBJ’s radar at this point.
And American women? They did not even rate a mention in his speech.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned sex discrimination in employment along with race discrimination. But as the law went into effect, Johnson and his administration just rolled their collective eyeballs. “The sex discrimination part had been tacked on as a joke and a delaying maneuver,” wrote Betty Friedan. “After the law went into effect, the administrator in charge of enforcing it joked about the ban on sex discrimination. ‘It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies,’ he said.”3
This attitude was typical of the time. In this pre-feminist era, women were expected to tolerate discriminatory jokes and innuendos without complaint. Highly educated women like Sybil Stockdale and Jane Denton accepted and embraced the concept that their primary duty was to be a wife and mother. How had these women arrived at that point of view?
When America was founded, women and men alike were just trying to survive. The defining of roles was of little concern to women initially as they endeavored to keep their families alive in the New World. By the eighteenth century, some women were beginning to think more critically about what their place in society should or could be. After allowing women a period of relative freedom in the pre–Revolutionary War era, American men once again tried to confine them, to categorize them and contain them as much as possible. More leisure time among the upper classes also allowed men more time to write about and define gender roles to their own advantage.
The American eighteenth-century concept of “republican motherhood” created “an ideology that gave women a political function, that of raising children to be moral, virtuous citizens of the new republic.” Also called moral motherhood, this role did afford women a place in the new republic, although they were not allowed distinct political roles outside the home.4
American women’s status in the nineteenth century devolved still further, reducing women (at least those of the upper classes who could afford it) to Victorian goddesses of the hearth whom society decided had no business being anywhere else. According to nineteenth-century lecturer and physician Dr. Charles Meigs, women had “a head almost too small for intellect and just big enough for love.”5
Beginning in the 1820s, the “cult of true womanhood” gained precedence, reaching its peak after the Civil War. This cult identified four key womanly virtues: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. A woman’s “job” was to act as the spiritual and moral guardian of the family.6 Ideal Woman’s next incarnation evolved slightly: the New Woman, with her pert Gibson girl nose and sporty mien, was more independent. Under the Nineteenth Amendment, women were finally granted the right to vote. Free-thinking “flappers” like Zelda Fitzgerald, Josephine Baker, and Clara Bow dominated literature, pop culture, and movie screens in the mid- to late twenties. Still, society’s collective vision that a woman’s ultimate objective should be marriage and children remained largely unchanged.
World War II presented a turning point for American women’s history: Rosie the Riveter, the idealization of the can-do American female worker, arrived on the scene. Women were called to work in the factory, just as American women had been called to work on the farm during the Revolutionary War, to fill in for the men who’d gone off to fight. The war economy demanded that women use their brains and muscles for the good of America. But this independent, highly competent working woman would (at least temporarily) disappear as the need for female labor evaporated after the conflict.
The postwar economic boom of the fifties brought the relative luxury of automatic dishwashers, shiny new cars, and, most important, television. This magic square box updated and then further cemented the vision of women as domestic goddesses. Harriet Nelson, June Cleaver, Donna Reed—they were all Hollywood concepts pitched to and accepted by American consumers. Rosie the Riveter was plucked from her perch in the factory and set firmly into place in the household environment. Instead of her factory denim, she now sported a crisp shirtdress. Her bandanna headband was replaced by bouffant hair set with Dippity-do. This formerly powerful paid worker now stayed home with children and wielded a vacuum instead of a blowtorch. After one step forward, most American women took more than two steps back.
In the fall of 1965, Sybil was completely content. She did not see herself as oppressed, deprived, or downtrodden. She found her role as a mother and wife fulfilling. Her three oldest boys, Jimmy, Sid, and Stanford, were all in school full time—only her youngest, Taylor, was home with her all day, so she was able to do a little tutoring in the afternoons to keep her mind occupied. The only thing she regretted was her husband’s absence. Jim’s deployment would be over in December, she reminded herself. Sybil had always been good at keeping busy: years as a Navy wife had taught her the value of distraction and constant activity, and finding those things was not a tall order with four energetic boys to manage.
On the afternoon of September 9, 1965, with the boys finally enrolled in school, Sybil accepted an invitation to see Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! in San Diego—a play she and Jim had seen together in Japan that summer. The songs made her a bit sad as she thought about the romantic time she and Jim had spent together in July during his leave. No children, hot Japanese baths, cocktails! Now the boys were back to school and she was back to her daily routine in Coronado.
Sybil went home after the play, fixed a quick supper for the boys, and was shortening up the boys’ pants for school at about 9 p.m. when her best friend, Doyen Salzig, suddenly appeared on the stairs. Startled, Sybil asked what in the world Doyen was doing there so late.
Doyen pulled Sybil close to her and whispered, “Sybil, Jim is missing,” her voice cracking on the word “missing.”
It was as if Doyen were speaking underwater or in another language that Sybil did not understand. What was she talking about? This made no sense at all. What the hell did it mean, “missing”? Sybil thought. You are either dead or alive. She felt sluggish, as if she were struggling through a nightmare.
“What do you mean, ‘missing’? Is he dead?”
“We don’t know, Sybil. His plane was shot down and they think he may have gotten out, but we don’t know. The chaplain is downstairs talking to Jimmy.”7
Sybil’s reaction was more stoic than she herself would have expected: “No tears gushed forth. No screams of anguish. Just a puzzling sensation of shock that this was happening to me.” Then, later, the panic set in. “I began to shake all over.” Doyen ended up spending the night with Sybil and her boys on the sleeping porch.8
Then there was the terrible task of explaining the situation to her children. Jim Jr., a high school sophomore at the time of his father’s shoot-down, tried hard to be a grown-up and help his mother. Sid, at eleven, cried his eyes out. Her youngest, Taylor, was too little to understand what was going on.
Six-year-old Stanford, or “Stan,” was the one whose expression of condolence Sybil would never forget. Stan was a striking little boy with black hair and his father’s big, round blue eyes. He snuck up on his mother quietly one day while she was doing the laundry. Looking Sybil straight in the eye, he said, “Mom, I’m so sorry about Dad.” Sybil thought she might cry but managed to whisper back, “Thank you, sweetheart” as she wrapped him up in her arms along with the laundry.9
The POW/MIA children suffered from shock and despair just as much as their mothers did. When Jim Stockdale was shot down, his second son, Sid, was about to begin sixth grade. The day in early September of 1965 when he rode his bike to school to pick up the information packet for the first day of classes, “all the other moms were looking at me sympathetically and saying things like ‘Isn’t it sad that he’s here all alone.’”10
How could Sybil explain to Sid and her other children that their dad might never be coming home? Perhaps all the Stockdales realized this possibility on some level, but it was best to shut the thought out, to lock it up and throw away the key to get through the day.
POW and MIA wives on the East Coast were struggling with the same issues as their West Coast counterparts like Sybil, and experiencing a bewildering silent treatment from the American government. After her Air Force pilot husband, Wilmer Newlin “Newk” Grubb, was shot down in January of 1966, Virginia POW wife Evelyn “Evie” Grubb knew immediately “that our children and I were an unwanted problem for the senior Air Force commanders in the United States. They didn’t appear to have too much training in handling this kind of situation. I was expected to sit down, shut up, keep a low profile, and not bother them with questions.”11
Some military husbands had the foresight to give their wives power of attorney when they departed for their tours in Vietnam. These wives were luckier than most. Without that (and even sometimes with that), POW and MIA wives could not complete day-to-day financial household management in the absence of their spouses. Some could not draw their husbands’ pay, which accumulated in special accounts while they were held prisoner. Many could not buy or register a car, create and manage a mortgage, refinance, rent an apartment, or buy a house.
The women needed their husbands’ signatures to do anything on their own. When your husband was locked up in the Hanoi Hilton, this signature was impossible to obtain. If your husband was shot down in the jungle and listed as an MIA, he generally did not leave a forwarding address. Without her husband’s written endorsement, a POW/MIA wife and her family could be denied funds for their basic financial needs. Any legal bills that arose for these families from trying to combat such issues also had to be borne by the women.
When the Pentagon was asked to comment on the unique problems facing this population, a spokesman nonchalantly replied that these issues were “normal things that must be put up with when a man is missing or captured. Anyone with someone missing or captured will hit snags.” This same spokesman advised POW/MIA families, “Don’t write anything that would bring a flood of letters or calls … It would create unnecessary problems.”12
These two important groups, women and POW/MIAs, were shut out from LBJ’s Great Society. While the men lived in prison cells in Vietnam, their wives were trapped by their own service protocols, endemic societal prejudice, and, worst of all, their own government representatives. Most 1960s D.C. politicos didn’t even bother to hide their disdain: What could women possibly know about war and diplomacy? The ins and outs of negotiation? Their husbands’ fates?
As it turned out, plenty. By late 1966, the realization was sinking in among the POW and MIA wives that they were low priority on the Johnson administration agenda. LBJ happily appeared in photos with these wives (Smile for the cameras, ladies!), but he avoided meeting with them one-on-one or even in groups to discuss their concerns in depth.13 Sybil realized early on that LBJ couldn’t have cared less about the women and their concerns. “What truly infuriated her … was the Johnson State Department’s benign neglect.”14 This neglect would turn out to be anything but benign, endangering the prisoners as time went on.
Though the State Department all but ignored the plight of the women, the military assigned a casualty assistance calls officer (CACO) to each POW and MIA family. These officers often acted like surrogate heads of the families. Some were helpful and dedicated, their presence greatly appreciated by certain POW and MIA wives. Dorothy McDaniel, whose husband, naval captain Eugene Baker “Red” McDaniel, was shot down in May of 1966, felt strongly that “Navy casualty assistance was … outstanding, and I was grateful to those who worked so diligently to make my life easier as the wife of a missing serviceman.”15
Other wives were not as enthusiastic as Dorothy about their assigned CACO liaisons. Sybil soon informed the Navy about the inadequacies of the system. She felt the CACO officers meant well, but most were too young and clueless to know how to deal with the POW and MIA families sensitively. In September of 1966, she wrote to Captain James Andrews, assistant chief for morale services, warning him, “Don’t forget that when you are talking about CACO’s, you are talking about a group of very nice young men who usually know very little about the Navy. I don’t for one minute think that regular solicitations by a CACO could begin to take the place of a periodic letter from Admiral Semmes and Company.”16
Sybil was urging the Navy to make the wives a priority, not an afterthought. They deserved attention from the top brass, but this was not the treatment they were receiving. The women were often perceived as an annoyance by many in the military—hysterical females who just needed a shoulder to cry on now and then.
Even worse than the CACOs’ general lack of experience was the seeming indifference some of them displayed toward the wives’ legal, financial, and business problems. Some of these officers actively fought the women’s right to make any decisions. Evie Grubb was appalled by her Air Force CACO officer’s behavior after her husband, Newk, was shot down in January of 1965. “From the outset, [the CACO officer] adopted an attitude of suspicion and obstruction. It was as though his mission was to protect Newk from me and our children, as if we were the enemy, and he was on a mission to save Newk from us.”
Although Evie had power of attorney, her CACO officer continued to question her right to access Newk’s pay, and he was stunned to know that she had had any say about the couples’ savings plan. How could he not realize, Evie wondered, that many military spouses had to manage family finances while the men were gone on long deployments? “I could not believe I had to get his permission to handle our money!” Evie fumed.17
Some of this attitude may have stemmed from experiences in the Korean War. There were instances among the Korean POWs of men who returned home to find that their wives had spent all their pay and wanted divorces. Protocols were then put in place to try to prevent this from happening again.18 As Vietnam War POW and MIA wives like Evie found, these good intentions based on that earlier war were often misplaced and could hobble a POW or MIA family’s finances.
Even as the wife of the highest-ranking Navy POW, Sybil Stockdale still had to fight hard just to get her husband’s paycheck. After Jim was shot down, she trusted that she would get the money soon, but she quickly became concerned. Her mortgage was due (thank God she had bought the house during Jim’s previous deployment) and she still had no paycheck from the Navy. Her friend Doyen’s husband, Bud, also a Navy man, encouraged her to address the Navy sooner rather than later about the issue: “You can put up with that, but you don’t have to.”
After her conversation with Bud, Sybil threw down the dishes she was washing (she did not have a dishwasher yet) and, still covered with suds, called her legal officer, Commander Luddy, to inquire about Jim’s paycheck. When she asked if he had heard anything about this matter, the commander nonchalantly said they had not been able to get Cleveland (Navy pay was processed out of there) on the phone.
By now Sybil’s heart was pounding and her hands were shaking with fury. “I’ll tell you how you can get Cleveland on the line,” she told him, as she recalled in her diary. “You can get up at 5 o’clock in the morning and call them before the lines are busy … It won’t hurt you to get up early for once. I doubt my husband is getting much sleep these days.”
The officer began to protest, saying there must have been some misunderstanding, but he was no match for Sybil’s rage and indignation:
You’re right, there’s been a misunderstanding, and in my opinion, it’s between you and your duties as a U.S. Naval officer … I’ve had enough of being backed into a corner and patted on the head waiting for you to get Cleveland on the line. I’ll be fair though. This is Friday. I’ll give you until Monday noon to get my financial status completely straight. If you can’t handle it by then, I’ll call Admiral Semmes, and see if he can get through to Cleveland on the wire.
Commander Luddy called Sybil on Monday at 9 a.m. Her financial status had been resolved.19
On Friday, April 15, 1966, something happened that improved Sybil’s morale “1000%.” As she was leaving the house to do errands with her youngest son, Taylor, the mail arrived. As she flipped through, it seemed at first as though there was nothing but circulars and junk that day. Then her heart stopped as she recognized something. Hold on a minute, she thought. That handwriting looks familiar. She looked closer and realized it was her husband’s. The envelope bore stamps from Vietnam and a postmark that read “Hanoi.” Then she discovered that there were not just one but two letters from Jim in the stack. Sybil hurried to a friend’s house with Taylor to read the letters, just in case they contained bad news. On the contrary, she found out Jim was alive and well in a detention camp for captured American pilots somewhere in Vietnam.
One letter was dated December 26 and the other February 3. These relatively long missives indicated that Jim had been injured when his plane was shot down. The solitude was trying, he said, and he often dreamed of his family and their eventual reunion.20 Even so, Sybil was ecstatic. She wanted to scream and jump up and down. “How incredible to get those letters from him out of the blue. How wonderful to know he was truly alive. How I thanked God for having watched over him.”21
Sybil reported the letters to Commander Hill at the local Navy intelligence office and gave the staff her assessment of the contents. The San Diego–based intel specialists, impressed with her commentary, referred her along to Commander Bob Boroughs at the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), in Washington.
What was her and Jim’s favorite song?
A bit taken aback, Sybil hesitated, then reeled off a list:
“Near You.”
“Que Sera, Sera.”
“Putting On the Style.”
And finally, though she was embarrassed to admit it, “Fry Me a Cookie in a Can of Lard.” Sybil thought that title would at least lighten things up a bit, but Boroughs did not react.
At the end of the conversation, Boroughs asked Sybil to come see him in D.C. to talk more—all expenses paid by the government. Thrilled, she planned to go see him in early May.
The evening of May 1, Sybil got another call, but this time it wasn’t Boroughs. It was a commander from Naval Air Forces’ Pacific headquarters, warning Sybil that Jim’s capture had finally been announced. An article would run in the morning’s paper, possibly with a photo of Jim.22
In the middle of that cold and foggy night, Sybil went to await the arrival of the San Diego Union on the Coronado dock. The dock lay just across from the Mexican Village restaurant, a popular Navy hangout where she and Jim always enjoyed going for their enchiladas and potent margaritas. She had continued to have girls’ nights out with her POW/MIA wife friends here, at a familiar place where they could drown their sorrows. She even took her boys there sometimes for a quick bite. It was a total dive, but it reminded her of better times.
The fun and camaraderie of those evenings, contrasted with the horrible scenario she was trapped in now, seemed surreal. She felt like she was in a spy movie, but with no training and no idea of the intelligence she would receive. Sybil sat in the car shivering, waiting for the 2 a.m. boat while her oldest son, Jim, remained at home with the younger children. The newspaper didn’t arrive on that shipment, so she had to go home and come back for the 4 a.m. delivery.
When Sybil finally had her hands on the paper, she saw a photo of Jim, unshaven, looking determined but wary.
The headline blazed in front of her: “Hanoi Claims S.D. Man Captive.” Sybil later recalled that she was “relieved it was less horrible than it might have been. Very cautious about the press.”23
Just in case Sybil had decided otherwise, it seemed the Navy was going to make sure that she was cautious in her public response. The article in the San Diego Union noted that “Mrs. Stockdale, at her home yesterday, would not comment, a family friend said.”24 When she read the article, Sybil was puzzled—who had the family friend been?
The “family friend” was almost certainly the Office of Naval Intelligence acting in accordance with the dictates of the LBJ government. Right now, Sybil and all her friends were terrified to speak to the press. As they had been told over and over, they might endanger their husbands and put their lives in jeopardy by speaking to the media. All the prisoners’ wives could do for now was lie low, do what the American government commanded, and keep quiet.