UPDATE : Stockdale Takes Stock in Virtues of Not Being Vice : Retired admiral says he’s not sorry he’s not in the White House with Perot. But he does think he could do a better job than Clinton.

A large American flag flies from his porch. The “Perot for President” bumper sticker on his car is still shiny. And retired Adm. James B. Stockdale believes he could do a better job than President Clinton.

But the 70-year-old Vietnam War hero--Ross Perot’s 1992 running mate--doesn’t spend much time these days contemplating what life would be like if he had been elected vice president.

Leaving politics behind, Stockdale has slipped easily into his old routine, studying the works of ancient philosophers and waking in the middle of the night to write down his thoughts.

“There are certain things I’m good at. Fighter pilot I’m good at. I was damn good at leading a prison underground.”

But vice president? “That was a lark.”

Stockdale is a modern-day Stoic, a man of tremendous fortitude who survived repeated torture and solitary confinement during nearly eight years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

He also survived his brief foray into politics and the televised vice presidential debate that propelled him, unprepared, onto the national stage. “Who am I? Why am I here?” he asked viewers, seeming somewhat befuddled and bewildered in the most memorable moment of his campaign.

“It was like I was a college football player that somebody decided ought to go into boxing and a week later is in the ring with Joe Louis,” he recalled. “I was playing catch-up all the way.”

Stockdale, a soft-spoken, white-haired winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor, derives strength from the philosopher Epictetus, a onetime Greek slave who taught that true freedom stems from never wishing for something that is in the control of another.

In politics, Stockdale said he never hungered for high office and suffered no disappointment when he lost. “I don’t get up in the morning and think about what I would do if I were (vice president), and I never did,” he said.

Today, Stockdale and his wife, Sybil, split their time between their historic craftsman home in Coronado and Stanford University, where he is a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace.

“I have a very full life. George Shultz is on my right, Edward Teller is on my left and Milton Friedman is upstairs,” he said, referring to the former secretary of state, the nuclear physicist and the economist, respectively.

Earlier this year, Stockdale returned to Vietnam for the first time since his release from captivity in 1973. Touring the country with a Stanford alumni group, he saw the prison where he was once held. A 45-minute video of the trip titled “Stockdale Triumphs” was recently released by the Stanford Alumni Assn.

Because he had been blindfolded in captivity, this was the first time he actually saw what the primitive, impoverished country was like.

“I was surprised at how junky it looked,” he said. “God, we were so dumb about it. Did we think of the lives we squandered on this dump?”

The cruise also took Stockdale through the Gulf of Tonkin, where he lectured on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s fraudulent pretext for entering the Vietnam War.

As a Navy pilot, Stockdale witnessed the purported North Vietnamese attack in the gulf in 1964 and knew that no raid had occurred. But he led the first bombing raid on Vietnam the next day.

Shot down a year later and subjected to grueling torture sessions, he desperately resisted telling his captors he knew the Gulf of Tonkin attack was a lie.

Since his release, he has maintained that the war was based on a fraud. But he also criticizes Johnson for failing to end the conflict quickly by sending in B-52s to bomb Hanoi.

His wartime experience, he believes, would have helped make him a good vice president who would bring a sense of integrity to Washington. “I know my strengths, and they are to keep that damn White House honest when storm clouds are brewing.”

He agreed to run for vice president as a favor to his friend Perot, who had worked during the Vietnam War to improve conditions for the prisoners. But initially, Stockdale was just a stand-in and never expected to be on the ballot.

A lifelong Republican until the 1992 campaign, Stockdale says Clinton is leading the country in the wrong direction. He is especially critical of the President’s health care program, which he believes would turn medical care into a government-run “cesspool.”

Now he would like to see Perot form a permanent third party. If Perot runs for President again, Stockdale said he would help any way he could but has no desire to be a candidate once more. “I’m not the right guy to do that.

“I am not at home talking hypothetically about what should happen to the country in the years ahead. I’m not a policy wonk. But I think I would be doing a hell of a lot better than Clinton is right now if I was sitting there.”