CHAPTER 1

THE DINNER PARTY

MAY 24, 1973

SOME SAID ENTERTAINER Sammy Davis Jr. was the first to float the idea for a large soiree honoring returned prisoners of war from Vietnam. Others said First Lady Pat Nixon, during an emotional embrace with Margaret Manhard at a White House reception, had promised a “big celebration” when Mrs. Manhard’s husband came home. Philip W. Manhard had been the highest-ranking civilian captured by the Viet Cong and held for five torturous years in the jungles of South Vietnam; both women eagerly awaited his return. Still others thought the idea surfaced in the Oval Office while Cabinet members watched footage of the first freed POWs arriving at Clark Air Force Base aboard a C-141 Starlifter.

Wherever the idea originated, President Richard Milhous Nixon, amid growing scandal, latched on to it with palpable enthusiasm, and so did the rest of the country. No matter on which side of the war a person’s political beliefs landed him or her, nearly everyone thought a party for the POWs was in order.

And who didn’t recognize the uniqueness of the occasion? All the returning prisoners —repatriated a short nine weeks earlier and reunited with wives, children, and families, many of whom had not seen one another for as long as eight years —were regarded as heroes. The group quickly attained near-celebrity status. Once the celebration began to take shape, an incredible outpouring of entertainers came forward to participate, some of the best known in show business.

The role of master of ceremonies naturally fell to Bob Hope. John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Sammy Davis Jr., Roy Acuff, Joey Heatherton, Vic Damone, Irving Berlin, and Les Brown and His Band of Renown, among others, were eager to perform for the troops gratis. They spent most of the night mingling, shaking hands, and posing for pictures with as many as desired.

Remembering the evening years later, then–presidential military aide Colonel Stephen Bauer said no event in all his six years of working at the White House was “more thrilling, awesome, or satisfying than the celebration held for the just-released prisoners of war.” Excitement overflowed to social staff, domestic staff, press corps, guards, police officers. Even the usually stoic Secret Service wore happy smiles and maintained a generally relaxed attitude.

The menu was kept simple, nevertheless hearty: roast sirloin of beef au jus, tiny new potatoes, and selected garden vegetables. A pair of long aluminum canoes filled with ice became unlikely buckets for dozens of bottles of champagne, and two additional Army refrigerator trucks kept hundreds of strawberry mousse desserts and Supreme of Seafood Neptune appetizers with cornsticks chilled at the appropriate thirty-six degrees.

More than thirteen hundred guests attended that evening. The sheer size of the dinner required an enormous tent, longer and wider than the White House itself, covering the south lawn where the president’s helicopter normally lands. Underneath the sprawling canvas, hanging chandeliers along with hundreds of votive candles created a serene glow. As guests arrived, dozens of table stewards rushed to put finishing touches on 126 round tables draped with gold cloth, topped by beautiful place settings, flowers, and linens.

It was the largest seated dinner ever given at the White House since John Adams first occupied its still-unfinished interior 215 years ago. It remains so today.

In their room at the Statler Hotel, two blocks north of the White House, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas “Jerry” Curtis, in his formal Air Force mess dress uniform with its new silver oak leaves, stood quietly watching his stunning wife clip her pearl earrings into place. The day had been nonstop. That afternoon in the West Auditorium of the Department of State, President Nixon’s address to the POWs began with a nearly two-minute standing ovation. The returning POWs as a group would forever think of Nixon as the one who brought them home.

While the honorees listened to their commander in chief, their wives, mothers, and guests were hosted by the first lady and her daughters —Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower —in the State Department’s formal Diplomatic Reception Rooms. Now the couple was headed to the White House to be honored along with the other POWs at a formal, seated dinner, with entertainment by a host of celebrities, and to meet the president himself: heady events for anyone, much less the youngest of nine children born into a rural Texas subsistence-farming family.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the large Curtis family had farmed acreage near Teague, Texas, outside of Houston. Though they lived “cash poor,” especially through the Depression years, what they needed for survival they planted and harvested themselves. Whatever they picked in the garden that day became supper that night. The family was self-reliant, confident, hardworking, and unassuming.

When Emily Parazade Howell Curtis realized she was pregnant with their ninth child, she chose the name “Geraldine,” certain she was carrying a girl. During the same time frame, the family leased land from a Mr. Jerry West, who often rode his horse to visit. Between his mother’s mistaken intuition and a friendly landowner, the name “Jerry” survived and is what family and close friends call Thomas Curtis today. Air Force friends and acquaintances, however, know him as “Tom,” since the military customarily uses first names.

Jerry’s father never went to church except for funerals. But his mother led a quiet Christian life, helping neighbors whenever they needed it, displaying a servant’s heart as the occasion called for. Very shy as a boy, Jerry dreaded going down to the altar in front of everyone at Cloverleaf Baptist Church. At twelve, however, he felt an irresistible press upon his heart to “walk the aisle” and ask Jesus Christ to be his Savior, even though he had silently done so a year earlier.

After graduating from high school, Jerry commuted back and forth to Houston University’s main campus. But a gradual loss of interest in his diesel electric studies plus growing financial need prompted him and some friends to check out the aviation cadet program sponsored by the United States Air Force. Glen Duke, his best friend since sixth grade, went with him.

Jerry had never even been in an airplane. His first flight came as a passenger in a Navion, and Jerry immediately fell in love with flying. He trained with civilian instructors at Kinston, North Carolina, the first twenty hours in the PA-18 Super Cub, then 120 hours in the T-6 Texan. After training in the T-28 and the T-33, Jerry received his wings and a commission as a 2nd Lieutenant on December 18, 1954. For several years afterward, he would fly jets and then transition into helicopters.

Pilot training had required all his attention, to the exclusion of everything else, including faith. So when he finally arrived for his first assignment at Ellington Air Force Base, Houston, several older siblings set out to see he returned to his Christian roots. One of the ways they did this was to invite him to attend a revival service being held at Uvalde Baptist Church, where one of his brothers was a deacon. It was here he met his future wife, Terry. She was eighteen years old at the time and played piano for the services.

After dating for two years, during which Jerry taught high schoolers in church and in general drew closer to the Lord, the couple married on April 12, 1957. Their marriage always included active church involvement wherever they were stationed, including beginning a small church in Germany, Faith Baptist Church in Kaiserslautern, which today is one of the largest churches in the International Baptist Convention. It was here that Jerry was ordained as a Baptist deacon and continued teaching Bible studies, and Terry contributed her talents at the piano and organ and as a solo singer.

At this moment, as they prepared at the hotel to meet the president of the United States, their life together before Jerry’s imprisonment seemed a million years past. Words could hardly express all the emotions Jerry was experiencing. He was still just getting used to being in the same room as his beautiful wife again. Before he was shot down, they had been married for eight wonderful years, enjoying each other and their two young children and Jerry’s work in the military. As Jerry was fond of saying, “Life is good.” Then disaster struck.

He was lost in recollections when Terry appeared in her evening gown, signaling she was ready. Jerry smiled as he remembered the first time he saw her at eighteen years old, playing the piano for a church revival service and wearing enormous orange flower earrings that covered half her cheeks. They stepped into the hallway of their hotel and rode the elevator downstairs. Attentive escorts pulled out huge umbrellas to protect them from the downpour that had persisted for the past thirty-six hours. The largest seated dinner ever held at the White House awaited them.

The evening was a blur for the Curtises. As Jerry and Terry joined the long reception line under a covered tunnel created to protect the arriving guests, Jerry relished seeing fellow POWs decked out in their crisp formal military attire. Everyone was polished and gleaming. He felt almost bewildered with joy.

Though the rain began to slacken, the White House lawn remained squishy wet. Attendants frantically covered the ground with burlap runners and straw, to little avail. Women, in a futile attempt to keep their skirts dry, hiked up their long evening dresses. Open-toed evening shoes sank down into soft, drenched turf, as did the legs of dining chairs. No one seemed to care. Someone even commented the downpour was God himself weeping tears of joy now that the POWs were home and out of the grasp of hell.

When President Nixon made it clear after dinner that they were welcome to roam through the White House unescorted, the guests became like kids in a candy store. Everyone agreed it was the highlight of the evening. One Navy pilot, shot down late in the war, afterward recalled exploring the upstairs with another former POW. Opening a door along an empty corridor, they walked in on the president himself, alone in his study. He simply waved, bidding them to make themselves at home.

The night continually offered surreal contrasts from the POWs’ previous existence of years of imprisonment. The most important difference, of course, was exchanging captivity for freedom, delightfully demonstrated by their unfettered run of the White House.

But the differences abounded everywhere. They had exchanged chipped, glazed tin plates for historic fine china, stamped aluminum spoons for silver flatware, tin drinking cups for crystal flutes, and bowls of thin soup for as much sirloin steak au jus as they could eat. Even the tent itself presented a subtle contrast, its red and gold stripes seemingly morphed into a festive echo of the dingy red-and-beige striped prison pajamas worn 24-7 during their years within Hanoi’s prison system.

Despite the lovely evening and its merriment, however, there would be long periods of adjustment ahead for nearly all returning POWs and their families. As ABC News White House correspondent Tom Jarriel pointed out during live television coverage of the event, some ninety returnees declined the White House dinner invitation for a host of different reasons. Some were still recuperating from various health issues, and some had met with devastating family news when they returned, such as wives who had died, leaving them widowers, or parents who were critically ill and required care. Others discovered themselves single again after spouses had obtained divorces in Mexico. A few returned with deep antiwar sentiments and declined the invitation as a form of protest. For many, adapting to the return home would prove as challenging as being away had been. For one, who took his life just nine days after the dinner party, the adjustment proved more difficult than could be endured.

Jerry looked down at the beautiful table setting before him. For 2,703 days, hunger had been his constant companion. Every man there that night had lost weight —forty, fifty, sixty pounds or more. He himself had, at his lowest point, weighed only 125 pounds. He had eaten scant bits of food, often riddled with worms or other foreign objects, always surrounded by gloom and darkness and the threat of torture. His journey to the splendor of a White House dinner had begun eight years previously at a remote outpost in Thailand, next to a little-known country bordered by a long river on one side and a winding trail on the other in a far-off corner of the world.