“That Other Stockdale Naval Hero(ine)”
United States Naval Academy Chapel, Annapolis, Maryland
November 6, 2015, 10:30 a.m.
A Service Celebrating the Life of Mrs. Sybil Bailey Stockdale
FRIENDS AND FAMILY POURED into the Naval Academy Chapel, in Annapolis, on this warm but gray fall day to remember Sybil. She and Jim had met at the academy fifty years earlier, on a blind date. They could never have imagined when they met how momentous their lives together would be and how many men’s and women’s lives they would impact. Many of Sybil’s POW wife friends attended her service, Dot McDaniel, Patsy Crayton, Marty Halyburton, Louise Mulligan, and Lorraine Shumaker among them. Many of their husbands, former POWs, also attended. Six female midshipwomen, trim and confident in their immaculate white dress suits, carried Sybil’s heavy mahogany coffin, festooned with roses, up the church aisle. Sybil would likely have appreciated that touch.
Vice Admiral Walter E. “Ted” Carter and his wife, Lynda, spoke together from the chapel pulpit about the dual experiences the Stockdales had during Vietnam, and about how they were full and equal partners in coding secret messages that allowed them to communicate about the prisoner abuse Jim and his fellow soldiers experienced. The implicit trust that each of the Stockdales had in each other allowed this risky and dangerous endeavor to succeed.
It should come as no surprise that James Stockdale was awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest award for valor, in 1976.1 What fewer people learned about was that in 1979 Sybil became the only wife of an active-duty naval officer to receive the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award. Part of the citation reads:
By her courageous and determined actions, Mrs. Stockdale performed an outstanding public and humanitarian service for captured and missing military members of all services, their families and the American people. Her actions and her indomitable spirit in the face of many adversities contributed immeasurably to the successful safe return of American prisoners, gave hope, support and solace to their families in a time of need and reflected the finest traditions of the Naval service and of the United States of America.2
Each of the Stockdales’ three living sons, Taylor, Sid, and Jim Jr., spoke movingly about their mother. Each remembered the unique bond they had formed with her. Taylor noted that his mother often talked about wanting to be a princess, about wanting to find her Prince Charming and to live happily ever after. He observed that his mother was indeed reunited with her Prince Charming after many years and many hardships.3
Sybil and her POW and MIA wife friends did not have the luxury of being damsels in distress, though. Fate and history made them all into something else, something far more substantial. These by-the-book military wives were transformed by circumstance into international diplomats, hostage negotiators, coders of secret letters, and POW/MIA activists for their husbands and for their country. Sybil, Jane, Phyllis, Louise, Andrea, Helene, and Kathleen did not need knights to save and defend them. In fact, when politicians called them “girls” and patted them on the head, telling them not to “worry,” they got angry. Angry and frustrated enough to take their fate and their husbands’ fates into their own capable hands. They became dragon slayers, facing the monsters of government indifference, poor diplomacy, and wartime violence—relying primarily on one another and their own inner resolve. “You have got to understand,” Sybil would tell Jim after the war, “the POW wives who worked with me were not victims. They were fighters and we were at war with our own government as well as that of the enemy.”4
These female freedom fighters never got to be princesses. Instead they got to be warrior queens who fought for their husbands’ freedom and an accounting of the missing men—and won. As a group, these ladies became a powerful force that saved their families and ultimately changed the role of military wives and the fate of American POWs. These women were a self-created lobby that not only forced their government to listen to them but also convinced the government that their opinion mattered.
If these military wives hadn’t rejected the “keep quiet” policy and spoken out, the POWs might have been left to languish in prison long after the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. embassy in April 1975. More surely would have died in prison from maltreatment and lack of medical care. They demanded the accounting of the MIAs that was built into the Paris Peace Accords. They wanted answers, not platitudes, hard facts even if they were distressing, and accountability for both the prisoners and the missing. Only months after their return home would Jerry, Jim, Paul, and their fellow captives, like John McCain, realize how much credit the POW/MIA wives deserved for the end of the Vietnamese torture campaign and for their safe return to the States. Without the National League and the wives’ relentless lobbying of the president, his national security adviser, the Defense Department, the State Department, and Congress, the women’s covert work, their savvy media campaign all across the globe, and their own personal sacrifices, the entire prisoner and missing scenario might have been ignored by a largely oblivious American nation and the world.
Jeremiah Denton would credit his wife and her League friends with the noticeable change in POW treatment that came about in 1969. He claimed that without the women’s help, certain POWs who were on the brink of death would have most certainly died in captivity. “In my analysis, the wives’ campaign was at least partly responsible for the huge change that took place—the change from night to day—in our treatment” in the fall of 1969.5
Interviewed in 1986, thirteen years after his return home, Jim Mulligan also felt strongly that his outspoken wife had been instrumental in his rescue. “Louise is even better with politics than I am because she can cut them off at the legs if she has to … it’s a good thing Louise came along when she did.” Mulligan went on to say that the women’s efforts “helped get the POWs released sooner than they otherwise would have been.”6
In 2016, Senator John McCain said much the same thing that Denton had said years before. He claimed that the POW/MIA wives’ intervention had made all the difference. “Our treatment changed dramatically. It went from bad—in my case, solitary confinement—to being with twenty-five others … It was a decision made by the Politburo. It was not gradual.” McCain firmly believes that “some of us may not have been alive had it not been for that change in treatment.” He confirmed that “keep quiet” was the wrong call. The wives’ instincts had been right all along.7
Even the government finally admitted as much. Dick Capen, Melvin Laird’s assistant secretary of defense, remembered, “Until 1969, little had been done to defend the rights of these men under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions. The international outrage generated in 1969 saved lives.”8 Sybil had gone public in 1968 on the West Coast, followed soon after by Louise Mulligan on the East Coast. The government backed the women up in 1969 and amplified their voices. But the POW/MIA wives and families and later their National League of Families began the process, putting the word out there, first in the media. They knew better than anyone what to do. Had it not been for the National League and the POW/MIA wives’ efforts, the world might never have known about the POW/MIA issue. For the men who could not have survived additional torture, the women were their personal SEAL Team Six.
Some historians claim that the Nixon government used the women for its own ends. However, these women also used the Nixon administration to amplify their views, recruit members for the National League, and support worldwide publicity highlighting the POW and MIA situations. They were not puppets but partners, frequently directing the president and his staff on this issue. The women became POW/MIA experts because of their devoted and fierce connection to their husbands. They had a lot more to lose than any government administrator.
As Sybil explained years later, “Of course we [the League] had authority. It was our business. Otherwise you see when Harriman was saying they had the keep quiet policy going—they took our authority or any authority away from us. And that was not ok. For the government to have the authority, the sole authority—heaven help us—no way.”9 When the League was accused of being controlled by the Nixon administration, 1970–71 League chair Carol North vehemently disagreed: “Sure there’s been a calculated campaign … but it’s our calculated campaign.”10
It was a campaign that Sybil, Jane, Louise, Phyllis, Andrea, Helene, Kathleen, and their League of Wives dared to imagine and implement.