StoryCorps 475: Keeping the Faith
Michael Garofalo (MG): It’s the StoryCorps Podcast. I’m Michael Garofalo.
[MUSIC – “Part of Me” (Instrumental) by Alialujah Choir]
This episode is all about keeping the faith. We’ll hear stories about people who never gave up hope, long after most other people would have called it quits. Whether it was persistence, courage, or just being stubborn, these people had something that allowed them to keep hope alive.
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We’re going to start off with something that we hear a lot of during an election year like this one: a soundbite.
Does the name James Stockdale ring a bell for you? You might remember him as Ross Perot’s running mate in 1992 and his disastrous performance in the vice presidential debate. His opening statement became a punchline on late night TV.
Vice Admiral James Stockdale: Who am I? Why am I here? [Applause and laughter].
MG: But Stockdale’s legacy goes way beyond that soundbite.
He’s actually Vice Admiral James Stockdale and he was the highest ranking naval officer to be held as a POW in Vietnam. His plane was shot down in 1965 and he was captured and brought to the infamous prison known as the “Hanoi Hilton.”
He spent seven and a half years in prison and his son, Jim Stockdale, was a teenager when his father first went missing. When he sat down for StoryCorps, he talked about how his family spent those years waiting for his dad.
Jim Stockdale (JS): At one point while dad was gone, mom decided that we would not take any family pictures. She just said it one night at supper and we nodded knowingly as though that made sense. And she decided that she would buy no new clothes until dad came home. There was also a point at which she decided that we should always have a small bowl of rice for supper and that’s all, to sort of share dad’s meager existence.
These sound like strange — they are, they’re, they’re emotional kinds of things that really indicated how desperate we were to do something, you know? How we might live our lives in waiting.
I at one point visited a counselor, probably five years in. And the one piece of advice I remember was, “You may be better off just considering your father dead and gone.” Which, at the time, made pretty good sense to me. You know? After years and years of living with it.
The day that dad came home — we had been forewarned about dad’s injuries — but standing there on the tarmac, when he came down the a…came down the steps, I remember just holding his featherweight frame in my arms. We were just sort of stumbling over our love for one another.
And I remember the third night he was actually at home he wanted to go and call the, ah, wife of one of the men who had died in prison. And, ah, we had about one of those to do a night for a couple of weeks. He felt it was his obligation to report what he knew about the nobility of men who had suffered greatly and had died of injury or infection or, in a couple of cases, just a broken heart as he described it.
And we realized how close we had come. And, uh, we maintained a fierce, loving allegiance to one another through to the very end.
[MUSIC – “Demus” by Charles Atlas]
MG: That’s Jim Stockdale remembering his father, Vice Admiral James Stockdale, who was a POW in Vietnam.
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MG: Joining us now is the producer of this story, Alletta Cooper. Hey, Alletta.
Alletta Cooper (AC): Hi, Michael.
MG: So, Alletta, we heard about the family back home and what their experience was like while Stockdale was in captivity. But can you tell us a little bit more about what he went through as a POW?
AC: Yeah, you know, as you mentioned before, he was the senior ranking officer held as a prisoner of war and he was a leader among the other American POWs. He, for almost four years, was in solitary confinement, but he managed to come up with a code, a tapping code, to communicate with some of the other prisoners.
MG: Like what? They’d tap on the wall or something?
AC: Yeah, they’d tap on the walls so they could hear each other because they really weren’t allowed to communicate when they were held in these camps together. He also came up with a code of conduct so that they wouldn’t be used for propaganda videos, and he went so far as to slash his own face with a razor blade so that he wouldn’t be on video for propaganda against America. And the scars are visible in the pictures taken right when he got back from being a POW in 1973.
MG: So we know that eventually he ended up on a presidential ticket, but could you tell us a bit more about when he first came home? What was it like?
AC: When he got home he’d lost more than 30 pounds, he had a stiff leg, he had a bad back, but his health was overall pretty good, all things considered. And he stayed in the navy for another six years, retiring as a Vice Admiral in 1979. And in 1976 he was given the Medal of Honor, which is the military’s highest award.
A lot of people kind of expected things to fall apart for him and his relationships after having been a POW and in solitary for so long. But he came home to his sons who he had only known as little kids and really was able to show up for them and build these incredible, lasting relationships with them, as you hear in the piece. And his wife, Sybil, and he were really a solid team and they were able to continue that partnership.
Our storyteller, Jim, talks about when his family was reunited on the tarmac. But Sybil actually had a phone call with her husband before that moment. And it was recorded without her actually knowing it. One of her sons bought this phone recording device from a mail order catalog and secretly hooked it up to the phone before this phone call happened. And we have that phone call. This is the first time that Sybil and James spoke to each other in more than seven years.
Sybil Stockdale (SS): Jim?
James Stockdale (JS): Syb?
SS: Can you hear me?
JS: Very well. Can you hear me?
SS: Yes.
JS: I love you so. And I am so proud of you.
SS: Oh, I love you, Jim. Are you alright?
JS: Yes, I am. I’ve got a stiff leg and a bumped shoulder, but I wouldn’t worry about either. It sort of gives me a little style. I’m really in a fairyland here and I think I’m picking up right where I left it.
SS: Well that suits me fine.
JS: I wanted to know if there’s something you’d really like to have in the way of a gift.
SS: No. Just you. I just want you to come home and get to know the younger boys who are just beside themselves with anticipation.
JS: Yes, and I’m going to spend more time with each of those fellows.
SS: Jim?
JS: Yes?
SS: It doesn’t seem possible, does it?
JS: No, it doesn’t.
[MUSIC – “M Laurelle” by Robin Allende ]
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MG: So there’s really this kind of amazing love story embedded in here.
AC: Yeah, you know, there really is. You can hear in the phone call how much they care for each other. Even when her husband was a POW, Sybil and he were a team. She didn’t actually know he was alive until seven months after he first went missing. And she found out because she actually received a handwritten letter in the mail from him that had come from Vietnam through the US postal service with stamps from Vietnam. No one really knows how that happened, but it ended up there at the house.
Here’s Jim again.
JS: The letters contained some things that were somewhat disturbing and some things that seemed mysterious to mom and me as she laid them out on the card table and we read them together. There were allusions to persons and places that didn’t make sense in context in the letters. And we were a little unsure whether that meant dad was losing it or perhaps he was sending a cloaked message. Fortunately, it turned out to be the latter.
AC: So, as you can hear, it was Sybil who actually discovered that these letters were coded. And she worked with the CIA to send coded messages back and forth with her husband for the entirety of his captivity.
So Sybil was truly a hero in her own right. And aside from the coded letters, she was a fierce advocate for Prisoners of War and Missing in Action. And she really helped get rid of the “keep-quiet” policy around the conditions of the captured soldiers.
MG: Wait, what do you mean a “keep-quiet” policy? I’ve never heard of that.
AC: So, at the time, the government was telling families of people who were missing and prisoner that they shouldn’t talk to anyone about that and about the conditions of the prisoners or anything like that. And the Pentagon kept reassuring the families that everything’s fine, Vietnam is abiding by the Geneva Convention, everything’s wonderful. But these letters that Sybil was exchanging with her husband, these coded messages were clearly indicating that that actually wasn’t the case. He was describing torture, which clearly violated the Geneva Convention. And Sybil just wasn’t going to have it. And she was this incredibly proper Navy wife, self-described, but she really wasn’t going to let this policy continue on her watch.
JS: Mom applied her considerable social skills. And don’t forget, this is a time when Navy wives wore white gloves and were supposed to be proper and relatively obedient. She broke through that pretty quickly and was invited to some luncheons where some of the people who were denying her the information would sit politely and, you know, use the right fork for salad. But that didn’t stop her from saying, “You need to communicate more and better,” and, “you should be helping us.” And finally she broke through.
[MUSIC – “Mangata” by Jon Luc Hefferman ]
AC: In 1979, Sybil received the Navy Distinguished Public Service Award, which is the highest award that a civilian not employed by the Department of the Navy can receive.
MG: So are James and Sybil still living?
AC: Sadly they are not. Although they did remain married until Vice Admiral Stockdale died in 2005. Sybil died in 2015 and they’re buried next to each other at the United States Naval Academy Cemetery in Annapolis, Maryland.
MG: Thanks for joining us, Alletta.
AC: Happy to be here, Michael.
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MG: Democrats in the House of Representatives staged a sit-in earlier this month to protest a lack of action in Congress on gun control measures. You probably read about this, or maybe you watched some of it online.
Well, it turns out that one member of the House who took part in that protest, Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, he’s in our archive. In 2007, he recorded an interview with his granddaughter, Sydney Reed. And he told her that, even though he’s one of the top ranking Democrats in the House of Representatives today, his journey to Washington was not easy.
Sydney Reed (SR): Have you ever felt you wanted to quit?
James Clyburn (JC): Oh absolutely. When I first won in 1970 – when I won the primary of the South Carolina House of Representatives – there was this big party after the votes came in and everybody was jumping up and down and very happy. But the next morning, I went into the bathroom and there on my sink was a little note from your grandmother. And the little note said, “When you win, brag gently. When you lose, weep softly.” And I thought that was kind of interesting. And I stuck it up on the mirror in the bathroom. So we go into the general election in November, and when the polls closed that evening around 10 o’clock, all the news media announced that I had gotten elected – that I was going to be a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. About 3:30 in the morning, somebody rang my doorbell, and they told me that something had gone wrong down at the courthouse. And I went down to the courthouse and they told me rather than winning by 500 votes, we have determined that you have lost by 500 votes. The next morning when I went to my bathroom, I looked up at the mirror and I wept softly. And yes, I thought then that this was the worst thing [that] could possibly happen. But later on that morning, I determined that I was going to go forward.
In 1978, I ran for Secretary of State – and lost. Eight years later, in 1986, I ran for Secretary of State again – and lost. And um, more than one person said to me, “Well that’s your third strike. What are you going to do next?” And I always said, “Three strikes may be an out in baseball, but life is not baseball.” And so in 1992, I ran for the United States Congress. And this time, I won. I don’t know, there was just something that kept telling me that you got to stick this out. And you know, we have a state seal in South Carolina, and the Latin phrase on the seal says Dum Spiro Spero – While I breath, I hope. And I’ve always felt that there’s hope. And so I have never given up.
[MUSIC – “Lift Every Voice and Sing” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers ]
MG: That’s US Representative James Clyburn, of South Carolina. He was speaking with his granddaughter, Sydney Reed.
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[MUSIC – “When I’m With You” by Scott Holmes ]
That’s all for this episode.
These stories were produced by Alletta Cooper and Anita Rao.
The podcast is produced by Elisheba Ittoop and me.
Find out what music we used on our website, StoryCorps.org, where you can also sign up for your own interview.
Thanks for all the comments on iTunes. We just got a bunch more in this week. We are reading them and we really appreciate the feedback you’re giving us. Now we’d love to hear how you listen. One person told us that they put us on while they mow the lawn. Another said this podcast is a ritual with their kids. Then, another, who I assume is a college student, said that this podcast is the perfect length for their walk to class. So, we’re curious. When do you put this podcast on? How do you listen? One episode at a time or do you binge? Let us know in a review, over at iTunes.
For the StoryCorps podcast, I’m Michael Garofalo.
Thanks for listening.
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